For 16 years I thought that Chicago was the capital of Illinois and yes, for nearly two decades I pronounced it Ill A Noise. It wasn’t a lack of education that led me to these assumptions, but rather the fact that up until October 16 of 1996, I had spent my entire life living on Mars. Okay so according to Webster’s dictionary, Mars is defined as being the fourth planet from the sun, but in my vocabulary, it is synonymous with California.
It’s a government run by celebrities and filled with enough drama to make a daytime soap opera jealous. Only in the golden state can you hear the Terminator comment on tax reforms. It is here that you witness stars being born and eventually finding their ultimate demise. According to Ross MacDonald, a famous author and one time resident, there is nothing “wrong with California that a rise in the ocean level wouldn’t cure.” Despite the negative image sometimes shared by residents, Southern California was a geographical paradise for me, because no matter which direction you headed, within an hour of driving you’d find yourself at a beach, a dessert, in the mountains or under a little hut eating REAL Mexican food south of the border.
Imagine my surprise when my parents decided to whisk me away from my west coast metropolis and re-root me in the middle of the corn, some 2,000 miles away. It was with this relocation that I learned moving cross country can be a complete culture shock and result in unfair stereotyping.
Now I surely don’t have to explain to you the culture of Illinois, but imagine for a second how others perceive those who live in this state? How Hollywood generalizes the mid-western majority as hicks who ride tractors. Jan Morris, a writer for the British journal Salon.com, reported his idea of Springfield calling it, “a sprawled and uninticing plain, sometimes icy cold, sometimes appallingly hot,” he went on to suggest that slow speaking farmers sit in saloons all day swapping stories about a hard days work. Even though I now believe his impression was inaccurate, it wasn’t too far off from my view when I first moved here.
On my first day of school I concluded that I was the epitome of cool in my corduroy shorts and knee high doc martin’s. It never occurred to me that it would be freezing outside! Sure, the temperature was actually in the upper 50's, but for us Californian’s that was equivalent to a frost!
I survived my first two classes with only mild embarrassment. When the teachers asked me to introduce myself to the class, that always induced some giggles from the back of the room. It was around 10:30 when a whaling alarm went off that sent me into a state of terror. The girl next to me obviously noticed my fear and promptly informed me that it was a tornado siren. Now in California we have random Earthquake drills all the time, where we are instructed to “duck and cover.” So naturally my first instinct was to curl up under my desk in a ball, which I did without hesitation. It was only when I heard the roaring laughter that I realized this is NOT how they do things in Illinois. At that point I wish I could’ve stayed hidden under that desk.
By lunch time my actions were known to most of the school. I hung around the soda machine and tried to blend in with the other students, but I stuck out like a sore thumb. It was then a girl in my biology class walked by and offered to buy me a “pop.” I gave her a quizzical look and she just laughed while explaining pop was a soda. As we opened our “pops”, she started asking me all sorts of questions such as, where I was from and what was the ocean like. By the end of the lunch hour there must’ve been ten kids by that soda machine, drilling me with questions, especially asking if I knew anyone famous. What they didn’t seem to understand was that Hollywood was about two hours north of San Diego and a subculture in itself, but I used this ignorance to my advantage told them all Leonardo DiCaprio and I went to the same pre-school.
As the lunch bell rang, the girl who bought me a soda, smiled and pointed out that I looked like the typical valley girl. The way I dressed, talked and my general attitude all fit the description of someone she thought would be from California. That’s when it hit me. I wasn’t the only one making brash generalizations. These people in Illinois had their own negative ideas of what west coasters were like. The professor who operates Etherfarm.com is a Chicago native and says that, “Californians have a type of snobbery, unsurpassed by everyone except the French.” and that’s putting it nicely.
I like to think through it all I adjusted fairly well to my new surroundings. It only took me a few months to remove the word “like” from my main vocabulary and tone down my valley girl accent. After living here for nearly eight years I’ve come to consider myself an Illinoisan. I no longer give strangers the finger when they drive by waving, I actually smile and wave back. I have come to know that the proper way to pronounce the prairie state is Ill - Annoy. I think it’s safe to say that no matter where you go or what school you go to, there’s always going to be some kind of stereotyping.