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Upstater
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Dec. 31st, 2008 | 01:31 pm
The next person who makes any mention of how I must be ignorant because I grew up in a big city (NYC) is going to get smacked. Seriously.
I was born in Binghamton, which is located in Upstate New York. Note that it is two hundred miles away from New York City. I grew up in Candor, New York, which has a village population of less than a thousand. I worked on a farm during the summers in high school. I know how to drive a tractor. My graduating class had sixty-three people, and we were in all the same classes from kindergarten through twelfth grade. I am from a small town.
This is actually something that happens a lot, and while it's predictable, it's still annoying. New York is a fairly large state. New York City is enormous, but it covers a relatively small geographic area even if you account for urban sprawl. Upstate New York is geographically, ethnically, and culturally very different from NYC. No matter what downstaters would like to think, they do not speak for the entire state.*
I don't expect people from other areas of the country to be intimately familiar with the geopolitical details of a state they've never visited, but I really wish they'd stop making assumptions (the fact that they're always delivered as 'what would YOU know, coming from a state that's coated in pavement' probably doesn't help the matter, and makes me want to send them photos of my hometown**)
*I'm a little bitter about this because upper-middle-class kids from Long Island and NYC have a tendency to come upstate for college, and they can be unbelievably arrogant and rude toward locals.
**For reference, the last photo is of Main Street.
I was born in Binghamton, which is located in Upstate New York. Note that it is two hundred miles away from New York City. I grew up in Candor, New York, which has a village population of less than a thousand. I worked on a farm during the summers in high school. I know how to drive a tractor. My graduating class had sixty-three people, and we were in all the same classes from kindergarten through twelfth grade. I am from a small town.
This is actually something that happens a lot, and while it's predictable, it's still annoying. New York is a fairly large state. New York City is enormous, but it covers a relatively small geographic area even if you account for urban sprawl. Upstate New York is geographically, ethnically, and culturally very different from NYC. No matter what downstaters would like to think, they do not speak for the entire state.*
I don't expect people from other areas of the country to be intimately familiar with the geopolitical details of a state they've never visited, but I really wish they'd stop making assumptions (the fact that they're always delivered as 'what would YOU know, coming from a state that's coated in pavement' probably doesn't help the matter, and makes me want to send them photos of my hometown**)
*I'm a little bitter about this because upper-middle-class kids from Long Island and NYC have a tendency to come upstate for college, and they can be unbelievably arrogant and rude toward locals.
**For reference, the last photo is of Main Street.