Cookies!

This the first of what could be many posts about someone who impacted my life more than I ever hoped they would.

I hope I've done enough explaining about missionaries at this point that I can simply say, this friend was one of my companions for three months (or two transfer cycles [or 12 weeks {or 84 long days}]) Only one companion of mine ever demanded an "ET" or "Emergency Transfer" meaning that there were such serious conflicts between the two of us that they couldn't be resolved and we had to switch it up. This is that story.

We'd come home from eating dinner with a nice, though someone unstable old man who I'll call Steve McLaughlin. Steve is a story for another time, because like all guys called 'Steve' he's a ball of fun. Anyway, we'd eaten with Steve and we had something of his that we'd borrowed so when he dropped us off at our apartment, I grabbed it and headed back out to give it to him. When I came back, my companion was nowhere to be found. After a brief search, I discovered that he was in the bathroom. So I sat down and started to read. After a while of reading, I realized he was taking a rather long time, so I went to knock on the door when I heard him talking to someone. I was very confused by this turn of events, so I listened. I realized rather quickly that whoever he was talking to was getting an earful about some jerk who was a control freak, didn't listen and hated my companion, who, for this story I'll just call Teddy.

Turns out, Teddy thought that control freak was me. Uh oh.

My first response was surprise because though he wasn't my best friend, he was also not someone I abhorred to be with... yet. So I walked back to the couch, but could now hear him more clearly. I listened with gritted teeth for a few minutes. After a while of more slander being laid out there, and this had taken at least 15-20 minutes, I finally just yelled, "If you have such a big problem, why don't you come out here and talk to me about it?"

This was followed by silence and then, "Elder Savage has been eavesdropping! See what a bad person he is!"

Right Teddy. You're talking angrily on the phone in the bathroom in a small apartment with hardwood floors that create echoes. Yep. I'm the bad guy here.

So anyway, he comes out and hands me the phone (didn't even flush. I mean come on man!) and I am told by a friend of mine on the other end of the phone, "Listen, I know you're upset, but just keep your mouth closed and we'll get this figured out."

So I do as I'm told. I just live with it. In quiet fury. Plotting his untimely demise.

That phone call ends and there's about ten minutes of silence. I mean how are you supposed to do anything (much less when the 'thing' you're supposed to do is teach people how to have peace in their homes and lives) when that just happened?

Then the phone rings again. Teddy answers, but it's for me.

It's PJ. The Man. President Jensen. The person who takes care of all of the missionaries  Someone we love deeply and are dreadfully afraid of all at once. He takes ten seconds and says, "Hi. Sorry about all of this. I thought this would work, and I was wrong. You're too intense for him. You'll have a new companion in the morning. Please give the phone back to --" and I just handed him the phone.

Now, one of the things that I take a little pride in is that I work well with other people. My mom taught me to play nice. I happen to have many great friends you can read about. I am a talker, and a decent listener. So why this? Why now? I felt like I'd failed. I recognized this friend of mine could be somewhat more sensitive than my other friends (as I write about him again, and again you'll get more of this) and I thought I'd done a good job. I hadn't. This was day 4 of us being together. His birthday, a weekend, and now Monday night. Yuck.

Then came the worst part. As he started packing his bags, and trying to suppress smiles of having won he came over to where I was and started telling me things like, "You're a good guy, we're just different people." or "I'm really excited for you, this will be a good opportunity for both of us." and "Maybe this is what God had planned, you know? He works in mysterious ways." And even "Listen. It's not your fault you're a horrible person, I'm just better than you and deserve to get as far away from you as possible. Or maybe I'm just a big whiner, and annoying and you're lucky to be rid of me because I'm crazy, but probably you're just the devil incarnate and no one will ever love you and you should just go die."

... you know, or something like that. My memory is a little fuzzy on the details. Either way, I felt very talked down to by someone who had just crapped all over me. So, I did the only thing I could think to do.

I walked into the kitchen, pulled out a large knife and stabbed him repeatedly in the chest until he couldn't scream any more.

No wait, sorry, that's what I wanted to do. Here's what really happened.

I walked into the kitchen pulled out a large knife, slit him across the throat and skipped away as he fell to his death... no, sorry, that was the red velvet cupcake incident. We'll get to that one.

I walked into the kitchen, pulled out a jar of M&M cookie mix that happened to be in there and fired up the oven. As he continued to go between talking down to me and sorting his clothes back into his suitcase I pulled out butter, milk, whatever ingredient went into the cookies, mixed and baked and did exactly what my mother would have had me do. I pulled those cookies right out of the oven, and they were perfect. Soft, warm, and would have melted right in your mouth. He was in the kitchen talking to me as this happened, perhaps hoping to steal one of my precious cookies. I placed them carefully on a plate and made sure he didn't get to steal one of them. I handed the whole plate to him.

He was confused by this.

"What is this for?"

"Eating, generally."

"For me?"

"Yes, for you Teddy."

"Why?"

I told him the truth. It was because I didn't hate him. I told him I was sad things weren't going to work out, and that we hadn't really given it a fair shake, but that I understood his decision and hoped him to have the best of luck. He was once again very quiet after this. Though he did take my cookies.

So I sat down and read some more and he sat and nibbled on cookies. After a few minutes he looked at me and said, "Do you think we could make this companionship work?"

"Teddy," I responded, "With the Lord's help I can make anything work."

And there you have it ladies and gentlemen. We ended up staying together twenty one times longer! Our days were just as crazy. There were other attempts to get an ET, but he was rejected on the grounds that I make fabulous cookies from there on out. This man, though it may not seem like it now, would deeply move me and humble me in ways I couldn't imagine, and to this day, I'm very grateful we happened to have a jar of M&M cookie mix in our cupboard.

And not many sharp knives.

The Face In the Mirror.

This blog post might be the most telling about me so far. I try not to talk about me much. I think it's clear that with such great friends in my life, they rub off on me. I think if nothing else, it should be clear that they teach me to see the good in the world because the good in MY  world comes from them. However, this post, which will reveal a good deal about me, will also be exceptionally telling about me because I have a friend who is SO much like me. 

This friend is the one who anyone in my family would see right away as my closest comrade. We do lots of things that are amusing mostly to us. A handful of examples come to mind:

We like a lot of the same music, and some fun things happened because of that.. When we were both younger, we would often play a game where we would have to speak only in song lyrics. The catch was, you'd have to use a word from the other person's song lyrics in order to use your next set of song lyrics. It was a little more complicated than it sounded, but since we listened to the same music, it worked out pretty well. He and I went to the concert for my favorite band the only time I've seen them live. We hear songs the same way in odd ways. Like with Taylor Swift's song, "Love Story" she says a line, that goes, "They try to tell me how to feel." We both heard it as, "Good Charlotte tells me how to feel." There was a time when my sister was dating a guy who we'll call umm... Travis. Travis was just a little bit feminine... and would do things like blow my sister off for dates to go tanning with his guy friend. Travis is married and has a kid, but he certainly was a little feminine. Anyway, one time my sister was driving this friend and I somewhere and we had an entire conversation of sentences that started with the phrases, "Dude, looks like." And "Somebody Told Me." If you don't catch those references, that would be Aerosmith's "Dude Looks Like a Lady" and the Killers' "Somebody Told Me [you had a boyfriend that looked like a girlfriend.]" Again, this stuff cracked us up.

I also will take this time to divulge a somewhat obscured secret that this friend and I played Yu-Gi-Oh. We weren't lame about it though. It wasn't like we'd sat around the house and played against each other (which we did). We spent copious amounts of time studying the pojo.com forums, waiting for the newest upper deck announcements for the banned list, or the creation of new booster packs. We played in competitive YuGiOh tournaments each Saturday down at the local card shop, where the winner won more packs of cards depending how many people showed. $5 entry fee, usually three rounds, plus finals winners played winners, and so forth. The way we talked about getting excited to win a few packs you'd think we were gambling for cigarettes with hobos, which wouldn't be that far a cry from what we were doing considering some of the people who would show up to the local shops. Every few months we'd go to the huge regional tournament where hundreds of social rejects, geeks, and Seto Kiaba wannabe's  gamers, fathers with sons who used their children as an excuse to play a children's card game and blow hundreds of dollars on cardboard. I mean if you think parents pushing their kids to play football is bad, you've never seen the YuGiOh dads.  who are out for a good time, and of course kids like us who just wanted a Saturday off of work when we told our boss we were sick or something to do instead of before going on a date. Those were the ones where guys would show up and stack their top 8 play mats to flaunt their winning ways. I can't pretend I didn't love that. It also happened to be pretty profitable when I sold a card I was lucky enough to win in a random drawing won through sheer grit for $550 dollars (That's not a joke) and bought my sweet laptop with that dough.  We may have been nerds. But we were the Kings of the Nerds, and we still managed to be pretty decent people, and you can'd manage to be both if you don't have a good friend to keep you balanced.

This friend of mine has been someone I could always talk to. He was someone I knew would tell me the truth about girls I dated, and would talk me up if he could, and I did the same. We always tried to stand up for one another and it was nice to know that even if I took a girl on a date who was totally disinterested in me, at least he was there to make it fun. We went to church dances together until we realized that we were 17/18 and the girls we thought were cute were 13/14 (I ended up marrying a girl in that range, and so did he). There was the time that he went to ask a girl who was kind of a wall-flower to dance and she turned him down in a kind of rude way, which he felt bad about. I thought maybe she just didn't want to feel like a charity case, so I went to ask her to dance. When I did, she got a big smile on her face and said, "I'd love to." Ouch. So part way through the song, I said, you know the guy who asked you to dance last time? He's my best friend in the world. She went and found him later for a dance. 

We often did stupid stuff together. I threw a soda out my window once... and it opened all over him... because I threw it out his window. He convinced me to put glowstick in my hair for a dance... and I got it in my eye. I convinced him that if he bought a box of iced brownies from the grocery store and put them on a plate, the girl he liked would think he made them (she didn't.) 

He was also there for me at some of my lowest points. When I called my best female friend at the time a word I'm not proud of (It didn't rhyme with stitch, but it wasn't good), and I called her home phone a good 25 times in a row [which I'm sure made me look like a stalker], he kept encouraging me that I'd be able to reconcile (I did.) When a girl who had toyed with my heart strings several times did it once more, he was there to pick me up. He reassured me of myself, and was just great.

The funny thing is, I wasn't able to be there for him during some of his roughest times just due to the way things shook out. I felt at some points like maybe we'd drifted. But I've never called him without being able to have a completely natural conversation, no matter the subject matter. We talk about spiritual things, family things (Because we're cousins), we talk about girls, and now wives (who we love dearly), finances, sports (lots and lots and lots about our Oakland Raiders), jokes, music, and everything. We've had some disagreements, but only one real fight. He lived in my room for a month. We joke about everything, and know all kinds of things about the other. And they're not always the important things. In fact, i don't know lots of the important things, and he might not either. But we know how to make one another laugh. Our conversations often lack depth, but we can talk, and I've needed that at a lot of points in my life. 

This person is so much like me, and gets me so well, he's kind of like the face in the mirror.

Lovin' On Everybody

Wow! Two Blog Posts in One day!

So, I have a confession. I like to make people laugh. I love watching people be surprised, and laughing despite themselves. Anytime I can make my best friends, particularly my wife, laugh about something that they shouldn't, or wouldn't under regular circumstances. Sometimes that causes me to make inappropriate jokes or to do things that, in attempts to be funny, just count as kind of rude, or sad.

Today I did just that, and I did it to a friend I've probably done it to many times.I played a joke she didn't find funny, and it made her sad. And it was her birthday none the less.

This friend is someone who I have referred to in the past as my most dedicated reader. The person who always asks me, "When are you going to post again?" Due in large part to her persistence (and my good fortune in continually meeting good new people) I have gone from posting two out of the first five months I had my blog, to posting close to once a month (with a few explosions in between), to now I'll have posted eight times in the first ninety-two days of the year, or an average of every 11 days. Not too shabby if you ask me.

I want to talk about a funny experience with this friend, and how it both rings true and false at the same time. This friend graduated high school a year before me, and was all of six months older than me (She's an April Fool's Day baby). We took a foods class together, which was one of many fun things we did together. One day, our teacher, who was many good things (mostly in the kitchen) but tactful was not one of them, saw this friend of mine, and I think she was a minute or two late to class. The teacher, rather than asking her why she was late, or letting the situation slide, decided it was the proper time to tell my friend that she, "always sees her lovin' on everybody out in the hall."

I found this comment highly amusing. My friend did not.

No one would deny the fact that my friend was a very huggy person. She was flirtatious. She was friendly. She dated many boys in high school. She and I had minimal romantic history, though we were both big flirts, and we did go to prom together.

However, two things should be known about this girl. First, is that it didn't matter how many boys smooched her or took her out, or how many people she hugged or flirted with, or whatever else. It didn't matter because her heart always had and always would belong to one boy. That boy happens to be awesome, happens to be her husband, and happens to be the father of her precious little boy. Sometimes, even people who get written off as big flirts turn out to be the most stable ones of all.

Secondly, the teacher wasn't wrong either. This friend, this gloriously motivating, and tirelessly friendly friend loves on EVERYONE. She can't help it. My friend is affectionate. Or, as she would say, "mi amiga es muy afectuosa" She just has it in her mind body and soul. She likes children. She calls everyone "friend" and she means it. She's willing to say what needs to be said to people, and she listens well, too. She likes making other people laugh. She likes to say nice things about people, not because she likes being liked [maybe that's part of it] but mostly because she likes making people see their own good. She's a hugger, and gives really great and reassuring hugs at that.

There's a lot of good I could say about this friend, and I'm sure on other occasions I will. We've been friends for seven years, and I have great hopes we'll be friends for many more (especially since I now consider her husband a friend. He's really great). She's one of the few who has remained my friend even though we're no longer in High School and we're both married. Those things can often cause separation even among the best of friends.

So, Happy Birthday friend. I hope this makes up for me telling you I'd already done this. :)