Hello, world! Welcome back to the Brainstormer's Notebook - new thoughts hot off my head every Wednesday! If you have come to this blog, you must be a pretty awesome person. In fact, you're probably becoming more amazing just by reading this, because after all, I am the most important person in the universe, of course.
My topic of discourse today is more about my impressions of Utah, from the perspective of someone from the East Coast. Let's jump in!
It's impossible to talk about Utah culture (at least, in full depth) without mentioning The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints - the Mormons (which is my religion, by the way). That's what's stood out a lot to me, so that's where I'm going to start. Feel free to ignore this bit if you don't care about that, but I should think it might be interesting. I just hope nobody will take offense, though I don't see why anyone really would. I certainly want any readers to know in advance that I definitely didn't intend any.
The LDS church in Utah, in a word: Condensed. For example, where our ward (congregation) in Delaware drew from a large city's worth of geographic area, our ward here has more people and draws from about two streets. The building where we attend church takes less time to walk to here than it did to drive in DE. While I used to be the only person in my grade at my school with my religion, now it's those who aren't part of our religion who are less common.
Hand-in-hand with the dense Mormon population is a remarkable ubiquity of knowledge about us. The religion isn't just part of the public consciousness, it's part of the public culture. This shows in a couple of different ways. There's a lot less cursing in Utah (or at least in my high school) and a few (sometimes rather humorous) substitute phrases have sprung up, such as one of my personal favorites, "oh my heck". I'm pretty sure the Mormon religion influences Utah's strong Republican swing as well.
In my English class recently we discussed satire and, as part of our education experience, were to create a satiric piece. Since satire is by nature designed to poke constructive fun at society, I learned a lot about the culture here from what they created. But it was more informative not to see what they made fun of, but to see what they assumed their audience would know. For example, modesty was mentioned offhandedly, which is of course a real word, but the context (conservative standards of dress) isn't often used among high schoolers, I think - unless they're Mormons. Likewise, church youth activities were tossed out in jargon - not very confusing jargon, but jargon nonetheless - with no necessary explanation. I've also heard people mention "ward activities" in the grocery store, which would of course sound like you were from a mental hospital, unless you understood the LDS term for congregations. But it flew. It's seriously crazy.
Some of you might know about seminary, but I'll put it up here anyway. Seminary is simply the name in the LDS church for the scripture study class for teens. In Delaware, and most of the United States as far as I know, it's done by squeezing time in before school starts. This is the sometimes-dreaded early-morning seminary. Here, however, things are very different. Early-morning is an option, but the default is release-time seminary, which is basically a school class but not technically, because this is a public school and there's the first amendment and stuff. So they release us from school at a given time (hence the name) so we can cross the parking lot to a little building just outside of school grounds, where we study religion in basically a school setting. Unlike it was in Delaware, the teachers are career seminary teachers who get paid.
Unfortunately, I've overstayed my welcome on our sole computer, and am out of time anyway. So that's this week's post, mainly, but READ THIS PLEASE!
I'd love to know what you think of my blog, and how I can improve it for you, and what you'd like to know. So if you have any sort of feedback for me, I'd love to hear it in the comments, or by email if you know it. Honestly. I love hearing from you guys.
Until next week,
Ian
Wednesday, October 26, 2016
Wednesday, October 19, 2016
The Move Out (and Subsequent Activity) - Part I
Welcome back, dear readers. The tale I have for you today is not for the faint of heart. It is a chilling tale of horror, woe and grim fate. It is the tale ... of DRIVING THROUGH THE MIDWEST!
Okay, so maybe it wasn't quite that bad, but wide expanses of flatness do get monotonous.
Before I get to that, though, I'd like to apologize for taking so long to put this up. School has been keeping me busy up until this point; I've actually been meaning to post this since last week but, you know, life. And I'd also like to apologize for not responding to some of your emails specifically. People have usually just been asking how the move was, and I thought it would save some time to just tell it all at once. So here you are.
Monday the 26th we packed our moving truck completely, and stayed in someone else's house that night. Tuesday morning we left. It took us about five minutes to get to Pennsylvania, and we drove eleven or twelve hours and also visited Kirtland, Ohio, which is a historic site for my church. We stayed at my aunt's in Indiana that night.
We drove an average of 9 hours per day the rest of the trip. We saw Carthage and Nauvoo in Illinois on Wednesday, for the same reason as we did Kirtland (though unfortunately, none of these visits lasted very long) and another history site on Thursday. We stayed in a hotel and later a little camping cabin. Friday, the last day, we arrived in Utah and stayed at the house of another of my aunts. Saturday morning (so that's October 1st) we finally got to our new house here.
We spent most of Saturday and Sunday with a bunch of my mom's family. (Side note: I have awesome relatives.) Monday we unloaded our van. Our grandpa had moved out here to live near us, so that's cool. On Thursday the 6th we started school, and yesterday, the 11th, we finally got internet at our house after trying three different companies who didn't work out. That's why it's taken so long to get to all of this.
One of the first things I noticed about Utah was that the view is broken by mountains, not trees, and you can see for ages before that happens. There's also not a lot of green, mostly yellow-gray scrub. The school is way bigger, and quite different from Charter. At the risk of sounding like a humongous nerd (which of course I am) it's almost too easy. You're allowed to take Calc BC without taking Calc AB (and this is the AP), so the entire first semester is AB, review for me, in order to make up for those guys. In fact, APs here don't give extra GPA. They're about at the level of phase 5 back home, and the curricula don't line up, so I'm rather ahead in most areas (except history, and seminary and band which don't really count.) I'm ahead of my programming class, my Calc class, and my French class (see below).
I'm having a devil of a time working out my schedule. I've already met with my counselor twice to work it out and it's still not all free of kinks (although it's already the end of the first marking period). For instance, despite the fact that I wasn't ready for AP French at Charter, my new school's AP French class is still learning stuff I already know. So I'll probably be changing classes.
And as for the other aspects of school: First, it's about as big as the entire Charter/Cab building (including the middle school) plus a few classrooms, roughly. Also, there's no dress code like there was at my old school. In fact, in some ways they're just less paranoid in general. We can wear hats (unlike back home, where I think they were a security threat or some such thing) and the doors are unlocked while school is open (again, unlike the annoying DE get-the-office's-attention-so-they-can-expressly-let-you-in system). There's no activity period in the middle of the day, nor general study halls, but lunch is 45 minutes long and you can do whatever you want during it, including leave the building. They don't even keep track. It ends a little earlier than Charter did. Mondays, classes are shorter and the last 45 minutes are free, theoretically to use talking to your teachers and doing homework and stuff like that. I spent Monday afternoon convincing my APUSH teacher that she should give me credit for the first marking period. I'm not yet sure whether or not it worked.
And, the biggest immediately relevant difference: There's a fall break! As in, we get time off at Thanksgiving, but also RIGHT NOW. I don't have school again until Tuesday. So I might be able to chat you guys sometime or something.
That's more than likely enough information for one post. See me again in a week (or earlier, if I have the time) when I discuss Utahn culture - and especially Utah Mormon culture.
Feel free to comment or email me with any questions (and I'm sure there will be many)!
Okay, so maybe it wasn't quite that bad, but wide expanses of flatness do get monotonous.
Before I get to that, though, I'd like to apologize for taking so long to put this up. School has been keeping me busy up until this point; I've actually been meaning to post this since last week but, you know, life. And I'd also like to apologize for not responding to some of your emails specifically. People have usually just been asking how the move was, and I thought it would save some time to just tell it all at once. So here you are.
Monday the 26th we packed our moving truck completely, and stayed in someone else's house that night. Tuesday morning we left. It took us about five minutes to get to Pennsylvania, and we drove eleven or twelve hours and also visited Kirtland, Ohio, which is a historic site for my church. We stayed at my aunt's in Indiana that night.
We drove an average of 9 hours per day the rest of the trip. We saw Carthage and Nauvoo in Illinois on Wednesday, for the same reason as we did Kirtland (though unfortunately, none of these visits lasted very long) and another history site on Thursday. We stayed in a hotel and later a little camping cabin. Friday, the last day, we arrived in Utah and stayed at the house of another of my aunts. Saturday morning (so that's October 1st) we finally got to our new house here.
We spent most of Saturday and Sunday with a bunch of my mom's family. (Side note: I have awesome relatives.) Monday we unloaded our van. Our grandpa had moved out here to live near us, so that's cool. On Thursday the 6th we started school, and yesterday, the 11th, we finally got internet at our house after trying three different companies who didn't work out. That's why it's taken so long to get to all of this.
One of the first things I noticed about Utah was that the view is broken by mountains, not trees, and you can see for ages before that happens. There's also not a lot of green, mostly yellow-gray scrub. The school is way bigger, and quite different from Charter. At the risk of sounding like a humongous nerd (which of course I am) it's almost too easy. You're allowed to take Calc BC without taking Calc AB (and this is the AP), so the entire first semester is AB, review for me, in order to make up for those guys. In fact, APs here don't give extra GPA. They're about at the level of phase 5 back home, and the curricula don't line up, so I'm rather ahead in most areas (except history, and seminary and band which don't really count.) I'm ahead of my programming class, my Calc class, and my French class (see below).
I'm having a devil of a time working out my schedule. I've already met with my counselor twice to work it out and it's still not all free of kinks (although it's already the end of the first marking period). For instance, despite the fact that I wasn't ready for AP French at Charter, my new school's AP French class is still learning stuff I already know. So I'll probably be changing classes.
And as for the other aspects of school: First, it's about as big as the entire Charter/Cab building (including the middle school) plus a few classrooms, roughly. Also, there's no dress code like there was at my old school. In fact, in some ways they're just less paranoid in general. We can wear hats (unlike back home, where I think they were a security threat or some such thing) and the doors are unlocked while school is open (again, unlike the annoying DE get-the-office's-attention-so-they-can-expressly-let-you-in system). There's no activity period in the middle of the day, nor general study halls, but lunch is 45 minutes long and you can do whatever you want during it, including leave the building. They don't even keep track. It ends a little earlier than Charter did. Mondays, classes are shorter and the last 45 minutes are free, theoretically to use talking to your teachers and doing homework and stuff like that. I spent Monday afternoon convincing my APUSH teacher that she should give me credit for the first marking period. I'm not yet sure whether or not it worked.
And, the biggest immediately relevant difference: There's a fall break! As in, we get time off at Thanksgiving, but also RIGHT NOW. I don't have school again until Tuesday. So I might be able to chat you guys sometime or something.
That's more than likely enough information for one post. See me again in a week (or earlier, if I have the time) when I discuss Utahn culture - and especially Utah Mormon culture.
Feel free to comment or email me with any questions (and I'm sure there will be many)!
Wednesday, October 12, 2016
Introduction
Hello all! I'm Ian and I welcome to the Brainstormer's Notebook, my new blog. This blog is for you if you:
a) care about my life
b) want access to discourse on diverse subjects
c) like to read it
d) have any other reason to read it
e) ...are a human? I don't want to discourage anyone
Right now, I'm thinking I'll post weekly. Arbitrarily, because I first sat down to do this on a Wednesday, I'll be posting on Wednesdays. We'll see how that works out. (The weekly thing, and also the Wednesdays.)
As for content, I make no promises, besides the fact that they'll be clean, from my own head (mostly) and in English (probably). At first, posts will likely be updates after my recent move. Once my life settles down more, who knows? The possibilities are endless.* I might share self-written poetry, discuss current events, wax philosophical or scientific or both, answer reader questions, share book or game suggestions, explain something, or advocate ducks as headgear (though almost certainly - indeed, I estimate a 99.999% chance - not seriously).
This concludes your introduction to my blog. Once again, thanks for visiting. Enjoy!
-Ian
*Figuratively, due to the internet's finite capacity. This will - probably, hopefully - never be a problem.
a) care about my life
b) want access to discourse on diverse subjects
c) like to read it
d) have any other reason to read it
e) ...are a human? I don't want to discourage anyone
Right now, I'm thinking I'll post weekly. Arbitrarily, because I first sat down to do this on a Wednesday, I'll be posting on Wednesdays. We'll see how that works out. (The weekly thing, and also the Wednesdays.)
As for content, I make no promises, besides the fact that they'll be clean, from my own head (mostly) and in English (probably). At first, posts will likely be updates after my recent move. Once my life settles down more, who knows? The possibilities are endless.* I might share self-written poetry, discuss current events, wax philosophical or scientific or both, answer reader questions, share book or game suggestions, explain something, or advocate ducks as headgear (though almost certainly - indeed, I estimate a 99.999% chance - not seriously).
This concludes your introduction to my blog. Once again, thanks for visiting. Enjoy!
-Ian
*Figuratively, due to the internet's finite capacity. This will - probably, hopefully - never be a problem.
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