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"My name is Brett Ann Lalli. I recently graduated with a bachelor of arts in cognitive science, and I am.... "

Pathetic.

I keep reading about this archetype of a jaded, impoverished post-grad in a series of gifs on Buzzfeed, watching it play out on the latest episode of "Girls," thinking "thatisnotmethatisnotmethatisnotme." 

It's me.

I'm slumped over on my unmade bed amongst piles of laundry that I did four days ago and still haven't folded. I'm in my room, a cluttered, undecorated room I rented out in a dirty house belonging to a 70-year-old retired schoolteacher that has a yellow lab and doesn't ever leave the couch or god forbid turn off the television for five bleeding seconds. She is currently out there, on the couch, watching the Katie Couric Show or 60 Minutes or the Home Shopping Network or whatever mind-numbing program baby boomers are into these days. I can't leave my room or else she will try to engage me in a conversation about her vericose vein surgery or the desalination plant or the napkin holder she bought at Goodwill. So I have to bring my jar of peanut butter and box of cereal in my room.

Scoop. Dip. Scoop. Dip

That is me scooping peanut butter into a giant spoon and dipping it into a mug of Honey Bunches of Oats. I like the way the cereal sticks to the peanut butter and the peanut butter doesn't even have to try. It's just like "Yeah, I'm sticky. Look how things just stick to me." A bit of corn flake drops indifferently down the front of my fluffy robe. Between the robe and the $20 space heater I named Saving Grace, I should be toasty, but I just want to huddle deeper and cover myself with more layers, more hot air and carbon monoxide. 

Scoop. Dip. 

I am staring at a blinking cursor. The sense of depletion is awfully familiar. I used to stare at blinking cursors all the time in college, everyone did.

College.

Me: "I think I'm just going to stay here, get a part time job while I look for a better part time job while I look for a full time job while I save up to go back to school."
 Pop: "You don't need to do that. You're a bright girl. You have a great degree."

Things I wanted to say: "You realize that means absolutely nothing, right? It's been 30 years since you had to get a job. You lived in a flourishing world. There were opportunities like doorknobs, now there are only opportunities like the last bit of toothpaste you have to squeeze out of a tightly rolled tube.

Dad, I wish you had never told me I was extraordinary. I wish no one had ever told me I was exceptional, that I was bright, that I was beautiful, that I was some grand gift to the world like a second Baby Jesus. Low self-esteem doesn't come from never having heard those words, it comes from having heard those words and then realizing one rude day that that they were never true."

He still pays my rent, so I refrain from tripping those wires. 

How the HELL do you write a cover letter?

Stupid question. I know how. I've written dozens. Dozens of lines of bullshit about how OH HEY NAMELESS FACELESS EMPLOYER, I AM AN ANGEL SENT TO YOU FROM GOD TO FILL THIS RECEPTIONIST POSITION. I AM EVERYTHING YOU EVER WANTED. OF COURSE THIS IS WHAT I WANT TO DO FOR THE REST OF MY LIFE.

Turns out they don't even read them. You don't matter. You're not a person, you're a soulless list of fluff-things that you half-did in college between your last mixed drink and your next warm body. It doesn't matter if you aren't a soulless list of fluff-things. That's what they make you feel like. You don't even know who they are, but you resent them because you need them. 

People keep telling me that I need to apply in person, just show up in all my personhood, wearing person clothing and flashing a big person smile. Could I play the part of a "person" well enough during a 20 minute interview that they wouldn't smell my animal-like desperation?

I love animals. They're so simple. They have needs and that's it. They don't have to pretend. I work with animals right now, at my unpaid internship. I work ten hours a day for no money and I don't care.  I chop fish and scrub sea lion poop and wear rubber boots that are too big and squelch when I walk.  I love it. I want to do it until I die. I have never been happier, but I don't even get to enjoy it. I don't get the luxury of being. I have to move. I have to push. I have to squeeze the tube.

But what I really have to do is write this *#!%$ cover letter.

My name is Brett Ann Lalli. I recently graduated with a bachelor of arts in cognitive science and I am interested in pursuing...

That damn blinking cursor.  

 

Foods that you can't think too hard about

There are certain foods that you can't think too hard about or else you will immediately feel sick and never want to eat them again.
  
It usually happens when you are halfway through eating that food. 

*any "facts" cited in this post may not be completely accurate


1. Egg salad sandwiches.

The unfertilized gametes of the descendents of gargantuan reptiles are cooked, chopped up, mixed with an emulsified mixture of gamete placenta and vegetable oil, and served between two pieces of bread. 

2. Berries.

Plant ovaries. Bananas are berries, thus bananas are female gonads shaped like a male reproductive organ. Doubly unsettling. 


3. Yogurt.

Bacteria in milk ferments and coagulates to become "creamy." In some more "healthy" brands of yogurt, more bacterial colonies are artificially injected so they can line the walls of your intestines and help you produce more gut mucus. Leaving a glass of milk outside on a hot summer day for a few hours= homemade yogurt. Sometimes it forms that watery protein layer on top, which can either be stirred in or drained off like the pus out of an infected wound, which, honestly, is probably less gross than the reality. Throw some plant ovaries in your coagulated bacteria for a yummy parfait.


4. Anything strawberry flavored.

"Natural" strawberry flavoring doesn't actually come from strawberries at all. It comes from the anal glands of beavers. So next time you are licking a delicious strawberry ice cream cone, you are basically licking a beaver's bunghole. Heaven FORBID you ever eat strawberry flavored yogurt.


5. Hot dogs.

For all the obvious reasons.


6. Mushrooms

Mushrooms are a fungus, and are therefore in the same kingdom as the stuff that grows on the bottoms of your feet if you leave your sweaty gym socks on all day. Toss in a salad, bon appetit! 


7. The little oranges you sometimes find inside big oranges.

These are NOT a juicy, tangy bonus treat. These are the half-formed fetuses of the momma orange. Your orange was basically trying to have a baby. Do you like eating babies? Didn't think so. 


I sincerely hope I have ruined at least one person's lunch for the day. 

Snapshots from The New York Minute

"Not all who wander are lost...Unless they deliberately make themselves that way."

--Me 

Graduating from college kind of felt like finishing a book in a series before the next one has come out.  

After graduation, I was feeling a little lost, a little restless, and rapidly running out of episodes of Pretty Little Liars to keep me pacified. When my BFF Emily from the chapter of my life known as Turkish Delight casually invited me to come crash on her couch in White Plains for a month, I scrounged up my graduation money, emptied my closet into a suitcase named Goliath, and was on her front porch before I even made sure she wasn’t actually kidding. I thought it might be nice to document some isolated incidents from the brief, confusing, but awesome chapter of my life that shall heretofore be known as The New York Minute.

Brett gets career advice at a nightclub in the Meat Packing District

The first weekend I was in New York, a couple of our friends J and A came up from D.C. for Em’s graduation party and to explore the concrete jungle. On Friday night, they want to go to some swanky, overpriced clubs in the Meat Packing District to hang out with beautiful Europeans, get skeezy married businessmen to buy them drinks, and of course, pack meat. By the time Em, her friend Abbi, and I get to the MPD, J and A are outside the first club and have picked up DILF, Cisco Dan, and Handsome French Bastard to be our posse for the night. I don’t ask why they abandoned the first club, but I presume it is because Cisco Dan is an obnoxious, loud-mouthed dipshit and probably got them kicked out.

We continue to club number two, where all the tables are reserved and there is no room to dance. DILF and Handsome French Bastard go to find some butts to put their hands on, so the rest of just kind of stand around not even trying to talk over fist-pumpy house music that is turned up to level sonic boom. Fortunately I am carrying a bag roughly the size of a standard carry-on containing my clothes for two days in the city, and it clears a good two-foot radius around me.

“Can I ask why you have such an enormous bag?”

I whip around to see who has dared breach by space bubble and find myself face-to-face with Short Attractive Indian Man.

“To carry the body parts.”

SAIM apparently thinks I’m funny and we strike up some small talk. Normally I would make up a name and life story because I secretly like the sick adrenaline rush that comes with lying to a stranger, but I find it in my heart to be earnest with SAIM and tell him about my dream of becoming a doctor. I find out that he himself is a med student at Rutgers and ask him in the most tactful way possible if he has found a straw to breathe through under his crushing pile of student debt. He provides me with some fascinating and useful advice for starting a medical career and mitigating student debt besides “be Indian.”

At some point he got the hint that I was clearly exploiting him for professional advice and was not fun/dumb enough to pursue sexual activity with. That was that. A successful interaction.

Brett witnesses a robbery and lives to see justice served

On the Fourth of July, my friends (and by my friends I mean Emily’s friends) and I go to a bar in White Plains to celebrate our nation’s birth with booze and hoes. Within the first minute we walk in, a few of us see a sketchy old guy in dad jeans, running shoes, and sports sunglasses pick something up off a table and throw it under his polo. He barrels past us and down the stairs. Mere seconds later, a girl returns to the table and starts searching for something.

“Did you lose something?” Emily asks.

“Yeah, I can’t find my purse,” she responds.

“I think I just saw some guy take it.”

Emily and the victim immediately spring into action and zip down the stairs after Daddy Purse Burglar. Conveniently, there is a cop car parked right outside the bar, Emily temporarily distracts the cop from his donut duty and tells him there is a thief on the loose and that he just ran down the closed road. Cop radios his buddies. Daddy Purse Burglar makes the rookie mistake of returning to the scene of the crime and appears from around a corner. Emily and the victim sprint full speed down the closed road after Daddy Purse Burglar.

A few minutes pass, and my friend L and I have conjured up a terrible mental scene of Emily lying in a pool of blood and Daddy Purse Burglar wiping the blood off his knife with her cardigan. We decide to go investigate unarmed (stupid stupid stupid). We speed walk down the closed road and turn the corner greeted with the friendly, patriotic beaming of red white and blue police lights. Daddy Purse Burglar is smushed against a cop car being handcuffed. Emily is taken in to give a statement. Justice is served.

God Bless America.

Brett sucks at trivia

There were a few days in New York where I was struggling with a big life decision and was very unsure about my future, which rendered me kind of a giant emotional spazz. I call these few days the Emotional Crisis.

One night during the Emotional Crisis, Emily and friends and I go to trivia night at a local bar.
“I’m just gonna get wasted and cry,” I assert the whole way there.

I end up ordering a Diet Coke with lime.  

The host of trivia night looks like Jeff Foxworthy after losing a battle with New York humidity and is about 300% less funny. I admittedly do not know a lot of things about things, but Jeff Not-worthy asks questions that for the most part are completely irrelevant to anyone born after 1975. My usefulness on the team (which Emily stupidly names the Flying Purple People Eaters. It doesn’t all fit on the board so we are just “Flying Ppl Eat”) goes as far as knowing which Broadway musical “Light My Candle” comes from. After that I just check out and slurp Diet Cokes and try in vain to make flirty eye contact with the cute bartender, who I notice has gotten a haircut since last week.  In retrospect it was good thing I was unsuccessful in this endeavor because my “flirty eyes” actually look something like this:

After losing everything on a double-or-nothing and trailing by 300 points, we decide to just be obnoxious assholes and cheer really loudly after every answer even if we get it wrong. Which is every time, because we start putting bogus answers. Jeff Not-worthy does not find our answer of “Bill Cosby OR Steve Buscemi” in response to “identify this celebrity by just his eyes” amusing at all. Dick.  

Brett sucks at dodgeball

Emily recently joined a dodgeball league in the city and insists that it’s soooooo much fun and a great way to meet people. Even though I’m still having an Emotional Crisis, I go without complaint because I’m afraid she will think I’m a wuss if I don’t. She thinks I’m a wuss anyway.

First of all, the dodgeball gym is on the fifth floor of a rise-up, has no AC or any kind of ventilation, and is impossibly humid. It’s like playing dodgeball in soup. I am already getting a headache from walking around NYC all day in 90-degree heat without hydrating properly, and before the game even starts I am raining sweat from every pore. Emily also fails to mention that the dodgeballers are NOT, in fact, young, inexperienced kids playing for recreation, but are mostly athletic, 200-pound black men in their late 20’s who can palm a dodgeball and actually play it like it’s a real sport. Actually.

Despite never having played dodgeball, I’m doing reasonably okay and my shins and ankles are surprisingly quite resilient to being smashed with rubber balls flying at 90 mph. During most rounds, I’m the last one standing because no one wants to be the one to launch their ball at a kind of fragile-looking white girl who obviously has no interest in pursuing dodgeball. I try to catch one of the balls flying at me and jam my finger so hard that I can practically hear the bones scraping past each other in a horrific osteo-symphony of pain. My head hurts, my entire right hand is useless, and I’m in the middle of an Emotional Crisis, so in a gust of drama I attempt to flee the gym.

“Other door.”

“The one with the sign that says ‘Exit?’ Thanks.”

I sit on a random street corner and put my earphones in to drown out the homeless guy, who apparently has this corner scheduled for senseless ranting at this hour. I spend the next thirty minutes crying out every last conceivable drop of moisture in my body.

Brett sucks at mini-golf

We will never speak of this again

Every time I tell someone I’ve never played mini golf they look at me like I’ve just admitted to digging up a corpse. It’s not like I live under a rock, we just did other things when I was a kid. Like getting steamers from 7/11 and watching ABC family original rom-coms in the basement. Okay, maybe that was just me. At any rate, it finally goes that I had my first mini-golf experience at a redneck put-put course in New Hampshire while visiting my friend’s lake house.

You’d be amazed at how many times a golf ball can whizz within micrometers of the hole without actually going into the hole. I’m on par 16 or something, and the overweight couple in cargo shorts and visors waits patiently for our hole and cheers me on.

“Dear God, please grant me Jedi powers for the next 20 minutes so I can be done with this and get some delicious soft-serve ice cream in my mouth.”

Never again.

Brett gets a text from a friend: “How’s the city of big sleep that never has apples, or something like that?”

It’s funny in terms of content but hurts a little because I realize how much I already miss my friends from college. They all feel like characters from a book now, characters that only exist between two covers. Will there be sequels? Will I ever see them again? Nostalgia covers everything like a slimy blanket, and I know that it will never go away, but I can only hope that it will get easier to live with.

Brett and friends either avoid an untimely death or miss the opportunity of a lifetime, we’ll never know for sure

Emily’s uncle is chums with some New York Yankees high-rollers, so we and some friends were able to get a sick deal on some seats to a Yankees game close enough to the action to heckle the right fielder. Which we did. Relentlessly.

In the sixth inning, after taking a much-needed break in the VIP lounge to absorb some air-conditioning, we return to our seats and notice that a lot of people have left because it’s hot as balls and the Yankees are losing by a number of runs that seems embarrassing at a major league level. Even though we are only five or six rows back, we decide to move to the front row so the Minnesota Twins right fielder can hear us sexually harass him more clearly. No more than ten minutes after we move seats a home run is hit. It is coming straight at us. The world is in slow motion. The ball soars over our heads and lands in our seats. In our row. In OUR seats. The ones we paid for and then decided weren’t good enough. The Asian man that had been sitting in front of us turns around and picks up the ball. From our seats.

Maybe this was a good thing. Maybe all of us would have been checking our phones at that very moment and the ball would have smashed one of our faces in. Or maybe I would have caught a home run ball at Yankee Stadium and lived the rest of my life as a legend. A ball that I missed by ten minutes and ten feet could have changed everything, but it didn’t. So it goes.

I did not get a home run ball that day, but I did get a free bat and half a second on Sports Center. 

Emily gets her professor cross-faded in Rhode Island

Emily is best friends with one of her college professors. Not just friendly, but honest-to-goodness, braid-each-other’s-hair-and-talk-about-boys best friends. This came in handy when we visited Rhode Island and needed somewhere to stay for a night.

That night, Emily, Professor, two random college kids, and Professor’s Grateful Dead-worshiping neighbor sat on the porch and smoked weed out of a bong named Stacy or Laura or something, and then ate chocolate cake straight out of the pan with forks.  I fall asleep in Professor’s 13-year-old daughter’s room under the twinkly eyes and white smiles of One Direction. For a minute I pretend I’m 13, and it’s a nice vacation from being 22.

Brett finally wins something

One of NYC’s best-kept secrets is Broadway “standing room tickets,” which you get if you are one of the first twenty or so people show up a couple of hours before a show and wait in line. Emily and I decided to wait in line for standing room tickets to a matinee performance of the Book of Mormon, which she had already seen but wanted to see again with me so I could verify that all the jokes about Mormons are true (they are). 

The day we choose to wait in line outside for two hours also happens to be the one day of the summer that it is hotter than Satan’s rectum. After waiting and frying our cheeks on the New York City pavement for about an hour, we decide to enter the lottery to win front-row center tickets to the show. The lottery draws a huge crowd, so Emily goes to the front to listen for the winners while I sit in the line with my head between my knees. I don’t expect to win so I’m not really listening, but as soon as I hear them announce that the winner is from Utah, I know it’s me. I can sniff out a Utahn like a bloodhound and I’m the only Utahn in this crowd. Emily and I do an awkward chest-bump high-five thing and I push to the front of the crowd to claim my sign that the universe has finally acknowledged my personhood.

“You’re from Utah? Are you a Mormon?” the announcer asks. I’m starting to get really sick of this question. When people tell me they’re from New York, I don’t say, “You’re from New York? Are you a Jew?” I’d like the same consideration.

The show was incredible. We were close enough to the stage to get spattered with the performers’ insanely talented saliva and take selfies with the conductor’s score. After the show one of the stars said she noticed my cute shorts from onstage. 

This was right before I stuck my phone into the pit and snapped a picture of the bassist

 Brett almost gets in a fight with a barista named Raven

During that same hour we’re waiting in line for Book of Mormon tickets, Emily stays outside the theater and I go around the corner to the Starbucks in Times Square to get us some iced coffees. I sense that I am beginning the transition into a New Yorker because I already hate Times Square.  I enter the biggest Starbucks I’ve ever seen in my life and I instantly regret my decision. First of all, there are two separate lines formed behind two separate counters, and they are both out the door, which means that the door is open and the godforsaken New York City hellfire is getting in. Second of all, every single employee in the Times Square Starbucks is moving like they’re underwater, completely unfazed by the fact that caffeine-starved New Yorkers are piling up like ants on a fudgesicle. When I finally make it to the counter, I am very friendly to Raven the barista because I am sensitive to the stress she must (should) be under. I slowly and explicitly order two grande vanilla iced coffees.

“You want whip on that?”

Who the hell puts whip on iced coffee? “No…”

She rings me up for two mocha frappucinos.

“’Scuse me, I ordered two iced coffees. With vanilla.”

“There’s no whip on iced coffee.”

“Yeah I knoooow that.”

“Well that’s what you said.”

“That is definitely not what I said, I said I wanted two grande vanilla iced coffees.” We have a moment of pouty silence and intense eye contact. I’m not a combative person, but I am a thirsty person, and I have to decide quickly whether this exchange is worth prolonging. It’s not. She could beat me up. I cave and apologize for absolutely nothing, and the conflict subsides. To the best of my knowledge, Raven does not spit in my coffee. 

This is basically the story of how I am way too much of a pushover to ever fit in in New York and I should just move to Canada.

Brett almost kills everyone at Westchester County Airport

My trip to New York, originally scheduled for five weeks, was cut short because I decided to take an internship in Santa Cruz and had to get home sooner. I flew out of Westchester County Airport because it is closer to Emily’s house and easiest to get to.

I get to the airport three hours early because my flight has been delayed due to mechanical errors. This will subsequently make me miss my connection in Atlanta, but I’ll get to that story later. I check my bag, Goliath, which is predictably four pounds overweight even though the only things I accumulated in New York were some novelty coasters.  I have to open Goliath right there at the check-in desk to throw some shoes and other crap into my purse, and everyone at the Westchester Airport gets a sneak peak at my skivvies packed haphazardly on the top of my suitcase. The security line is bearable, but if you aren’t familiar with the frantic TSA dance it goes like this: everything moves painfully slow until it’s your turn to go through, then all of sudden everything rockets into fast motion. Whip off your belt, whip off your shoes, unpack your pockets, forget about your laptop at the last second and reach over the people behind you to grab another tray, meanwhile your pants are falling down, your bra is somehow riding up to your chin, your hair is stuck to your face and the back of your neck starts to sweat. You say “sorry” to the people behind you a grand total of seven times. They don’t hear you because they are busy dancing also.

When I finally get through the big whirring teleportation chamber/nudie-pic-taking machine, my hindquarters are patted down and my hands swiped for non-existent corrosives because the nudie machine has indicated that it has found some contraband in my buttcrack. The TSA agent decides I am clean and hands me over to another TSA agent, who informs me that I have to check the bag with my free baseball bat in it because I can’t carry a baseball bat on an airplane. I take my tennis racket on airplanes all the time and part of me wants to argue the finer points of arbitrary sporting equipment discrimination, but my underslept, undercaffeinated brain is not up to it. I check my baseball bat for $25. So really it is no longer a free baseball bat, it is now a $25 baseball bat.

When I get through security for the second time, the only seat left in the tiny terminal is in a corner next to a dumpy white family going on vacation to Key West. The four-year-old uses my leg to balance as it throws the world’s most spontaneous tantrum. There is nowhere post-security checkpoint to buy magazines or books, so I read Amanda Bynes’s twitter on my phone. My flight is delayed an additional twenty minutes.

Brett falls in love at the Atlanta airport

When I finally get to the Atlanta airport, I have missed my connection to Salt Lake City by about five minutes and am put on the flight that leaves three hours later. I buy a sandwich, watch some CNN, and compulsive shop in Simply Books. I go back to my gate to charge my phone and enjoy my spoils from Simply Books. I sit down, plug in my phone, and look up in the twinkly, smiling blue eyes of the World’s Most Handsome Stranger.

He smiles at me. Two days worth of scruff adorns a perfectly chiseled face. A solid gray baseball cap sits on top of tousled light-brown hair. He looks uncannily like Jon McLaughlin before his sophomore sell-out. I go into cardiac arrest.

Like are you kidding me I don't even...

I also notice that he is wearing socks with his Sperrys, which means he is definitely Utahn and definitely on my flight to Salt Lake City.

He is thoroughly engrossed in a dog-eared copy of The Fallen Angel by Daniel Silva, and I bury my face in Slaughterhouse-Five. Every time either of us looks up from our books it’s at exactly the same time and right into each other’s eyeballs. I feel like I am going to throw up. I haven’t been this infatuated with a stranger since EFY when I was 14. He wore Abercrombie Fierce AKA teenage girl kryptonite and played guitar, and when he smiled at me on the bus on the last day of EFY I promptly spilled my bag of mini-muffins down the aisle. As I sit here in the Shitlanta airport eight years later I can still hear the mini-muffins mocking me as they tumble gleefully down the aisle, “As IF girl, you’ll never be good enough for him, weeeeee!” In the end, my distaste for making small-talk outweighs my desire to stick it to the mini-muffins. Fallen Angel and I board our plane.

On the plane, I finish Slaugherhouse-Five and then remember Fallen Angel sitting ten rows back in Zone 3. I reason with myself, “Brett, the only reason you’re still thinking about this chump is because he is a symbol of uncertainty. And uncertainty is kind of the theme of your life right now.”

The wisdom you achieve at 30,000 feet.

After hauling Goliath and $25 baseball bat off the baggage claim, I assume that is the end of Fallen Angel. But lo and behold, when I drag my sorry ass across the street to the passenger pick-up, there he is, leaning against the railing, wearing sunglasses. When my mom finally comes to retrieve me, he helps her lift Goliath into the trunk. “The problem with pretty girls,” he roguishly jokes with my mom, “is that they need a lot of pretty things.”

Mildly sexist comment aside, Fallen Angel might have been my soulmate. He might have been some cad with a girlfriend. Or a wife. He might have stopped existing after we drove away. Or he might have read my luggage tag when he hauled Goliath into the car, and he plans on coming to find me.

We might never know.

Confessions of a Jack-Mormon: Escaping the Patriarchal Pigeonhole

“Knowledge is important for young women. It’s important for women to get an education so they know how to cook, and clean, and sew.” 

This is not an excerpt from a 1950s housewife training manual. This is not an exaggeration. These were words from a talk given by the president of an Especially For Youth program to a group of teenage Mormon girls in 2007. I was in that group, listening to that talk, and it was the first time I was hit hard in the face with the blatant patriarchal reality of the LDS church. My face burned. My heart raced. My fists clenched. In my soul I knew, even as a deluded 16-year-old who had never had even a brush with the real world, that there was something intrinsically wrong about the words coming out of Brother Andersen’s mouth. I resisted the impulse to get up and storm out. If this scenario was repeated now that I am a much more assertive and self-aware 21-year-old, I would have not only obeyed that impulse, but also delivered a caustic feminist monologue in front of God and everyone, sprinkled with only the finest Betty Friedan tidbits. I mean, the audacity of this guy…

“Girls, please don’t wait to get married. As soon as you turn 18, get out there and start looking for your eternal companion.”

Verbatim.

Let me make it known that I am not a feminist. I am not a gender activist, or a even a liberal, and I only took one sociology class. But I try to be hyperaware of stereotypes and have more or less dedicated my life to defying them. In my Mormon upbringing, I was especially sensitive to the fact that by virtue of being a woman I was also being pigeonholed into “traditional” roles, but I never took a stand against it. Sometimes after yet ANOTHER lesson in Laurels about celestial marriage I would go home and laugh about it with my parents, but it never occurred to me that the gender roles being forced upon me were socially constructed and completely disharmonious with the fundamental idea of religion.

In fact, these facts didn’t occur to me until I had to start explaining obscure Mormon practices to the friends I made at college. Like missions. And baptisms for the dead. And pioneer trek (try explaining THAT one). It was like,
 “What do you do at church for three hours?”
“Sacrament meeting, which is kind of like communion with sermons, and then Sunday school, and then the men and women split up and go to separate meetings.”

“Why do the men and women have to split up?”

“Well, because men and women are different and need different instruction.”

Men and women are different. MEN AND WOMEN ARE DIFFERENT? Am I really saying these things? Do I actually know this to be true? That men and women are “different?” It never seemed odd to me that men and women went to separate classes. It had been like that since I was 12. Men go to priesthood class and learn about how to use their priesthood and women to go relief society and learn how to….what? Raise children? Support our men? Be nurturing? Basically how to NOT have the priesthood?

Separate but equal. This principle that the LDS church is STILL operating on, even though it has been proven in countless real-world scenarios that separate but equal ain’t hardly ever equal. I read an article many many years ago that stuck with me about a feminist Mormon who proposed that women should have the priesthood and was excommunicated. She said it was “like getting gang-raped by the Care Bears.” Let me be clear that I am NOT insinuating that women “should” have the priesthood. I don’t believe that many Mormon women would “want” the priesthood or the responsibility that comes with it.  We have been bred to be passive. All I’m saying is that the church should disband its claim that men and women are equal if men are given God-like powers of revelation, leadership, and healing and that the “separate but equal” power that women have is….child bearing.

So our special “gift” is our uterus? A mere body part, that according to the church, we don’t even have ACCESS to without a man? Extramarital sex and gay partnership are forbidden, and single motherhood is strongly discouraged. Basically the rights have to be sold. To a man. With a penis. Your lady parts are portrayed as a magical chamber of feminine mysticism that have to be “unlocked” by a man.  

The rich, enchanted wonders of your womb are only accessed through marriage. Therefore the only way to reach your full spiritual potential as a woman is by waiting for some returned missionary to come snatch you up. This was always a sore point for me because every since I was 15 I’ve had this intuitive feeling I wasn’t going to end up getting married. Which honestly, is fine with me. When I tell people this and they say “don’t worry, it’ll DEFINITELY happen” I always feel the need to  explain AGAIN that not being married is not a nightmare. It’s a lifestyle. When I expressed this to my Institute of Religion teacher at Oxy, he told me that if I don’t get married I’m not necessarily accountable for that because it’s not my fault if no one “pursues” me. If a man doesn’t get married, he’s a bad boy because he could have just picked one and put a ring and some garments on it.

“That’s a little old-fashioned, don’t you think?”
“Yeah I guess it is.”

Those were the last words my institute teacher and I ever exchanged in person.

I don’t want to go through my single life believing that I’m unfulfilled because I couldn’t find anyone desperate enough to marry me. I see insecure 19-year-old Mormon girls smearing shit on their face and dyeing their hair and getting plastic surgery trying to make themselves desirable to men because they’ve been told every Sunday for their entire lives that being someone’s wife is all they’re good for. That it’s their “divine nature.” 

As if girls’ self-esteem wasn’t precarious enough already, the weird, twisted repressed sexual culture of Mormonism makes it a kajillion times worse. The “dressing modestly” bit Mormon girls get bombarded with every day, even in their PUBLIC schools, is based on the idea that all women are, at heart, Jezebel. A little too much thigh, a little glimpse of cleavage, a bare shoulder? Shame on you, you little harlot. You know that boys can’t control their imaginations. Cover your knees. Put on one of these abominable lace camisoles. You’re going to lead boys right down your slippery slut slope…

Maybe instead of making wholesome young girls feel like common whores, we should teach our boys to KEEP THEIR DICKS IN CHECK. It doesn’t matter how much clothing a woman is wearing, a man is going to imagine her naked anyway. It’s no one’s fault. Being straight about sex and not making teenage boys and girls ashamed of their biology would be a lot more physically and psychologically healthy for both sexes. Teaching kids that sex isn’t “evil” might end the slut-shaming. Putting blame on girls for being “provocative” is one of the most sexist, patriarchal practices of all time.

The world is trying to move beyond these archaic practices. Church policies, such as the disbandment of polygamy, allowing non-whites to have the priesthood and lowering the age to serve a mission are proof religion is still flexible in a changing world. The Mormon church has the potential for malleability. Patriarchy is rooted deep, but I don’t believe that it is “central” to the religion. I don’t believe that uprooting male privilege in the church would cause it to come crumbling down. But how do we go about it?

I think the idea of male privilege in the Judeo-Christian tradition starts with the classic Judeo-Christian conception of God as man. Mormonism claims that God is our “Heavenly Father” and that he has a body of flesh and bone (not blood for some reason because f**k science). So necessarily if God is a man, He also has a Heavenly Penis and Heavenly Testicles. The existence of a Heavenly Mother is acknowledged, but she doesn’t appear in any scripture, isn’t prayed to, and is scarcely mentioned. Some old white Mormon man told me once that we don’t talk about Her because “She is too sacred,” but I think we don’t talk about Her because it is just assumed that She is pregnant and barefoot in the celestial kitchen making sure Her man is well-fed and sexually satisfied so that He does a good job running the Universe.

Sound blasphemous? I didn't start it.

If Mormons are going to perpetuate this claim that ALL of us are made in Heavenly Father’s PHYSICAL image, they are going to have to drop this parasitic idea that God is a man. Is the idea of a gender-neutral, or even hermaphroditic God really that heretic? It took me about a year to adjust to praying to a gender-neutral God, and honestly, it makes God feel…bigger. It gives He/She/It the magnificent, omnipotent qualities He/She/It is worthy of.  I would argue that trying to put a concept like God in a gender box is limiting. It’s demeaning. So let’s start there, because gender is socially constructed and has no place in religion. Religion is about all-encompassing truths, and truth doesn’t depend on what’s between your legs.

Brelp: honest reviews of Utah chain restaurants

So you're in Utah and you're hungry? 
Brelp (Brett Yelp) can help with that. Om-nom-noms away!

I'm in the mood for: All-American cuisine
Nielsen's Frozen Custard, with locations in Salt Lake City, Bountiful, Holladay, Layton, and St. George, is the place to go. Known for its sociopolitically- conscious marquee slogans as well as its food, Nielsen's Frozen Custard is an old-timey diner style restaurant established immediately after the Mormon pioneers landed in the Salt Lake Valley. Because after trekking 2000 miles in the snow with no shoes, the first thing you want to do is eat a burger and ice cream. My favorite thing about Nielsen's (besides the fry sauce, non-Utahns inquire within) is the nostalgic atmosphere. It hearkens back to a time when men courted women and nobody knew anything about trans fat and heart disease. The "Concretes" are to die for. A Concrete is basically an ungodly amount of delicious ice cream that they have to put in two cups because it will smash through one cup like a brick through a soggy paper towel. They are named Concretes because their secret ingredient is actually cement, which solidifies in your intestines at an alarming rate. You can eat one of these on a Monday and still be lying on your bed gurgling with your pants unbuttoned on Thursday. 

I'm in the mood for: Mexican cuisine
Cafe Rio Mexican is a fast, delicious, fresh-Mex chain with locations in all major cities in Utah and sprinkled across the Southwestern United States. There's also one in Maryland just cuz. Cafe Rio is run by honest, hard-working people who have a commitment to you and your hankering for a mountain of barbacoa pork smothered in cheddar jack. To stay true to the Mexican fiesta atmosphere, Cafe Rio rather overtly tries to hire a Hispanic staff. At some locations in Utah, there might not a large enough Hispanic population to draw from, so they have to do the next best thing and hire Polynesians and girls who dyed their hair dark for the winter (close enough). Cafe Rio is still plenty white-people friendly; in fact, it's a wildly popular family night destination for Mormon families with six blond kids all under the age of five. Don't ask how that's even possible, just be civil and give up your booster seat. I very strongly recommend getting the pork salad, or really anything with pork on it. In fact, if they DON'T have pork for some preposterous reason, you might do better swinging by Del Taco. 

I'm in the mood for: Asian cuisine
If you want food AND entertainment, drop whatever fun Utah activity you're doing and get thee to Tepanyaki Japanese Steakhouse and Sushi Bar. There are four convenient locations in Lehi, West Jordan, Clearfield, and Salt Lake City. Skilled, mysterious, reticent teppanyaki chefs will whip up your Samurai Special right before your bewildered eyes on the teppan, the big iron griddle they use to cook food and punish curious children. If you're lucky, they'll even do that thing where they toss the shrimp in the front pocket of your shirt and get it all greasy but it's totally worth it. If you do choose to go to Tepanyaki, just accept that you're going to smell like it until your next shower, and don't plan on getting laid anytime soon unless you have some heavy, alcohol-based perfume on hand to cover the smell of steak grease and Japanese mysticism. 

I'm in the mood for: Italian cuisine
You MUST to go to Robintino's, located in Bountiful and South Salt Lake City. I can't really tell you why you MUST go there, because honestly it's the most mediocre Italian food you'll ever eat in your life, but for some reason Robintino's has a vice grip on the hearts and appetites of Utah residents. The over 50 crowd especially enjoys Robintino's, probably because it's the only thing in their lives that hasn't changed since 1960. Anyway, if you're in the mood for pizza or pasta, come by and dip your breadstick in nostalgia and hometown glory. Or go to Sbarro. Whatever. 

I'm in the mood for: a delicious deli sandwich
Unhinge your jaw, folks. Cutler's has the best and breadiest sandwiches west of the Wasatch mountain range. Located in three easy Davis County locations, Bountiful, Centerville, and Layton, Cutler's "Grandma's kitchen" vibe will warm your heart and coat your soul in mayonnaise-saturated bliss. The friendly teenaged staff are remarkably quick at making sandwiches while gossiping and studying for the ACT. My favorite thing about Cutler's sandwiches is that they don't cop out and give you those hoagie buns that blurb all your ingredients out one side. They use good old-fashioned sliced loaf bread so that your ingredients can blurb out ALL of the sides. Don't forget to get a cookie! Cutler's is famous statewide for their cookies because they bake more butter into a batch of cookies than Paula Deen has used in her entire career. I recommend the brownie-mint or glazed (not frosted) sugar cookie. You might as well get both, because after eating one your dreams of becoming a Nike ab model are already pretty much snuffed. 


Happy noshing Utah!