May 19, 2011 A new letter

A new letter from Cody has been posted at codypuertorico.blogspot.com. Please go there to get the latest!

Cody's mission blog has moved!

For various reasons we moved Cody's blog to a new location. Please find and follow it here. The new address is codypuertorico.blogspot.com.

There are a few new posts there already. See you there!

April 9, 2011 Provo MTC

This last week was really cool, especially General Conference! I so dearly wish I could have brought everyone over here to watch it! Also, every Tuesday is a "devotional" by important people and Wednesdays we go to the temple. So, yeah, things are still hard, but I'm strangely happy.
I think there was something important I needed to say as well...
Feel free to send cookies and stuff?? I don't think that was it, but that's important too...
Oh! and I found Elder Fitzgerald! (Ammon) It was totally weird.
That's all for now!
Elder me

Two weeks at the MTC

Two weeks at the MTC

It feels like I've only been here for one day! onE REALLY LONG DAY!!! But not a bad day. It's really hard to describe. It's like.... I DON"T KNOW! I want to say it's like being on drugs and skydiving while you try to learn a language as you fall. But I've never been on drugs, so I shouldn't pretend I can relate :P I definitely belong here though. they serve curly fries and A1 steak sauce!!!! THAT'S ALL FOR TODAY! I"M OUT oF TIME BYE!!!!

Letter Excerpts from Elder Cody Barnes, Written March 23/24, 2011

Today has been quite swell. No, really. It's been pretty rad. My companion doesn't drive me nuts or anything. Everyone is so happy! I can't help comparing this day to what Logan's told me of hist first few days at boot camp, and people keep asking me why I'm chuckling.
We wake up, no, "Arise" and "Prepare for the day" at six tomorrow--
Oh, it's time to "reflect on our experience today and rest". I'll write more tomorrow!

New day! I forgot my Super Special Card that gives me access to food, but they were nice enough to let me run back and get it :-)
All the elders are so full of brotherly love around here O.O So weird.
Oh, first day here I got a migrane! THAT was fun! I've never thrown up so much, 30 minutes of exercise! It's the lights in my classroom that give me migrains!! O.O not cool.
The second day has really helped me fortify my reasons to be out here, and my confidence in my usefulness.
The days really are long like they said it would be. We eat dinner at 4:30, but it still feels like I don't eat till evening! I keep looking out the window, expecting it to be dark and then find out it is only noon.
But the peace here makes it...ZEN. At least so far.

Drawing time!

three days left, mission farewell

The contents below is the speech I wrote for church at my mission farewell. Enjoy!

This, is a letter I wrote last night. For all of you, because I couldn't come today.

it begins:

hello everyone, and thank you for coming my not mission farewell :)

I'm sorry you all came and I didn't but I'm sure Brother Gardener, Brother Shumway, and Brother Gover were interesting enough.

I was asked to talk about agency, But I can't.

Oh, I wanted to, I spent two weeks agonizing over this, looking through scriptures and past talks for inspiration but it seems I can't talk about our great gift that is agency.

The irony is not lost on me.

This is why I've chosen to be sick today, and I apologize for not coming in, but really, even if you don't forgive me, I'm going to Puerto Rico, so... oh well!

Actually, to be completely honest, I'm not sure I was meant to give this talk at all, Maybe I did something wrong and God was mad at me, or maybe it was just DESTINY!

Yes, it was my destiny to fail at this talk about agency and prove to you and myself that I'm just not meant to be a public speaker.

So instead i'm writing this letter about... me- And maybe you. I want to talk about how each one of you, just by being you, saved me from losing myself.

I'm kind of a creep, I know that doesn't sound right to any of you, but let me explain myself,

I

Love

you.

each and every one of you. When I look into your eyes I am completely blown away with what you can be. I FEEL so much for each of you and Many of you don't even know my favorite color!

...Do you see the problem here? How do I convey to you ALL individually that I support you ALL and am willing to give anything if it means you'll find your way?

I don't know if it's possible, not without either turning my naivete' into meaningless tools for the lackadaisical or becoming a superhero -which would be awesome...

But that's not the worst of it. If this letter proves nothing else, it shows that I CANNOT give you what I wish I could show you with every fiber of my being.

My desire to help is far greater than my ability to do so, and For much of my life I was trapped by the conclusion that if I couldn't be there for all of you, I couldn't be there for any of you.

So I'm staying in bed.

This talk was meant to be my gift to you for all that each of you have done for me. For putting up with me when I came to class half asleep, when I didn't call you back because I forgot, for being nice to me while I was your home teacher, and for taking the time to listen to all the weird things I had to say.

They say it takes an village to raise an Idiot-or something like that-and I have to agree with them. I wouldn't be going on my mission, proud and happy, if it wasn't for your choices.

Thank you.

I'm sorry I couldn't tell you about agency, but I hope that knowing you helped make someone who's trying to save the world is cool.

Sincerely, Elder Barnes.

Well, Turns out I did find myself here, and I AM going to tell you that Agency is a gift from God from the premortal life that gives us the opportunity to find true and everlasting happiness, if we so choose it.

No, it's not nessecary for you to find it, you don't HAVE to do ANY of these things, but if I could give you one thing, I would give you the taste that I was given of what we can be.

Agency is the ability to choose our consequences, which I can understand if that comes across as quite limiting. Like a credit card, we can grab and hide with personal pleasures all we want, but If we didn't work for it and make it an honest part of ourselves, it will destroy us.

False claims to substance will only sustain us for so long.

But we're taught that if we can learn to work with the rules we've been given, we find there are higher laws that open up the world, and actually make the laws of physics quite beautiful.

I'm not going to lie, this mission is going to be a real test for me, to see if I really can walk the walk, as they say, but I'm really only nervous that they're going to make me talk more talks,

because I'm not afraid of wearing myself out. I'm counting on it! But I'm really going to be leaving my comfort zone out there.

But I'm not nervouse

... well, I hope you like 'em Short and Sweet, 'cause I don't have much else. But I want to testify to you that our decisions ripple out and touch many more lives than we think, and in turn everyone acts on It's like Billions of universes crammed on a ball and consciously

or not teaching each other what it means to be human. We're maturing as a people, and thanks especially to technology we are gobally connected. The truth is slowly becoming easier and easier to find, But we will always be dependant on eachother down here. I bear witness that those that seek to produce happiness are the ones that will be the happiest, and I humbly pray you all may come to learn this In the sacred name of Jesus Christ Amen

17 days left

These are the lyrics to a song I'm recording right now. I should be finished by the end of this week, and then you can hear the thing for realz!!


Anyway, *cough, it's a serious song, dripping with sarcasm and satire or something like that, I hope you enjoy it anyway!


ok, here we go.


Just Maybe by Cody-me


A Family fight in a happy home
It's just like a joke that just shouldn't be told :/
and maybe it's "all good" in the end
but I missed the punchline again...

And maybe I'm just crazy!
maybe I don't understand,
I guess I need to pay attention,
but something feels so wrong...
in here...


If I don't want a girlfriend, does that mean that I'm gay?
Why can't I just save MYSELF and live in a cave?
...Yeah it kinda hurts to be all alone.
But I'm doing better on my own!

And maybe I deserve this!
Well I hope it doesn't show
I'm shaky I'm so nervous,
I guess I'm reaping what I sow
well I'll do it with a smile...

And once again I've hurt myself,
trying to save the world
I seem to think that small and nice,
is better than being cool
And EVERYBODY knows that
intelligence is low and
the government's lying,
but what if it's our PERSONAL egos
that will kill us all in the end?

OR MAYBE I'M JUST CRAZY.
and maybe.. uh... i don't know.. O.O
Maybe I should shut up.
or better yet I'll go!
Far away
far away
I'll go so far away and I'll leave you with a smile.

Thrice "All the world is Mad" Observed

We are saints made of plaster, our laughter is canned;

We are demons that hide in the mirror.

But the blood on our hands paints a picture exceedingly clear.

We are brimming with cumbersome, murderous greed,

And malevolence deep and profound.

We do unspeakable deeds, does our wickedness know any bounds?

Something's gone terribly wrong,

with everyone!

All the world is mad!

Darkness brings terrible things; the sun is gone -

What vanity! our sad, wretched fires.

We can't medicate man to perfection again;

We can't legislate peace in our hearts.

We can't educate sin from our souls, it's been there from the start.

But the blind lead the blind into bottomless pits,

Still we smile and deny that we're cursed?

of all of our iniquities ignorance may be the worst.

Something's gone terribly wrong,

with everyone!

All the world is mad!

Darkness brings terrible things; the son is gone -

What vanity our sad, wretched fires.

Oh, what little light we have!

It only serves to show

The snares and seeds of wrath

We have already sewn on every path 

Something's gone terribly wrong,

with everyone!

All the world is mad!

Darkness brings terrible things; the son is gone -

What vanity our sad, wretched fires.

This poem sheds light on what we very well could be, but it doesn't have to be this way!

There IS a truth, there IS a peace that can be found in this Mad World if we could only learn to see it. I've touched it, I know it, but I don't understand it enough to use it as I should.

I pray wish with every fiber in my being that you never lose hope.

Just a thought.

You are what, 5'6", 6'? maybe 6'8" if you're pituitary gland is a little excitable? How long does it take for you to walk a mile? ten miles? How big around is the earth? Pretty stinking big- WRONG

Imagine space is a bathtub-no, better yet, the dead sea. A vast body of water completely devoid of life, and earth is just that freak little rubber ducky with mold on it. We are the mold.

How have we managed to survive this long? Floating through the bleak nothingness, black holes and meteors threatening to smear us across the solar system and you have NO clue as you sit back and text on the freeway. Radiation barrages us ceaselessly but it just so HAPPENS that earth's magnetic field is strong enough to hold the brunt of it at bay. Just enough that you can be satisfied by a pair of sunglasses and some sunscreen.

And although you feel like it will be FOREVER before you get out of school once it's past it will be FOREVER before you get a job, before you get married, before you die. And all of this in a space of what, eighty years?

You are SO small. That guy outside staring at you through the window is a dot on a slightly bigger dot in a sea of dots. and that sea could very well be on the back of a turtle in some universe sized aquarium. But he can't comprehend that, and neither can we. It doesn't even compute how many children are dying under the baking sun in Africa, their small worlds extinguishing before they know what their favorite color is. Before they taste ice cream. There could be an intergalactic war just one galaxy away. MILLIONS of people being torn from their families, tortured, and murdered while you complain about the zit on your forehead. WEIRD huh?

So many people throughout history have seen this and decided affecting other peoples lives are what make a man important. To be remembered is to be immortal.Others look at this and say "screw that, I'm here for me" and become a level 80 druid on World of Warcraft.

So yeah, I can see where atheists are coming from. I still think they're missing something, but maybe that's just my ego begging to be justified. I think I've been standing on this ledge for a long time now. Looking at the vast unknown trying to build up the courage to take a leap of faith. I WANT to believe in myself. I want to believe that these chemicals flooding my brain are doing it for a reason! It sounds so immature, but what else can I do then what my dumb heart tells me to?

Restless

I want to think that if other people thought like me, the world would be a better place. But if my mind was so special, how come I haven't done anything with myself? Why am I still sitting here with barely a high-school education ,with no patents, no projects, not even recorded music?
So the only conclusion I can come to is that I'm NOT special. Everyone thinks like me, Everyone feels this SOMETHING burning within them, everyone hopes and tries and fights themselves in their personal minds, and yet so few take advantage of this potential they all feel.
BUT HOW COULD THAT BE!??

It Couldn't. No. People would pay more attention if they thought like me. I'm not short-sighted enough to rob a bank, cheat on a test or friend.... am I? Even with my small spectrum of experiences, I HAVE done SO many things that even as they happened I KNEW were stupid. ...I think... Part of me would really like to think that maybe, just maybe, my mistakes were somehow for the best in the grand scheme of things. Like God knew that me doing this would make someone think of this and the butterfly effect would cause something really, REALLY good to happen in china... or ... something...
Yeah, I know it's just wishful thinking.

I need to go to bed

Just got back from california.

Yup, spontaneous road trips are pretty common around these parts. For those who don't know, it's roughly a twelve hour drive from my house to San Diego, so most people would spend at least three days out there, saving lots of money and planning weeks in advance. Not us, we got the Idea last Wednesday, I was COMPLETELY broke, and we stayed for a little more then 24 hours.
It was cool. The beach was nice, surfers and oysters, and my brother showed me this way tight secret sushi bar. Probably the best sushi in this arm of the galaxy. But that's just a guess.

Wee


I'm bored of blogging

Week of numbing Epilogue

In his attempts to fall numb to the anxieties of waiting for things to happen, the subject fell comatose by Wednesday 4 am. At Wednesday 10:21 am, the subject was declared dead.

He was a whiner anyway, so whatev's.

Tuesday

Progress progress progress.

I'm kinda sick today, but it's going to take a lot more than a little necrosis and limb numbness to stop me from blogging!
My days have been good to me this week (as depressing as my blog tends to sound) Things are good. Friends and family come and things go, winter was cold but if you blink too slow you could miss spring and fall right into summer's lap. That's the glorious thing about time, in my opinion. It goes on.

The Week of numbing- Monday

MONDAY

Today it rained.
I opened up my eyes to the sound of cat's crying for attention and dogs laughing at their dependency on us, the masters. I walked down the hall as rain poured down the stairs. Dirty rain, the kind that you only see removed by those special stain cleaners on late night TV scams.
I'm feeling sick, and I don't know if it's cause I stayed up until three again or because my friend had a miscarriage, but I'm trying really hard to pretend I'm just hungry.
Because I Am hungry.
I take the time to consume an orange, turkey, toast, a banana smothered in peanut butter and t2o cups of milk in hopes that this somehow covers all my dietary needs for the day. I'm trying to ignore that persistent downpour that drowns out the cheery "good mornings" I would otherwise hear. I'm really thirsty, but as I raise my cup to the sky to partake of this heavenly hydration I am not refreshed. Instead my stomach is filled with dread because I know I'll have to drink more later to survive.
I spend as much of the day as I can smoking computer games. I don't know why.
Outside the rain comes down, desecrating the valley with a mocking promise to cleanse and revitalize. I'm inside, but that only means I can't run.
My only comfort is the knowledge that it can only touch my body. This black rain can flood the world but it will never seep inside me. With years of careful immunization I've become desensitized enough that the icy liquid's only effect on me is sadness and tired eyes. Because of my discipline my joy is never truly extinguished even as my friends pressure me into drinking so that they can feel comfortable.

At the end of the day I am grateful that mondays only happen once a week.

I should have just gone to bed.

It's described as a hollow feeling, though I disagree when they add "like someone ripped out your heart". More like you never had one to begin with. Just a shell with a black hole trying to suck your ribs in. I don't want to eat. I don't want to sleep or move or think. It feels like a sin against nature that I even exist, that I have connection with the world at all. I am completely helpless to this gloom- oh, there are pills, exercises, meetings, books, but in the end, The only cure is time.

They say everyone feels like this from time to time. It's worse for some then for others. I guess it's just a chemical shortage in the brain.

I should be better because no one else is trying. I should be honest because everybody lies

A friend of mine brought up an interesting observation the other day. If someone sees a butterfly caught in a spider web, their first instinct is to save it. Surely without help the butterfly will die, and most people feel a noble sort of obligation to save a beautiful creature like a butterfly. But looking at the other side we know that without that butterfly, the spider we stole it from will starve. That SHOULD be just as wrong, no matter how scared you are of spiders they are just as much a living animal as a butterfly.

Don't like bugs? Fine, how about bears eating deer? Orca eating penguins? Cats and birds? People eating cats? In any of these examples the point remains that once something like this is witnessed one feels a sense of responsibility to take action, and even by inaction in a way we decide the fate of those creatures. Either way, someone gets hurt and we knew it.

As the Indian gurus and American hippies say, "there's a natural way of nature". Up until the Homo-Sapien there was a balance on our mother earth, even though all animals were striving for world domination in pretty much the same way we were.
Survival of the fittest, eat and be eaten, mindlessly doing ANYthing necessary to prolong your species. We just happen to be the best at it, so we came out on top.
Isn't that weird that humans have come up with the idea that it's wrong to be like this? That we believe there's some way to make Everyone happy? Why do we WANT everyone to be happy? I mean sure we're social creatures, but so are ants and birds, and they wouldn't give spit if one of their comrades died. For them it's just about using each other. We've got it into our heads that other people not only have feelings but even deserve power and freedom of their own.

Maybe the correct answer is to free the butterfly, but then reform the spider. Take it home and set it up to eat all the flies and bugs that hurt your home. Teach the bear to be comfortable eating cat food and the occasional burglar. That way your just defending yourself from others, and maybe there's even a way to set up homes for those creatures you don't like.. But.. hold on. Shouldn't a correct answer stay correct even on a large scale? It's not fair if only a small number of people can do the right thing! So THEN what happens? Save the trees save the whales and the lions save the wolves and the hippopotamus (hippopotami?), get meat eaters to eat fast-food and special nutrition bars, You now have a planet bursting at the seams with animals that only die by accidents, old age, and meteors.

Well, if the planet is getting too full we obviously need only to spread out! spend a few years "terraforming", and start putting life on other planets!

.YES.

and with all the animals reformed and working together (under us) we can reach levels of productivity like never before! We'll get rid of disease! Cure cancer! Learn to transfer brains into new bodies and we will become a cornucopia of immortal creatures spreading across the galaxy like a plague of lawful/good slime-mold!!
Isn't it freaky to think that in fifty years, this could totally be possible?


And yet as fantastic as it sounds.. there is something very WRONG about it, isn't there? What makes us cringe is the thought of us over using our power to mess with the way things were before we got here. Nobody wants to be the fat loud American that comes into a country and tears everything up.

So we watch the predator eat the prey.