Messin' with Texas

I spent most of my life in New York and have hardly ever been to the south. I have never been to Texas. I have met a few people from there but not many. I have cousins there whom I have hardly ever seen in my life. However, I have lots of ideas in my head about what Texas must be like. It probably has a lot to do with our current president being from Texas. Regardless of why, I had all these ideas about Texas before coming here, most of which had no information to back them up.

The first thing was that everyone was telling me I had to change. All of my Yankee friends were telling me I had to get a pick up truck with a gun rack on it, I needed to start eating beef at every meal (I am a vegetarian), I had to start going to church and I had to become a republican. Someone even ventured as to tell me that I needed to start wearing a cowboy hat. Basically everyone that hadn’t lived in Texas had this idea in their heads that Texas was still full of cowboys. Not quite right.

What I got from Texans was a little different. For one, most of them asked me why the hell I would want to live in Beaumont, Texas. I told them it was a job and they told me I should get another job. Pretty much every Texan I met said that part of Texas was boring, and swampy. That didn’t give me a good feeling about the decision I had already made. I even had the good fortune to meet someone from Beaumont at a party in New York City, who had 18 years of experience in Beaumont. She confirmed that it was a boring place.

My most interesting conversation I had about Texas was with a real estate agent I talked to about renting apartments. The conversation went something like this:

Me: What is there to do in Beaumont?
Agent: Let’s see it’s hunting season now. Folks like hunting. And I guess folks like going to church around here.
Me: Wow, where I am from there isn’t really any hunting and not many people go to Church.
Agent: Wait, are you Jewish?
Me: No. I am [***] but I don’t practice
Agent: Oh ok. Well you are going to want to stay away from [***] because that’s where the KKK is.

I am not sure what she meant by that, but throughout our 30-minute conversation she giggled the whole time. She couldn’t even talk about houses without giggling a little bit. The only thing that seemed to get her to stop giggling was the thought that she could be talking to someone Jewish.

Another thing that I noticed that, in my opinion, does not bode well for a liberal minded person like myself is the Fox News shop. If you are not sure why that’s not a good sign for someone as liberal as me, ask.

Through my upcoming blogging, I will do my best to confirm or dispel any preconceptions you might have about Texas. I will tell you that Texas is huge and the culture varies from region to region. I am in the east, which is swamp country. I am close to the border with Louisiana so we have alligators and snakes and bayous and all that fun stuff. It never gets cold but it gets hot and humid.