Hometown Strange Love or: How I Learned to Stop Being Pretentious and Love My Florida Roots

That's right: I'm beginning to love my Florida roots. Though being so close to sea level, those roots can't grow too deep before hitting water (which also explains to all you northerners why I'm more excited about your basement than your backyard swimming pool). So picture me growing long, snaking roots like St. Augustine grass.

After work had turned me into an 100-word-per-second 4am infomercial conspiracy theorist, it was time to go home and detox in the bliss that is napping on a cool leather couch with the air conditioning pumping away in the dead of a Florida summer.

What else is there to do in the middle of a Florida summer? Hang out by the pool? Check. Go to the beach? Check. Go shopping? Check. Check. And double check.

My mother and I pretty much had two ways of entertaining ourselves when I was growing up: go to the movies and go shopping. But times have changed. Now my mom is on a permanent boycott of the Regal Oviedo Marketplace 22 Cinemas because the theaters smell bad--which is a topic I love bringing up because it launches her into one of my favorite rants of all time: she swears the smell comes from boys peeing on the carpeted walls by the theater entrance so they don't miss a minute of the movie they're watching. (I personally think the smell most likely comes from the fact the carpeted walls don't dry properly when they're washed which causes them to mildew and smell--but I will concede that her explanation is infinitely more entertaining than mine.)

So shopping and more shopping it is. Now this might sound all expensive and materialistic to you folks unfamiliar with Florida shopping. But in a land where neighborhoods grow wild around strip malls and the urban sprawls over the marshland like kudzu, the concept of "shopping" exists in an entirely other world.

On Friday, I made a pilgrimage to FleaWorld, America's Largest Flea Market:



Check out that wide selection!

FleaWorld is my brother's favorite spot to buy weapons and t-shirts that ironically imply I'm retarded (see below, right).

(For the record: I am special, damnit!)

After spending over 2 hours walking around FleaWorld--just to see everything!--I ended up walking away with one fake tattoo that said "Bad Girl" on a banner across two hearts that peeled off in 5 minutes and 4 trashy romances novels that I bought for $1 (half what my tattoo cost!) one about werewolves, one about a diet that makes you horny, and two that are straight up written pornography (as the woman who sold them to me more or less assured me, since she's read them all). I can vouch for the one called Heatwaves about a call-in radio sex show--that shit is D to the IRTY.

And if shopping around a flea market--with great joy and enthusiasm no less!-- for fake tattoos and trashy romances doesn't confirm that I'm truly a Florida girl at heart--like it or not--I must also confess... I went to Walmart. And loved it. In the eyes of my northern peers that may condemn me to hell, but I am not sorry. It's my culture. And I am proud.