The other night, Joe and I were at my friend Margot and Matt’s home. We were eating dinner and talking and having a great ‘ol time when all of a sudden I noticed that people were looking at me a little strange. Joe had started rubbing my shoulder in a supportive way, Matt was looking at me across the table with a skeptical eye, Margot mentioned I was clicking and unclicking my pen at a faster than human rate and my friend Jeff had stopped practically mid-word mid-sentence and then slowly brought his words out of slow motion and the record started turning again. All this while I was being very conscience to reassure myself that I was NOT bothered by what Jeff was talking about and I was certainly not showing any outward signs of discomfort.
I consider myself to be an open minded person. I figure I can always listen to someone’s opinion, even if I heartily disagree. In this particular case, however, I didn’t necessarily even disagree with what Jeff was saying. And I was still having a hard time just maintaining the status quo.
We had finished our dinner of sweet and sour vegetables, frozen pizza and salad with optional ‘some kind of cheese/salsa sauce’ which only Jeff was brave enough to try and had brought out the pens and paper to exchange reading, watching and listening favorites. (Margot’s idea…really a great one.) Somehow the conversation had landed on religion. Specifically, the religion I was raised in: mormon. Now, let me interject here that I have never been the ideal mormon and have had serious doubts most of my life about the validity of one religion claiming to be the only ‘true’ church and have almost been the model ‘jack-mormon’ the past 20 years of my life. So, someone please tell me why I suddenly felt like I needed to remind myself to breathe evenly and to not show any streaks on the outside of the inner stress I was feeling? I’ve been known to make fun of policies, rules and beliefs of the LDS church many times. And I’ve heard people poke fun at things I was taught were the gospel truth and never batted an eyeball. Here, we have Jeff just trying to have a conversation about a particular myth in the church history, not even making any jokes or rude comments and I’m having some kind of allergic reaction. What is up with that?
Well, there isn’t really any end to this story. It’s just something that happened that I haven’t been able to figure out yet, but haven’t stopped thinking about.
In other news, I spent almost the entire day from 6 am to 6 pm in my car driving to various photo shoots for North magazine. It was a long day. But good, too. More on that later.
quick recap for the kids:
you don’t have to know everything all the time, your mom still has lots of questions about things, i’m using the new camera a lot, can’t wait to see you this weekend! the new strongbad is pretty funny…..
hugs and kisses,
mom