Land of Mormons, Part 1

Utah is a strange and wonderful place full of Mormons, yes, but also breathtaking mountain views, seagulls, flyers advertising Avalanche Awareness, iMacs for anyone to use, and, um, that's about it. This campus is HUGE! I'm lucky I found my way to the student union. My next step is to inquire about the student population, find a cup of coffee STAT, and finish up my presentation for tomorrow morning.

I spent two hours in the Phoenix airport chatting with a 68 year old woman, one of a pair of twins, about life, families, and such. It was so fun! I've always heard that when you travelled alone it was easy to make friends, and since I've met three people (four if you count the little kid's mom) in the past twenty-four hours, maybe it's true.

The weather here in Ogden is pretty crazy - it was nice when I got here (not as nice as Phoenix, but not too bad, but by the time the shuttle got me to my destination, the sky was a rolling black spewing forth hailstones and rain and the wind was blowing with a vengence that made me wonder if god was smiting me for thinking mean thoughts about the two Mormon girls in the back of the shuttle having a spirited discussion about the relative worth of the different books of the Bible.

Later, the rain stopped so I went for a walk to explore the area and rented a movie at a Hollywood Video that had the best selection of Foreign / Special Interest flicks I've ever seen two doors down from Cleanflicks, which is exactly what the name suggests. On the way back, the smiting started again and I was soaked, quite literally, from head to foot by the time I staggered back to my dorm.

The dorms are to be expected: nothing fancy there, but for $9 a night I wouldn't dare complain. They even gave me clean sheets, how about that? The weather is nice this morning: beautiful but chilly so I think I may be forgiven.

So where's the coffee, Weber?

Utah Vs. Moira

It occurs to me sometimes that I generally have no idea what I am doing. My plans are just about finalized for my upcoming trip to Ogden, Utan for the National Undergraduate Literature Conference. Sure, it's way cool that I've been invited to present my paper, and I'm excited to go somewhere new. But it's Utah! Six days in Utah? Alone? Oh, kids, we're in trouble here. If half of what I know about Utah is true (polygamy, Mormons, salt), Dr. A's example in Publication Workshop today, which included dialogue about a cop wanting to arrest me, may have been more than a funny example of dialogue gone wrong. I can just imagine the story titles:

On the run in Utah
A British Ex-Pat in Ogden: Me and You, ta.
My Short-Lived Career As A Mormon Housewife
When Salt Kills
Mutiny of the Mommies
The Utah Taskforce Special Edition: Moira Gone Wild

What's a girl to do in Utah, anyway?

Well, with 8 listings on Shadowland's "Haunted Places in Utah", I could get in a little ghost hunting in my free time. The Historic Radisson Suite Hotel has a problem that reminds me strangely of 2nd floor Admin: A ghost named Mrs. Eccles stops the elevator on the 5th floor. Hmm... Union Station, one of Utah's oldest railroad stations, has been featured on television due to its unexplained ghostly occurences. Even Weber State university has a few ghost stories: Should I worried that they both involve handguns? Yikes. Maybe I'll leave the ghost hunting for another locale.

I might be able to find a Big Foot if I am lucky and I bring peanut butter sandwiches. (For me, not Big Foot, come on!) Apparently, Big Foot is Big Pimpin' out in Utah: there have been 160 sightings in the state. Even the Book of Mormons mentions the lumbering beast! In fact, the Uintah mountains near Ogden boast more sightings that any other area in Utah. Sure, eight guys went searching for BF all tripped out in the seventies and found nothing, but Utah and Mr. Foot have never encountered me before. You just never know...

Well, I guess I won't be that bored after all. But will I be safe? I figure I should be wary of a few things here and there. After all, I am a woman traveling ala carte in the land of many wives. Blurbomat suggests I be on the look-out for "churchy weirdness." [ If you visit this page, be sure to read the comments. Hah! ]
Apparently, not all Mormons like Utah:

"When I lived in Utah and was a practicing Mormon, I couldn't wait to get out."

More than that, I need to worry about pajamas?

"Ogden, Utah - There's a new fad of students - mostly girls - wearing pajama bottoms to school, and so far administrators are not making a fuss about it."

Thanks, Normblog, you said it yourself: no one cares, but you are on it! Rock.

So, what do you know about Utah?

NULC & Me

Maybe you noticed this NMJ entry way back in October 2005:

Undergraduates: Apply to Present at a Literature Conference.

I decided to submit a paper I had written for American Lit with Dr. Jerz to the conference. I didn't actually expect that my paper would be accepted or that I'd have the chance to visit Ogden, Utah any time in the near future, but guess what: I got accepted! Yay!

My acceptance letter arrived yesterday and reads:

"Dear Moira,

We are pleased to inform you that your submission, "The Dooms of Love: The Tragedy of Unrealistic Cultural Expectations of Love," has been accepted to the 20th Annual National Undergraduate Literature Conference. Your work is among the finest submitted to us by undergraduate students from every state in the nation, and we enthusiastically congratulate you on your achievement as a writer."

Sweet! How cool is this? ;c)

The conference is being held at Weber State University March 30 - April 1st and includes four keynote speakers: Alice Sebold, author of The Lovely Bones, Glen Gold, Sebold's husband and author of Carter Beats the Devil, Brett Anthony Johnston, a former NULC participant (Yay!) and creative writing teacher at California State University, and Terry Gifford from the University of Leeds.

I looked at the list of colleges and found that no one from Seton Hill has gone before. In fact, only a handful of colleges from Pennsylvania are represented in the mix (Penn State - Abington, York College, & the University of Philly are the ones I saw).

Many thanks to Dr. Jerz for posting about this conference!

I'm so excited. My paper was relatively experimental in that I used Raymond Bergner's “Love and Barriers to Love,” an academic article about psychological effects of love, to analyze two short stories we had read in class: Lorrie Moore’s “You’re Ugly, Too” and Pam Houston’s “The Best Girlfriend You Never Had.”

I will have ten - fifteen minutes to present my paper as well as opportunities to hear fellow students from across the nation present their works. From the looks of things, this is going to be a ROCKIN' conference! Here are a few of the other papers being presented that weekend:

Goblin Market: Victorian Fairy Tale or Adult Erotica
Dust and Dollars: The Grapes of Wrath and Social Darwinism
Asking for It: The Wife of Bath and Reformative Rape
The Joke's on Us: Laughing at the Dark Side of the American Dream
Richard of Gloucester and Wal Mart: The Ruination of Two Societies

I can't wait!

If you are curious, here's the intro to my paper:

Increasingly in modern literature, female characters are portrayed as neurotic and otherwise defective individuals if they are not involved in the expected heterosexual relationship, especially when the woman is older. Are self-aware, older single women unable to form loving relationships? The problem seems to lie in the contradictions surrounding each woman – a woman learns from childhood onwards that marriage is the ultimate goal, even in a culture where career-minded women are more socially acceptable, women are expected to eventually settle down. With the emphasis on youth and impossible standards of beauty, most women don’t stand a chance.

In “Love and Barriers to Love,” Raymond Bergner illustrates the barriers to love that a person might experience in his or her lifetime – these barriers are ones culled from the psychoanalyst’s 31 years of experience in the field as well as observations from other clinicians. Although these barriers are meant to serve as a broad diagnostic tool for psychoanalysts, this paper will use these guidelines as a means of examining two short stories, Lorrie Moore’s “You’re Ugly, Too” and Pam Houston’s “The Best Girlfriend You Never Had,” to explore the question of whether increased self-awareness leads to a lowered capacity to love in the traditional sense by examining the two main characters: Zoë Hendericks and Lucy O’Rourke following a psychological perspective of love. Using both the character’s personal reflection and, when possible, the reactions of others to the character, in order to determine each character’s implied capacity for love, this paper will compare and contrast the two main characters in order to reveal that Lucy O’Rourke is better suited for love than Zoë Hendericks, using the text and outside sources to illustrate why.

Admittedly, this was a kind of bizarre slant to take for a literature paper, and as I started the paper, I wasn't even sure if it would work. But it did! Woohoo, Utah, here I come!