I Hate New Hampshire - Part 4 of 7

As indicated by the title, this is part four of a seven part "I Hate New Hampshire" series. This is not the casual observations of a visitor. Rather, my impressions were gathered during a painful year of actual residency. Beware all who follow.

SOCIETY

The Accent – We’ll call it an “accent.” But it more or less would be called baby talk anywhere other than New England. If unfamiliar with it, part of the technique is to misplace your R’s. In other words, you drop the R at the end of a word and add an R to the end of any word that ends in a vowel. (Examples: pizza = pizzer, pasta = paster, Car = Cah, Driver = Drive-a). Essentially, this would be a speech impediment in any other part of the country, and you’d face years of speech therapy in the back room of your school library with some scary looking dude that passes out root beer barrel candy and hates kids. The great news is that if you birth a kid who can’t quite get the speech thing right, just export him to New Hampshire and you’ll save everyone a lot of trouble.

Standoffish – Before you even entertain a visit to New Hampshire, people will warn you that the locals are “standoffish.” You’ll nod and smile and channel what it must be like to visit France, then say – ‘whatever.’ But, don’t kid yourself. It’s there, and it weighs on the atmosphere like a lead septic tank. However, instead of being standoffish, it would be more accurate to say that they’re socially inept. New Hampshire folk have a very difficult time moving past discussing the weather and into developing an actual rapport. Certainly it has something to do with the general culture of the region in addition to the geographical lack of personal proximity. Overall, the experience of dealing with these folks feels like standing in a room full of supermodels while wearing thin, white pants and liberating a dubiously wet fart.

Tailgaters – No, I’m not talking about the fun game day / race day kind. Rather, I’m talking about the ‘can’t see the front hood of the car behind me’ variety. I arrived to New England with Nevada license plates and thought perhaps the constant tailgating had something to do with the colors on my car. However, that’s just how they roll in NH. Ironically, road signs in the state say something about ‘driving courteously is the New Hampshire way.’ I think this is an attempt at irony. It seriously doesn’t matter what speed you go, where you are, or what time it is. On any given road, you will instantly have some jackass riding your butt. You should also note that this is a rural society, where traffic congestion is a serious rarity. It's not like the roads are jammed up and you have to wait for a rare opening to pass. Even more perplexing is that when you eventually find yourself behind a slower driver, they actually are so unfamiliar with respectful driving that if you go to pass, they try to spoil the attempt by speeding up. My conclusion is that tailgating is their default position. The NH Driver Education manual reads - Get on the road; drive fast until you catch up with someone; stay on their ass as long as possible; repeat steps 2 and 3.

Nosy neighbors – During our introduction to the two nearest neighbors, my wife and I noted that both ladies felt obligated to toss in an unsolicited disclaimer of how they were not at all nosy. This was just the first clue that indicated exactly the opposite. Nosiness is especially ironic given the rural nature of the state. You sort of have to go out of your way to even have a sight line to the neighbors, but it’s possible. If you pay attention, the neighbors will repeatedly out themselves by mentioning some detail about what you did recently, whom they saw at your house, and whatever minute details of your day they ‘happened’ to notice. An actual quote from a neighbor when we were prepping for our move south – “I did see that you were up in your attic, so I figured something was going on.” Fortunately, we never got around to discussing my toilet paper usage, or bathroom schedule.

This view is considered socializing in New Hampsh-a