I had a lot of fun in college.

It wasn’t so much the drinking, the partying, the first taste of freedom, or the drug experimentation-not that those were unappreciated.

It was the peace of mind.

From the day the big acceptance letter came in the mail, I felt set. I had truly earned something. Now my days of working toward truly earning anything would be over.

Graduating from college isn’t a challenge. You just have to pass. And unless you’re a square and study engineering or something, it’s hard not to pass. I chose my degree based on the ideal ratio between scholarly prestige and lack of mandatory lecture attendance. I had my life planned out, and a top university pedigree was all I needed to set it into motion.

I’d be sort of like the bourgeois bohemian David Brooks wrote about ten years ago-except I’d be younger and cooler. I was just going to be a comfortable bohemian. And I was going to live happily and alternatively ever after.

In case there’s any confusion about what I mean by “comfortable bohemian,” let’s start with what I don’t mean: a bohemian in the original sense. That’s someone in the creative class who lives with total disregard for society’s norms. It’s sexy. It’s a Hunter S. Thompson type of lifestyle. But living like a true bohemian almost guarantees a life of poverty and hardship. And that sucks.

Comfortable bohemians, on the other hand, gripe about the death of old-fashioned bookstores while relying on our iPhones to find quaint new spots to take their place. We read our local alternative weekly, pushed by the national alternative weekly syndicate, to tell us what alternative concerts to see. We’re tired of the commercialization of American sports, so we watch European soccer, fed live by ESPN and Fox Sports at 11 a.m. We shop at Trader Joe’s and try to get to the farmers market when it’s nice out. We’re alternative. But not that alternative.

In the arena of life, we occupy the peanut gallery. We get to take in the show, but we don’t jump in ourselves. We don’t necessarily strive for material affluence, but we compensate for economic inferiority with cerebral superiority.

It’s a lifestyle with its hypocrisies, sure, but that doesn’t make it unrespectable. (Hypocrisy and respectability actually marry quite nicely.) I have no trouble finding the absurdities in our society, but I’m not about to devote my life to railing against the status quo and dwelling on the fringes. I’ve dabbled with poverty enough to know it’s not for me. But I still carry a little shred of conscience. So I’m willing, as a card-carrying comfortable bohemian, to maintain an attitude of respectful dissent, as long as it doesn’t exile me from polite society.

If the point of going to college is to prepare yourself for your future career, I can without boasting say I succeeded in my preparation for comfortable bohemianism. I studied political theory. I read my Lenin and Lukács and Foucault.

Of course, if I’d been looking around more, I might have realized a lot of my peers were, just like me, paving their way toward lives of comfortable bohemianism.

And it might have worked out for us.

Unfortunately, we’ve found ourselves thrust into the worst economy since the Great Depression. And all those squares we laughed at for joining student business groups and going to speed-networking sessions are the only ones with decent jobs. And we live with our parents.

No, things aren’t going as planned. Let’s be clear: the first rule of comfortable bohemianism is comfort. You find your golden cow, whether it’s a job that “harnesses your creativity” or a fat inheritance. And then you layer on tasteful bohemian accents to a degree that’s commensurate with your income. The greater the income, the more bohemian accents you’ll require in compensation.

But without any income, what can we be? Certainly not comfortable bohemians. But we can’t be uncomfortable bohemians, either. We’ve been taught to depend on material abundance. Even those with much more bohemian resolve are weighed down by student debt they can’t ever shake.

And so we are floundering.

To make it worse, pundits have taken to kicking us while we’re down, offering up diagnoses for our problems: We’ve been coddled. Facebook has turned us into social retards. (This is coming from the generation that needs Match.com to get laid.) We’re indifferent to becoming useful members of society.

In some ways, they’re not entirely wrong. Contributing to society isn’t something that feels like an especially noble calling right now. This is a society with its priorities out of whack. This society told me I needed a university education to avoid becoming desperately poor-and then buried me with debt when I followed its directions. (Just going to UC Berkeley, a public university, left me with $80,000 in student debt-and that makes me one of the luckier ones.)

Now, I know my gripe is in some ways predictable. It’s the natural order of history that every generation gets into a fight with its predecessors. Still, it’s pretty rich to be taking a lashing from the generations that gorged themselves on credit and sent the whole system crashing down, all the while rearing us on Playstations and designer handbags and convincing us that it was possible to live comfortably off of a liberal arts education.

I think my generation would garner more respect from our elders if we tried to stand for something more substantial. We could show even slight concern about our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and Libya (or is that last one over?). We could cause even a slight uproar in response to the California college tuition hikes. We could-I don’t know-ask to audit the Fed, or something. Instead, the biggest political groundswell I’ve seen from my generation was a not-very-taxing effort to elect our slightly left-of-center President Obama. And I suspect even that was fueled mainly by clever Facebook marketing and a Shepard Fairey portrait.

Perhaps my generation could have had a watershed moment if the London rioters had actually protested the killing of their disenfranchised peer instead of looting sneakers and computers. But we are the youth of today, and today very few of us would allow principles to distract us from a free shopping spree.

So maybe we should just become real bohemians. Jack Kerouac set out on the road with nothing but a notebook and a beat-up Chevy, and that worked out pretty well for him. Then again, would he have been so eager if he’d had a monthly iPhone bill to think about?

Calvin Alvarez is from Los Angeles.

*Photo courtesy of reidmasimore.

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by Brenda Yancor

If I hadn’t grown up Mormon, I wouldn’t have gone camping every summer for seven years. I wouldn’t have had any place to throw my 16th birthday party or any guests to invite. I wouldn’t have known what it was like to have a father figure I could look up to and depend on. And I definitely wouldn’t have known what it felt like to belong.

My family moved around a lot-pretty much every couple of years, and always within a three-mile radius, never leaving the cities of Cudahy, Bell or Maywood. No matter how many times I had to get used to a new neighborhood, I never had to get used to a new church. The church never forgot to pay the rent, never got foreclosed on, and never got kicked out. It was the closest thing I had to a place to call home. At least it was until this past June, when I finally wrote a letter of resignation to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.

Usually, when I tell someone I grew up Mormon, they either joke about multiple mothers or ask how someone like me – a Guatemalan woman from the hood – could fit in. I explain that my mother (and I have only one) converted to the Mormon Church from Catholicism when she was still living in Guatemala, and the congregation I belonged to while growing up in Southern California was almost entirely non-white. Sunday services were in Spanish. So were the scriptures I read every night.

The Mormon Church found my mother at a lonely time. Her husband had gone to the U.S. to find work, leaving her in Guatemala with an infant daughter and son. One day my mom went to the store to buy five cents worth of vanilla to make incaparina – a porridge-like drink that helps prevent protein deficiency – but the storekeeper was only selling the whole jar. With only five cents in hand, my mother was about to go home empty-handed, but a lady in line overheard the exchange and invited my mother over to her house to get some vanilla. Then she invited my mom to a class on turning old clothes into new baby clothes. This woman was Mormon, and when my mom showed up for the class, Mormon missionaries were also there. Not long after that, my mother was baptized into the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.

My family’s finances were always shaky, especially because my dad had trouble holding onto a job. But when things got especially rough, the church was there for us. One of the first jobs my mom had in the United States was at Deseret Industries, an LDS-sponsored vocational rehabilitation program and thrift store. Not only was it a source of income; it was also where I got a lot of my clothes. We benefited a lot from the Bishop’s Storehouse, a pantry where Mormons in need can get bags of bread, canned food, soap, shampoo and other basic necessities. A few times, the church even helped us with the rent.

Being a Mormon isn’t just about believing. It’s about being taken care of – spiritually, emotionally, and physically. You don’t just go to church for three hours on Sunday. You do something almost every day that defines you as a Mormon. There are weekly activities, monthly dances, and constant responsibilities.

When I was a teenager, my friends and I would take trips to the Los Angeles temple to perform baptisms for the dead – the ceremony of getting baptized in the name of someone else. (That way, if that person chooses to accept the Mormon Church in the afterlife, they’re ready to go.) A group of six or seven of us would pile into a van and get driven over to the Westside to the grand temple on Santa Monica Boulevard. I loved going to that temple – its lawn so neatly trimmed, its golden statue a signal of the wealth and stability so lacking in my own life.

We’d change into white jumpsuits and line up to be used as vessels for those who have died. A Brother at the baptismal font would recite a prayer for each person on the list and then dunk one of us into the water. Afterward, we’d pile back into the van and head over to Tommy’s Burgers for some chili cheese fries and soda.

These were happy times. No matter where you are, or what you’re doing, you’re connected to a sense of purpose when you’re LDS. You’re in a worldwide club. As long as you’re a member in good standing, it’s home.

Seven years ago, I started to lose that good standing.

I was in high school when I had my first – and, to date, only – love relationship with another woman. She was my best friend, and when I finally admitted to her how I felt about her, she admitted she felt the same way about me.

I tried to fight it. I wanted to maintain my good standing within the church. I met with my church bishop. He told me-as I knew he would-to break it off and repent. I started going to free therapy offered by a church friend. I’ve blocked out the details of those sessions, but the entries in my diary are a reminder. When I was first able to admit to myself how I felt about my friend, I wrote about how happy I was and how I knew God still loved me, even if I was doing the wrong thing. After I started the therapy sessions, my entries became a record of guilt. I started to keep a daily list of the things I did to deserve God’s love or not. On the days when the not-deserving list was longer, my writing would deteriorate into tortured illegibility.

College took me to UCLA on the west side of Los Angeles – a change I wasn’t really prepared for. Where I grew up, a weekly allowance was something that only existed on TV shows, half of the people in our families were born in another country, and we could switch between English and Spanish in our conversations without hesitation. That wasn’t the experience of most of my classmates at UCLA. Going to church on the west side didn’t make things any better, as the difference in social class between myself and the rest of the congregation became clear. My parents weren’t paying for my college education, while the parents of most of my fellow Mormon classmates were. I wore thrift-store clothes. Everyone else looked like they shopped at J.Crew. Nobody was ever unkind or dismissive, but I felt out of place.

All of this took place at a time when I was frustrated by the idea that I’d never get to be sealed with my family in the temple. Being sealed means you will be together in the afterlife, but a woman can’t perform this ceremony with her children on her own, and my parents had divorced when I was a teenager. For a family to be sealed, both parents must be Mormons in good standing. I couldn’t reconcile the idea of a loving god with the thought of being deprived of my family in the afterlife just because my parents’ relationship didn’t work out.

It didn’t help that I was starting to think about what it means to be a “Lamanite.” Mormons believe that an ancient man named Nephi, who was godly and faithful, produced a line of descendants called the Nephites, who were likewise godly and faithful. Among Nephi’s brothers was a bad one named Laman who left behind a tribe of descendants called the Lamanites. These people were wicked and mocked God. So God cursed them-with dark skin. “I will cause that they shall be loathsome unto thy people,” says God in the Book of Mormon. The skin of anyone who was non-white-my skin-was downright “loathsome.”

In the early days of finding myself at odds with the church, I Googled “gay Mormons” and found an organization called Affirmation that provides a support network for gay Mormons and gay former Mormons. Browsing through Affirmation’s online bulletin boards, I learned that it was possible to resign from the church. At the time, Mormonism was still so intertwined with my identity that I couldn’t bring myself to take that step, but the idea had been planted.

All of these internal conflicts eventually forced me to make a choice-or, rather, many small choices that added up to one big choice. On Friday, May 27, 2011, almost seven years after unintentionally embarking upon my apostasy, I sat in my living room with my computer on my lap and poured myself shot after shot of José Cuervo. “I have chosen to terminate my membership with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints,” I wrote to the Member Records Division of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints in Salt Lake City. “I’ve fallen in love with the world. I love people, in their raw humanity and endless flaws. I love sin, with its ability to teach you things you would never know otherwise.” I headed over to the nearest notary public in order to assure the Member Records Division that it was I, Brenda Yancor, who wrote that letter. I paid 18 bucks to send it overnight.

A week and a half later, the Records Division acknowledged my letter but asked me to reconsider in view of “the eternal consequences of such an action.” They also wrote that they’d forwarded my letter to my local bishop. They enclosed a pamphlet titled “An Invitation” asking me “to return and partake of the happiness you once knew.”

The ex-Mormon forums warn that if you live with Mormon family members, they will be informed of your resignation. Sure enough, on Sunday, June 26th my mother called me to share her anguish. She blamed my friends, she blamed my college education, and she blamed my pride. I had to explain to her that my decision was the culmination of years of thought, not some impulse. Where Mormonism so often saw sin and called for repentance, I saw humanity and called for acceptance. My mother might not have fully understood or agreed with me, but at least she didn’t disown me.

On July 5th I got a letter from my local bishop lamenting my decision but agreeing to take the necessary steps to process my request. Soon after, I got a letter from Confidential Records. It was two paragraphs, each one sentence long. As of July 8, 2011, my name had been removed from the membership records of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.

I’d waited a long time for this moment, but it still wasn’t easy. It was really over. They’d yanked my name out of their records. It’s like I was never there.

When I was Mormon, I thought I knew everything – where I came from, where I was going, and what I needed to do. It was hard to let go of that. Today, I’m okay with having beliefs based on observation and common sense and changing them when I feel it’s necessary. I’m happy and excited about figuring things out as I go along, about plunging into the unknown at the start of every day and coming back with new experiences and ideas. Above all, I’m okay with not knowing.

Of course, although I’m no longer a Latter-Day Saint, I will forever be a Guatemalan Mormon who grew up in the hood. I doubt I’ll ever be entirely free of twinges of Mormon guilt. Having a coffee or beer still causes me a moment’s hesitation. I’ll always understand the sense of bliss from surrendering to a higher power. Whether I like it or not, the church will always be a part of me, even if I’m never again part of the church.

Brenda Yancor is an intern at Zócalo Public Square, and takes her coffee with two sugars, lots of milk, and a small portion of guilt.

*Photo courtesy of Altus Photo Design.

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by Lisa Margonelli

Optimism about technology is more or less a California trait, but it requires some discipline.

Consider Burbank Assemblyman Mike Gatto’s proposal to harvest energy from street surfaces. Gatto’s AB306 instructs the California Energy Commission to research putting vibration sensors in some pavements and converting the vibrations caused by passing cars to electrical pulses, which ultimately could be used to power road signs or even sold to nearby communities. Sounds too good to be true? In June, the state assembly voted State Assembly voted 65-3 to pass AB 306 out of the chamber.

Is there still gold in them thar streets of California? The name for this technology is piezoelectric. Here’s how proponents say it will work: Tiny sensors will be embedded in roads. When cars drive over the sensors they will push the top of the sensor towards the bottom, generating an electrical impulse that will join up with thousands of other impulses to form a current. (Piezoelectric devices are commonly used in starters for gas stoves and lighters.) Caltrans, proponents say, will be able to sell the electricity or use it to power signs. Significantly, this is not a decree saying the technology must be applied, but a motion to make the already over-worked California Energy Commission study it and design a test, to be executed by CalTrans with existing money.

This concept is an indicator of the state of our optimism. Are we canny strivers of the future? Or is optimism a lazy habit, an embedded belief that a technological Santa Claus will solve our problems? Beyond the statement that piezoelectric worked in Israel, the media contained very little thoughtful discussion of how this stuff works. This is partly a reflection of our gutted news organizations and more significantly, an indication of how little consensus there is on the technology.

I spoke with Alan Meier, a professor at UC Davis who has worked at both Lawrence Berkeley Lab and the International Energy Agency. “What are they?,” he asked, “Miraculous black boxes that suck energy from the air? When you’re taking movement and pressure and converting it to electricity, that energy has to come from somewhere.” Making the road soft enough to absorb the pressure, he says, will take a bit of energy from cars. And the electricity produced may be greenish, but it’s not cheap. Meier calculates the gasoline used to generate the electricity will cost about five times as much as electricity currently costs.

Meier finds the idea more intriguing when the piezoelectric device is embedded in a long downhill slope — say the Grapevine — where it can absorb braking energy that’s being wasted. After running the angles, he imagines there might be a few niches where the technology works. “But why? It’s not energy from nowhere.”

To be fair, there is another strain of thought that highways are built to withstand the shock of wheels going up and down and that possibly creating a bed of piezoelectric sensors in the roadbed will absorb some of that strain and reduce rutting in asphalt, making it last longer, AND generating a little electricity on the side. However, I was unable to find any papers stating that this is the case with piezoelectric technology in roads. I did, however, come across a press release from the Innowatch saying that their piezoelectric road web can be used to track vehicles and their speed as they pass over–which will undoubtedly drive privacy advocates bananas.

For me, the most telling indicator of the reasonableness of this scheme can be found in the recent report by the research, analysis and events firm IDTechEx. Listing hundreds of companies doing work in the field of energy harvesting, the IDTechEx report is one of those 400 page specialist things that sell for around $4000, and for which I had to beg before they released it to me as a member of the press.

IDTechEx says that by 2021 the total market for tiny devices to power our laptops, harvest energy from our bicycles and even power pacemakers without a battery will be $4 billion. The report details a dazzling array of far- out applications, mentioning offhandedly that the U.S. military is researching robot jellyfish and robot bats, which will benefit from replacing batteries with energy harvesters. In Japan there are two train stations that use embedded sensors to capture the energy from people stepping through fare gates to power signs.

However, IDTechEx views roads embedded with sensors as something of a long shot, saying that while a lot of methods of implementing it have been studied, “the jury is still out on which is best.” A cursory scan of the rest of the report suggests that the cost curve for the sensors is likely to come down dramatically over the next 10 years, meaning that it may make more sense to do this later. Meaning: Not much sense now.

Optimism about technology like this can be more dangerous than a lazy habit. It runs the risk of causing hope fatigue among voters. And worse.

First, it promises something from nothing. The green space has become cluttered with Jules Verne-esque crap that promises only to be “new” while ignoring all the “old” fixes we know to be effective. In fact, we don’t need new energy so much as we need less–most of the developed world uses far less energy to generate $1 of Gross Domestic Product than we do.

Second, we’ve created a political ecosystem where the kind of new technology most likely to survive fake “controversies” is the stuff that’s of dubious efficacy. Last year California shelved an eminently sensible plan to require car manufacturers to use reflective paint and glass that could have saved a comparatively gargantuan half a million metric tons of carbon dioxide a year by 2020 because it became “controversial.” This is right on par with the recent U.S. Congressional backlash against energy-saving lightbulbs.

When I called Alan Meier I had forgotten that he once created a wonderfully pragmatic plan to save the world millions of barrels of oil a day cheaply and quickly. It’s called “Saving Oil In a Hurry.” Reduce the speed limit? Save 363,000 barrels of oil a day in the U.S. Institute a full-on car-pool program with parking, communications, and dedicated lanes? 800,000 barrels. Add in an eco-driving campaign OR a telecommuting campaign and you’ve cut another half a million barrels a day.

We could enact all, or some, of these measures in California and reduce oil consumption and pollution while saving money and pioneering the technology that would support them–telecommuting software, new social networks and geo-spacial systems to enable safe carpooling. But these ideas are not “new.” They’re old. We know we could do them. We just don’t feel like it. We’d prefer, lazily, to dream of a “black box that sucks energy from the air.”

Lisa Margonelli, director of the New America Foundation’s Energy Policy Initiative, publishes the Energy Trap. She wrote Oil On the Brain: Petroleum’s Long, Strange Trip to Your Tank.

*Photo courtesy of {Andrea}.

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