A co-worker of mine has a t-shirt on today. The banner on it says Hawaii (no apostrophe).

Below is this image:

Um, no. Na-uh. Nope.

T-shirt people, you’re going to need to try harder. My co-worker, to her credit, seemed sanguine about the state mix-up on her shirt, when I pointed it out. (She was, no doubt, thrilled to have me, her boss, point out the error on her shirt. Thrilled all day long.)

Had I not just gotten back from Hawai’i, I wouldn’t have known what the Hawai’i state flag looks like. I still would have known that the image was all kinds of wrong. Last time I checked tweren’t any palmetto trees to be found in our fiftieth state.

How colonial of you, Hawai’i.

The palmetto one is South Carolina. There are palmettos there. It’s a thing.

It all reminded me of the moment on Miss America: Reality Check where Miss Pennsylvania couldn’t find her state flag.

Look! I found it for her. (To be fair, she did have the good grace to be chagrined afterward).

The Hawai’i/South Carolina t-shirt is what we get for outsourcing. How is someone in a third world country to know that the palm looking tree is a palmetto and has nothing to do with Hawai’i? Maybe it’s because of how my mind works, but I like knowing random stuff. Not all the random stuff. Just enough that the world makes a little sense sometimes.

Knowing my state flag and noting the ones of states I visit seems the least I can do.

My honey, as a child, participated in a school performance in which a piece called “Fifty Nifty United States” was featured.

A lyrical interlude…

50 Nifty United States
from the 13 original colonies
50 nifty stars on the flag
that billow so beautifully in the breeze

Each individual state
contributes a quality that is great!
Each individual state
deserves a bow
Let’s salute them now!

In alphabetical order, the kids were to shout the name of the state whose flag they were holding and raise the flag in the air. She was to be holding New Jersey. She left the flag in the cloakroom. Quoting Honey directly, “…[W]hen New Jersey’s turn came, I remained quiet rather than drawing attention to the fact that I had no flag, hoping no one would notice the omission.” In other words, they just went straight from New Hampshire to New Mexico. Here’s my compensatory raising of the New Jersey flag:

In case you’re interested, and even if you’re not, here are the states I have not yet visited. My criteria for a visit? I must have at least stopped to see something somewhere in the state other than the airport. I’m on a roll, having gotten to Colorado in ‘07 and Hawai’i in 08.

The missing ones are: Idaho (scheduled for ‘09–Gem State, here I come!), Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nebraska, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, South Dakota, and Washington. I should note about that last one, that in addition to my strong support of this year’s Miss Washington, I regularly have dreams (like while asleep, not figurative “I-wish-I-had-been-an-astronaut” kind of aspirations) about going to the top of the Space Needle. I have NO idea why. Feel free to share out in comments how many missing states you have and/or your interpretation of my Space Needle dream.

I’ll be learning the flags as I go.

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