Elder Something or Other

The Mormons came to visit tonight. I have often seen pairs of them wandering around the city with their white shirts, black slacks and backpacks; but I've never actually had any come to my door.

This is not to say I've been blessed with a total lack of people trying to convert me. Whenever I was in the Memorial Union at school (usually trying to do homework* and drinking a bathtub sized Coke) the Christians would come and harass me. And I have to say, I like the Mormons much better. The Christians pairs always kind of creeped me out. There'd be one normal guy who would approach me, introduce himself, and then introduce his creepy friend who always lurked 3 or 4 feet back from my table. It was like they were playing good cop/weird cop. I would tell them I needed to get stuff done and they would ask if they could leave some literature. Usually I'd say sure, and they'd leave, and I'd recycle it.

On one occasion the same normal-creepy combo found me 2 days in a row and came over to quiz me on the literature they'd left.

"Did you read it?"
"Yep."
"Well then, what did it say?"
"Something along the lines of accept Jesus and I'll go to heaven."
"Um. Well. That's not quite all of it."
"Yeah, sorry, I really need to have this circuits homework done by 1."

I just think it's a little weird that the extremely religious try so hard to recruit people. Especially when they know it is going to annoy the vast majority of people. And it's not like the evils of the world try that hard. I've never had anyone approach me and ask if I've welcomed the calming influence of heroin into my life.

Anyhow, back to the Mormons. They looked a little surprised when I answered the door. I guess they weren't expecting a white guy. When I said I wasn't interested, they gave me a little postcard and asked if I knew where the Chinese people live. I said I didn't know specifically, but they had a good chance of finding some by sticking to my street. They thanked me and left.

The postcard they offered posed some questions designed to make me think about spirituality and where my life is going. What is the Nature of God? What is the Purpose of Life? (Their capitals, not mine.) And it directed me to Mormon.org, where there is a picture of a guy sitting on a mountain contemplating the big questions of life in acid-washed jeans.

I went to their site and I even watched their Mormon.org video, which took some doing as the site isn't compatible with Firefox**. The video didn't enlighten me much, but it did re-feature the acid washed jeans guy.

Come to think of it, he may just be trying to figure out how to get off the mountain.

* And by do homework I mean look at girls.

** Nerd Alert: Their site is plenty compatible with Firefox, they just coded it so it would see that I wasn't using Netscape or IE and tell me I couldn't watch their video. And yet once I dug through 2 pages of code and found the link to the video I watched it just fine. That's probably the best way to get me to watch a video about your religion: Tell me my software is incompatible so I can't watch it.