Don’t Judge a Mid-Westerner by Its Cover

Kelly is 5’10’’, thin, blond and has extremely white teeth. She has a sweet, soft voice and hails from Northern Minnesota. These, of course, made me instantly decide she had nothing to offer. That is, until I found out she had called me a bitch. Ah, the pettiness of young women. We only respect each other once we find out that someone else is as rude and mean as we. Not so. It was a statement of fact. I met her at orientation. She kindly introduced herself, and I all but spat in her face, declared my lack of interest in American friends, and gave her my back once more. It was a statement of fact. I’d acted like what is commonly known in American English as a bitch.

Beautiful, boring Kelly has a soft and sniping wit and has more than once quietly said what I think loudly. Last Thursday, over maybe the third round of one tinto de verano, one beer, and a glass of wine, she informed Vanessa and I that she had worked in a morgue, and for as long as she could remember, has wanted to be a medical examiner. This is where my picture of Kelly shatters into little pieces of statuesque mini-Kellies asking for a scalpel and a camera for her 12th birthday. (She’s not actually that morbid. That image was my personal invention.) So, as she pops fried mystery cheese into her mouth, Kelly details how bodies are examined, which parts get removed, cut up and tested for confirmation of cause of death, jokes about mix ups between the tests on the old guy and ones done on the over-dose victim, and gushes about getting to take off and wrap up the clothes of victims of violent deaths when they arrive in the morgue.

Moral of the story, something most people learn when they're seven: just because she’s beautiful and from the mid-west, doesn’t mean she’s dumb or boring, it just means you’re an asshole.