What can I say? Robert J. Lippert kept bankrolling mediocre genre programmers to fill out double bills, and VCI Entertainment keeps releasing them on DVD and sending them to me, so I keep reviewing them. Tonight’s fare: Renegade Girl (1946).
Qwest finally fixed the problem that was denying service to me and several other households in the neighborhood. After four days, I now have my landline phone and DSL again. They are also crediting us for the four days without service. Counseling for pain and suffering is not included.
I suppose that opens me up for the neo-luddite accusations (or just from my mom) that I’m too dependent on technology for my day-to-day living. Here’s how I think of it: any technology that you can take or leave isn’t really useful to you; it’s just a novelty. For it to be truly useful, it has to be integrated into your life, and that means that its removal causes causes hardship and/or major adjustment. That’s the hazard that you have to live with if you want to take full advantage of the benefits of any technology: cars, telephones, TiVos, Google Calendar.
August 29, 2010 is a momentous anniversary. It’s twenty years since I entered the Missionary Training Center as an LDS missionary.
It’s become a bit of a cliché for returned missionaries to say that their mission was the “best two years” of their lives. Possibly they mean it was the best discrete two year period of their lives, or that it was the single period which had the most positive effect on them. (Or maybe they really mean that it was the best two years; I shouldn’t judge someone else’s experience.) That’s probably how I look at it: the most influential two years of my life.
And, frankly, that’s aside from any spiritual maturity I gained as a result of my service, not that I discount such. The entire experience is designed to turn boys into men, in a way that nothing else – not even military service – can match. To wit:
- Mormon teens expect and plan for their mission experience for years ahead of time. (LDS men are expected to serve once they’ve turned nineteen; LDS women, if they choose to serve, can do so once they turn twenty-one. It’s considered more of a responsibility of the men.) In fact, they’re expected to save their own money to pay for it.
- Much like the military, they adopt a proscribed hair cut and a “uniform” of a white shirt and tie. They give up the use of their first name and are referred to, even among themselves, as “Elder Whatever.”
- They do not choose the location of their missionary service. They could be assigned somewhere stateside, or anywhere in the world, and after a short stint at the Missionary Training Center (three weeks if going English-speaking, eight weeks if going foreign-speaking), they arrive at their “field of labor.”
- They are expected to leave behind all concerns, hobbies, and other matters which could be distracting. They should only call home on Christmas, Mother’s Day, and in extreme emergencies. They should write or email their family once a week, and any others on the same schedule. (Usually they do this on the one day of the week their mission designates “Preparation Day,” on which they do laundry, go grocery shopping, and catch up on anything else that isn’t proselyting.)
- They are expected to always been with a missionary companion, whom they don’t choose; the Mission President (himself a full-time volunteer for the Church, along with his wife) assigns him where and with whom to serve, with frequent transfers around the mission area to different locales and companions.
- They are expected to wake in the morning, spend an hour or two in study (both religious text and their foreign language, if any), then proselyte until lunch, then proselyte until dinner, then proselyte until bedtime.
- They are expected to sever themselves from popular entertainment – music, movies, video games, etc. They are supposed to also keep themselves away from any personal contact with the opposite sex.
Again, even leaving behind any question of whether what they teach is true or not, the missionary lifestyle creates a discontinuity with their previous selves. They replace pop cultural concerns with work. They learn to be outgoing, bold and devoted. They learn how to focus on the task at hand full time.
There’s a maturity that returned missionaries can exhibit which isn’t recognized or encouraged as much in the broader culture today. Returned missionaries are ready to stand up and be men; there isn’t as much of the “man-child syndrome” visible among Mormon men. Returned missionaries are ready to pursue their education, get married, and be adults. I know of no one, regardless of faithfulness, who hasn’t been changed for the better by the experience. And I’ve known a few young Mormon men who, for one reason or another, didn’t serve a mission (instead going into the military, or focusing on their education), and in each case I’ve said to myself, “You know what this kid needs to help him grow up?”
Of course, I’ve got more reason to consider my mission a life-changing experience that most returned missionaries. A first laid eyes on Sister Fuller a month into my time at the MTC; she had just arrived to train in Japanese to go to the same mission, Japan Tokyo South. I thought she was gorgeous. We never served in the same area at the same time, but we knew all the same people by the time we had each gotten back. I was going to Brigham Young University afterward and she was living in Provo, and we both got a ride with the same person to a missionary reunion. We started dating, and thus we each bypassed one of the traps that returned missionaries fall into: they want to tell all of their stories, and pretty much nobody cares. But we knew all of the same places and people, both missionaries and Japanese members, and by the time we ran down on stories we were engaged. That summer, a little less than a year after I got back, Sister Fuller became Mrs. Shumate.
The calendar tells me it’s been twenty years since I entered the MTC, but it’s hard to wrap my mind around it. It certainly doesn’t feel like the time since then has been greater than my lifespan up to that point.
I haven’t written much fiction for years, I’ve finished what I’ve written even less often, and I’ve submitted stuff for publication not at all for a decade. I do have plans to write a novel in the very near future, though, so it’s heartening that my only other fiction writing attempt of late has hit the bull’s-eye at which it was aimed.
Eric (Theric) Jepson and William (Wm) Morris are editing an anthology called Monsters & Mormons, meant to showcase fiction featuring, well, monsters and Mormons, aimed primarily at an LDS audience. (More info here.) I heard about it when they announced it in April, but I had no plans to submit — until I heard Jaleta Clegg’s submission at her reading at CONduit in May. “This,” I thought, “would be fun.” And no, I didn’t appropriate anything from Jaleta’s story except for the very broad idea of supernatural happenings in a contemporary Mormon setting.
So I wrote my story, called “Other Duties,” and sent it in. Submissions don’t close until October, but I heard back a week ago — and they’ve just made it public — that my story made the round of “early admits” for the anthology (so, too, did Jaleta’s).
It’s good to know that success in that particular arena is possible, if not guaranteed.
Confession time: I hadn’t ever seen The Last Man on Earth (1964) before I watched it specifically to review. But I read Richard Matheson’s novel I Am Legend last year, on which this movie is based, and years ago I had seen The Omega Man (1971), the Charlton Heston vehicle even more loosely based on I Am Legend. Does that count?
… no new movie review tonight. Alas.
