The amount of time I have spent in New Jersey has led me to one conclusive and indisputable fact: it sucks. When you present this conclusion to someone from New Jersey, they will most certainly accuse you of judging the state based on a small strip of land surrounding the highways that pass through the state. This past fall, however, I volunteered on the campaign of now-governor Jim McGreevey and saw a great deal of the state beyond the highways. Unfortunately it's not much better.

The problem is that the entire state is really just one giant strip off a highway. Every town that you drive through is exactly the same. The outside of the town is composed of a number of gated communities and suburban developments with names like "Bubblybrook Meadows" or "Sunset Hills." Each of these developments consists of row after row of the exact same house, with the exact same paint job, each spaced exactly four and one half feet from the neighboring house. The only difference between homes is the color of the SUV in the driveway.

Down the center of every town is the main "strip." The strip consists of: an Applebees, a Wal-Mart, a Chevy Dealer, a diner and a Motor Inn, though not necessarily in that order. It doesn't matter where you get off the highway because you will be met with this exact configuration no matter where you are. The only reason that Trenton is the capital is that its Wal-Mart is a "Super Center."

One of the most common complaints against New Jersey is its famous highway system, and for good reason. The New Jersey Turnpike is a long, boring road that crosses the state from North to South. The state is so dull, that the highway planners could only manage to come up with about 19 different locations where anyone would actually want to get off of this road, and five or six of these are right at New York City. This is why when you're in Jersey, asking someone, "what exit" they live near gives only a broad, general description of where that person resides.

Because the Turnpike appeared that it was going to function way too efficiently in its original plans, a group of dedicated engineers came up with an idea known today simply as, "The Merge," whereby a full 17 lanes of high-speed traffic on the Turnpike merge into just one lane in a matter of eight yards. To the joy of the highway planners, this configuration manages to back up traffic for miles on even the slowest of traffic days.

For some reason that may be related to the viscosity of the pavement in New Jersey, tractor-trailers seem to roll over an awful lot on this particular road. Nearly anytime you drive through the state, a traffic advisory will advise you that there is an overturned tractor trailer at exit 8A, just after the merge, which has backed traffic up for the better part of next week. As you sit in your car waiting for things to clear up, you may very well see several tractor-trailers blowing past you like tumbleweeds in the wind.

After you exit the highway, the roads unfortunately do not get any better. The good folks of New Jersey have come up with something called a "jug handle" (I am not making this up) whereby you must make a RIGHT-hand turn just BEFORE you wish to make a left-hand turn. You then swing back around 180 degrees and cut back across the road from which you have just come. "But wait," you observe, "that would mean that you would have to know where you were turning left long before you actually needed to turn." This is absolutely correct, and it is the reason why no one who is not from New Jersey can ever find a damn thing that is not directly off of the highway or on the strip.

Besides outlawing the left-hand turn, the state of New Jersey has also made it illegal to pump your own gas. The result of this is that the state is creating an entire generation of young people who cannot pump gas and must be taught how to do so when they go away to college in Connecticut. I once saw a girl with Jersey plates on her car waiting at a self-service pump for someone to come and help her for forty-five minutes. True story. (No it isn't.)

The fact that students from New Jersey don't know how to pump their gas when they come to UConn means two very disturbing things. First, it means that they've never been out of the state of New Jersey and been forced to pump gas for themselves. Second, and more significantly, it means that they must have been tied up and blindfolded every time anyone has ever filled their car for them, because any knucklehead can figure out how to pump gasoline if they watch someone do it even once.

From my experience, the only people who truly love New Jersey are the people who haven't lived outside the state. Generally, anyone who has lived anywhere else, including Mogadishu, will favor that other location over New Jersey. Even the professional football teams that play in New Jersey refuse to identify with the state, but that gets us into a long history of New York City methodically defecating on New Jersey that I just don't have time for.

My friend Chris, who co-hosts the acclaimed new UCTV show "Row, Row, Row" Monday nights at 10:30, calls his home of Cape Cod the muscle of America, making New Jersey, of course, the armpit. I can't think of a more appropriate description.