Day 3: Sunday in Manassas

Bryan spoke at church today. He's quite funny on the podium. Very good deadpan. As for the rest of the talk, on one hand, it's amazing how much pose he has. On the other, he's got to watch it a bit with the overconfidence. He tries to do some things as he speaks that don't quite come off right, and I guess a lot of that has to do with age and lack of experience. It seems a little unauthentic, as if he intellectually gets what he's saying, but the emotion's not there. As if he's playing a game and he's solved the puzzle, but doesn't understand why he was solving the puzzle. Or maybe the problem is things come out a little too simplified, again because he hasn't yet had to contemplate any other paradigms, and therefore doesn't understand why no one gets what to him is so obvious. In short, he reminds me a lot of myself at that age. In particular, I can think back to one talk I gave where I ate up almost the whole sacrament meeting (I'm kind of surprised the Bishop didn't kick me to say, "time's up, kiddo. Got to have our adults speak."). I remember some of the jokes I told and insights I tried to make were just way beyond my experience. And Sister Harlow came up afterwards and said, "I can't believe you had the guts to pull that off." Back then I thought that was in reference to a joke I made about girls. But now that I think about it, I think her statement stemmed more out of the same mixed feelings I have about Bryan's talk.

Anyways, not much else happened until the missionaries came over for dinner (how is it that they always seem to come when I come? I guess mom likes making an excuse for a big meal). The only thing interesting with the meal was that one of the missionaries had been there for Christmas. And he reminded me of the "Nut in Pie" incident, which really needs to be told. Amy and Susie were in the kitchen making chocolate mousse pies (this was back during Christmas vacation, remember), when I walked in and they suddenly asked me what I would have done, as a missionary, had I taken a bite of something that wasn't supposed to be crunchy (i.e. a chocolate mousse pie), and found something crunchy instead (i.e. a nut). I said I would probably just ignore it and keep eating. Well, they're laughing hysterically as they said this and they finally confessed to me their secret experiment. Each of the pies was to have one walnut in them, and each missionary would get the slice with the nut. I decided that this was a pretty fair experiment, and we went for it. My mission was to find out if they had any nut allergies. I forget how I did this now, but I'm sure it was very clever. So it came time for desert, and the girls started dishing out the pie. Only, they forgot where the nuts where. So mid-way through it, Amy took a bite and suddenly stops chewing and looks around and starts laughing hysterically. She had a nut. And so, we soon discovered, did Susie. To this day, the missionary claims we were trying to poison him. Well, anyway, it was funny. You probably had to be there.

The only other event of the day was actually a little bit of a non-event. Chris and I were supposed to watch the Lakers vs. Spurs game, only the missionaries interrupted that. So mom put a tape in the VCR and started recording. But she recorded the wrong channel. So much for that. The Lakers won, by the way. So it's all evened up. Apparently it was pretty close. If only the Spurs could find a way to win in L.A.

Posted May 11, 2003 (11:56 PM) | Comments (1)