1. And where did he serve his mission?
2. A warm October day down by the Provo River
3. Orem's not so bad when you give it a chance
4. I can rely on myself
5. Jared gets drunk and gets laid
6. Forget about her, Jared
7. A story I never tell anyone

• (character chart)
• Warning/Disclaimer

1. Young Women's
2. Youth Conference
3. Saturday's Warrior
4. Brigham Young University
• Gratuitous Love Scene
5. Polygamist
6. Temple Wedding
7. Orem High
8. Bordeaux Mission
9. Exmo Conference

"From a health perspective fish and seafood are good for you. And from a moral perspective, to me a lobster is essentially just a gigantic bug. I just can't see killing arthropods and mollusks as being equivalent to killing mammals or birds."

"What about the fish?" I asked.

"Well of course then there's always the question of precisely where to draw the line. When I drew my line I was probably biased in the wrong direction by the fact that I love sushi!" She laughed.

"So you think that it's wrong to eat a pig and not to eat a fish?" I asked.

"Essentially," she said. "The thing is that when you step back there's really no canonical purpose to life and no moral reason for anything in the universe to exist or not. Nothing really matters in a universal, objective sense. Right and wrong are human concepts and they only have meaning in terms of the way humans perceive the universe. Therefore it's reasonable for me to define right and wrong in terms of my own human experience. So naturally I see killing a pig as wrong because it is a thinking, feeling creature I can empathize with. Swatting a mosquito, for example, registers zero for me on the empathy scale. Anyway, maybe I'm wrong, but that's the way I see it."

It seemed like she was probably right, but I wasn't sure I really understood what she was talking about. "You should study philosophy!" I said.

"Nah, I hate philosophy," she said. "Too boring! Whenever I try to read philosophy people start deconstructing things and my eyes start to glaze over. Maybe I'm a simple person, but I have to see the world in concrete, practical terms. That's just the way I am."

I never expected to hear Andrea saying that some subject was too boring or difficult for her to follow! Another something I could relate to her on! I smiled at her and reached across the table to touch her hand briefly. She smiled shyly back and looked away. She was so pretty!

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"So what movie do you want to see?" I asked.

"I don't know. I don't like to go see movies in the movie theater because they're too expensive. Even if I have the money for it, I don't like to pay for extravagances that cost a lot more than they're worth. Is that weird?"

"I was going to pay," I said.

"On principle," she said, "Even if it's someone else paying."

"We could go to the dollar theater," I said. That was what I was kind of hoping to do anyway.

"I don't feel like going to an ordinary movie tonight. I'm kind of in the mood for a really old movie or maybe something foreign."

I wasn't too thrilled about that idea. I thought about some of the weird films they sometimes made us watch in French class. But I guessed that I could sit through one of them for Andrea.

"We could go to the BYU International Theater," I said. "They show foreign films."

"Oh, do you know what's playing?" she asked.

"No," I said. As if I would just happen to know what was playing at the BYU International Theater!

"Let's just rent a movie and watch it at my house," she said.

"Okay," I said.

So we went to a movie rental place and she went straight for the foreign films.

The first one she picked up was called Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. "I love this one!" she said.

That didn't sound too promising. It sounded like a chick-flic. Reading my expression, she put it down and grabbed another one.

"Oh, this one is really good!" she said. The film was called The Wedding Banquet. That sounded worse than the first one!

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