conference weekend

is all the rage, all the buzz. people LOVE it. it is AWESOME.

conference, for the uninformed, is a weekend, twice-a-year, where members of the lds (mormon) church hear revelation from their prophet, seer, and revelator, get advice, and hear about how pornography is still evil (have you signed the pledge?). this weekend is conference weekend.

as a child, my parents would turn on conference (it is broadcast worldwide!) in the kitchen. i remember sitting at the kitchen table, mesmerized not by the words but by the sheer dullness of the presentation.

Prophesying

i thought conference, like the curious undergarments my parents wore, was strictly for adults. it was something i would understand when i got older.

honestly, it still puts me to sleep. this sleepiness is mirrored in the book of mormon. i'll share a delightful excerpt from mark twain's roughing it to humorously illustrate my heretic point:

All men have heard of the Mormon Bible, but few except the "elect" have seen it, or, at least, taken the trouble to read it. I brought away a copy from Salt Lake. The book is a curiosity to me, it is such a pretentious affair, and yet to "slow," so sleepy; such an insipid mess of inspiration. It is chloroform in print. If Joseph Smith composed this book, the act was a miracle -- keeping awake while he did it was, at any rate. If he, according to tradition, merely translated it from certain ancient and mysteriously-engraved plates of copper, which he declares he found under a stone, in an out-of-the-way locality, the work of translating was equally a miracle, for the same reason.

i'm just going to continue excerpting, because i'm having a lot of fun:

The book seems to be merely a prosy detail of imaginary history, with the Old Testament for a model; followed by a tedious plagiarism of the New Testament. The author labored to give his words and phrases of the quaint, old-fashioned sound and structure of our King James' translation of the Scriptures; and the result is a mongrel-half modern glibness, and half ancient simplicity and gravity. The latter is awkward and constrained; the former natural, but grotesque by contrast. Whenever he found his speech growing too modern -- which was about every sentence or two -- he ladled in a few such Scriptural phrases as "exceedingly sore," "and it came to pass," etc., and made things satisfactory again. "And it came to pass" was his pet. If he had left that out, his Bible would have been only a pamphlet.

if you're still reading, thanks, and i have two more thoughts for you. first, i have a really high threshold for boring things. most of my interests are probably boring for most people. there's a reason why more people don't get graduate degrees and i don't think it's because it's particularly difficult. this is why i'm surprised i can't handle conference!

second, in the end, it's just not my cup of tea. i don't understand it. i'd like to get it, i'd like to derive pleasure and inspiration from it, but i don't. and i'm genuinely amazed by my friends who do. what am i missing?

that's really not a rhetorical question.