A Little Less Celebration, a Little More Action.

I always thought (until how recently I decline to say) that the positions of attorney general and surgeon general were military distinctions, sort of a way to let all the different generals stand out. Turns out that is not the case.

So there was a little festival going on yesterday to celebrate Pioneer Day, which I attended with some folks I know. The problem was, we got there in the afternoon apparently right when it was all closing down. It wasn't all at once, though: pretty much every single activity or exhibit or whatever waited to shut down until we walked by it or, if we were trying to take part, we were next up in line. It was like a malevolent series of Pioneer Day anti-miracles, as they were out to get us instead of helping us celebrate. Pioneer Day 2013 ruined. The magic is gone for me; next year I'm going to need to learn a valuable Pioneer Day lesson to offset this year's mild inconvenience.

I've got a family reunion that's going to start tonight, and I'm really excited about that. Dear Little Sister will be there, so I'll have to pretend to be excited about that. (I kid, I kid! Or do I? You be the judge.) We always stay up late playing board games and do fun things with the niblings. (Fun fact of the day: "niblings" is a real word that encompasses nieces and nephews. You're welcome.) It'll be nice to see everybody.

Okay, okay, I'm not so jaded that I don't believe in Pioneer Day any more. Obviously I'm a huge fan of having work and school off all day. It should be a weeklong celebration, I say.

I'm going to have a fun contest. Whoever memorizes every word published on this blog will get a dollar. Go.

This Is All Just a Big Misunderstanding.

Somebody from home recently went to Comic-Con and had been keeping me apprised of its goings-on via Facebook. That is to say, they posted photos to their timeline from time to time—not so much like a direct channel as I'd like, but just as effective as a direct line to the Kremlin. Facebook was my red phone on my desk that kept telling me that somewhere, someone else was having fun and I wasn't there. I always thought Comic-Con—well, I guess I just drank the Kool-Aid about it being dweebish and unbecoming one of a high station in life as myself (read: over 16 years old). Red Kool-Aid, on my desk, for parallelism's sake. But the Kool-Aid was a lie. It looks awesome.

I was also just alerted by my informant in China—that's unnecessary to this story, but you needed to know that I have powerful friends strategically globe-hopping on the internship phase of their professionalization—to an article about a man with my same name. Middle initial and everything. He was just released from a prison sentence that nearly spanned my complete mortal sojourn, exonerated by DNA evidence for a crime he didn't commit, and he's having the order that set him free framed. Nothing particular about that story, just that I can't imagine what the world would be like without DNA analysis. Well, I can, since it hasn't been here forever, but I mean I'm grateful for it. It's just awful to think about that much of someone's life being taken from them. How do they cope, or make the best of it? Do they, even? Bummer might be as much of an understatement as awesome is an over-, but there it is. It is the ultimate bummer to start your morning off with. And he has my name. Could have been me. Thanks a lot, informant. Let's take it down a notch on keeping me so apprised.

So there's a song that I've taken a particular shine to. It's by a band that I've always assumed was heavy metal—to be perfectly unfair, I apparently thought every single band from before the eighties, sans the Beatles, was heavy metal. Elvis probably dabbled. Anyway I've come to begrudgingly accept my naivety and to see that this song, and presumably this band, is extremely pretty. It's my favorite song of the moment. Meaning it will expire as such in about a week, and I have favorites of more permanence at the moment, but this is this song's time to shine, baby.

Well, it features prominently a name of a girl that I am also starting to really, really love. The name, not the girl. Well, I don't know the girl, so let's not judge unfairly: I at least love the name. I shot it right to the top of my list of favorite girl names for when I have children. It also probably has an expiration date attached. I need some favorite names of more permanence here. To quote Jack Donaghy's surprisingly reasonable advice, you've got to stick to Bible names and kings and queens of England.

Problem, though. I don't want my daughter—my little angel—to be named after a heavy metal song, even one falsely accused as such. Well, really a popular pre-70's rock song isn't going to cut it for my princess either. When they go around the class in third grade to say how they got their names, I don't want her to have to cite a rock band of any generation, quite frankly. I don't often mind what third graders think of me, but if they've heard of that band and made the same assumptions as I have, I will officially be the worst father ever in their little eyes. My little girl needs something better to say. I need to make this name normal. Meaning, today I begin my studies of the Bible and British royal history in earnest. I'll even drum up some forged manuscripts and see if I can get society to buy into them if it will keep me—cool? will that word even be around then?—in the eyes of those (surprisingly judgmental, in my imagination) children. Okay that's why we talk about these things. I've got some serious issues I need to deal with, here. Not the least of which is my rogue underpunctuation and overinterjection.

It's Time for Mission Stories.

All right, folks. You asked for it, you got it. Installment number four of what may yet come to be known as the most significant series of emetic posts and mental waste yet to grace your face. That might not be true, but I offer a challenge up to anyone on the Internet to supply more meaningful regular posts than are to be found here. Go ahead. I defy you.

Back when I was on my mission in Albania (for the LDS Church), I spent a lot of time every day just walking from place to place, trying to talk to people. Sometimes it was harder for me to open my mouth than others; those are the times when I would get lost in a cyclone of thought, bouncing from one idea to another as I tried to calm down my sense of the world, think about what I should be teaching and focusing on, and figuring out where we ought to go to look for more people.

Whenever I did this, I found myself doing the same thing: I would find myself imagining myself on my first Sunday home from my mission, giving a talk in church as a report of the things I learned on my mission, and how I learned them. My journal is full of these moments, I think. I would always be saying in my mind, "If I learned one thing on my mission, it would be the following." I probably summarized the whole of my mortal experience into a couple concise phrases a dozen times a day. It wasn't that I purposely set out to prepare for my homecoming talk like that, just that I kept finding myself standing at the pulpit in my imagination trying to summarize the most fundamental principles of existence. I guess I wanted to make my mission worthwhile for the people at home when I got back as well as to make it worthwhile to myself and the individuals I was teaching at the time.

I don't know why my mind always went there, but I'm glad it did. There was probably too much going on for me to list it all off, so I always thought, "If I can just get the right way to phrase the right thing, then I can be let off the hook and just always refer to that when I need to." Turns out, though, there seems to be a reason the Church is built on the principle of continuing revelation. Building your body of knowledge "line upon line, precept on precept" like this would refresh my understanding and make old principles new to me. In particular, I always found myself coming up with a phrase that closely mirrored a song we sang in primary or a scripture we had focused on studying in seminary, or that I had read that morning in my personal study.

A lot of people talk about "deep" doctrine as something to be avoided, but I always felt like the "deepest" doctrines I was privy to from the Holy Ghost were those that were the simplest and the easiest to miss or forget in a time of struggle. "Love one another," or "For God so loved the world that he gave his Only Begotten Son." Stuff that you feel like, since it's not a complicated principle, you need to advance forward or branch out from. Actually, I found it the other way around: they're deep in moment and meaning, not in phrasing or relative obscurity.

Maybe "the course of the Lord is one eternal round" because it keeps bringing you back to the same doctrines over and over again, but not in a stale or repetitive way—in a way that makes you feel like you've never heard the right things properly before, even the last time that you read or heard the exact same thing. Somehow, when you're stepping forward and leaving your home, you end up appreciating what you left that much more when the road leads you right back where you came from. Usually when you thought you were farthest from where you started and weren't even paying attention.