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PaperclipPerfector
1d ago
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Notes -
I had my third encounter with the Mormons of the Bridge.
For the second time running, two bubbly blonde girls intercepted me as I was hustling my exhausted ass back to my apartment. I wasn't paying attention, had earphones in, and assumed I was being asked for directions. I popped out a bud, made the mildly inconvenienced face one gives lost tourists, and was instead asked if I would like to find God and attend church on Sunday.
What I really, really wanted to be doing was lying in bed, dissociating, queueing up another dose of stimulants, and grinding my nose against my exam notes. But I wanted to be polite. So I told them the main thing God could help me with this weekend was exam prep.
The two of them looked at each other and communicated telepathically (as Mormons do), then informed me, with the cheerful assurance of customer service reps reading from a flowchart, that this was no problem at all. God wears many hats, and is a first-line service worker for the academically distressed.
I considered asking whether He might sit the exam for me, reconsidered on grounds of basic civility, and told them I'd be spending the weekend at the altar of an entirely different kind of book.
By this point the exchange had run unusually long. Normally I dispatch them inside fifteen seconds with a polite "thanks, but I'm not interested." It seems my willingness to engage past the standard cutoff registered as encouragement, because they then asked for my number, so they could send a friendly reminder once exams were behind me.
It pained me to decline such requests from reasonably attractive young women, particularly the taller one. But academics come first. I told them this. I didn't tell them that God has nothing if not time, because that would prompt them to argue that I'm the one with limited time under the sun, with the stakes being my immortal soul. However, I plan, eventually, to outlast Him from inside a Matrioshka Brain, at which point the sun has finite time under me. None of which I said aloud, on the grounds that what I was facing was, functionally, a sales pitch, and they'd been rather polite so far. Nor was a windy, windy bridge the best place for a debate about applied transhumanism.
They took non-disinterest as a green light and pressed further. They volunteered the address of their church and helpfully clarified that they belonged to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Yeah. Couldn't have inferred that from physiognomy alone, let alone the badge. I'm genuinely impressed by how they mass-produce these people from a single template perfected somewhere in Utah: clean shaven, soberly dressed young men; clean skinned, soberly dressed young women, big honkers as standard issue. The willingness to press without quite tipping into overbearing serves them well in respectable sales careers and at the CIA. I'm less impressed by their theology, though I've seen worse from people far less well-groomed.
In fairness, the operation is well-oiled. The median LDS missionary baptizes 3 to 5 converts a year, which is more impressive than I'd thought.
Why do they keep approaching me? On 2/3 of these encounters I've been the only human on the bridge, so it was me or the seagulls, who are Anglican and not open to conversion. Maybe I look like a particularly lost lamb. Maybe I look like a lost lamb because I am undercaffeinated, in which case they are correctly identifying a state I'm authentically in and misattributing it to spiritual rather than circadian causes. In fact, becoming a Mormon would probably make the coffee-problem worse. Maybe a brown Indian man scores well on diversity-funnel metrics. I'm sorely tempted to attend one Sunday just to see what happens, which is, of course, exactly how they get you.
I told them I'd keep it in mind, and that I knew where to find them. Which I do.
I kept walking.
How did Brigham Young manage to breed big honkers into his flock? Surely polygyny means women should be subject to less sexual selection, not more.
Attractive women do not just come from attractive mothers; they also come from high value fathers with substantial resources (such as would be needed to support families with multiple wives). Additionally, Utah was disproportionately settled by immigrants from Scandinavia and the British Isles. You can find similar phenotypes in the Midwest, especially Wisconsin and Minnesota. This is probably also an HBD explanation for why Mormons and Midwesterners have such rhyming cultural stereotypes (e.g. passive-aggressive politeness, or Mormon "funeral potatoes" versus Minnesotan "hot dish").
In the midwest we have both funeral potatoes (assuming you mean the tasty dish ones with sour cream and cornflakes on top, yes?) and many casseroles which can be called hot dish (not a single specific recipe). Notable for their flavor cheat inclusion of "cream of" soups. The Pioneer Woman has multiple such casseroles, if anyone is curious.
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