See You in Palau, Beeyotch

Living in the Pennsylvania burbs has its pluses and its minuses.

I'm reasonably certain that one could say that about living just about anywhere. Like, for instance, Sheboygan probably a pretty nice town, but it's got to be a tough place to live if you have difficulty spelling words like "Sheboygan."

I'll bet living in Sheboygan isn't all shits-and-gigs if you're black, too. I'm not sure they have too many black folks in Wisconsin.

Anyway, getting back to the suburban environs of Pennsylvania, which is where I be at (yo) I do very much like it here, most of the time. This is, after all, where I am from and it is where (in spite of the fact that my sister is moving across the street in thirteen days) I am staying. On the plus side, we've got pretty much everything that you could possibly want. If you want theatre-- we've got tons of it. If you want drugs-- we've got tons of that, too. Hot little Asian pre-med students wandering around center city in scrubs? We've got Drexel, Penn, Jefferson, and the Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine for the ones that, you know, just couldn't quite make the cut.

Sales tax in the burbs is 6%, which I find to be reasonable. We have a saturation of culture and education-- the lower Main Line alone has more elite private schools than you've got irregularly-shaped moles on your back, and we're currently leading the nation in the category of Most Lexus SUVs Per Driveway. In short, Pennsylvania's a great place to live, if you can stand all the jokes about Intercourse, PA, the fact that one of our most famous, living African-Americans is a cop-killer, and that we frequently labor under the misapprehension that our meteorologists are celebrities.

The problem, though, with living here is that, when you create online accounts or pay for something or order tickets to a show or basically anytime you're entering your mailing address online, when you get to "State" and you type that letter "P," for "Pennsylvania," the goddamn computer thinks you live in Palau.

Puh. Lauw.

Yes, we are talking about the small island nation in the Pacific Ocean, located approximately 500 miles east of the Philippines, 2,000 miles south of Japan, and nowhere near anything else of any consequence. According to http://www.happyzebra.com/, which, due to its name I inherently trust, it is 8,080.1 miles from Milwaukee (Wisconsin) to Koror (Palau). Exact distance from Sheboygan proper was, apparently, incalculable.

In any event, PayPal, my bank, various cultural ticketing agencies, online retailers, and AT&T all want to content themselves with thinking that my wife, my dogs and I all reside in Palau-- perhaps in a house that looks something like this:

I can assure you that this is not the case. Kinda nice, though, don't you think?

I thought I might take a little time today to learn something about the island nation I am typically thought to live in according to online merchants. It's an archipelago known as "The Black Islands," though, on images taken from helicopter, they look rather green. There are several other jokes I was going to make here, but I think we'll just leave it at that.

Having no military of its own, Palau relies on the American armed forces for its defense, much like the rest of the world that has a military of its own does, whether they like it or not. No doubt this dependence makes our brave servicemen pleased.


N'yah mean?

The religious background of Palau is quite interesting, with the predominance of its inhabitants answering to Jesus Christ, courtesy of a heavy Japanese and German missionary work back in the mid-20th century. According to Wikipedia, which is maybe almost as trustworthy as a happy zebra, "There is a small Jewish community in Palau. In 2009, it sent 3 members to the 18th Maccabiah Games." And, again, we'll just leave that alone, if we know what's good for us.

It's nice to know, though, that, should my wife and I choose to make the jump across the ocean to settle in the place where (Jewish?) pygmies settled nearly 4,000 years ago, that, if we looked hard enough, we'd find some place to go to synagogue.

Not that we do that in the suburbs of Pennsylvania, of course.