Seattle has been someone else's favorite city for a while now.

The rent is three times what it was, the coffee shop your mom used to go to is a kombucha place, and everyone who moved here from San Francisco has opinions about the rain.

The woman who grew up in Ballard or Beacon Hill or Tacoma or Bellingham is not impressed by any of this.

WAAF. Washington As Fuck. Strange Allies put it in block letters with a lightning bolt and nothing else because nothing else is needed.

For the PNW women who grew up watching Mount Rainier decide whether it wanted to show itself on a given morning.

The mountain makes that call regardless of anyone's plans.

Grunge did not come from nowhere. It came from gray skies and wet pavement and years of being the city that the rest of the country forgot about until it couldn't.

Women in Washington grew up with Nirvana and Pearl Jam as background noise, not cultural artifacts. Just the radio. Just what was on.

The Cascades are not a backdrop. The Olympics are not a destination. They are just where you live.

And if you have to explain that to someone you met at a tech happy hour, the WAAF baby tee will do it faster.

The Washington State Ferries are the most ridden in the country and no one who takes them regularly has ever once called them scenic. They are infrastructure, not Instagram content.

The woman from Bainbridge Island or Vashon knows this. She has done the commute in rain and fog and summer sun and never photographed it.

Olympia, Spokane, Walla Walla, the San Juan Islands, the 206, the 253.

Washington is not one thing and the women from it know every version of it. The dry side. The wet side. The ferry schedule.

The souvenir that says what kind of Washington you mean. The gift for any woman who still calls it the PNW without having to think about it.

The mountain either shows up or it doesn't. Either way it's still there.