Utah Weather

Utah is very different from Indiana, in many many ways. First off, not everyone and their brother (no pun intended) is a member of the Church.  Right now however, I'm noticing a very distinct difference- the weather.  Back in Indiana, there was humidity, so the moisture stayed in the air.  If it was a hot day, it was not dry heat, but a muggy nasty wetness that would literally  make your clothes stick to your body.  And what's worse, there was NO WAY to escape the heat.  Since humidity is actually in the air itself, if it was a hot day and you sought a refugee from the heat, forget trying to go under a tree.   The shade did nothing, because the air was the hot part, not the rays.
Utah is totally different in that fact.  If it's a hot day here, one must only find a location that is shaded and you suddenly have found an ailment from the heat.  It's the sun's rays themselves that make it hot, not the air.  Also in Utah, there seems to virtually be no fall season.  The leaves turn red so quickly, it's like the golds and yellows were completely skipped over.  But more than that, fall weather lacks the perfect intermediate temperature.  The air doesn't have the quality to let it be cold outside (without the rays), but still a comfortable warm.  It feels as if it goes from summer straight to winter.  Furthermore, that summer to winter process can happen in virtually a day.  Sometimes I wake up in the morning and it is BONE CHILLING outside, so I dress in heavy clothes (complete with a coat) to brace myself for the cold all day, however, it doesn't stay.  As the day goes on it can change from extremely cold to extremely hot.  All the sudden the "warm clothes" are warm for another reason- they're too hot against your body.

Rhetorical Analysis and Classroom Application

For my rhetorical analysis, I wrote on a talk given by Chimamanda Adichie.  She is an African woman who wrote The Dangers of a Single Story.  Adichie is from Nigeria, so she has a lot of credibility when she pleads with her U.S. audience so beware of African stereotypes.  She knows from first-hand experience how detrimental it is for the receptor of the "single story" (the concept of hearing only part of a person/culture's story and accepting that as your sole source for information), and the person that the single story victimizes.  Adichie speaks about how a lot of people assume and think that all Africans are uneducated, unrefined people who live in mud huts.  The same day that I turned in my rhetorical analysis I got a dose of what the single story can really do to people.  We were instructed to write down the topic of our research paper so that it could be analyzed by classmates.  My question was, "How has televised futbol affected African people, economy, and politics?"  I passed my paper past my head so that the boy behind me could comment on my question.  To my dismay, this is what I received back, "Do people in Africa even have TV's?"   ...and THAT is the danger of a single story.