FM

My wife and I have a term: FM. It stands for Fucking Massachusetts and describes a general sense of dread and misfortune that surrounds this region and its people. My wife is having an FM day because, in a ten mile drive down a main drag, she began our day with three seperate traffic jams caused by road crews. Anywhere else, this would be cause for hurling D batteries at unsuspecting assholes leaning on their shovels, but in Massachussetts, it's pretty much run of the mill. I feel bad because I dragged her here.

I would like to briefly outline what it is about Massachusetts that is so deeply shitty. Nearly all human relationships conducted in this state are muted by one degree. Perhaps a chart would work:

1. Close Friends
2. Friends
3. Friends of friends (like when you go drinking with a friend, and they bring a guy they know from work)
4. acquaintances
5. people who stand in line behind you in a super market and will laugh if they overhear one of your jokes
6. strangers
7. strangers who would step over you in the road if they found you there bleeding

All right, in Massachusetts, there really aren't close friends per se, at least not in intensity. No one will act like a close friend the way they would in another state. They might act like a normal friend, but someone who is just a friend in Massachusetts will act like a friend of a friend.

For instance, if you call up a friend and ask them for a ride to the airport, they will probably act weird, this is because they assume you have better friends, since you and they aren't really all that close, though in any other region, you would call them friends and act accordingly (invite them to parties and weddings, etc., that kind of close). In Massachusetts, not so much.

Note, this goes for working relationships too. So the guy who is responsible for my dissertation is wondering why I'm bothering him with my dissertation--isn't there someone with whom I have a better relationship that I could bother them instead? Though he is responsible, though he has been working with me for five years, though he has agreed to sign on to the project, the reaction is always the same--he acts like I just walked into his office five minutes ago and began, in a friendly enough way, to demand his help on something he knows nothing about. His reaction is similar to what it would be if I were looking for someone else's office and were asking him for directions: there's the person you're looking for, now go away.

Only a close friend will watch your pets. Friends can not be bothered with this task.

What's funny is how much people who you DO know in some regular capacity will act like the guy at the supermarket who laughs at your jokes when he overhears them. Any attempt to press the relationship further will cause these people to clam up like you're a stalker. Take the people at my church...many of them are acquaintances and they are willing to talk to you for exactly five minutes, but call them to let them know about a church activity and suddenly you're the weirdo with space issues. I have no idea where any of them live, for instance, even though I see them every Sunday and in some cases would even call them friends. Though I have gone to the same church for 4 years, there are tons of people whose names I don't know. Moreover, the pastor doesn't know their names either, so during prayers and concerns, he says things like: "yes, of course, we'll pray for your recovery from the cancern...what's your name again?"

By the way, no one would deign to laugh at a joke if they didn't know you. They would, however, comment on you as a person. At one point, at a Jake Shimobokur (horribly misspelled) I was sitted at a table with a couple whom my wife and I did not know, and the man asked what I thought of Massachusetts. Knowing enough not to blast him, I said, that we were used to people being a bit more social and that people seemed to be in their own world. His response? Swear to God, didn't know him for five minutes: "Well, maybe you shouldn't care so much about what other people think." Seriously, what a fucking masshole. The other day, my wife saw a guy walking around with a kid who was my kid's age, so she went over and after talking with him for five minutes asked, "so do you guys live around here?" Mind you, this conversation occured ON MY FRONT LAWN. The guy answered, "I don't feel comfortable answering that," and then shied his kid away like we'd tried to show her pornography.

Now, why? You have to ask why these people are so horrible, and I guess I don't have any great answer for that. A few things come to mind, though. First, I really do think that the brain trust in this area just has way too much effect on these people. They know people who go to Welsley, Smith, Amherst, Harvard, Brandeis, MIT, and fifty other schools I've never heard of and they're as smart as these people (right or wrong, how hard is it to be smarter than a 20 year old) and so they've all decided that they're super geniuses too. In fact, they think they're so smart that they've decided that the normal rules are for morons and do not apply to them. Thus, they ignore traffic laws and rules of social decorum with equal abandon. An intersection that is not entirely girded by stop lights in this state is an accident waiting to happen.

Second, Massachusetts just plain in general sucks. It snows in the Winter (five months long), it doesn't have a Spring, and it rains in the Summer. Anyone who could leave this state, did. The only people left are people too stubborn and full of themselves to listen to other people's ideas to move West. Moreover, they descended from people who lived locked up in a cabin for the Winter months (again that's five of them, minimum) and so have evolved away from a need for personal contact.

Lastly, shit attitudes simply breed shit attitudes. Massachusetts is like a bad karma closed room without a single person attempting to open the window to let any good attitude in. If I leave my house, I can bet on having something happen within five minutes of my travels that will utterly piss me off. Whether it be some moron running a red light (often in front of a cop who won't give him a ticket), somebody who feels that their job is beneath them (and so have decided not to do it, though they keep getting paid), or the fucking deluges that happen four times a day to ruin any plan to get outside during the Summer. I am as bitter about my condition here in FM as any other FMasshole, and I am willing to spread it as much too.

The only thing that saves this state from slipping into violent anarchy is a sense of obligation. Everybody at least understands that, though they don't want to do their job or help you or get out of your way, etc., society will fall apart without their cooperation, and so the entire fabric of this society is held together through obligation, but it carries no one much further than the bare minimum. If you are obliged to help someone shopping in your store, or obliged to read someone's disseration, or obliged to show up to work, that's all you fucking do, and you expect that everyone will leave you alone after that or face your wrath. So, while one cannot count on the intensity of a strong friendship, people realize that they are, in some sense, to do their part and drive you to the airport or water your plants. So, I guess that's at least something.