[Editor’s note: I guess I should tell you all that I am getting married. I’m sure most of you have heard it by now anyway. This is a litle ditty written by my elder brother, Dave, who sees the world with the eyes of a skinny cynical genius. This was written and sent to me while I was unofficially officially engaged. I post this on the site now that the cat is out of the bag, thereby proving his point exactly. Oh well.]

Marriage, Parenting, and Conspiracy Detection Tips

As many of you know, Jeffrey is insane. This is evidenced in the fact that he likes his Anatomy and Physiology classes chiefly because the volumes of technical terminology are "fun to memorize." Furthermore, this knowledge allows him to perform feats of freakish mental strength such as having someone point to any part of their body and challenging him to name every skin layer, bone, muscle, tendon, organ, etc. in sequence from the point where their finger touches their body, all the way through their body, and out the other side. He wins every challenge, I have tested him thoroughly.

As Exhibit B, I present to you Jeff’s marriage. Not the circumstances thereof, or even the bride (though that part was in dispute for some time) but rather the planning. His engagement is technically not officially public knowledge. He maintains this position even though it is obvious and everyone knows about it. But what’s funnier is this: he has had a room for the reception in the Joseph Smith Memorial Building (no shabby location, mind you) and a sealing room in the Salt Lake temple reserved for August 6 since a couple of weeks ago. He has plans for the timing of the switch from "officially unofficial" to "officially official" as though this is a normal part of an engagement that everyone plans. The whole situation is obviously a result of Jeff having serious and irreversible brain damage, from a source that will, no doubt, alarm many of you.

Regardless of Jeff’s condition, however, marriage and parenting are tasks that no one should have to surmount without advice from those who have been there. Marriage produces strange conflicts of interest within "the husband." As with the pre-marriage days, the husband will desire to assert his masculinity. However, where he used to do this by performing feats that no female could (or would desire to) perform such as "I cracked this walnut between my forehead and the kitchen table", his feats will now be aimed to show that you are a husband who is desirable to "the wife" and is sensitive. Your new feats will include such things as "I washed all of the dishes without being asked then rubbed my wife’s feet." Or for more advanced husbands, "I bought my wife flowers and a card for no apparent reason, not a funny card but one that said ‘thinking of you’ with a message on the inside (which I wrote) that contained the words ‘love’ and ‘pookie’." Though these kinds of things take a little while to get used to, marriage is actually the easy part, the kids are the real challenge.

For the first two or three months, kids have three settings: staring, crying and sleeping. Don’t worry about ‘sleeping’ because it will not happen much after the first two weeks, focus your attention on the other two. They stare when something catches their attention and they are interested. Normally, it is impossible to get them to engage this mode unless are being held or fed. The other 90% of their awake time is spent in crying mode, as other sounds are not produced for another two months or so. Because of this, parents immediately become shrewd observers of all details for the sole purpose of determining what conditions maximize staring and minimize crying. I will tell you about one to help you along. Babies can drink a bottle while they are completely asleep. We learned this trick a few weeks ago when we learned that if we give Will a bottle at 10pm, he will sleep until 5:30am. And, if we put him down at 8pm, he will sleep until 10pm. In the past we got him up at 10pm for the feeding thinking if he was awake he would concentrate and drink faster. This was later proven to be false. The truth is that when he is asleep he is not distracted by lights or ceiling fans. More importantly, he does not need to be put back to sleep afterward. That alone will add an hour a night to you and your spouse’s happiness (which to parents means "sleep" and nothing else.)

Nevertheless, these things must not distract you from the true topic of this paper. As you will see in the following paragraphs, there are much weightier concerns to be addressed than such trivialities as eternal devotion to one’s true love and the rearing of future generations. The real problem we all face is the source of Jeff’s brain damage. Believe me, it is not from any kind of unethical medical tests, or a result of drug use in his youth, or even from the medium level radioactive waste for which he has been accepting $200,000 from the government each year and then turning into mulch to fertilize his award winning man-eating Venus Flytraps. No, nothing so simple to identify as those things. The source is his brother Steev. As we all know Steev is sane, maniacally sane, and has a carefully crafted and methodical plan for world domination. If you don’t believe me, go see for yourself, he is so confident of himself that he clearly explains his plan to everyone without fear or anything hindering his success. Jeff is a pawn in that plan, showing that Steev is on steps 7 and 8—"manipulate" and "abuse" respectively, after having labeled Jeff as someone whom he can manipulate with his mental prowess and beat into submission. I have no idea to what end Steev is using Jeff, or what fiendish and ruthless forms of manipulation he is using, but the evidence of the psychological damage that it has caused Jeff is undeniable.

I was startled when I first heard of Jeff’s "engagement" (though it has never officially been called that yet) because I couldn’t see how they could have possible gotten together. Specifically, I couldn’t see why Jeff had shown interest in Laura, because I knew both of them before all of this not-yet-engagement stuff. But now I see things more clearly, and thus I see that I gravely underestimated Laura’s worth. You see, Jeff did not choose Laura, Steev did. It is the only explanation for such an unlikely match. And it can only mean one thing: Laura is essential to Steev’s plan—possibly for his progression to step 9. It is even possible that Steev has spent most of his life patiently conditioning Jeff solely for the purpose of acquiring Laura. Or perhaps it is not Laura at all that Steev wants, but merely her genetic code that, when paired with Jeff’s, will produce an offspring which will aid in Steev’s plan. There is no telling what Steev is up to, or how many of us are unknowingly fulfilling his purposes. We may never find out any of the answers, and if we ever do it will probably be too late.