I attended my girlfriend’s 10 year high school reunion this weekend. A disappointment to say the least. There was a pretty good band playing, not a single person danced all night (with the exception of my girlfriend and I). In fact, only a handful of people even ventured more than 8 feet from the bar all night, which was around the corner from the tables and dance floor. Essentially it was a group of a couple hundred people who didn’t like each other crowding around a bar in the middle of International Market Square. There wasn’t a single cat fight and no one got so drunk they couldn’t stand. While at the same time, there was not a soul in sight who seemed even remotely interesting to talk to. The hostility was so guarded and contained you could barely whisper and it would vanish into thin air. It was like a passive aggressive convention combined with an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting gone horribly wrong. Lame.
I was trying to figure out why this group of people seemed so boring. Then I remembered something I felt when I first moved to the Twin Cities.
This was a reunion for people who grew up in Maple Grove and Osseo. For the most part, these people all still live in the metro area. Their name tags read like a suburban sprawl guidebook: Burnsville, Hopkins, Maple Grove, Fridley, Apple Valley. To be honest, I couldn’t even tell you where these suburbs are. I’ve lived here 18 years and I still have no idea which direction Apple Valley is from Minneapolis.
I am speaking to you suburbanites now. Help me understand this bizarre phenomenon. What makes you think that you are somehow different from one another? Like you’re from different cities and as a result have a unique identifiable culture?
You don’t.
You are all from the same city. The city is Minneapolis/St. Paul, or better yet the Twin Cities. That’s where you are from. Not Maple-Pine-Grove-Park-Valley-Dale. You’re about as different from one another as two cocker spaniels from the same litter. Sure, maybe one of you has a brown spot over the left ear, but when you get together you just drool, run around in circles and wreck the furniture. I’ve never seen so many people drop their drinks and then walk through broken glass in my life.
For some reason however, this stratification seems desperately important to you. Maybe it started as high school rivalry. I don’t know. I don’t even pretend to understand it. It seems that without someone from a different suburb in your midst you have nothing to say. As though, being from the same suburb means you all share the same script and therefore have no need to read it to one another. The point is, when you get a group of people together all from the same suburb, they turn into cows. They huddle together on one side of the field, drink miller light from a bottle, and occasionally shit on each other.
3 comments:
I'm so happy you started this blog.
Yes! Nice analysis of the local geography-based personality disorders.
My wife's from Maple Grove. Her sister's ten year h.s. reunion is next year, so she was likely one year behind your girlfriend.
I'm originally from somewhere else (a big west coast city that rhymes with "smell hay"), moved here ten years ago (almost to the day). I've long wondered about the security blanket social networks that Minnesotans create based on geographical associations and high school acquaintanceships., and that end up limiting interest in new friends later in life.
When I first came to town, I attended a holiday party for MN-based ex-Peace Corps volunteers. It was a very diverse group in terms of age, birth place, and residency. Coming from a bigger city and used to having many casual relationships, I was very happy at the party. But I talked to one guy at the party--I'll never forget--who was a little freaked out by it. It was the one party of the year, he said, where he was uncertain of who would be there. "When I go to a party," he said, describing his circle of friends, "I almost always know exactly who is going to be there. I may be one or two persons off, but no more than that. This [holiday] party is always weird for me."
Michael, I am curious, do they this sort of geographically based class distinction in "smell hay"? I am sure there is to some extent, being a difference between Beverly Hills and Compton. But I think that tends to be along other class or racial lines rather than pure geography. Maybe I am missing something in the social structure of the Twin Cities, but I can't tell the difference between someone from Fridley versus someone from Burnsville.
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