Next week I’m going to New England to talk about my upcoming new book at a conference just for indie booksellers (yay!) and I was talking to Elizabeth (the lovely person who runs Nowhere Bookshop) about it and she asked “Where in New England, because it’s pretty big?” and I thought she was crazy because isn’t New England a small state? Like, it’s so small I can’t even remember what the capital of New England is and then Victor and Elizabeth just stared at me in horror, because apparently New England isn’t a state at all. I assumed that they were fucking with me but they explained that New England was a whole group of states and asked if I also thought “the midwest” was a state, and I said, “Obviously not, because there is a ‘the’ in the title. That’s how you know it’s a group. ‘The southwest.’ ‘The Atlantic Seaboard.’ Like, if New England isn’t a state then why do we have The New England Patriots? We don’t have “The Mormon Corridor Stallions,” do we? This is too confusing. Petition to rename New England “‘The Upper Righties’.”
And then they looked at me like I was even stupider and I wondered if New England wasn’t even in the upper right of the map. and reminded them that they didn’t teach me Geography in high school because I was too busy taking classes on judging-cotton, cattle insemination, boll-weevil eradication and square dancing. (Thanks, Texas! Super helpful!)
Elizabeth was like, “You never learned the songs about the states?” and then proceeded to send me something called “The Nifty Fifty,” which was decidedly not a bop and didn’t even rhyme. Then she sent me “Wakko’s 50 State Capitols” and I was like, “Ringo Star as a mouse teaching me geography sung to the melody of every square dancing class I ever took was not on my bingo card for today, but I guess here we are.”
So my question to you is, what is something you learned as an adult that made you feel incredibly stupid, because I can’t be alone here.
Also, whoever decided that we should capitalize “Capitol” when it refers to the building but not “capital” when it refers to the capital city that the Capitol is in is on my forever shitlist. Also, spellcheck is telling me “shitlist” isn’t even a word. I fucking give up.