born and raised in the sunbelt...not just ANY part of the sunbelt, but the california sunbelt. the land of beautiful people. i never gave that much thought until i moved to 'the other coast' and my daughter spent a few days in ocean city, maryland and relayed horror stories about the people she saw there. she was totally freaked out! i thought she was just homesick so i talked a new east coast friend into taking me there. now granted, people are people, and you can find all shapes and sizes just about anywhere. but this was different! along the boardwalk there are restaurants and small shops and at the end of the boardwalk is a ferris wheel, other rides, and those games where you throw balls and stuff and win stuffed animals...you know what i mean - people you see there are in a word, strange. not strange in the sense of the word we all know, but really, really strange. not all, certainly, but the majority. there were families of big-headed people. really! big heads. i'd never seen families with big heads. not just abnormally large heads, BIG heads. there were misshapened families...not just the mom, or just the dad..but whole families of misshapened people. it's a scary place. i'm thinkin' generations of intermarriage must play a role here. ocean city isn't the only place for this phenomenon, but probably more evident because it's a popular vacation spot, and a beach city. yikes!
i rode the metro to and from work the first year and a half i lived here. among the multitudes of strange folks on the metro there was one dude who wore a see-through plastic square on his head. yep. it was put together with duct tape. couldn't really call him a 'bubble boy'. i guess you could, but he was more like a 'box-boy'. the sad thing was, no one stared at him, he was like 'normal'.
i'm guessing the real reason i was so shocked by the 'difference' in the looks of people here is people have always moved to california for basically three reasons - jobs, weather, or to be one of the beautiful people, and growing up i didn't know that, so i presumed with the exception of a few now and then, all people looked like californians. mid-western, white-bred, blond, blue-eyed sturdy folks with maybe a little mix of somethin' else. sure there were hispanics, african americans, asians, all of that, too...but can't say that i saw too many strange lookin' folks.
maybe it's the long, cold winter. i've heard that about maine.
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3 comments:
wow, you ARE a snob! awesome post, and really takes me back to 13 years ago when we moved here... getting attention from everyone right off the bat - because i didn't resemble the locals. not saying that i'm gorgeous, but certainly have a different 'shape' and 'features' than many of the locals.
re: ocean city - it's like the dregs of society merge there each summer... from WV, PA, MD, DE, NJ, NY. i look forward to our vacation this summer. *cough*
You can be a snob. Even growing up in Western Pa, I think those people are weird too. I stay the hell away from Ocean City and similar places. But I do like the laid back tone of the Outer Banks. Not exciting, but not filled with the carny people.
workingmom is here too... she's figured us out. ;)
what i think my mom and i both feel is that, while there are people like she describes those in OC EVERYWHERE IN THE WORLD, it was just totally FREAKY for us to see that having just moved from squeaky clean socal. if these BIGHEADED people DID exist in socal, they most certainly kept to themselves. amont the hills or whatever...
ahhh, CAAARRRRNYS!
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