Neoteric.

When things fall into place:

I am working, full-time, for slightly more money than I made as a graduate student, but much more money than I made as an unemployed post-graduate. I can sustain a decent lifestyle in Middle America on this paycheck, and really, what’s most important is that the work is relatively interesting and I respect my boss. She’s an attorney who dabbles in pilates and guitar lessons, understands my desire to buy some decent produce in this part of the country, and commiserates with me regarding the sometimes-here, sometimes-not feeling of despair I’m slowly learning to live with–grow into–while I nestle into the cold metal of America’s Bible Belt buckle.”You should take up a new hobby,” my boss tells me, right after I ask her for more work (I apparently catch on to the legal-ese of estate planning quite quickly). “Maybe horseback riding?”

I cringe. Visibly. The thought pains me.

“Okay,” she backtracks, “I mean, maybe, um, what about glass blowing? They offer classes at the Art Center.”

“Now that would be cool,” I murmur, somewhat interested, but not really.

“Or maybe,” she continues, “you need to volunteer. Maybe you need to feel like you’re doing something meaningful.”

I shrug. “I guess so.”

She sighs. “Okay, my dear,” she finally offers, “let me give you a real Halloween scare. When my husband carted me out here 14 years ago? He said we’d be here for no longer than 5 years.”

Three children and a law firm later, they are still here. My boss likes it now, though she often jokes about Okie names, Okie speech, Okie reasoning, and Okies, period.

And these are things that do exist: Okie-ness is a fact. And Oklahomans perhaps are plagued with the deepest inferiority complex of all the states’ citizens, being known for earth that swirls ’round the sky and births John Steinbeck novels. I, however, fall into a fascination with that dry earth, and how hypocritically it floods over, red blood mud, when it rains.

Well, it doesn’t rain here. It always storms.

I also enjoy the bandit history of the state, how at a youthful 100 years old, Oklahoma is just starting to shed its “Bandits, Cowboys and Indians” image. A man I met recently worded it this way: “The Indians who survived the Trail got some shit land that no one wanted. Then people realized that there was something to be had in Oklahoma, and whites came out and stole the Indians’ land again. People came out for free land and freedom from the rule of the law. Sometimes they bothered with due process.” It’s not surprising that Jesse James has a history in Oklahoma, and yet they always film those Wild West movies in places like New Mexico. I want to be a little sharp shooter with a revolver in my garter, except I’m about 120 years too late. I suppose all fashion comes back around.

In the meantime, I work and wonder what I’ll be when I grow up. Jesse James, a bartop dancer, a land irrigator, or anything that doesn’t require me to wake up at 5:00 AM.