There Are No Civilians

I. Run, Hide, Fight.

The police teach.

They point out the person in the video who wanders down the hall, unaware that there's an active shooter. That's why you must keep your eyes open. But what do people do? They wander around looking at their phones!

We see it all the time: civilians just wandering around with their eyes glued to their phones! Students eating lunch. Shoppers in the grocery store. Or sometimes their eyes aren't glued to their phones, but they're listening to music on their headphones. Can you imagine? A student hanging out in a lounge, eating lunch with headphones in and music playing? Just an embarrassing lack of situational awareness, really.

The officer with the Irish accent has previous experience with the Troubles. He explains about the OODA loop. You need to learn to disrupt the attacker's OODA loop to confuse them, and then exploit that confusion.

Don't try anything that takes fine motor control though. During times of high stress, your fine motor skills stop working very well. Large motor skills still work, but enough stress make them stop working too, and even more can make you black out. That doesn't make you a coward: it's a physiological response. Training can help. 

Raise your hands if you know what gun shots sound like in real life — half the room raises their hands.

Keep your hands up if you know what gun shots sound like inside — the only hand that remains is the former prison guard who now works security at the college.

Get in the habit of scanning every room you enter for possible exits, and run through possible attacks in your head. What if someone were to attack inside this room? What if you heard gunshots in the hall right outside? What if they sounded farther away? Would you even know what that sounds like? What would you do in each case? If you haven't imagined it, your OODA loop will be interrupted so much that you might freeze. Fantasizing regularly about your future potential responses will give you a chance.

So, next time you go to the store, or head to your classroom, just think: what if someone pulled out a gun in front of me? Don't get neurotic about it: just stay constantly vigilant and regularly visualize violence.

II. The Soldier

Adam served in Afghanistan. 

Back at home, it took him a while to feel comfortable driving around the town. It took him a while to be able to go shopping at a Walmart. It took him a while to step onto a college campus. 

Adam chose the seat in the back corner where he could see all of the other students in the class and the door. He angled himself so there were no windows behind him. He learned to only need to glance out the window every 5 minutes or so.

The room with 2 walls full of windows was tough, but the rest of them were fine. He learned to reconnoiter the scheduled classroom before registering for a class to avoid that problem in the future.

If only all students were like Adam.

III. There Are No Civilians

How do you like your news? Red, or blue?

• Rachel Scott (aged 17), killed on grass outside west entrance
• Daniel Rohrbough (aged 15), killed at bottom of stairs leading to west entrance
• William David Sanders (aged 47), shot in hallway adjacent library by Harris; died of blood loss in a science classroom
• Kyle Velasquez (aged 16), killed while sat on a chair near the middle of the north computer table in the library
• Steven Curnow (aged 14), killed at the west end of the south computer table in the library
• Cassie Bernall (aged 17), killed under library table No. 19
• Isaiah Shoels (aged 18), killed under library table No. 16
• Matthew Kechter (aged 16), killed under library table No. 16
• Lauren Townsend (aged 18), killed under library table No. 2 
• John Tomlin (aged 16), killed next to library table No. 6
• Kelly Fleming (aged 16), killed next to library table No. 2 
• Daniel Mauser (aged 15), killed under library table No. 9 
• Corey DePooter (aged 17), killed under library table No. 14
• Jamie Bishop (35) Pine Mountain, Georgia—German instructor 
• Jocelyne Couture-Nowak (49) Montreal, Quebec, Canada—professor of French 
• Kevin Granata (45) Toledo, Ohio—professor of Engineering 
• Liviu Librescu (76) Ploiești, Romania—professor of Engineering 
• G.V. Loganathan (53) Gobichettipalayam, Tamil Nadu, India—professor of Engineering 
• Ross Alameddine (20) Saugus, Massachusetts—sophomore 
• Brian Bluhm (25) Louisville, Kentucky—masters student 
• Ryan Clark (22) Martinez, Georgia—senior 
• Austin Cloyd (18) Champaign, Illinois—freshman 
• Daniel Perez Cueva (21) Woodbridge, Virginia/Peru—junior 
• Matthew Gwaltney (24) Chesterfield County, Virginia—masters student 
• Caitlin Hammaren (19) Westtown, New York—sophomore 
• Jeremy Herbstritt (27) Bellefonte, Pennsylvania—masters student 
• Rachael Hill (18) Richmond, Virginia—freshman 
• Emily Hilscher (19) Woodville, Virginia—freshman 
• Jarrett Lane (22) Narrows, Virginia—senior 
• Matthew La Porte (20) Dumont, New Jersey—sophomore 
• Henry J. Lee (20) Roanoke, Virginia/Vietnam—freshman 
• Partahi Lumbantoruan (34) Medan, Indonesia—PhD student 
• Lauren McCain (20) Hampton, Virginia—freshman 
• Daniel O'Neil (22) Lincoln, Rhode Island—masters student 
• Juan Ramon Ortiz (26) Bayamón, Puerto Rico—masters student 
• Minal Panchal (26) Mumbai, India—masters student 
• Erin Peterson (18) Centreville, Virginia—freshman 
• Michael Pohle Jr. (23) Flemington, New Jersey—senior 
• Julia Pryde (23) Middletown Township, New Jersey—masters student 
• Mary Read (19) Annandale, Virginia—freshman 
• Reema Samaha (18) Centreville, Virginia—freshman 
• Waleed Shaalan (32) Zagazig, Egypt—PhD student 
• Leslie Sherman (20) Springfield, Virginia—junior 
• Maxine Turner (22) Vienna, Virginia—senior 
• Nicole White (20) Smithfield, Virginia—junior
• Cynthia Tisdale, 63 (teacher) 
• Glenda Ann Perkins, 64 (teacher) 
• Jared Conard Black, 17 
• Shana Fisher, 16 
• Christian Riley Garcia, 15 
• Aaron Kyle McLeod, 15 
• Angelique Ramirez, 15 
• Sabika Sheikh, 17 (an exchange student from Pakistan) 
• Christopher Stone, 17 
• Kimberly Vaughan, 14
• Lucero Alcaraz, age 19 
• Treven Taylor Anspach, 20 
• Rebecka Ann Carnes, 18 
• Quinn Glen Cooper, 18 
• Kim Saltmarsh Dietz, 59 
• Lucas Eibel, 18 
• Jason Dale Johnson, 33 
• Lawrence Levine, 67 
• Sarena Dawn Moore, 43
• Alyssa Alhadeff, 14 
• Scott Beigel, 35 
• Martin Duque, 14 
• Nicholas Dworet, 17 
• Aaron Feis, 37 
• Jaime Guttenberg, 14 
• Chris Hixon, 49 
• Luke Hoyer, 15 
• Cara Loughran, 14 
• Gina Montalto, 14 
• Joaquin Oliver, 17 
• Alaina Petty, 14 
• Meadow Pollack, 18 
• Helena Ramsay, 17 
• Alex Schachter, 14 
• Carmen Schentrup, 16 
• Peter Wang, 15
• Victoria Soto, 27, teacher
• Lauren Rousseau, 30, full-time substitute teacher
• Dawn Hochsprung, 47, principal
• Mary Sherlach, 56, school psychologist
• Rachel Davino, 29, teacher
• Anne Marie Murphy, 52, para professional
• Nancy Lanza, 52
• Jessica Rekos, 6
• Olivia Engel, 6
• Avielle Richman, 6
• Jesse Lewis, 6
• Grace Audrey McDonnell, 7
• Noah Pozner, 6
• Ana Marquez-Greene, 6
• Emilie Parker, 6
• Charlotte Bacon, 6
• Catherine Hubbard, 6
• Josephine Gay, 7
• Daniel Barden, 7
• James Mattioli, 6
• Caroline Previdi, 6
• Allison Wyatt, 6
• Dylan Hockley, 6
• Madeleine Hsu, 6
• Chase Kowalski, 7
• Jack Pinto, 6
• Benjamin Wheeler, 6
• 2 additional adults
• 19 additional elementary school children
• and counting

Overthinking Tweets

I wanted to respond to a tweet, but didn't have anything useful to contribute to the discussion of what the tweet was actually about, so I'm writing this post to discuss the tweet itself, my reaction to it, other people's reactions to it, and and my reaction to other people's reactions to it. No normal conversation can ever hope to stand up under this sort over-analysis. While most people don't write posts like this, some people (like me) often go through similar thought processes. The worry that other people might be doing this same thing to my daily conversation (either on or off twitter) is a source of anxiety that I suppress with the hope that most people have better control of their own thoughts to avoid wasting their own time and energy like I sometimes do.

With no further ado:

I. The Tweet

Many mormon women expect their husbands to provide 50% of the housework, but at the same time expect 100% of the money and 100% of the “spiritual leadership” to come from the man. 🤔

Worst of both worlds. 😩

— A set of feasible rays (@RecessionCone) May 21, 2022

As I said, I don't have much to say about the tweet itself. That hasn't been my experience with "many mormon women," but also I don't have a large enough sample of most other people's relationships to really opine much. That's partly because I don't pay much attention to other people's lives, except where they intersect with my own. Even in a house I lived in for 18 years, I'm not sure I could tell you much about the distribution of responsibilities in my parent's marriage to opine reliably on a percentage breakdown.

I sympathize with the original tweeter though, as having unclear or perceived unfairness in contributions to a relationship is distressing, and it seems reasonable to assume that this is at least partly coming from his own experience. It also seems like he has observed the same dynamic in other relationships (not everyone is as unobservant as I am), which is why he broadened his observation to "many" women.

If he had written "most mormon women" or just "mormon women" my nerd senses would have tingled, and I would have been tempted to ask for justification (how do you know "most?"), or plead for qualification ("surely you can't mean ALL Mormon women"). If we were talking in person I might have even said one of those things in response. However, on twitter there's no social expectation that I say anything, so I almost certainly wouldn't have actually responded to even this counterfactual tweet without the appropriate qualifications. Considering the tweet as written with appropriate specificity, and considering my lack of interest in the topic, the clear move is to scroll on by.

II. The Reaction

So why didn't I scroll on by? Why did I click to read the comments?

If I'm honest with myself, I expected people replying to be upset. Specifically, I expected that people would call RecessionCone a misogynist, and I was not disappointed. Or rather, I was disappointed, but in exactly the way I expected to be.

To highlight why I expected this, I'm going to focus for a bit on something completely different: people who play video games, aka gamers.

Many people have bad opinions of gamers, often informed by bad experiences with self-identified gamers. Rather than misremember or make up some criticism, I searched for "The trouble with gamers," clicked the first hit, and here's what I get when I check out the first chapter description:

This chapter argues that gamers, including academic gamers, use the angry feminist as an abject figure to reinforce gamer identity and impose politically-motivated limitations on what constitutes an “expert” of video games.

OK, this doesn't seem true to me in general, as my friends who do call themselves gamers don't "use the angry feminist as an abject figure to reinforce gamer identity." Some gamers are feminists themselves. However, not all gamers are like my friends. Anti-feminist gamers definitely exist, and bonding over disparaging another group works just as well for Army vs Navy, Yankees vs Red Sox, Republicans vs Democrats, or Gamers vs Feminists.

How many people who get upset by that claim would be mollified if it said "many gamers" instead of just "gamers?" Clearly it's still criticizing the group, and criticism of the group from somebody outside the group tends to be perceived as an attack on the group. They hate us 'cause they ain't us. In general, people don't strictly parse qualifications like "many" or "some" when hearing criticism directed towards a group they want to protect.

(It's worth noting that this is just a chapter summary from a book I haven't read, and you would expect that brevity matters more than fully explaining the chapter, which presumably has an entire chapter to explain exactly what it means. This isn't intended to be a condemnation of a book I haven't read.) 

Clever provocateurs can exploit qualifying statements to justify their actual statements as true ("I didn't say all gamers") while still levying disproportionate criticism towards their target group. Selective criticism can always find someone in the targeted group doing something worth criticizing, and repeating that process over and over builds an impression of the group itself being bad. People who recognize this game being played pushback early, not necessarily against the strict content of the statement, but the perceived connotation and the perceived ulterior motives of the statement.

Sometimes people tuned into this sort of manipulation catch false positives from speakers who really actually only mean the explicit content of their statement, and aren't intent on using it to build up a condemnation of the entire group. Sometimes they don't even care about the speakers intentions, as a bunch of separate well-intentioned statements can have the same impact on societal views, regardless of the intent of the speakers.

While this can be frustrating if you want to use your words to convey specific meaning, this is how much interpersonal communication works. The actual words often matter less than how they are conveyed.

III. Men's Rights Vibes

Maybe it’s just the wording you chose, but this has “mens rights” vibes

— new year, same queer (@suburban_queer) May 21, 2022

OK, so what's the problem with men's rights? Doesn't it matter that men commit suicide at a much high rate than women? Doesn't it matter that many family courts have officially codified bias against fathers? Doesn't it matter that men underperform academically compared to women?

Yes, clearly those things matter. So what's the problem with men's rights? Simply put: the men involved.

Try hanging around men's rights folks for a while and you'll likely see what I mean. There are many men with axes to grind against specific women that they have expanded to blame women in general. It gets weird and gross.

So do I find myself agreeing with at least those three issues that men's rights activists (MRA's) also complain about? Yes, and two have direct relevance to my own life.

Do I ever want to call myself a men's rights activist? No, a thousand times, no. First, I don't spend much time doing anything about it, so activist would be a stretch. But also, the group I would be lumping myself in with is not a group I want to be a part of.

It's kind of like why I don't call myself a Brony. Yes, I'm a man who has watched various forms of My Little Pony shows and I enjoy them. But I don't want to group myself with the people who make it an important part of their identity, because it's not accurate to me, and it gets weird.

Quick note that should be a footnote but I'm not going to figure out how to do that right now.

If you followed some of the previous links, you might have found that the family court one is actually an article about bias in family courts being a myth:

Why do people perceive a bias in family court?

There are a few reasons why people believe that there is a bias against fathers in family court, even though that is rarely true. These may include that:

• Some fathers are absent or choose to spend little time with their children.
• The courts weigh custody based on who takes care of the children more often and who has a stronger bond. More women are stay-at-home parents, which would mean that they had more time to bond with their children and may have a stronger case for primary custody.
• Fathers may be the breadwinners, so they are outside the home more often and cannot take on as much custody as a result.

The article claims that there is no bias against fathers, while outlining the precise mechanisms by which the biased outcomes are achieved: because father's tend to work more, and mother's tend to be stay-at-home parents more, you end up with clear disparate impact in terms of assigning custody in contentious divorces. Men's rights advocates use similar arguments to explain why the disparity in pay isn't actually biased: if you adjust for education, experience, age, location, job title, industry and even company" the pay gap mostly disappears. (That link argues why that justification also isn't convincing)

IV. Why did I write this?

The equitable distribution of household responsibilities in other people's households was not on my list of things I needed to spend time thinking about prior to reading the tweet. I'm still not terribly interested in it. And yet I've spent the time to write this blog post. Why?

Blame the Boston Celtics. They were losing badly to a much less talented Miami Heat team in game 3 of the Eastern Conference Championship Series, and I wanted to think about something else.

But also, I hope that by writing this I've sufficiently shamed myself for the amount of mental effort I expend thinking through this sort of thing from everyday interactions. It's not wasted, exactly, but it's definitely far from an optimal use of my time and energy. Twitter makes this worse, in that I can always find this sort of thing at the swipe of a finger, and written down it's harder to dismiss or misremember compared to normal conversation. Maybe next time I'm tempted to spend a lot of mental energy thinking through tweet conversations I didn't even participate in, I'll remember this blog post, and go do something else.

If anyone I've mentioned is bothered by this post, please feel free to block me on any and all social networks; it might even be good for me if it saves me from similar future mental exercises. I was iffy on whether I should post this or add it to my list of things-I-should-never-share-because-they-would-make-the-world-worse, so if you ask me to take it down, I probably will. Pre-publication I already removed a whole section breaking down additional twitter replies which at very least made an already too-long post shorter.

And hey, it could be worse. I could be a journalist at a major news outlet.

The Ides of March

I.

She stands alone on the rock.

She can see her father sitting on the curb by a drain, 50 yards away, illuminated by the dull orange streetlight in the parking lot.

Why didn't he just let her stay at home? She didn't want to come in the first place. She said she'd come some other week, but no, he had to make her come this week.

And why didn't he just stay inside? He kept coming out to check on her. She was having fun running around in the dark by herself. Until he came outside, and she had to be mad at him again for making her come to this dumb activity.

It is a great rock. Fun to stand on. It's cool that she can get on it so much more easily now. She's definitely taller and faster than she used to be.

She thinks about climbing onto the rectangular rock with letters carved in it that declares the building behind it a church. She used to love standing on the sign, but she decides to sit on it instead. Her dad might get mad at her for standing in the dark. Maybe if he leaves she can stand on it again.

She likes being outside in the dark. Her dad always makes her come inside when it gets too dark, but she's thirteen now. She knows to stay away from bobcats, and to stay out of the street. She'll be fine. Even here at the church he doesn't leave her alone outside for more than 10 minutes without checking on her. She hopes he doesn't ask her to come inside and at least hang out during the activity again, but he's just sitting there on the curb, not even looking at her. 

When's he going to leave? Maybe she can sneak away from him and wander some more before it's time to go home. It turns out she can. 

She starts running again, feeling the wind blowing back her hair. The parking lot on the other side of the church has plenty of space, and the grass and pavement feels sure under her feet.

II.

He stands alone in the dark.

He watches her walk towards the rock. As she draws closer to it, the hazy moonlight through the clouds that illuminates her is blocked by shadows from the pines. He watches as a blurry shape that used to be his daughter sits down.

He walks towards the curb by the drain. 

As he does, the grass beneath him starts to move. Spirals of motion everywhere pulsate. The world is creeping, moving, shifting. The night itself begins to swirl.

He sees his daughter at 7, running out to the rock after church, faster than her siblings. She's 9 and racing to the other end of the building to climb the hill. As high as she can go, she runs down as fast as she can. Her siblings try, but they're not as sure-footed as she is and they fall and scrape their knees. She keeps running.

She's 6, and climbing in a tree near the rocks. She gets his help to climb down.

She's 8 and jumping out of the tree herself.

She's 13 again, and the rock seems smaller than it used to seem. She thought it would make her happier to play on the rock again, but it's not the same.

He sees all of this. 

And then suddenly he doesn't. His connection to reality is severed, and he just sees the night. The haze persists; the night is still.

III.

He's in a car driving his kids home. He asks his son if he enjoyed the activity. 

"Yep."

He makes (another) mental note to note ask yes or no questions when he's trying to prompt a conversation.

He doesn't even try with his daughter. What's the point? Is he even helping? He knows he was trying to help. She hasn't had regular interactions with anyone outside of the family for the past 2 years. Staying home for school has been the least bad option, but she needs friends, right?

He remembers not enjoying youth activities at the church when he was a teenager, but he still had to go. Ultimately, it was good for him to interact with people his own age. He even learned stuff sometimes. She doesn't have to do the actual activity, but she at least needs to be there, right? Right?

He remembers taking books to church dances and reading them in the hallway. He remembers attending church services and activities, and he remembers occasionally escaping from them to be able to think, and breath, and exist. Is he a hypocrite for trying to help her find sustenance in activities that left him starved?

But that's just him, right? Just because he doesn't make friends doesn't mean his daughter is condemned to the same fate. Just because he can't sleep at night doesn't mean she won't be able to. Just because he considered running into the street outside the church doesn't mean she did.

[besides, it wouldn't even have worked; the speed limit is 35 mph and even if a car is speeding, it can slow down enough that he'd most likely just end up with some broken bones and maybe another concussion (and he wasn't serious about it anyway)]

The road blurs in front of him, the light from his headlights diffracting through moisture that begins to run down his cheeks. He starts breathing slowly and quietly through his mouth. He avoids sniffs that would make the changes to his mucous membranes obvious. He turns on cruise control. When his muscles start involuntarily convulsing, he clenches his face and abdomen to keep himself from shaking visibly, quivering in place instead. He opens his eyes quickly and blinks to make sure he can still see the road, but the rural highway is unchanged and empty, his headlights providing the only light between the towering pines.

Eventually the spasms stop. He's pretty sure the kids in the back didn't notice anything. He's had some practice.

IV.

They arrive home and she heads inside. She hangs out and enjoys as her brother recounts his delightful activities to a disapproving mother. She laughs when her parents start to argue. Sometimes her dad gets really mad and scary, but this one is just a silly argument, at least for now. Once it gets boring she heads back to her room to continue reading her book.

A time to every purpose under the heaven

For me it’s more comforting to me to believe that a loving God/universe is there to mourn with me & help me heal. Not killing off parents of young children for his missionary army.

— Mean Old Clam (@TheIronDaisy) February 15, 2022

I. A time to be born and a time to die

Adam was born of goodly parents who loved him.

Adam followed the rules. He was kind to others. He gave service selflessly. He served a mission to spread the gospel to all the world; to bring them his love and kindness; to bring them a hope for an eternal future together in an eternal loving family. He had limited success, and wondered if he was even supposed to be there, but had faith he was doing what the Lord had asked of him and returned home honorably.

Adam didn't date men. Of course not, you're supposed to date women. So Adam dated women, and he even got married to one who later made him feel unclean. But life is long. Until it isn't.

Adam died alone, by his own hand.

II. A time to break down and a time to build up

Anyone who brings up problems is a troublemaker creating dissension. Just make sure we can’t see the problems and they no longer exist. All is well in Zion.

— Brinkwater (@brinkwatertoad) February 10, 2022

In Delivered from Evil, Robert Leckie makes the case that the Japanese forces in the Pacific during World War II had a problem with information flow. As America advanced and defeated out Japanese forces, the concept of saving face (メンツを保つ, mentsu wo tamotsu) made it difficult for the Japanese military to report bad news up the chain of command. So rather than report that many of their own ships were lost, they might report that few were lost. Rather than report that few enemy ships sunk, they might report that many sunk. 

This caused Japanese military leaders to make strategic and tactical decisions based on incorrect information, which lead to further losses, which were also downplayed. This wasn't the only reason Japan ultimately surrendered, but it didn't help.

In building up Japanese industry after the 2nd World War, this reluctance to report problems up the chain of command continued to cause problems. Taiichi Ohno recognized that to overcome it, he needed to implement explicit principles and processes to make it possible for people who see the problems to be empowered and willing to share them with those who have the authority to change them. The least among us in pay and title are sometimes positioned to notice things that managers aren't.

The remedy is two-fold:

1. Get the decision-makers down to the actual place where value is created (現地現物 genchi genbutsu, or 現場, gemba). 
2. Explicitly set aside time to improve, and involve and empower low-level workers to make changes. "Wisdom is given equally to everybody. The point is whether one can exercise it."

This remedy is part of what has become called lean manufacturing, which has spread widely, with many methodologies, terminologies, and pathologies. I've personally spent time embedded for months in a couple of companies, and I've found that sometimes the form remains, but not the meaning. The customers want to see lean initiatives and continuous improvement, so the company implements rituals to show the customer that they're a lean company. But they don't actually give their employees the time to do it right. At Kaizen Blitz events, employees are expected to spend most of their day doing additional work to overhaul the process, but then they're still expected to hit production targets. Employees understandably spend as little time on improving things as they can get away with so they can make shipments. In the name of the god of elimination of waste, no slack is allowed for the continual improvement process itself. They are ever learning, but "never able to come to the knowledge of truth."

III. A time to weep; a time to mourn

In 2006 a man from Elda dies from an overdose. 

A few days earlier he receives a blessing from a missionary while in the hospital intensive care, but to no avail.

Many years earlier he grows up in a town with a shoemaking industry that is mostly killed by an influx of cheaper imported shoes. The shoemakers (zapateros) leave the closing factories to begin making shoes on a piece rate in their poorly-ventilated houses, and suffer headaches from the glue fumes. Many turn to drugs to cope with the headaches and the poverty. People shoot up in broad daylight at bus stops.

At the wake and funeral, there is much weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth. As they slide the coffin into a wall, a mother yells out, "¡Ya está! ¡No hay más! ¡No hay más!" That's it, there's no more, there's no more. 

The Americans present feel uncomfortable. They find such raw expression of emotion during a time of mourning unfamiliar and strange. They joke about it afterwards ("¡No hay más!"), and then feel gross for joking about it.

Imagine the funeral is over and people are still sad? How sad it must be to think your child's death was really the end! They share testimonies about how grateful they are for the comforting truths of the gospel, and about the different experiences they had at their own relatives' funerals. Sure they didn't lose a child, but their grandpa died, and the funeral was ultimately hopeful. Same with their uncle.

Even in death, they pretend everything is fine.

IV. A time to kill and a time to heal

The missionary regrets... too many things. 

The missionary regrets not healing the man from Elda. He really wanted to, but when the time came he blessed him with peace instead. Maybe if the missionary had more faith, or not been so depressed, the man would have been healed. Maybe his failure killed the man from Elda.

The missionary regrets how long he spent in Spain being depressed. The man from Elda dying didn't help. But I guess the man from Elda didn't mean it personally.

The missionary regrets not pushing back harder at other missionaries who chastised him for wasting time on non-productive conversations. Why waste time asking about soccer? Why talk about break-dancing? Why ask about the town's history? Sure, limited small talk to help build relationships of trust is fine, but if you don't bring the conversation around to the gospel, what are you even doing? How can you justify spending time mourning with those that mourn if you don't try to convert that outward expression of empathy into baptisms? What better time is there to reach out from behind your shining example of charity to pull others into your beautiful whited sepulcher? 

The missionary regrets that his missionary journals burned up in a fire 12 years ago and now the missionary doesn't even remember the man from Elda's name.

But the missionary needs to learn how to let some of this stuff go. He'd prefer not to end up like Adam. Most days, at least. 

Maybe he should pretend harder.