The Move Out (And Subsequent Activity) - Part II

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