take me home, country roads

I just had a good walk and talk with my buddy from Kentucky. I can't explain how great it is to talk to somebody who knows about my part of the country (since it's also pretty much his part of the country) here at school. Here at school you've mostly got:

a) people from California who don't know the geography of the East Coast at all, which is kind of okay because it hasn't really been relevant to them before (even though I still know the shit out of California geography, but I'm a geek like that),

b) people from New England who only know the geography of New England and how long it takes to get to New York, and

c) people from New York who don't give a shit about the rest of the country outside of the five boroughs/Long Island, and generally operate under the assumption that people from Jersey are trash, people from Boston are assholes, everyone from California is high all the time, and everyone else is a redneck. And they say us rural folks are ignorant.

Oversimplifying, obviously, and generalizing, but that's probably 70% of the situation. So it's always great to talk to this kid, who knows I live closer to Cleveland (and Cincinnati, for that matter) than to Philly, and who will bitch about the National League Central with me and marvel at how miserable Cleveland and Columbus are as cities.

We were talking about one of the cheers some members of the BU fan section do at hockey games when we play Maine and other rural state schools: "the wheels on your house go 'round and 'round," which is so fucking ignorant. He was a columnist for the paper last year and actually wrote an article calling them out on being snobs and elitists and generally assholes, and people got all up in arms at him, telling him to go back to Kentucky, calling him a fucking hick, all this shit. Of course, this was all in anonymous comments, on the newspaper's website. He still gets pissed off talking about it, and I get pissed off too - I've been in the student section when that cheer started up, and I wouldn't say it. That's worse than BC calling "safety school" at us, and that makes me livid (I could have gotten into your sheltered, suburban Catholic school if I'd had any desire to, savvy? I got into NYU, which is just as selective, and had a fighting chance at Northwestern, which is more selective, so y'all can kiss my Irish ass, unless you're too scared to come down here into the big bad city to do it).

Anyway. None of my friends here are snobby assholes, obviously, but it's always good to hang with a Midwestern kid who also identified me as Midwestern, haha. The picture above - they were actually going to make a 14th colony/state back in the day, with the highlighted bits of Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Kentucky, because it was wild-ass frontier country back then and they didn't think they really had any connection to the governments back east in Philly and New York. I wish I could cite that to everybody who ever asks me if I'm a Phillies fan or how far I live from Philadelphia.