Parallel Universe

There are two worlds within this great nation of ours: the television world where, like my blogbud Farm Girl pointed out in her most recent blog, people like Horatio Crane can get away with say REALLY bad one-liners as long as they are wearing cool sunglasses and living in a metropolitan area surrounded by beaches and cabanas. And the real world, where we don't wear high heels with jogging suits and we still spell words with the vowels in them - no, I don't speak TXT MSG and I don't carry a dog in a purse. In fact, this past weekend at a family reunion I actually said the phrase "Do we have any toothpicks because I've got some barbecued coon stuck in my teeth..."
So here are some other major differences that I'd very much like to point out.

• There are rumblings that Wal-Mart is getting a bit uppity what with the new Martha Stewart line. I know some women who are talking about organizing an official protest against having to match their gum boots to their gardening gloves.
• Here in rural America, we don't have "Sex and the City." We have "Desperate Nookie in the Parking Lot." If you've been married for awhile you have intense arguments about what to watch on TV after the weather report.
• Some Hollywood starlets and harlots are taking these exercise classes taught by ex-strippers that teach them how to pole dance and twirl themselves around on a steel pole using their core muscles to help reduce fat or something like that. That would never fly here and the main reason is that we are the kind of people that make do with what we have and the splinter factor is just way too painful to even consider.
• The flea market factor. Let me explain: in metropolitan areas flea markets are campy, destination weekend trips. Here, flea markets are how we furnish entire houses, buy gifts for people we really don't like or buy gifts for people we truly love.

So are we missing out, out here in the sticks where restaurant food is limited to what can be wrapped in paper and shoved into your car through a drive thru window? Where our first thought when we hear the word "yoga" is either a probiotic dairy product or BooBoo Boy? Where we have made a verb out of the term "garage sale" as in "I'm getting up early Saturday morning to garage sale." I used to think, as I would pour over the Ikea catalog and dream of waking up to a sun-filled loft overlooking a skyscraper skyline, that yes, I was missing out on something, as undefineable and elusive as that something was. But now I know that I'm most likely completely wrong; that it's so much better to wake up to the sound of kiddos laughing as they wait for the school bus, and to look out my window and see the garden that needs weeding desperately, but instead I choose to plop down on my flea market sofa with my homemade coffee that is just plain old coffee from the coffee maker and enjoy five minutes of windchimes, dogs barking, a couple of cars passing by and laughter from the preschool playground just down the street that makes up the small town symphony in this non-metropolitan parallel universe.