Is it cultural?

confused missionaries, environmental degradation, and faith

¿What you heard?

I’m fascinated by my new friends the missionaries — a small-town girl grown up across the lake from Provo and a farmer’s daughter originally from Eugene.

I like these people, and they like me. The only thing they don’t like is when I go to Wikipedia for more info about The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints instead of just texting them. They trust in God, Jesus, and Joseph Smith, not Wikipedia.

I’ve only lived two places in this country — Los Angeles and New York, so I consider Sister Aylworth and Sister Pendleton to be some real salt of the Earth true blue Americans, and they consider me…

Well, I don’t know what they consider me.

Crazy, perhaps.

I tell them I dance, and they wonder if I ballet.

“No,” I say, and their faces go gobsmacked when I show them this video of my teacher…

“Is it cultural?” Sister Aylworth asks, struggling to make sense of the sabar.

What you doin’?!

A screenshot from my first attempt. Obviously a lot wrong here. Blur, overexposure, holes. It improved in the following runs.

I owe my robot a serious conversation about my Gaussian splat of Leimert Park.

I had to try this over and over again this week because I kept ending up with these impossibly long processing times.

At one point, it told me that it was going to take 64 days just to track all of the cameras!

The issue, I’ve realized, is that I was a bit too ambitious with my splat, choosing a few blocks of a neighborhood when many splats are simply a single object on a table or a single room in a house.

In the end, I settled for two days of processing for a middling splat of Degnan, 43rd, and the park, and I think I’ll use this as the basis for finding coverage before making more specific, confined, higher quality splats of the exact areas I want to use.

What you seen??

ONE PIECE (1999-) continues to align perfectly with where I’m at in my life.

Last week, I faced friendship challenges and was in the middle of the Arabasta Arc.

This week, my three encounters with the sister missionaries have left me reflecting on faith, and I am in the middle of the Jaya Arc, where characters are ridiculed for their faith in an apocryphal tale about an island in the sky.

I have not yet seen enough to know whether their faith is rewarded in the end or even if the island is real, but it doesn’t really matter to me.

Same with religion.

I tried explaining to the sisters that, as an agnostic, I am perfectly at peace with leaving the universe’s most mysterious questions unanswered.

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