Samer told me that to get properties of a record from Parse when you have retrieved it from the database you can just do theObj.attributes.theProperty. I had found a hack by doing JSON.parse(JSON.stringify(theObj)).theProperty. I can not find where it says how to do this anywhere in the Parse docs! Ridiculous! Anyways, I just switched to using .attributes for all the stuff where we get skills from Parse. Also deleted some commented out debugging stuff we do not need anymore.