One of my best used-book finds ever was a copy of 1912's Hygiene for the Worker, a book published to help young men and women become happy, healthy, and unquestioning factory-laborers. The book is wonderful in so many ways. The illustrations are simultaneously delightful and creepy, the language is charmingly outdated, and the lessons in the book attempt to create a race of scrubbed-clean, milk-drinking super employees who spend their vacations at home "laying up a greater store of health and energy than the young people who come back tired and weary from having too good a time at the mountains and other regular summer resorts."

I love Hygiene for the Worker a lot, and thus I was pleased to recently discover that it has been digitized by Google Books. I highly recommend taking a skim through this hilariously outdated, yet sometimes disturbingly pertinent book.

As some of you may know, one of my embroidered shirts was recently featured in Philadelphia Style magazine. In the article, they lovingly refer to me as a "Philly native." But since this three-inch-long feature is surely going to shoot me straight into stardom, I would like to take this opportunity to address a possible scandal:

I, Meg Favreau, am not a Philadelphia native.

I'm sorry. But in my defense, I never told them as I was. I merely seized this city as my own after moving here and somehow conned my way into two jobs where I write as a "Philadelphia insider." But no, I am not a Philly native.

I originally hail from northern New Hampshire. It's a rough-and-tumble land, a land that’s easy to lie about because most people haven't visited there. I was born in an abandoned hunting camp. The first meal I was fed post-womb was not breast milk, but a traditional deer jerky known as "Infant’s Lesson," designed to separate the strong babies from the weak. I was riding moose by the time I was three. Oh, it sounds fun, but it was a hard life. We didn’t get the internet until I was thirteen-years-old, and to this day my parents only have dial-up. Yes, northern New Hampshire is a vast Luddite wilderness, a wilderness that creates stubborn pride and snowmobilers. But I knew I wanted something more than a Ski-Doo. I wanted to live somewhere where I could get DSL. I wanted to live somewhere where "going out for the evening" didn't mean taking a 30-pack of Coors to the spot in the woods where a guy was scalped in the 1700's. I wanted to live somewhere where no one knew about the grave error I made in the 1996 Moose-Riding Pageant for Eligible Girls, turning my moose right into the audience instead of left into the show ring.

So I came to Philadelphia. And even though I didn't intend to, I planted roots in its glass-littered soil.

Am I a Philly native by birth? No. Am I a Philly native by blood? No, I still have the New Hampshire and its Lyme disease running through my blood. But am I a Philly Native when magazines want to claim a young, new designer as their own before anyone else does? Yes I am. And in the end, isn't that what matters?