NIMBY

Well, hey there. I missed you. Glad to be back among people who don't work every hour of every day.

To be fair, I did find time this past week to go to a play, a bizarre party, and a very nice potluck dinner in a Victorian mansion. (Long story short: The Semiotician is endlessly resourceful.) But otherwise, I've been editing 24/7 like it's my job.

Yeah, so it is my job. Never you mind. Let's talk about my cowboy hat instead.

Last weekend, I decided to see what would happen if I wore it to Berkeley Bowl. Not the wildest thing anyone's ever done, granted, but I still thought it'd be an interesting way to check the local political pulse. Berkeley, original stomping grounds of the Yuppie with a Hippie Ethic, liberal haven extraordinaire. But can the lefties brace themselves and not pass judgment on a cowboy hat? You know, the kind our incredibly evil dictator/president might wear?

The unscientific answer: Sort of. Nobody said anything out loud, but the Sunday cart-pushers did shoot some daggers with their eyes. For the most part, it seemed more like, "Well, she's not from around here," than accusatory. But I'm a decent judge of what people are thinking, and I definitely got more than one what-are-you-doing-in-that-thing glance. Other folks were clearly just amused.

Too many soc classes in college? For sure. But with a grain of salt, consider this: I have it really easy in this life. I look about as unthreatening as a person possibly can to every social group in every region of the country. So, for a couple of hours, it was pretty interesting to have my neighbors look twice and visibly try to decide—on a basic knee-jerk level—if they could trust me, or if I were some freaky outsider who accidentally wound up in the wrong town.

Because in the hat, see, I might be one of them. The red-staters. Shudder.