Jennie Smash

Study: Living in the Suburbs Can Make You Sick

Case in point: Did I ever tell you about the time I went to visit my high school guidance counselor, a semester after graduating? This is the woman who had made my life a hell all through school, asking me why I wasn’t taking more math classes and trying to get me to apply to schools far away when I could barely drive to the post office without having a panic attack. She had a bleached blonde moustache and a weird sour body odor, like bad milk or yogurt.

Anyway, I went to UMass and did really well. My GPA was a 3.9 my first semester, and I was really happy and felt well and successful and young and pleased with myself. So I went back to visit my guidance counselor, to show her that she’d been wrong.

“Good for you,” she said, pursing her mouth beneath its moustache. “Now what are you doing for … extra-curricular activities?”

I should have said “drinking”, but instead I just cried.

I know you’ll probably say that she was just one asshole, an isolated incident, nothing, certainly, from which to extrapolate an entire set of values. But I swear to you that she was emblematic of my high school, and in some ways, the snootier aspects of my town. Whatever you were doing, it wasn’t good enough.