So, it´s 2011 and while thinking about what resoloutions I´d make I realized I already know exactly what I will do every single day this year... so... I´ll try to get fat or something. In the mean time though, another week has passed by. I read President Uchtdorf´s talk about pride in the priesthood session and it helped me just learn to accept my companions tendancy to correct me. It crazy, because he actually doesn´t bug me at all any more. That is seriously an enormous huge leap for mankind. You can forget about the moon. That´s is child´s play next to getting me to figure out how to accept correction (especially when it´s seemingly unnecissary and coming from someone who is under my leadership). But hey it happened so, woohoo for miracles.

Also I´ve been pretty bad at getting letters out over the past 7 or 8 weeks, and I know it sounds crazy, but I haven´t had any personal time yet. Actually I have had a little bit, but it has been consumed by service and buying drugs because I got sick and blah blah blah. There is always something to do, and I think I can count the hours of personal time that I have had in the last two months on one hand. But it´s amazing. It sounds stupid, but I can´t believe how much happier I feel. I can honestly say that I have never in my life felt happier than I do now. Before the mission, given that I was incredibly lazy and mildly rebelious, all of the joy that I felt always had another side to it. But here there is generally no bad feeling inside of me. At the most I feel slightly stressed by the fact that other people can make their own decisions sometimes, but on a personal level I have never felt the way I do now. It´s actually kind of hard to explain, but the whole ``go lose yourself in the work´´ thing that Gordon B. Hinckley´s dad wrote to him is 100% applicable to real life. Who´da guessed that one...? I love it when I learn things that everyone else already knew.

All I can say is that I finally think I understand the application of service in a normal day to day life, and surprisingly the goal is not to just help other people. I seems to me that almost all of the bad feelings of sadness or especially contention, anger, or hate that I have ever felt were generated by a deep rooted selfishness and pride that pretty much everyone has. But in order to get rid of that cause all you have to do is think less about yourself and more about other people and you are set. I just realized this the other day, but when I go to sleep and I am just smiling to myself super creepily because I have a general feeling of happiness that wasn´t generated from any one specific action during the day, but that I repeatedly saw people more or less like our Father in Heaven sees them. Some dude blew marajuana smoke right in my face as I walked by and instead of getting super mad and punching him in the face like I would generally want to, my first thought were ``how can I help him in his progression...?´´ Like what the heck? that isn´t me... at least it didn´t used to be me....? Meh, I am not really putting it into words super well, but service makes you feel better when it´s is sought after in the right way.

And in response to going on a cruize somewhere sunny in 2012, that would be cool, but do it here if that exists. I mean heck, at least that summer I´ll be better at portuguese than english and we should use that to our advantage. I can tell the people we aren´t the stupid kind of americans and make them sell us stuff at normal price. Plus you´d get to see the real Brazil. Just a suggestion...

But anyways, I am out of time. I love you all and I am still waiting for the christmas package. I will notify you when it gets here. Stay sweet