musings.

I've just realized something incredible.  I cannot do any assignment for school until ABSOLUTELY the last possible minute.  I mean, it's 5:45 in the morning and I have a Marriage Prep project due at 10.  That's a fairly imminent deadline.  But instead of working on it, I spent the last hour stalking mission pictures of boys from my freshman ward on f-book (Michael Babcock put up some sweet Croatia photos), reading through the ridiculous quotes I've written down from my English professor this semester (favorite: "I've read many a book because of the cover. A sexy cover always gets me. And in this case, sexy doesn't necessarily mean heaving bosoms and cleavage."), and staring at the quote wall that's up in my apartment (Aleisha, myself, and our constituents have really said some inappropriate yet hilarious things).

I guess those 3 things have something in common: nostalgia.  So maybe I'm not being a lazy bum and avoiding work, but rather, I'm taking a time out to reminisce.  Which is an important thing to do, but I'm pretty sure I do it way too often.  My friend Ian wrote me a letter from Canada and said he didn't like my letters because they made him trunky.  But heck, I'm trunky, too.  For freshman year.  You don't have to be on a mission to get like that.

I think it's just the lack of closure that bothers me.  How all the guys who went on missions got yanked out of my life.  It's like social suicide or murder.  I don't care when relationships and friendships fade out in a natural death; for instance, losing people I know who are graduating or getting married and moving away don't bother me, because I know they're moving on to the next phases of their lives, and I don't want to try and tag along on those journeys.  But missions cut right into the college life cycle.  The boys disappear for two years and then come back different.  Always somehow different, and always unpredictably so.  It's like they're returning from war, almost: you have this image of them in your head of how you perceived them before, and you can't tell in what way that image should change until they step off the plane.    

I mean, missions are great.  In fact, I want to serve one.  But they are such a strange social phenomena, and a HUGE part of Mormon culture.  They've created so many stereotypes around the words "premie" and "RM."  I could really puzzle over it all forever.  Or at least for a couple more hours until I finally start my assignment.