Sweet Tea

First of all, I love the South. (If I cue a paragraph with "first of all" and then say that I love something, I am going to go off on a rant about something related to that thing.) I really do love a man that can pull off a seersucker suit, and I love when my husband answers me with "yes ma'am" when I ask him to do something. I love how pleasant everyone is. Southerners will make the effort to be to nice to your face, which is more than I can say for people from many other places. I'll take fake pleasantness over surly any day. Although, I don't think they are being fake to your face. I think they really do want to be nice to you when you are standing right in front of them, even if they don't have nice things to say about you when you leave.

There is no mystery, however, why the South has the highest concentration of obese people. It's the food, duh. If it walks on four legs or grows out of the ground, the proper way to prepare it is deep fried. And the sweet tea. Holy fuck. We were at a BBQ restaurant with my in-laws and we all ordered sweet tea. It was so sweet that it could substitute as pancake syrup, and the straw stood straight up in the glass from the viscosity of it. The sweet tea is served in a glass that, if you were allowed to take it home, you could throw it in the yard with the chickens and use it as a kiddie pool. (The South also seems to have a large proportion of fine dining establishments that offer souvenir cups.)

After my in-laws had finished half of the sweet tea [2 liters?], the waitress came around to refill the glasses. Everyone took a sip and looked very confused. My brother-in-law called the waitress back and explained to her that something was wrong with the tea, that it was, in fact, "nasty" (and thereby also demonstrating his ability to use his big words). The severely misguided waitress had refilled the cups half full with - are you ready for this because it is sheer horror - regular tea. Damn her. What was she trying to do? Save our lives?

Tomorrow, I head home to a place where people will jog in a blizzard, demand organic produce and free range chickens, and can tell you the proper recycling method for any variety of plastic. I guess someone in America needs to be doing it to make up for all the people in the South who aren't. On behalf of them, thank you. Now I need to get back to my sweet tea because that stuff is fucking fantastic.