Post-script to The Pseudos

I'm sitting on a runway. I'm in an airplane on the runway, by the way. It's not as though I'm attempting some sort of exercise in civil disobedience by staging a one-woman sit-in on an LAX runway, or anything similarly exciting.
My plane loaded and is ready to go, but something has unexpectedly delayed our departure. The pilot has graciously allowed the plane's occupants to use our technological devices, so I'm making use of this time to add a few notes about my pseudo-relatives before I rejoin them in Utah in a few hours or in many hours, depending upon the length of the flight delay.

As I was being driven to the airport by the director of my facility, who, as a licensed psychiatrist probably billed my parents' insurance carriers his full fee for out-of-office therapy for the entire time he was away from the facilty for the trip, he mentioned having read my most recent blogs. He noted that one might get the impression from reading my blogs about the Pseudos that I maintain the childish perception that they exist solely in their interactions with me, almost as though they are placed in a drawer each time they depart from my presence and remain tucked away until they are again needed to perform some service or function in my world.

If he read my blogs more extensively, the director would surely come to the conclusion that I write of each person whose name or description appears in my blog with that same egocentric view. My blog focuses typically upon my own life -- people, situations, and things I have encountered in the past or continue to face. I can't blog extensively about Fidel Castro or Kim Jong Il, because I don't know enough about them to write about them extensively, although Kim Jong Il would be a fascintating topic for an extensive blog if I had the time and access to primary sources of information. My obsession with Kim Jong Il notwithstanding, this blog focuses upon the thoughts of a seventeen-year-old girl -- me -- and the influences in the seventeen-year-old girl's life. As I see things, it wouldn't make sense to go off on tangents, speculating on things that may or may not have happened when I was not present, for the sole purpose of convincing any potential readers who may inadvertently stumble across this blog that I do not think I am the literal center of the universe. Still, it behooves me to present myslef in the most mature light possible in the view of the director of my facility, so I shall discuss my pseudo-relatives as human beings unrealted in any sense to me.

My Pseudo-Unlce, Scott, is twenty-seven years old. He is the youngest of seven children, six of whom survived infancy. His father, now retired, was formerly an engineer and a professor at Brigham Young University. scott's father is also a singer, and sang with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir for twenty years, which is, I believe, the maximum number of years of affiliation with the Mo-Tab. Scott's mother was mostly a stay-at-home mother, although caring for young children was not necessarily conducive to her mental health. Fortunately for both her and her young children, she had inherited a not insignificant wad of cash, which provided nannies and other household help.

Scott's parents descended from Mormon pioneers who followed their religion all the way across America's vast prairie to what would eventually be known as Utah. Most of Scott's childhood took place in Utah, although he had the disctinction of having been born in Hawaii during his father's stint as a professor at one of bYU's satellite campuses located on Oahu's north shore.
Scott followed his religion as far as South America, where he served a two-year mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. At some point in the course of his two-year mission, a realization came to Scott that life for him perhaps had more to offer without the church-imposed ban on everything in life that he considered fun. Nevertheless, he completed his mission honorably before returning home to announce that he was forsaking the family religion.

Shortly after returning to Utah one Sunday morning in October, while virtually everyone else in his world was in church, Scott encountered a petite, raven-haired sixteen-year-old BYU tennis player while running in a park just below one of the area's canyons. Concerned for the safety of the attractive and unaccompained student-athlete, he returned to the same location at the same time each week. A friendship ensued. When the young woman reached the age of eighteen, Scott asked her out. They were formally engaged within a year, and married less than a month following her graduation from BYU.

In the meantime, Scott had completed his undergraduate degree in biophysics at Brigham Young University and had enrolled in the University of Utah Medical School in Salt Lake City. With financial support of his wife, who taught elementary school by day while attending law school by night, Scott focused on his studies and plodded through the four years of medical school.


As of this writing, Scott is poised to graduate from medical school this spring. He plans to begin a residency in pulmonology at a southern California hospital in July of this year.

As much as I would like to share more about Pseudo-Uncle in my endeavor to show the world that I know he exists independent of my assocations with him, I must discontinue at this time, as the pilot has ordered pasesngers to disengage electronic devices. Our plane is finally being allowed to take off.

Dr. Jeff, I hope you're satisfied with my effort.