Fifteen months out now, and what a ride it's been.
Of course, the last two months have felt as long as the previous thirteen combined. That doesn't help too much.
Things have been changing almost faster than I can keep up with. We got a new mission president at the beginning of July and he hit the ground running. The person over the young missionaries on this mission (a.k.a. the babysitter) also changed. This leadership has a very different, much more hands-on approach to running things. The schedule of meetings doubled, expectations rose, and the rules were revised. The new rules should be coming out any day now, so we'll see just what they have in store.
Another one of the changes that have been happening is that apartment moves are becoming a lot more prevalent. In the last month, the make-up of my apartment has changed three times. For those of you who are wondering, this does not make for a good time. Especially when one of the moves brought in one of the most annoying human beings on the face of the Earth. He grates me the wrong way more than any other person that I have ever met before. More than any of the autistic elders I have dealt with, this boy is my ultimate trial. If he lives, we shall all know I passed the test. If he doesn't, it wasn't me.
On Monday, I had a "fun" experience with a patron. This particular patron is friends with anautistic elder who tells him a lot of the things about the mission and how it works. I emphasize autistic because this is not really the best place to come upon your sole source of information on a subject. Autistic kids have a different view of reality. I figured this out somewhere between being told by one that he was a member of the SWAT team in high school working undercover to bust an illegal street racing ring and another one telling me that he had eighteen girlfriends (all his age, he clarified, just in case anyone was wondering). This patron has not learned this lesson. He went on to tell me (I being the elders quorum president) that I needed to call a third counselor and that it needed to be the AP. He also elaborated on how he felt that almost all of the elders were failing in their missions and even named one lower-functioning autistic as a "lost cause" because he has a tendency to be in his own little world. Heaven knows that autistics never do this (sarcasm). To top everything off, he was nice enough to tell me that the former AP (a good friend of mine) was a failure at his position...which he wasn't, FYI. Because he was a patron, I had to treat him with respect. This limited my responses to unintelligible grunts and nods.
[[Author's Note: This entry was supposed to be much longer; however, I never actually bothered to finish writing it. I was just going to erase it (having long forgotten where I was going with it), but I love the title so much that I decided to just publish it in it's half-completed form. For those of you who are wondering, the title is a play off of a song that while originally performed by Sonny and Cher was really perfected by Buddy Rich and his band. For those of you who are wondering who Buddy Rich is, he quite possibly may be the best drummer of all time and worked with some of the biggest names on the jazz scene before starting his own band. His version of the "The Beat Goes On" is much better than the original in my completely unbiased opinion. I hope that this half-post is not too much of an inconvenience!]]
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