Indecisively Restless: Howdy Ya'll: Misconceptions about Living in Texas

25 July 2013

Howdy Ya'll: Misconceptions about Living in Texas

I've traveled a bit around the US and Mexico. My family and I would go on vacation various places around the United States. It was fun to get to see all the sights and the way other people lived, even if we weren't that far away.

I've lived in Texas, practically my entire life. I lived in Salt Lake City, Utah one year as a freshman in college. It was my first experience to how much other people didn't travel and just what exactly that meant when it came to common misconceptions about Texas.

When people heard I was from Texas, eyes would widen and they'd ask, what to me, were really ridiculous questions. "Do you own a horse?" "How big is your ranch?" "Do you own cows?"

In the beginning I laughed thinking they were kidding but the more people asked, the more I realized they were serious. A lot of these people thought I owned a ten-gallon hat, always wore cowboy boots and rode a horse to school.

Eventually I came up with, what I thought was a pretty clever response. When they asked me something about my horse I'd ask how many moms they had.

Some got the joke and laughed with me while others took it personally, angrily yelling at me that "not everyone lived that way." I'd calmly tell them that it was same case in Texas. Yes, we have people who own ranches (a lot of people but only because Texas itself is so huge) but that I lived in a city, didn't own a pair of cowboy boots and hated horses.

But we do have a lot of these.

Texas is a huge state. There is a lot of open area which means that a lot of people do in fact own ranches, wear hats (it's damn hot out here), and ride horses for whatever reason. But there is a lot of Texas that doesn't.

We have Austin: the so-called music capital of the world. It holds our capital in the center of town and it has 6th Street where all livers go to die.