I’m living The Simple Life.
You read that right. I don’t mean to mistype, and I don’t mean to be artistic or pretentious, pulling proper, italicized nouns with definite articles out from where they don’t belong.
I told you: I’m living The Simple Life — that is, the Y2K-era reality television show starring debutantes Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie as they’re ripped from their rich comforts and thrown into real-world work.
Much like the girls in the first season of The Simple Life, I spent this summer on a farm. “Sort of,” I think, a footnote dangling from my statement like dingleberries on sheep’s wool. Which I saw a lot of this summer, if that makes it more true.
It was a farm museum — an open-air museum, as I learned you call them. I interned in their Archives & Collections department. My familiars groan; the mention of a farm for me is a slippery slope segueing straight into something I mention far too often. Did you know I’m from Kansas?
Another year at Hopkins, another first Voices article waving my proud Kansas flag above my head. (FACT CHECK: At this time, Strait does not own a Kansas flag. His statement is merely figurative.) Last year, however, I wrote about my hometown with implications of hay bales and combines, “empty streets where you can go hours without seeing the headlights of a car,” all the fixings.
These things are true, but they’re true in the way that — technically — nothing ever really touches. Allow me to sound like a nerd overdue for his wedgie, swirlie or some other bully’s delight: You know, because according to quantum physics, atoms are mostly empty space with their electrons repelling one another.
I may be from Kansas, but I’m from the east side, only a half-hour from Kansas City — that is, a suburban purgatory no one outside of Kansas has heard of, but hey, we’re still the state’s fourth largest. Like atoms, my Kansas is buried inside of me, and my stories are indelibly stained with it, just as — for all appearances — things still seem to touch.
My friend who hooked me on The Simple Life told me that I would be Paris. You may think, “Where to begin listing your similarities — beauty, body, bounties of other miscellaneous blessings?” Well, perhaps, I concede. However, the real reason that struck me like a branding iron on my hip is this: Like Paris in The Simple Life, I feel as if I’m a poser wearing my identity like sheep’s clothing.
The sheep, the sheep — that’s right! Were you worried I had forgotten about my internship at the farm museum, that it would go unaddressed? I hope my writing isn’t bad enough for you to have so little faith in me; forgive me, however, if I’m prone to taking the slow, scenic crawl toward the point I’m making. (Maybe it’s the Kansas in me.)
I married a horse this summer… Sort of. Well, I was the groom in a horse wedding. It was love week on the farm. It was an 1854 Presbyterian wedding ceremony. It was sunny out, and I was wearing a dirtied hoodie and smelled like sweat, alcohol and cigarettes before it was even noon. In other words, I beat many men to the punchline — you know, the ones who wait a few years after their vows to devolve into what I was on my (the horse’s) wedding day, when I spoke for Goliath and said, “I do.”
It wasn’t what it looked like, I swear: I was sweating because I worked in the agricultural barn; I smelled like alcohol because I used Everclear to conserve and restore antique farm equipment (water rusts metal); I smelled like cigarettes because… Well, that one was because I’m cheap and got a good deal on a used smoker’s vehicle.
Like an airtight alibi, no one can deny the fact that Paris Hilton has seen her share of farm work — there are eight episodes of footage for proof. Also, no one can deny the circumstances of that footage: It was a reality television show, which is as unreal as anything gets. I worked on a farm in Kansas this summer… as the museum’s intern in a suburb, the fourth-largest city in the state.
So the atoms don’t touch, so it was all TV; that’s Hollywood, baby, that’s Kansas. Still, it’s all inside of me, and who looks stupider between you and me if you say that my rear isn’t touching the chair I’m sitting on because of electro—Let me stop you there. Rephrased: If you run the odds, you scientist, which one of us will get the wedgie if a bully walks by right now?
Let me live in my ignorant unreality: the wisest one. Which one of us has the better story to tell, or a story at all — what are you reading right now?
I’m living The Simple Life. Call me Paris.
Riley Strait is a freshman from Olathe, Kan. studying Writing Seminars and English. His column, "In Medias Res," translates from Latin to "into the middle of things," shares narratives that bury occasional insights within fluff that often leave the reader wondering, "Did I ask?"
