The diners are the same in B'more

The Armpit of America? Is this what the rest of the country really thinks of New Jersey? I'm not sure that most Americans really think much of the state, except that it has the Turnpike, 24-hour diners, a location proximate to New York City and Philadelphia (depending on allegiance to North Jersey or its rival, South Jersey), the Shore and Atlantic City.

I'm also uncertain about whether people who don't read The Record, The Star-Ledger and other Jersey newspapers care about how the state is now officially the most affluent in our union, surpassing our embittered friends from Connecticut. What Jerseyans and non-Jerseyans alike think of the state is positively vague - like my introduction to this column.

But I do know that if you're a student here at Hopkins from New Jersey and someone asks you where you're from, the questioner is likely to roll their eyes when you, the questioned, tell them where your home is. As if it were something disgustingly normal like saying you're tired when people ask "What's up?" or that you've had a long day when someone asks how your day was.

But listen, people - how can we continue to function here at Hopkins without being informed as to what our demographic constituency signifies - if anything? Further, how have we been able to avoid thinking about connections between our most densely populated state and our academic mainstay? Surely there must be something, right?

I'd like to think that there must be some alternate explanation for the presence of so many Hopkins-Jersey troublemakers than the continued success of "Joisey's" public school system; by the way, only people from Brooklyn call it "Joisey." There just may be some phenomenon that forces so many suburbanites down I-95 into Baltimore year in and out. Maybe there isn't something that separates the Jersey kids from the rest, but this semester we can try to test the hypotheses of location's affects on individuals' values, stigmas, ideas. Surprisingly, I dig my home and I wouldn't mind figuring why that is now that I'm not there anymore.

And if there isn't anything we discover in our talks about The Garden State, at least we'll just say, "Oh well, it's just New Jersey - who the hell cares?" afterward. You can digest these talks and resolve that the state is filled with second-rate, wanna-be people, like columnists in the News-Letter who write about smoking. Or you can be intrigued and want to move to Jersey from other exciting states such as Oregon or Nebraska. You can also ask yourself how where you're from has affected you, now that you're in The Greatest City In America.

I beg of you, however, to give me a chance and to let us all make fun of ourselves. Without poking fun at ourselves, we may end up proselytizing and bickering. Think about it: many of us have the tendency to think that where we come from is what the rest of the world should be like and that in making this normative assumption, we should change everybody else to think like us.

But this "us" idea is now an unfounded one. Are we all part of a common humanity that transcends the silly empirical stuff that makes us "us?" Habits, vantage points, traditions that tie us to imaginary geographic lines - are they futile lines of reasoning out how the world works? Or can we recognize that where we come from tells us at least something about where we're headed?

This fall, join me in a journey from Jersey to Johns Hopkins, from people like Kevin Smith to people like John Waters, from the Bendix Diner to the Paper Moon, from 7-11 to RoFo, from pollution to more pollution, from Bergenfield to Baltimore, from where we were to where we'll be.