Different Ends of the Same Island

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It’s funny how different aspects of a fad or trend are so differently received in different places. The same clothes, same music, same label can mean one thing in one place, and mean the complete opposite just an hour’s drive away. Just one example of this stark contrast happened to me this very weekend—and not even in the city.

I went home for the weekend to help my parents around the house. To help out with all of the extra work—there’s lots of heavy lifting involved when it comes to horses—my mom asked her friend’s son Joe to come over. As we moved wood chips, branches and other ridiculously heavy things, we ended up talking about music. He tried to peg my musical interest: “You’re definitely a country girl, aren’t you?”

“That’s what my mom would want you to think,” I snorted as I carried a saddle past him. He tried to justify his guess, by saying that the plaid shirts and the boots that I always wore seemed to fit perfectly into a Garth Brooks video—not to mention the whole “horse thing,” he joked.

Sure, his assumptions seemed to make sense to me—but now that I live in the city, his strategy seemed a bit off. Here, everyone’s perspective seems so different than from Manorville, the little farm/forest town that I hail from. The exact same outfit that I was wearing as Joe dubbed me “country” jokingly got me labeled a “hipster” in my dorm’s common room. What’s the difference? How is it that the East End of Long Island has such a different opinion of various trends, when compared to Manhattan? And most of the people that called me “hipster” weren’t even from Manhattan—so even on different ends of the same island, perception can alter greatly (even about the small things, like flannel and boots).