Buy Or Don’t Buy

It used to be that you could always count on Pennsylvanians to be pretty high-quality people. Benjamin Franklin, Betsy Ross, Winfield Scott Hancock, John Oates, Andrew Bryniarski, Liza Weil: credits to the Keystone State all. (Sadly, for some reason the only people the Pennsylvania magic has not extended to are US Presidents.)

But two popular stories on The Huffington Post last Friday caught my eye, and suggested that maybe, after 233 years, Pennsylvania has finally started to produce some duds.

The first:

The Alexandria: Jon Gosselin’s New York Bachelor Pad

“Jon & Kate Plus 8″ newly single dad Jon Gosselin has supposedly moved into a two-bedroom apartment in The Alexandra, an Upper West Side building at 201 West 72nd Street.

People reports he moved into the building recently and stayed a night, shortly before taking off for France with his girlfriend Hailey Glassman and visiting his eight kids in Pennsylvania, where he is also obligated to film his TLC reality show.

The second:

Heather Zeo Arrested for Having Sex with Underage Student

Heather Zeo, a 36-year-old married mother of three who teaches at North Penn High School in Pennsylvania, was arrested for allegedly having sex with one of her underage students. The student described how the relationship escalated from Facebook flirtations to sexual intercourse during a courtroom appearance.

Prosecutors say that Zeo engaged in a “calculated seduction” and that they “will be asking for jail time.”

These stories are disheartening for a multitude of reasons. Let’s start with Story #1. Now, I don’t want to toot my own horn that much, but I like to think that — comparatively — I’m pretty awesome. Lots of life skills, fun to be around, very hard-working. And I live in a two-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn. (I’m not complaining; it’s a nice apartment, but it’s in the kind of neighborhood where liquor store clerks work behind clear plastic.) Meanwhile Jon Gosselin, who comes from the same part of Pennsylvania as I do, lives in luxury on the Upper West Side and takes vacations in France. The same Jon Gosselin whose main accomplishment in life is having a wife who gave birth to an above-average number of children. The same Jon Gosselin who quit his job in order to live off of his children full-time. I’m sure he’s a nice man, but he’s not exactly the best PA, or even Berks County, has to offer. [This line was originally a joke, but then I did research and found out Berks County has been home to Taylor Swift, Jon Updike, Richard Gere, Kerry Collins and Steve Burns. Go Berks County!]

The second story would appear to be one so small and tawdry as to hardly merit comment, except for the fact that North Penn High School is the same one from which my fellow BoDBers and I graduated. I never met Mrs. Zeo, (she wasn’t teaching there when I was a student, probably because Facebook wasn’t open to high schoolers yet) but that won’t stop me from offering a stern and condescending lecture to her. Thank you, Heather Zeo, math teacher. My high school used to be famous for state champion sports squads, an awesome TV show devoted to 78 rpm records, serving cookies-and-whipped-cream sandwiches and graduating writers of immensely popular Internet blogs — now it’s only famous for seductive homeroom teachers with sidelines in Christian music. To quote two famous Pennsylvanians of old, “I can’t go for that.”

Previous generations of Pennsylvania were noble and honorable and selfless. They signed the Declaration of Independence, fought in the Battle of Gettybsburg and visited Gettysburg National Military Park on school field trips. Fellow Pennsylvanians, you need to act now unless you want “The Keystone State” to turn into “The Skeezy Tabloid Fodder State.”