(8/28/24)

I have met my new roommate (the Evan replacement) and I know three things about him: He is really nice, he is media illiterate, and he is Mormon. Or at least his parents are. I knew of a family of Mormons in De Kalb. The LDS had a church across from the funeral home, but to my knowledge, this family were the only Mormons in town. They were nice. The parents were strict. Their house did not have a TV. Everyone pretended that they didn't exist. Tyler is pretty much the same. His house did have TV (this was my first question upon learning that he was Mormon), but it was not hooked up to a cable box and he said that the only movie that he remembered watching on it was Left Behind (not the one with Nicholas Cage, the other one with Kirk Cameron). He said that he mostly reads and he had recently bought himself a Nintendo Switch. He did have to explain to his parents that Nintendo is not an enemy of the Church of LDS. The big scandal came when he announced that instead of going on a mission, he desired to go to a liberal arts college and study chemistry. His parents' fears were proven a reality, Nintendo had turned their son into a rotten chemist! In actuality, it was a VHS of Bill Nye the Science Guy that developed Tyler's love for chemistry. Tyler is pretty quiet. All he does is play on his Switch and do his homework while listening to house beats. The greatest shock when meeting him was that he knows practically nothing about movies or popular culture. Caleb took this as a challenge to introduce him to all of the best media before he learns that a majority of it is actually quite awful. We are currently working our way through all the Lord of the Rings movies. We don't have a TV, so we all have to crowd around my computer monitor. I think after this Caleb wants to show him the Sopranos, but I want to ease him into the more mature stuff. Tyler said that he's never seen a Rated-R movie. If anybody has any suggestions for what we should show to this ex-Mormon, send them to my email!

~clancy