And etc…

Have you ever wondered what it’s like to live Utah? Of course you have. You’ve wondered what it would be like to escape the in-laws by living 1800+ miles away. Who hasn’t? Really, I mean, who hasn’t? It’s a universal sentiment. We could probably catch Osama if we’d just figure out where his in-laws lived, and then look as far away from them as humanly possible. Probably in caves.

Anyway, I put up with a lot of things living in Utah. There’s a culture clash between me and the general culture. I recently discovered a blog (thanks to type awesome Brittany, who gets irritated when I don’t mention her in my blog posts, so hi Brittany! These shout-outs would be more fun if I had an embarrassing nickname for you. Hmm…)…where was I? That parenthetical was amazingly long…oh yeah, I found a blog that somewhat describes the culture here, What Mormons Like. It doesn’t describe everything, but it hits on some of the biggies. Like, Mormons like names I can’t pronounce and/or remember how to spell. Doesn’t become a big deal until you’re a teacher. A teacher who has enough problems remembering people’s names to begin with.

Anyhow, this is general conference weekend. What is that, you ask? It’s that weekend when the LDS church tells people stuff all weekend. I’m unclear on exactly what they talk about, but it’s televised. And widely protested, which is fun. I love a good protest. Doesn’t totally matter what the topic is. I just discovered they do this conference thingie twice a year, but for some reason I only knew about the spring one because people treated that like it was a really big deal. The fall one? No one ever mentioned it to me before now. Maybe it’s just not as cool as the spring conference. I guess we’ll never know…Both of them are full of old white guys talking and people singing churchy songs, in case you were wondering. It’s broadcast on KSL, which is our NBC affiliate station. So I tuned in once to see what the deal was. Old white guys and church songs. That was the deal.

It’s sometimes fun to live in a place where you don’t fit into the dominant culture and no one believes in genocide. And by sometimes, I mean once or twice a year. Good times. And to all my LDS friends, hi! Hopefully this wasn’t offensive. And if it was, well, for me this is pretty unoffensive. So deal. Bye!

So today I got into a fight with Marci in the lab about who has the worst phone anxiety. Marci told me she’s still afraid to call to order a pizza, and has managed to never do so in her entire life. I tried to top that, then I realized that I’ve gotten over most of my anxiety about the phone. I will call to order pizza nowadays, though it annoys me, for whatever reason. Apparently people with phone anxiety just need to get a job at an incoming call center to overcome this. And maybe drink a lot.

Of course, I still HATE the phone and find it to be the most imprecise form of communication ever invented. Yes, even worse than obscene gesturing, smoke signaling, and blogging. It irks me that I cannot see the non-verbal communications of others over the phone, and people often say things that they haven’t actually thought through while on the phone. Also, how do you know if the other person is actually listening? I mean, I’m only really listening maybe 60% of the time. Maybe. And that’s if I like you.

Anyway, the real point here? Marci is way weirder than me. So she wins. Congratulations! Though, we were also having the fight to decide who had to make the call to order Domino’s. But someone else Brittany (who is Type Awesome) did that anyway. It was a win-win situation for me. No longer the most messed up, and didn’t have to do anything. Life is above-average at the moment.

So yesterday Brittany accused me of being Type A. Then I realized she was really complimenting me. Because “A” stands for awesome. I am Type Awesome, thank you very much. And I do have “Free floating hostility, which can be triggered by even minor incidents.”

Now I’m going around insulting people by calling them Type B. I am so hilarious.

Just an FYI: I still suck at following directions necessary to cook something decent. In case you were wondering.

Ok, so we weren’t murdered by murderous relatives. However, due to the campingness and rainy-ness, I’m not sure how upset I would’ve been, overall, if they had turned out to be serial killers.

Matt took me to Victoria, BC, Canada to make up for it. It mostly worked. I heart Canada.