I'm praying that I'm not the only one who feels this way, but when I got home from my mission, I found it a bit difficult to fit in right away. It seemed like the entire world had changed in just 2 short years. When the last movie that you saw before you left was Superman Returns and back when HomestarRunner.com was still popular....
Walking around campus I realized that I didn't understand what people were talking about over 70% of the time. People would also talk about restaurants that I'd never heard of. 93% of everything my family says comes from movie quotes and I was feeling really out of place. So here is what I did to try to pull myself out of this awkwardness and place myself back into 'the swing of things.'
1 - I started watching "The Office." I knew that this would help a little bit, but I didn't realize that it would completely cover the 70% of conversations that I was lacking and quite a bit of the family quotes. Who knew something could become that popular without me.
2 - I went to Demae and tried Sushi. I didn't really see how this would help me all that much, but everyone told me that it was a must. There were about everybody in the world there eating raw fish. I even kinda liked it. People were coming up to me and congratulating me on getting out of the awkward stage of my life. What is that supposed to mean?
3 - As for the movies, it's a never-ending battle. I've watched several and am further behind than when I started. So on that I've given up, but noticed that nobody really cares. I saw The Dark Knight and the Pixar films, that helped a lot. And I learned a few quotes from other movies, just to help me out. Simple things like, "I'm kind of a big deal" "Life is like a box of chocolates..." and "Never go against a Sicilian when death is on the line!"
So I'm walking around with my head up these days. I understand what people are saying when they tell me that I act like Michael Scott or have the mental capacity of Kevin Malone, so I'm feeling pretty good about myself.
So a few friends and I were driving around a few days ago looking at Christmas lights and having a good time. We went out to Salem and looked at some lights floating on a pond that are set up to look like Christmas trees. They looked really neat out there, especially with their reflections. They also had a bunch of trees with mysteriously un-Christmas-like green and blue spotlights on them. But they looked cool anyway. A lit bridge spans the pond and provides a fantastic place for all visitors to freeze out in the open with winds coming from all directions. We had hot chocolate and continued looking at lights. It wasn't very exciting cause we didn't think there would be much out there to top what we had just seen. My sister had told me about a house that was uniquely decorated, so I decided to check it out. We drove around the foothills of Orem 
and Lindon for quite a while before we came to a house with flashing lights ALL over the place. There was a sign out front that instructed us to tune our radio to 99.9. The entire light show was put to music!! More and more lights would come on as the music would progress, lights would change colors, speeds and brightness. They were actually in sync with the music! I wasn't quite sure it was possible. We were all very impressed with our new discovery and it kinda pushed the whole pond scene out of our minds. This seemed to be quite a bit more advanced. It's amazing what they can do with technology these days. Either that or the home owner has enough time on his hands to sit inside flipping a few light switches while everyone else enjoys a fantastic yule celebration.
