Provo: It Was Like That When I Got Here

This is something I wrote last year, just thought I'd repost it here for your reading enjoyment. This is the town I live in:

What an interesting town it is that I live in: A dumping ground for Mormon families all over the nation and world who wanted to straighten out their misled kids by throwing them onto a veritable G-rated breeding ground with a bunch of other kids who are in the exact same situation. Yeah that's a GREAT plan, or one with disaster written all over it, I forget which.

So Provo (and when I say Provo, I mean Provo/Orem as a college town, not the cities themselves with their native residents) is a melting pot of sorts (albeit with what appears to be the same ingredients). It is a town with more than a few Texas-flag-adorned apartment windows, a town with enough regional American dialects that it's a wonder we can all understand each other, even a town with one aggregate craving for In-And-Out Burger big enough to almost make us all collectively drive to Vegas this very second.

Along with this narrow individualism and home-state-pride, however, comes a mentality of blamelessness. Example: how many times have you heard someone complain about "those gosh dang utah drivers"? The ironic thing is, most of the time those very drivers that are being complained about probably just traded in their Washington plates for Utah ones last week. My point is that for anyone currently living here to criticize all things Utah is to criticize themselves, for we all are "THOSE people".

If we are all outsiders looking in, are we not staring at nothing? Let us instead embrace our fate, that we're not in Kansas anymore (figuratively, unless you moved here from Kansas, then literally), that we are in fact residents of the places we are now living. This way, if something sucks here, we're all to blame. This way, you need not go TOO far out of your way to mention the disclaimer on your myspace profile that while it SAYS you live in Provo, you're always a (insert home state here) girl at heart. This way, when you go to California this summer to sell Pest Control or return to your hometown to rekindle the dwindling flame with that old high school sweetheart, you will know that if all else fails, there's always a place for you in the social orphanage for twenty somethings that is Provo.