Like many Americans, I’ve always kind of resented the
stranglehold California and New York have on American culture. Being
the centers of film and TV production, fashion, and finance, they have
grown a little cocky. This attitude is often expressed in the
shockingly common phrase “Fly Over People” to describe those of us
living outside New York and California. Having grown up and gone to
college in solidly “fly over” states, I was not one to be easily
impressed by the glamor of Hollywood or Manhattan.
My skepticism was unfortunately reinforced by the men I met from
these places. In my home state, male jewelry was confined to a watch,
cufflinks, and a wedding ring, and the only underwear that was ever
allowable was a pair of cotton boxers. Briefs were only acceptable
when actively playing football. I went to college in a state
populated by the grandchildren of Vikings, where one was considered a
little eccentric if he or she did not want to sit on a frozen lake for
six hours and fish through a small hole in the ice. Everybody, men
and women, were supposed to be, well, a little tough and not too
fussy. In college, I asked my friend from Colorado why our mutual
friend Sam was obsessed with hair care products, wore sparkly
toe-separating socks, and aspired to be a stay at home dad - all the
while being completely heterosexual. She merely told me, “All you
need to know about Sam is- he’s from Southern California.”
After graduating college, I moved to New York City. The young men I
met and went out with didn’t seem to me to have normal, adult
abilities. They spent twelve hours a day at work making the rich even
richer, and then they had their laundry sent out because they were too
lazy to do it themselves. I dated one guy who had his breakfast
delivered every morning. It wasn’t like he was eating waffles or eggs
and bacon either; he literally had a small carton of milk and a mini
cereal box delivered to his apartment every morning. My own cousin,
bless him, lived in New York for a few years and picked up some bad
habits. He actually walked around for an entire winter with his coat
half open because one of the buttons popped off and he somehow forgot
how to sew a button back on. One man I went out with a few times was a big
fancy/pancy lawyer of something, but he told me he could never go
camping because he really had to have a nice, soft bed. What the
hell!? I can understand thinking that, I just can’t understand
actually saying that.
After New York, I moved back to the Midwest and met the man who is
now my husband. For our third date he cooked me dinner. The next
week, he fixed the problem with my television that had been driving me
nuts. He can drive a stick shift in the snow. He can fold laundry
better than any person I’ve ever seen. His frying pan scrubbing skills
are legendary at my parents' house. He can do normal, competent,
adult human being stuff. He is also, however, from Southern
California. I learned that I misjudged the non-flyover people for too
long. I didn’t know they made men in Southern California. I thought
it was just breast implants.
Then we got to Germany. The German government doesn’t really care
about all the nuances of where I’ve lived over the years, they only
know where I was born – in a state securely in the Appalachian
Mountains where the non-flyover people assume the locals marry their
cousins when they are sixteen, two years after starting full time work
in the coal mine. When a German government bureaucrat looks at my
husband’s information, she won’t see a Hollywood stereotype of a
pampered man who is too incompetent to put his Ikea furniture together
so instead goes to get a microdermabrasion and a chest wax. Because
of a small typing mistake, she’ll only see a man born in Calidornia.
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