Nicolas Sparks

Mom you don’t think I know who Nicolas sparks is....!!?? Wow, I am offended. Going to the Carolina’s because that is where Nicolas sparks made his movies. Sweet! Why didn't I think of that..... In the movie October Skies, this lady is always talking about Myrtle Beach and painting a panorama of it. When you said that you went to the beach in the Carolina’s, I knew that you went to that beach because of this movie. ha

My new Mish President is fantastic. He is a good mix of funny and serious. He asked a sister mish in one of the training meeting if she ever felt attracted to the boys she saw on the street. She said no because "she is a missionary." His response was more or less; "well that’s not true, and it shouldn't be like that. You are not robots. You are adolescents; very good ones but you still are what you are. You don’t have to stop being yourself to be a missionary. You just have to dedicate yourself, work hard, follow the rules, and keep high standards. But you don’t have to enslave who you are."  It caught my attention because I have thought and talked with my comps a lot on my mish. I think I have found a good balance. At times I have probably been too serious and other times probably had too much fun. But I haven’t strayed too far from what I think has been that good balance. For example my comp and I studied super hard this morning then after a couple of hours we started to clean the house and I grabbed a tape roll and we started playing a game which continually transformed between soccer, hockey, and ninja badmitten, which he grabbed a shirt and I grabbed my towel and we started locker room whipping each other. Haha, we finished super out of breath and gasping with laughter. He got me several times solid on my bum.

I liked what you said about tearing down celebrity status. It made me think of Elder Cook’s talk where he was talking about Facebook." He observed that when using social media, we tend to broadcast the smiling details of our lives but not the hard times at school or work. We portray an incomplete life—sometimes in a self-aggrandizing or fake way. We share this life, and then we consume the “almost exclusively … fake lives of [our] social media ‘friends.’” “How could it not make you feel worse to spend part of your time pretending to be happier than you are, and the other part of your time seeing how much happier others seem to be than you?”    

So my President just called me and told me that he just booked my flight for the 12th of January.