I Have A Bone to Pick with The South: My Most Recent Trip to the Video Store.

On Sept 19 in 1979, I came storming into this world, during a, how very appropiate, tropical storm way down South in Hollywood, Florida. Then at the age of 3 my parents packed up and moved to Texas, this was to be a temporary move, my father had no desire for the Inland and my mother wanted to be around the family back in Florida, but after finishing Seminary my father made the mistake of buying a house while he looked for a church to pastor back home. The rest is history: he never found a Pastoring position, the bills began to accumulate, he got stuck working to provide, unable to get ahead to leave with a mortage hanging on his back, I grew up in even more Southern Country than where I had been born. Which could be an explanation as to why storms have always had a comforting affect on me, though being born and raised in the South, it gives no pliable reasoning as to how I find very little in common with my fellow Southerners.

I know I should love country music, college football rivalries, country fried steak, iced tea, big houses ten feet apart from one another, wicker, and the thought of having been married at the age of 19 and with three kiddos by now.

But up until two years ago I had no idea what country fried steak was, let alone, had ever tried it, and I hate country music, though a few exceptions exist: like Gram Parsons or Hank Williams or the alt. country scene of Whiskeytown and Wilco and Lucinda Williams, and no offense to any die hard college football fans, but it goes straight over my head the feeling of belonging to a city or a school enough to cause pride and the perception of grandeur for a sports team, and nothing against tea being iced but I prefer mine warm and I don't understand why in the hell houses are built soooo big if there isn't enough room for a backyard or a side yard to go along with it, and holy SHIT, kids and marriage is serious bizness, I have a hard enough time as it is simply trusting most people to posess enough wisdom or life experiences for It's sucess, but to think you do at the age of 19 is just as insane as someone wanting to decorate anything besides an Easter basket with wicker.

I'm getting sick of feeling like the odd (wo)man out just because i'm 24 and the vast majority of my friends are married or halfway there. I feel too young to have to feel weird about the fact that I don't want to rush into any lifelong commitments and obligations. I'm very happy being single, liking a boy that I love, using wisdom and logic to dictate my future not emoutions and infatutions and insecurities.

Last night; after the Super Bowl, because, just because I don't understand the connection people make to it, doesn't mean I don't enjoy watching men strategizing and displaying great feats of physical superiority in the name of, "The Greatest Day of New Commercials", at all; I went to pick up a movie for Jon and I to watch from Hollywood Video, usually Jon is with me for such expeditions but it was rainy, he had made it to 10pm still in his pajamas and I wasn't about to end such a feat of another sort, plus I just can't bare to tear that cute boy away from his nerdy obsession of computer games for an errand I can do by myself, so off I went, unaware of the clerk that was to hassle me, ask me why I didn't want to watch the movies he was suggesting, why I don't like LL Cool J as an actor, how many times he had seen this and that movie, for thirty furkin minutes while I tried desperately and as nicely as possible to ignore him and blow him off so I could try to figure out what movie to rent before it was too late to start one.

At the end of my movie renting experience nightmare, Mr. Creepy Clerk then proceeded to ask me, "So why don't you have a ring on your finger?", I fought back the urge to ask him, "I'll tell you only if you tell me, why in the hell your so fuckin creepy and nosey?". Instead I snapped back with, "Because i'm only 24", and this dumbfounded the poor idiot who couldn't have been a day over 19.

Only in the South at a video store, I swear.