General Relief Society Meeting 2012

Every September, the Church (of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints) holds a big netting for women only. It's one of my favorite events of the year. This year was no exception. I usually watch the broadcast at a church building (except for 2006, when I sang in the choir at the Conference Center!), but this year my sister had tickets, so I went to see it live in Salt Lake with her and my mom. It was so good. I loved every talk that was given. It was all very Christ-centered and inspiring. If you've got time, I recommend watching it here if you missed it. The message of these meeting is always very inspiring and uplifting, but the events are always so much better when I get to spend the evening with female family.

Now that City Creek exists, it's even more fun. We were planning in dinner at Blue Lemon, but the lines were crazy, so we went to Nordstrom's restaurant, Sixth and Pine. I was surprised at how good and classy it was. And it must get forgotten, because it was not busy at all, and everything else downtown was. We were in a rush, so we just got soup to hurry things up, but I'd love to go back there and try their other menu items. I had the Chicken Pot Pie soup, and oh my, it was tasty. It had two tiny rosemary biscuits on top, which were just as delightful as the soup. After the meal the waiter brought us two different types of chocolate, which is just always a great thing to do. They had a display case of desserts, which I will try someday. They had a chocolate cheesecake that looked insane. I must eat it.

Oh, I also have to touch on a couple hilarious things that happened throughout the night. I won't go into the whole story, but we laughed a lot. There was this old homeless guy sitting on a corner and he said to us, "can you spare some change for and old veteran?" My mom misheard him and yelled back, "oh, you're not an old wretch!" He was confused, and when I told my mom what he actually said we all just about died laughing. There's more to that story, but I'll just say we couldn't stop laughing pretty much all night.

As we crossed the street from Temple Square to the Conference Center there were a couple ladies with big baskets handing out compliments, smiles, and packs of free tissues with little bows tied around them. Call me rude, but I honestly thought it was a little weird and didn't accept one. We were wondering what relief society thought it was a good idea to spend SO much time and money putting these bows on so many hundreds of Kleenex packets, and then missing the conference to stand out there passing them out. Well, turns out it wasn't a relief society thing at all. As we got into the building and went through security we noticed a huge box behind the counter where they check your purses. It was literally overflowing with those kleenex packets, and there was a woman there asking us to pass any tissues we received to her. Turns out those sweet ladies had opened each packet (yeah, their hands were all over those kleenexes) and inserted a little card with a sad-looking picture of a depressed woman with a bunch of pills next to the temple on the front, and all these websites listed on the back, before wrapping it up all pretty to hand out to these Mormon women. So weird. Pills? I think they were suggesting mormon + woman = depression and meds. Not so, ladies, not so. I'm quite happy. I just found it so bizarre. A kind enough gesture, I suppose, but also a little strange (even if they were LDS, I'd have thought it strange), and sadly, a waste of their time.

See, I really don't care what people think about the church. They're entitled to their opinions, as I am mine. I don't care if they try to fight against it (although it seems like a huge waste of their time), but I thought their trickery was pretty disrespectful. To assume that we're ALL cryers? I mean seriously, ladies. Some of us can keep it together.* No but really, it was kind of weird to masquerade as RS ladies. Not to mention unsanitary. Not the masquerading, the kleenex business...

All in all, it was a great night. (We missed you Brit! She was planning on coming but ended up not).

*I am totally a cryer.