weaktwos | (no subject)

I remember how at home I felt, the first time I left. The gallery sent me east to learn from teh master at Graham Aader's Pennsylvania headquarters. Getting off the plane from San Franscisco at the Philadelphia airport, I was taken aback. I realized I had been living under quarantine in some euthanized J. Crew catalog parallel universe of healthy good looks. Because, in Philadelphia, I was pleasantly surprised to see old people, average people, even ugly people, ambling around in dumb t-shirts and home perms. And if that wasn't relief enough, the weather was terrible and the coffee was dreck. The nice thing about Philadelphia is that no one has moved there to find the good life for over two hundred years. I went home to California feeling like the prettiest, most upbeat over-acheiver in the world.

-Sarah Vowell, The Partly Cloudy Patriot