Confessions of the Third Wheel

Su'um, noun ~WI~ something, all contexts

Get this: I think I've finally realized why I'm so fucked up.

Remember those Steven Spielberg movies you used to watch as a kid? The ones from, like, the seventies and eighties, where the kids wake up at 10 am and leave their house on their bikes to go play on the baseball field, and they don't come home in time for dinner? And they know everybody in the neighborhood, like the lawnmowing lady and the guy from the drugstore? And they live a life of adventure every day? You know what I'm thinking of. The Sandlot. ET. A Christmas Story. Movies where the kids go out on their own and do whatever they want--to the store, to the beach, to the playground--and nobody really gives a shit about it.

I think the main reason I'm so fucked up is because my childhood was the exact opposite of that.

For one thing, I was born in Wisconsin. Wisconsin. The one state nobody gives a fuck about, besides maybe Indiana or Idaho or Iowa. The I states. The only thing people really know about Wisconsin is that it's always cold and there's a lot of cheese. We're never mentioned in movies except as the butt of some terrible joke, and when somebody did try to make a show about us on the Disney Channel, they shot it in frigging California or whatever and called it a day. Which, admittedly, we do have great summers, but we're not California. You can't really set something in Wisconsin and leave out the snow. I'd say the Coens' Fargo was more accurate, but that takes place in Minnesota, for one thing, although they nailed the accents and everything so well it's scary. And I've been to the Twin Cities and to Minneapolis, which left a little room for me to fangirl.

So yeah. Nobody gives a fuck about Wisconsin, which basically means nobody gives a fuck about the people who live there, either. Every movie I watched or TV show I binged or book I read as a kid took place in California or Idaho or Iowa--WHAT'S IN IOWA--literally the same five states over and over again. Because apparently nothing ever happens in Wisconsin. Because apparently Wisconsin doesn't even exist.

But the best part of this is that on the rare occasion that some famous artist or whatever is from Wisconsin, 99.99% of the time their art has something to do with a) wildlife, b) wildlife, c) Wisconsin history no one gives a fuck about, or d) Wisconsin wildlife conservation history only Wisconsinites give a fuck about. Which only makes it a million times better, because it means every goddamn day you spend in Wisconsin, all that's pounded in your head is WILDLIFE WILDLIFE WILDLIFE and not in a super melodic way like in the similarly titled Talking Heads song. If I have to look at one more goddamn wood carving shaped like a duck I'm going to blow my fucking brains out.

I mean, don't get me wrong, it's a nice place to live. The people are nice. There's a lot of parks. And the winters really aren't that bad--I don't really get why everyone makes such a big deal out of them. And we're not all like the people in Fargo. Madison is a pretty big city, and pretty hip. It's just those little towns like where I live. Like Lac D'Oie, which is supposed to be pronounced like lack dwa but in Wisconsin everyone says it like lack doy. Sometimes people just skip the "Lac" and say "D'Oie". I mean, cities like Plover and shit are way worse than D'Oie--at least D'Oie has a Target and a decent-sized library--but I'd rather be in Madison. There's just so much more to do in Madison. Being in Madison doesn't feel synonymous with being totally cut off from the world.

But yeah. I live in Lac D'Oie, a city that might be real but might just be a figment of your imagination. I've lived in the same tiny house on Chapel Street for my entire life, 1221 Chapel Street, to be precise, and it's called Chapel Street because it has three religious schools lined up one by one along it, all belonging to a different sect of Christianity. My house is right in front of the D'Oie Baptist School, and to the right of that school is the St. Anthony Catholic School, and to the right of that school is the John Wesley United Methodist School. And of course, on the other side of the D'Oie Baptist School is the public elementary school, John Hancock Elementary School. I always wondered if maybe there was some weird sort of competition going on between the four schools, like if every morning when the janitors arrived to clean the school for the day they exchanged vengeful looks at each other reading my religion is better than yours. I remember being a kid and watching the older kids play on the four consecutive playgrounds during recess from across the street, and I wonder if that had some sort of detrimental effect on my well-being, seeing them there and feeling myself a world away through my living room window.