I'm not gonna use hers you sicko!

Greetings.

It is I, Benjamin of house Rivera, come once again to proclaim the happenings of events in the lands south of Oakland, California to those scattered about the land elsewhere.

I hope that my message will be received swiftly and in the most efficient of fashions, as it is of paramount importance that this information is relayed to those aforementioned individuals for whom it was written.

As soon as this email appeared in your mailbox, I'm sure you looked at your watch and, with horror, realized that Monday had come once again and that you therefore would have to read yet another email from me.

Well, here I am! I'm afraid that I am, indeed, composing another document meant for others to view. I do apologize.

Anyway, it has certainly been another eventful week. Things just keep happening. That's just the natural way of things, I suppose.

For starters, let me just get out of the way that Wednesday was definitely the worst day of my mission. Before you start up with all the booming accusations of me being a terrible missionary because I'm "not finding joy in the work" or something like that, let me simply defend myself by saying that I was, in fact, rather ill on that day. I'm not quite certain what caused this sudden bout of illness, only that it was uncomfortable and unwelcome, and that it made missionary work an absolute nightmare. You see, I was not about to stay inside all day because of some little stomach bug! Not as long as I can stand! (Admittedly, we did take an extended lunch and dinner break for resting purposes, as I definitely did not feel like eating). We just went out and had a semi-normal day. I was on exchanges with one of our zone leaders at the time, so it was fairly interesting. But, we got through it, and I have since recovered. I did discover something, though-and I'm going to use this as a sort of moral for this story... When you are feeling ill, it is just about the third most painful thing in the world to chuckle. I learned that the hard way, my friends. Laughing and sickness don't mix.

Moving on…

Another major world event that has occurred since we last spoke is the premier of Avengers: Endgame. Don't start condemning me yet, I am not an apostate, and therefore I have steered as clear as I could from this particular event (although several other missionaries and I do agree that this is a big enough cultural event that they should let us missionaries go see it, although unfortunately that is not how the church works in terms of mission rules) as I could. I include this in my letter only because I did not fully comprehend how massive of an event this movie would be. We have a rule in our mission that from 5-7 PM we have to be out finding (rather than doing other missionary activities), and I think that this weekend the movie actually impacted our finding, because fewer people than usual were actually home. I don't know. Maybe I'm just grasping at straws. It does seem like there could be some sort of correlation, though.

Anyway, now that "conspiracy theories from Ben" is over, I can continue.

Actually, though, not an insane amount else happened this week. Some of those we are teaching continue to make good progress, which is always good to see. We have zone conference this Thursday, so we'll find out the details of our role in the temple open house then. The upcoming month will be an exciting one, for sure. For now, though, I suppose I must bid you farewell.

-Ben "Bydgoszcz" Rivera

P.S. Look that word up, it's actually a thing.

P.P.S. ¡Adios Chicharron!

P.P.P.S. This week on Friday us and a few more missionaries coalesced our skills to make a gourmet dinner of chicken and waffles. It was truly a work of art, what we came up with.