The Life and Death of the Darth Cannon

A little over a month ago my ward had a dumb activity in which I didn't want to participate. So, instead of going to the activity, Tyler and I built a gun.
My friend Ryan and I had built a potato gun in high school, and I think Tyler had done the same, so we both knew the basic operations and what we needed. At the hardware store, we discovered that this is not only a very common practice, but that they don't necessarily like helping with this, so they don't readily sell the parts that we needed. We ended up compromising and making due with what they had, but in the process, we developed a new kind of potato cannon.
The Darth Cannon ^TM had a fail-safe. In the event that the pressure in the chamber was too high, instead of breaking the combustion chamber, it would blow-off the barrel to relieve the pressure. We were invincible. We couldn't hurt ourselves with this.
So, as any good college students who had built a gun, Tyler and I did science experiments on it. (I bet you thought we were going to use it to break things, huh?) We took it to the baseball field and measured the distances it traveled with different fuel-filling styles, until we'd figured out how to best use the Darth Cannon.
Unfortunately, the Darth Cannon met its end this weekend. We'd gone up the canyon to sit around a bonfire, and I'd gotten bored. So, naturally, I pulled the Darth Cannon out of my trunk (where everyone keeps their home-made guns) and loaded it up. I readjusted the barrel because it had gotten a little crooked in my trunk, but I guess I didn't tighten it up enough afterwards. When I shot it, instead of the potato flying out, the barrel itself shot off. This was good, of course, because it proved that my fail-safe would work, but in all of the excitement, I kind of broke off the trigger ignition that we'd put on it.

Anti-Mormon

I used to have this idea of the typical RM guy (his name might be "Peter"), and I hated him: He thought he was so righteous, and that if you didn't dress the same way that he did, he would think that you were a sinner or a bad influence, and he wouldn't be your friend. All he ever talked about was his mission, and it often seemd as if he just wanted everyone to know how spiritual he was, so he had to remind them all of the time. It's hard to be the punk kid around people like that, but I eventually realized that I was judging him just as much as he was me. It's funny, but it's possible that I was inventing that RM guy, because now I can't find him.
I think most of the time people choose whether to be happy in a situation or not to be. It's rare that a situation inherently makes you unhappy. Take Provo for instance. It's easy to have a negative impression of Provo: that everyone is all stiff and nerdy, and that there's nothing fun to do here and no cool people to hang out with. I don't actually think that anymore. Provo's pretty cool. I can do pretty much anything here that I can in the outside world if I want, and it being a college town adds up to a lot of cool people (both Jack and Peter) to hang out with that are in a similar stage of life as me (for the most part, anyway: I guess I am the oldest single guy in Provo).
I think the problem is that at some point people have decided that the Mormon culture is nerdy, and so they've decided not to be happy in it. No one can be happy if they've convinced themselves not to be.
Here's what nerdy is: when you're so into something that you can't deal with people that aren't into it as much as you are. I think that can apply to anything (computers, sports, music): I'm only a nerd if I belittle or otherwise can't get along with other people that aren't nerdy about the same thing as me. It is nerdy for people to not associate (well) with others that don't share their religious (or other) views, but it's not nerdy to live your religion. You can be happy with it, but it can't make you happy or unhappy. That's a decision you make about it.