Michigana

[nuncstans]

I'm tired of the lie that Midwesterners are straight-taahkin', haanest-dealin', friendly blond goyim. Midwesterners are mean!

anarqueso got me thinking about this with her post about community. Readers, I am rarely depressed. I mean, I get "depressed", like when it's gray outside and I'm bored and broke, and I have a hunger headache and I see a poster for

Comments

[ms_priestypants]

I spent some summers in Ann Arbor for mime camp, a really long time ago, but it seemed like there was some sort of little area downtown that was kind of arty and friendly? I just remember wandering around a sort of village and eating lunch there by myself in a little student oriented restaurant and not feeling so ridiculous. So hopefully you can find the normal, seen-a-Jew-before kind ofplaces soon.

[nuncstans]

The thing is, I'm sure this place is full of Jews. This is surely offensive, but to me the Jews here are kind of crypto. I can't tell who's a Jew. The culture is totally different, the mannerisms are totally different. I feel like this is the kind of place where as long as you act "perfectly normal" (a.k.a. within a narrowly-prescribed set of phonemes, gestures and volumes as per mistersmearcase's comment) no one will be bothered that you're jewish, just as no one will be bothered by the fact that you're black or asian or latino or whatever. But if you start doing the jew-talk, and the jew-attitude, and the jew-vocabulary, people react. I said "shlepp" to a lady working at the University, and as I was saying it I had a moment where I was like "should I...no, shlepp is on like Everybody Loves Raymond, it's totally mainstream." So I said the move had been a shlepp, and she just started laughing nervously, hysterically, and then changed the subject

Re: i'm a midwesterner...

[nuncstans]

it might take a little while but i promise it will get better (just don't talk about politics! - kidding. sort of.

Whatever it takes...

[alsoname]

What is up with acting like the fact that I'm not born 'n' raised here, as in here in this store, ought to make me ashamed?

Heh. When me and MNBXH (ask Constintina) moved here, we were in Circuit City or some such place looking for a phone-jack-related item. A woman in there was helping us, and said, "We don't have that, but you may want to try next door."

"What's next door?" asks MNBXH.

She knits her brows together in confusion. "The next building over," she clarifies.

"Oh," says MNBXH. "I mean, what is the name of the business you are referring to. See, I don't work here five days a week, so I don't know everything that you know."

Only in reality the phrasing was much funnier, and the meanness was much more subtle. The woman actually laughed after he said it.

[nuncstans]

Nice one. That's one of my favorite forms of human misjudgment, when you assumed that because you know something, everyone else must know it too...unless they're STUPID. Which conveniently makes anyone not in your immediate circle of friends/family STUPID. Foreigners are the stupidEST, because they don't know hardly ANYTHING you know. It's like the you-centric universe (youniverse), where the center of knowledge and culture is whatever happens to be most obvious to you.

[mjmj]

i'm going to try to remember "youniverse."

[functionary]

"Youniverse"! I love it, in all its similarities to my former workplace: the UNiverse: the bubble-world in which all the bureaucrats were encased so that the actual work of poverty eradication could be pursued - we put our boss in the UNiverse so that she couldn't disrupt the actual work with her careerism. Will have to share with the others!

[amillionandone]

There's a chance we may be in Ann Arbor or Ypsilanti soon. I will keep you posted as soon as I know more. A traveling caravan of five New Yorkers and a bald guy from L.A. will hopefully raise your spirits a bit.

[nuncstans]

OMG! Awesome! We'll hit jimmy johnz!!!

[mjmj]

maybe you're on to something about this unfriendliness of midwesterners. look at mary tyler moore. she was gonna "make it after all", but did she? lived there for years and her only friends were co-workers and a few of her neighbors. how could they not like her? she had spunk.

anyway. i hope it works out better for you in the coming months.

[nuncstans]

Thanks. If I have anything in common with MTM, that's got to be an accomplishment, even if it's just being ignored by the same region.

[mjmj]

mtm liked twirling around and throwing her hat up in the air at least once a week. that looked like it might be fun.