I’m Not Yelling From West Virginia

My friend Jacob and I drove down to West Virginia last weekend and spent the afternoon playing in the snow. While we were snowboarding, I got to thinking about all the T-Shirts that say, “I’m not yelling from West Virginia.” I am not a T-shirt hater, but sometimes I feel like I’m the bad guy because I don’t like someone’s opinion, no matter how stupid they are. Sometimes it feels like I’m constantly being told I’m not hearing what I want to hear. So I started thinking about all the T-Shirts that say, “I’m not yelling from West Virginia,” and I wondered why everyone was saying, “Why are you saying that?”

One of my friends who was sitting in the passenger seat said, “Why do you have to be a t-shirt hater?” I told him that I didn’t mind a T-Shirt if it meant I got free energy, or could count on a ride home from work, and he laughed. Then another guy in the car said, “Don’t you think your driver is nuts? He’s just talking loud like a cuckoo clock.” I thought to myself, I can take a Joke T-Shirt, a legitimate T-Shirt, and be just fine, but then I remembered that I was a T-Shirt hater, so I put on my I’m Not Yelling in West Virginia T-Shirt.

So as the day wore on, and we were talking about all the dumb comments people make about others, I was thinking to myself that maybe we should all just be ourselves, and if we really wanted to be heard, we’d be talking like someone who cared. Instead we were talking like, “I’m not yelling from West Virginia.” That brought me to think about all the BS comments people make about other people, and how mean they are. I guess I shouldn’t be too upset about that, I suppose. In hindsight now I guess I don’t care what other people say, I only care what I say, and say it with passion.