Email:
winter statistic:
98% OF AMERICANS SCREAM BEFORE GOING IN THE DITCH ON A SLIPPERY ROAD.
THE OTHER 2% ARE FROM COLORADO AND THEY SAY,
“HOLD MY SODA AND WATCH THIS.”
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Now, you’re from Colorado if………
You eat ice cream in the winter.
It snows 5 inches and you don’t expect school to be cancelled.
You’ll wear flip flops every day of the year, regardless of temperature.
You have no accent at all, but can hear other people’s.
And then you make fun of them.
“Humid” is over 25%.
Your sense of direction is: Toward the mountains and Away from the mountains.
You say “the interstate” and everybody knows which one.
You think that May is a totally normal month for a blizzard.
You buy your flowers to set out on Mother’s day, but try and hold off planting them until just before Father’s day.
You grew up planning your Halloween costumes around your coat.
You know what the Continental Divide is.
You don’t think Coors beer is that big a deal.
You went to Casa Bonita as a kid, AND as an adult.
You’ve gone off-roading in a vehicle that was never intended for such activities.
You always know the elevation of where you are.
You wake up to a beautiful, 80 degree day and you wonder if it’s gonna snow later.
You don’t care that some company renamed it, the Broncos still play at Mile High Stadium!!!
Every movie theater has military and student discounts.
You actually know that ** South Park ** is a real place, not just a dumb show on TV.
You know what a ‘trust fund hippy’ is, and you know its natural habitat is Boulder .
You know you’re talking to a fellow Coloradoan when they call it “Elitches,” not “”Six Flags.”
A bear on your front porch doesn’t bother you.
Your two favorite teams are the Broncos and whoever is beating the crap out of the Raiders.
When people back East tell you they have mountains in their state too, you just laugh.
You go anywhere else on the planet and the air feels “sticky” and you notice the sky is no longer blue.
FORWARD THIS IF YOU LIVE IN OR ARE FROM COLORADO !!!
The informant is a 65-year-old ghost writer and editor who lives in Carefree, Arizona. He lived in Colorado for about 25 years before he moved to Florida 7 years ago then moved to Arizona about two years ago.
The informant told me his brother- or sister-in-law in Iowa sent this email to him.
The informant told me he liked it because
People from Colorado could relate to it. [He liked that it talked about the] regional things Coloradans take for granted. Its the inside joke thing. People love to share jokes that other people wouldnt get, and this is one of those.
He told me he, sent it to everyone he knew that either lived in Colorado or had lived in Colorado because he thought “they would get a kick out of it.”
To me, as a fellow Coloradan, this joke certainly was funny, the wording makes it seem like these jokes are the ones that circulate about Coloradans rather than those Coloradans would say about themselves. For one things, the first joke has a clear tell that the “joke teller” in this email is not from Colorado – they had the Coloradan ask the passenger to hold their “soda”. Coloradans make fun of people incessantly when they say “soda” instead of “pop”. Soda to a Coloradan refers to club soda, not Coca Cola. Also, most of these one-liners need an outside reference to make them funny. “Humid” to people in the Midwest and on the East Coast is 90% humidity; 25% is nearly unheard of. And yet to a Coloradan 25% is more humid than normal. Unless one is able to take an outsiders perspective on most of these jokes, they aren’t funny – they’re simply how life is lived. So what. For example, for someone who eats ice cream in the winter all the time, it’s pointless to point it out. I think it is telling as well that the informant, a man who hasn’t lived in Colorado for 7 years, sent it to me, another ex-Coloradan, and initially got it from an Iowan. None of us currently live in Colorado. I don’t think this joke cycle would be as funny to someone who’d spent their whole lives in Colorado. Its humor depends on the transience of populations with people comparing the norms of one place with those of another. In this way, this joke cycle represents the transient nature of Americans as wells as the idiosyncrasies of Coloradans.