Providence Here I Come!

Tomorrow I'm off to a conference in beautiful, urban downtown Providence Rhode Island!

Growing up and living just outside of Boston until I was 22, I never thought in a million years I would get excited about going to Rhode Island. Rhode Island and I have some issues. Well, I do at least.

Where to start? How about with those Crimson Travel commercials that used to be on the Boston area UHF stations when I was a kid? If you're from southern New England, you might know the ones I mean. If not, here's the reader's digest version. It was a family owned travel company. I assumed, given the numerous Rhode Island local commercials that surrounded the Crimson Travel ones, that the company was based in Warwick or some other god forsaken place (major exports include cranberries and ticks). I think Crimson Travel specialized in Disney trips. The whole family would appear in the commercials - complete with peevish looking bucktoothed children, all wearing Micky Mouse ears hats. My family never went to Disney. We were poor intellectuals. This is not a good combination, but it is how I was raised. I still have a visceral reaction to bucktoothed spoiled people in Mickey Mouse ears. In my immediate childhood context, it meant "I'm a nouveau riche fuckwit with the aesthetic sense of a twinkie wrapper."

As a child, I naturally assumed everyone from Rhode Island was like this.

As a slightly older person, I became aware that Rhode Islanders are wretched drivers. The recent and quite likely very flawed study has shown what I knew as soon as I was able to sit in the front seat during drives on Route 128 and watch the Ocean Staters hurl themselves down and across four lanes of Boston driver-filled highway like lemmings into a blender. We may be Massholes, but we at least know road from median strip.

And then there were the numerous ill fated trips to Newport, most or all of which never happened. The first one, I was grounded. Two boys asked me and my sister to go to Newport. Why? They spoke of it like it was some kind of paradise. But we were, or I was, grounded for the first and only time in my life (I was 17). Mom didn't like the boys. Or didn't like that I liked boys. Or that they liked me. Or something like that. My sister and I snuck out, there was a drive, there were boys, there was ice cream, but I don't know if we actually made it to Newport. There were two other times in later years that I almost went to Newport, but on both occasions I got quite sick and had to cancel at the very last minute, once on the road and another time when I got massive serious vertigo. No cliff walk for me!

And lastly, there is the fact that my ex bf's family vacations in Rhode Island. And they just suck outloud.

So a pending trip to Rhode Island doesn't seem like it should elicit this level of excitement. But I am in the middle of nowhere. Our college town consists of a couple of strip malls, four to be exact, and a big CVS. My semantics professor used to make jokes using various combinations of definite articles, superlatives, and varieties of local restaurants. In this context, "The best Chinese restaurant" is funny. Well, it's funny if you're a linguist. Ok, it's funny if you're a german semanticist.

Years of middle of nowhere CT has made even Rhode Island look like an oasis of civilization to me. Plus there's the hotel sex.