The New Blog.

I'm officially retiring this blog. Follow me now at...

http://jaredmooney.tumblr.com/

Thanks kiddos.

By the way, I still technically contribute to the blog at www.GuessWhatTotallyBadassThing IJustFoundOnInstantWatch.com, although we haven't updated that in forever, and Netflix has kinda been pissing me off royally of late.

Beginnings...

Most of you are aware, I suppose, that there's lots of new things in my life.

I got married to Danielle on May 20th in the Boston Temple. It was awesome.

Tons of our family and friends made the long trip to celebrate with us, and the day was just perfect. Well, 98% of the day...
(Long story, perhaps for another time.)

We've lived on her employer's 3rd floor for a couple of months now, and we just got an apartment for September in Dorchester, a small, South Boston neighborhood. It's a modest little place, but we're doing some work on it and it should make a cozy little home for the next year or so that Danielle and I are in Boston... our first home.

The recording studio, which I built with Ryan Pedersen in 2008, and which has been my sole occupation for the last 12 months is in transition of ownership to an independent producer named Andrew Campbell. He's buying out Ryan in September and me over the course of the next year, during which I'll help him manage the studio.

That puts me back in the full time job market though, and I've been trying to dig up sound-editing/mixing, a/v, film, or teaching opportunities in the area. I'm experiencing the first really barren job market I've ever faced. I am both highly skilled and experienced, but there just aren't any jobs I am finding here. So, for the first time in 8 or 9 years, I'm looking for jobs outside of the professional media environment. These don't come easy either, as my experience is pretty specialized in that area. It's new territory.

All things considered, I feel great. We've been seeing real blessings and feel very well looked after despite our abject poverty. I just need this last piece to fall in place.

Lastly, I've been considering what to do with this blog. I'm leaning in the direction of a fresh start here too, perhaps on the tumblr front. It's a little better featured for what I think I want to do. I'll be sure to drop the new url on you guys when I get it going so you can keep me in your RSS feeds.

Thanks for reading everybody. And if any of you folks are praying people, I'd appreciate you sending up one for me in the old job search...

Mooney,
"Don't mind me, three feet from the ceiling."

An open letter to an example.

Dear President Webb,

In August it will be ten years since I came home from my mission. Actually, it will be for you too, now that I think about it. You left a couple weeks after me. It was an unreal experience. I often flash back to moments from it that were goofy or hilarious (I mean, it's Alabama), but I also remember moments of clarity, purpose, revelation, and unencumbered joy. I want to thank you for being a guiding influence during some really vital years of my life. I had made the choice to serve the Lord before we met, but you helped me to keep making that choice every day, even when the service was really, really hard.

As a missionary I learned about the value of real friendship. I learned the value of the sweat of my face. I learned about the pure love of God. I also learned about the sadness, pain, and hopelessness, inseparable to the human condition. I learned why Christ's mission was so much about ministering to the poor, the lost, the downtrodden, the neglected, or forgotten members of society. Healing wounds, giving sight, forgiving sins, and saving souls. Those are the lessons I took it the streets of Birmingham and Wetumpka, and Columbus, Mississippi. The lessons from you were the ones that helped me shape my person into a capable pastor and ready conduit for the Spirit of God. Learning how to really use revelation is clearly the most important skill I developed on my mission and serving with you was a fantastic seminar in how to do just that.

I'm really grateful that you were willing to serve for 3 years, at helping 200 or so young men find themselves, while they clumsily helped strangers find the Lord and His gospel. Sweet home.

Love, Elder Mooney

An open letter to someone who changed your life...

I'm gonna finish these last three if it kills me.

It probably will not kill me, but it will probably destroy the will to ever again commit myself to a running theme for posts. I know I've been long between posts, but I may need a real long break from the blog altogether. These turned way more personal/mushy than I usually like to be on the interwebs.

Mark,

I'm not even sure how we became friends. I'm really not. Of course, we were in church, young mens, and scouts together, but I'm certain we weren't real friends through most of that experience, because I didn't really have friends at that age. I am really ok with that. I've never really held on to those things, except to occasionally think to myself that if I now encountered the young me, I would feel very sorry for the little guy. He kinda let other people dictate the terms of his existence. I was small, if not downright runtish, until the end of the 8th grade, and while sometimes, I hung out with skaters and stoners, I wasn't really included as a part of anybody's group until I started to hang out with you and Joel in 9th grade. Since I'm not sure how we started hanging out together, I'm not sure if you're actually someone who changed my life, or someone who was just there while I changed it for myself. Probably a little of both, and it probably doesn't matter much, anyway. We hung out that first time and don't think we never really stopped until I left on my mission.

I have lived away from "home" now for more than a decade, long enough that Boston feels more like home than Mesa... So after 2 years on a mission, 5 years of college/work in Utah, and 5 years in NY/Boston, most of my friendships (of which there are now hundreds) are with people you've never met. Still though, I think I know probably 8 of the 20 most favorite people in my life through you. That seems pretty significant. I miss you and the gang, and I know am really terrible at staying in touch with you. So much of my life has been elsewhere for so long. But every time I come home I feel as welcome and as appreciated as always. You're a huge part of that, so thanks from the bottom of Mooney's happiness pie.

An open letter to someone you just can't handle right now...

Dear NPR Music,

You used to be so great. Subscribing to your RSS feed helped me keep up on new music, see tiny desk concerts, and occasionally discover new artists. But you currently have some BIG problems with your feed.

First, repeats. I got 8 posts of the same exact story on the new Bright Eyes record. I know Connor Oberst gives you all kinds of grown up feelings in your pants, but come on. I saw it already. 7 times too many. Then they had the nerve to play on World Cafe a show who duplicates every feed item. So there was Bright Eyes two more times, and me, still not interested.

Second. Hipster central. Do you guys ever cover mainstream music besides Lady Gaga? I love indie rock. I own an independent studio/record label for goodness sake! But come on, it's like the "must have a strange beard" parade. I feel like I'm at the Newport festival every time I sign on to my reader.

Third. The jazz and classical beats are prolific. I love jazz, but I honestly can't handle the sheer volume of stories about obscure jazz players I've never heard of WITH NO ACCOMPANYING AUDIO. If you're gonna write a story about this one clarinetist who died in 1962 and tell me why he was so pivotal, let me listen to some pivotal recordings. Classical is similarly out of hand with the no-sound music journalism. The worst is the W.W.B.D. series. I don't care what Beethoven would like on the internet this week. I don't even care what music he'd dig (he was deaf). Also, YOU DON"T EVEN KNOW, so stop writing articles about it every week. That series sucks, and it doesn't ever seem to get more interesting.

Fourth. Sheer mass. You need weight loss. Heaven knows I support and love public broadcasting, but I'm the kind of person who opens my reader once a week. I subscribe to not a small number of feeds, but without fail, NPR music is responsible for 65-80% of the content. Which brings me to my biggest complaint.

Fifth. All or none. You have ONE, count em, ONE feed for articles. Even if I subscribe on All Songs Considered's page, I get the full NPR music feed. I could subscribe to just tiny desk for concerts, but once in a very great while, World Cafe or the NPR studios have something I'd like to see.

It's enough to make a music lover unsubscribe, which is I guess what this has come to. I'm sorry, I think we should see other people. And it is YOU, not me.

Jared

An open letter to the person who gave me my favorite memory...

While this is probably also Danielle, I'm gonna choose a different memory.

Dear Anne-Kate,

I will always remember the night Elder Maxfield and I came home at the end of an exhausting day, ending an even more taxing week of the most difficult and disappointing kind of missionary work, to your voice on our answering machine.

We'd been "flushed into" an area where the prior missionaries had not been doing a whole lot of work (hence they were flushed out). I was a new zone leader, training a brand new missionary, and doing absurd full days of tracting to try and get just a few investigators in a fairly wealthy area of Birmingham where most people would sooner talk to their living room wall than to us.

Dinner that night had even been disappointing. I was served fish. Not deep fried catfish or something I could stomach, something freshwater with the head and scales still on it. I made it through dinner and our short member visit and got on my bike, but it wasn't more than a few hundred feet before I was prostrate and vomiting the whole mess into somebody's bushes.

When we got home and checked the answering machine, the first call was from our only promising investigator who had just been given a heaping dose of anti-mormon literature. He had called us to say he didn't want to visit with us any more. Then your voice came on and you said, "I've read the Book of Mormon, the Doctrine and Covenants, and the Pearl of Great Price and I believe everything and I'm ready to be baptized. Please let me know how soon we could do that."

Our mouths about hit the floor.

I think you probably feel like I'm the one who helps you to continue to believe, but I assure you, your call gave me a significant faith in the promises God had made me. Nothing I could do was giving us someone to teach. Then God gave us someone to baptize. And not just someone. One of my best friends in life, and a woman who taught me a tremendous amount about compassion and fairness and love.

May God always bless you with what you need and reward your diligent search for truth with understanding. May he bless you and Greg with health and strength and grace.

Worlds without end.
Allahu akbar.

Love, Elder Mooney.

Not an open letter...

By the way, in case you missed it somehow in that last post, I'm engaged to be married.