F. Scott Fitzgerald once described the very rich as "not like you and me." Hemingway disagreed, saying the only difference is that they have more money than the rest of us. I'm sure there's an element of truth in both of these statements, but sometimes I'm reminded just how differently they live.
This guy is retiring and is going to be an "executive in residence" and make $75,000 a year for 24 hours of work because "His BlackBerry contains 1,300 names of movers and shakers in Northeast Ohio."
I wonder what kind of work this involves, or if they're simply hiring his Blackberry. I also wonder how you end up with over a thousand phone numbers and what happens if said device gets stolen. I wonder if these people were such movers and shakers why nothing seems to be moving or shaking unless they've been raking in graft like the rest of the upper echelons have been, but my guess is they live in the suburbs or the really exclusive parts of the city in a world far removed from my own.
One of my great-uncles told me that when I went to school I should figure out who the rich and connected kids were and hang out with them because then I would go far in life and be successful. One of my uncles dropped out but his fraternity connections have taken him everywhere and he's pretty well off. I hear other people talk like this, and it's not like they're bad people, it's just such a different mentality than what I was raised with and how I see things.
I didn't do so well at this, majoring in English and an unfinished art minor, and the rich kids I knew were all pretending that they weren't from Shaker, Solon or Hudson, dumpster-diving and sleeping on mats and being fake Buddhists, talking about anarchy and consumerism while spending loads of money on concert tickets, drugs, surround sound systems, Apple products, and eternal grad school.
It was so weird to be eating at vegan potlucks as kids whose dads made six figures talked about "workers of the world" and how that world was far removed from my own, where you either did community college or got lucky and went to a state school if your grades were good and you got some scholarships or financial aid, where your "ethnic" last name shows where you are in the social strata especially when you get outside your city.
I could theoretically move and shake at my place of employment but I enjoy my fellow peons far more than most of those who have letters after their names who only associate with others on their level.
I don't tend to trust most people in suits as it is, since it seems like most of the evil in the world is perpetrated by the well-dressed. The men that I grew up admiring are people like my dad, coming home after working 12 hour days, with cracked hands covered in dirt and salt, wearing old hoodies and thermals and work boots, who listen to the Rolling Stones and NPR and reading all sorts of books, with a lack of interest in affluence and a preference for good music and maybe a baseball game or two.
My dad once told me he couldn't work behind a desk and dress up for work every day. It's something I do but I don't have to bother with power suits or trying to sell things. I've gotten to know a lot of people between where I live and work and worship, and so does he. It's just that the people he knows are Palestinians, Pakistanis, and Vietnamese families who run the corner stores, the Puerto Rican kids who stock the shelves at Marc's, and the people he plays music with and goes to church with.
That's what I know best and am attracted to most, and I'm sure that sometimes I judge those outside that circle a bit unfairly if I'm honest. It's a world that is both closed and uninteresting to me that seems so calculating and ungenuine.
And in the wake of more major political shenanigans and shadiness on a large scale, I'm more and more convinced that C.S. Lewis had it so right here:
"The greatest evil is not done in those sordid dens of evil that Dickens loved to paint but is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clear, carpeted, warmed, well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voices."
Friday, December 10, 2010
Thursday, December 9, 2010
the ice age is coming, the sun's zooming in...
So I've survived the first great snow of the year, exiting a crowded bus to walk downtown past almost a mile of complete gridlock to catch the train home. I brushed about 6 inches of snow off the car, gave a lady at the stop a ride to the church on the way to Save-A-Lot, and was thankful for the delays because it gave me more time to prepare dinner for some friends.
People act like it's the end of the world when it starts to snow but these are the times when I love public transit the most, especially looking at how my car insurance jumped in the last year between a crash last year, 2 tickets, and living in a city where cars get stolen all the time. When it's icy and gridlocked, it's nice to have someone else driving so that I can be amused by the antics of high schooler and work my way through Patti Smith's "Just Kids."
But once the heat is turned up and the stereo on, the red novena candles are lit, and the kitchen smells like curry and cinnamon, and I'm surrounded with those I love, drinking tea and snacking on egg rolls, it's a beautiful thing. We talk and laugh and share our joys and sorrows and stresses, help each other get through the hard times.
We've had a lot of hard times these past few years, stressed about work or lack of it, family, friends, relationships, ourselves. It's so easy especially in our culture to get into these romantic notions of being a loner and struggling through by oneself, but we need each other way more than we'll ever admit to and more than we'll ever know.
People act like it's the end of the world when it starts to snow but these are the times when I love public transit the most, especially looking at how my car insurance jumped in the last year between a crash last year, 2 tickets, and living in a city where cars get stolen all the time. When it's icy and gridlocked, it's nice to have someone else driving so that I can be amused by the antics of high schooler and work my way through Patti Smith's "Just Kids."
But once the heat is turned up and the stereo on, the red novena candles are lit, and the kitchen smells like curry and cinnamon, and I'm surrounded with those I love, drinking tea and snacking on egg rolls, it's a beautiful thing. We talk and laugh and share our joys and sorrows and stresses, help each other get through the hard times.
We've had a lot of hard times these past few years, stressed about work or lack of it, family, friends, relationships, ourselves. It's so easy especially in our culture to get into these romantic notions of being a loner and struggling through by oneself, but we need each other way more than we'll ever admit to and more than we'll ever know.
Wednesday, December 8, 2010
history is people.
I had an amazing history teacher in high school who gave me a love of the weirdness and strangeness of what people do and ignited a love of all things strange in regards to world politics. He told us about Watergate-era pranks and the foibles of various world leaders which made it come alive and gave it this surreal human element that was much more interesting.
He never tried to indoctrinate us into any political belief system even though we begged him to tell us whether he had voted for Bush or Gore. Instead, he taught us to think for ourselves, how to argue a point of view and back it up with facts, had us reading primary sources and debating issues in class like our colonization of the Philippines or dropping the atomic bomb and didn't shy away from the more unsavory chapters.
He took us on field trips to the local cemetery and the art museum, we listened to campaign trail music from the days of Andrew Jackson, watched clips of civil rights marches, "Birth of a Nation," "The Great Dictator," "Dr. Strangelove," and "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" and "Amistad," to give us context.
He told us that we were cogs in a Henry Ford-esque assembly line, given what we were perceived to need to become productive members of society, and that even though this was how the education system was set up, he wanted us to see it for what it was, and to be able to think things through for ourselves.
Yesterday we went through some Human Resources training and using Mr. Sketch Markers and giant Post-It notes reminded me of being in AP History again, having to come up with things to present to our group and us snarky slacker Dead Kennedys-loving honor students in thrift store hoodies and punk band t-shirts writing nonsense like "Those Damn Socialists" as a cause for this or that, only in this case, conformity was encouraged rather than railed against.
At a previous job, I didn't do so well with diversity training during an exercise where we were shown photos of various people and were asked to make assumptions about them and rate how nice they would probably be on a scale of 1-10. I put straight fives all the way through because they're just photos and I know nothing about the person unless I talk to them.
Evidently I wasn't supposed to do this. But really now. That intimidating biker looks like one of my uncles, the young black male looks like a guy I once dated, the Latina lady looks like my next door neighbor. You just don't know anything about people unless you get to know them.
I still sometimes feel like I'm straddling the cusp of the world of young people and the world of "grownups" when I hear people talk about how "weird" these young kids can be with their sagging pants and piercings and bizarre haircuts. That's one of the things I enjoy to be honest because it makes for great people watching.
I like seeing mohawks, afros, dye jobs, dreadlocks, and hi-top fades, the way that subsequent generations resurrect and remix past eras, the golden age of hip-hop, the eternally timeless rockers with long hair and Zeppelin t-shirts, 70's punks like it happened yesterday, and the kids who you can tell just discovered Bukowski and Kerouac or conversely Malcolm X and Marcus Garvey.
Maybe it's just me.
I couldn't imagine spending my life going to workshops and speaking this jargonized motivational corporate language yet hardly ever work with actual people. It's assumed that we'll make judgments based on skin color or whether or not someone has a blue hair when if anything I've had more of a problem with creepy old men of all ethnicities and dramatic middle-aged women.
I find myself marveling at the reverse Orwellian jargon that says something in a way that's supposed to be less abrasive but only obscures the meaning. If anything, instead of reducing language, we've just learned how to describe things in ways that sound more bureaucratic and acceptable. "Policy" becomes "Strict Guidelines," "Torture" is now known as "Enhanced Interrogation." Whatever. It is what it is and calling it as it is isn't going to kill anyone.
And for the record, besides Mr. Rollins himself, this is my favorite kind of HR:
He never tried to indoctrinate us into any political belief system even though we begged him to tell us whether he had voted for Bush or Gore. Instead, he taught us to think for ourselves, how to argue a point of view and back it up with facts, had us reading primary sources and debating issues in class like our colonization of the Philippines or dropping the atomic bomb and didn't shy away from the more unsavory chapters.
He took us on field trips to the local cemetery and the art museum, we listened to campaign trail music from the days of Andrew Jackson, watched clips of civil rights marches, "Birth of a Nation," "The Great Dictator," "Dr. Strangelove," and "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" and "Amistad," to give us context.
He told us that we were cogs in a Henry Ford-esque assembly line, given what we were perceived to need to become productive members of society, and that even though this was how the education system was set up, he wanted us to see it for what it was, and to be able to think things through for ourselves.
Yesterday we went through some Human Resources training and using Mr. Sketch Markers and giant Post-It notes reminded me of being in AP History again, having to come up with things to present to our group and us snarky slacker Dead Kennedys-loving honor students in thrift store hoodies and punk band t-shirts writing nonsense like "Those Damn Socialists" as a cause for this or that, only in this case, conformity was encouraged rather than railed against.
At a previous job, I didn't do so well with diversity training during an exercise where we were shown photos of various people and were asked to make assumptions about them and rate how nice they would probably be on a scale of 1-10. I put straight fives all the way through because they're just photos and I know nothing about the person unless I talk to them.
Evidently I wasn't supposed to do this. But really now. That intimidating biker looks like one of my uncles, the young black male looks like a guy I once dated, the Latina lady looks like my next door neighbor. You just don't know anything about people unless you get to know them.
I still sometimes feel like I'm straddling the cusp of the world of young people and the world of "grownups" when I hear people talk about how "weird" these young kids can be with their sagging pants and piercings and bizarre haircuts. That's one of the things I enjoy to be honest because it makes for great people watching.
I like seeing mohawks, afros, dye jobs, dreadlocks, and hi-top fades, the way that subsequent generations resurrect and remix past eras, the golden age of hip-hop, the eternally timeless rockers with long hair and Zeppelin t-shirts, 70's punks like it happened yesterday, and the kids who you can tell just discovered Bukowski and Kerouac or conversely Malcolm X and Marcus Garvey.
Maybe it's just me.
I couldn't imagine spending my life going to workshops and speaking this jargonized motivational corporate language yet hardly ever work with actual people. It's assumed that we'll make judgments based on skin color or whether or not someone has a blue hair when if anything I've had more of a problem with creepy old men of all ethnicities and dramatic middle-aged women.
I find myself marveling at the reverse Orwellian jargon that says something in a way that's supposed to be less abrasive but only obscures the meaning. If anything, instead of reducing language, we've just learned how to describe things in ways that sound more bureaucratic and acceptable. "Policy" becomes "Strict Guidelines," "Torture" is now known as "Enhanced Interrogation." Whatever. It is what it is and calling it as it is isn't going to kill anyone.
And for the record, besides Mr. Rollins himself, this is my favorite kind of HR:
Friday, December 3, 2010
so I'm probably totally on a watchlist now...
... based on my Internet consumption.
We've been having a lot of fun with the newest batch of Wikileaks files due to our amusement regarding the antics of grown men and women with lots of money and power talking smack about each other.
For someone like me who prefers to follow the antics of Hugo Chavez, Silvio Berlusconi and his "bunga bunga parties", Muammar Gaddafi's fabulous wardrobe choices and long speeches, and Vladimir Putin's PR campaign of manly manliness, this stuff is pure comedy gold in a gossipy "did you hear what so-and-so said?" kind of way. And headlines like this are awesome.
It's like a gigantic geopolitical high school notebook passed around in class where everyone's dishing dirt on the cool kids and the weirdos and no one's holding anything back and there's much more at stake and Hillary Clinton evidently types in capital letters ALL THE TIME. As regional as this little outpost on the Internets is, I love reading about places that I really don't know much about especially since I don't know if I'll ever get the chance to travel to Kazakhstan.
For all this hope and change talk we get from our Kindler Gentler Machine Gun Hand, the same shit different day approach to foreign policy and national security makes me really glad I voted third party in 2008, what with the TSA molestations and new checkpoints and Gitmo and the School of the Americas (renamed the very reassuring Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation) being still open and us being in Afghanistan even longer than the Russians.
Besides, U.S. Government, you're depriving me of some damn good reading material here about Central Asian weddings involving men with golden guns and "jet-skiing under the influence."
It's infinitely more interesting than celebrities who are dying digitally by quitting Facebook and Twitter to tell us that AIDS kills people. No duh. Also, Janelle Monae, you are way too awesome to be a part of this ridiculousness. And L7 beat you all to it anyway.
It must be nice to feel like you've really given up a part of your life for a cause by just not being on the Internet for a few days. Way to really sacrifice. Aung San Suu Kyi would be so proud of you.
We've been having a lot of fun with the newest batch of Wikileaks files due to our amusement regarding the antics of grown men and women with lots of money and power talking smack about each other.
For someone like me who prefers to follow the antics of Hugo Chavez, Silvio Berlusconi and his "bunga bunga parties", Muammar Gaddafi's fabulous wardrobe choices and long speeches, and Vladimir Putin's PR campaign of manly manliness, this stuff is pure comedy gold in a gossipy "did you hear what so-and-so said?" kind of way. And headlines like this are awesome.
It's like a gigantic geopolitical high school notebook passed around in class where everyone's dishing dirt on the cool kids and the weirdos and no one's holding anything back and there's much more at stake and Hillary Clinton evidently types in capital letters ALL THE TIME. As regional as this little outpost on the Internets is, I love reading about places that I really don't know much about especially since I don't know if I'll ever get the chance to travel to Kazakhstan.
For all this hope and change talk we get from our Kindler Gentler Machine Gun Hand, the same shit different day approach to foreign policy and national security makes me really glad I voted third party in 2008, what with the TSA molestations and new checkpoints and Gitmo and the School of the Americas (renamed the very reassuring Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation) being still open and us being in Afghanistan even longer than the Russians.
Besides, U.S. Government, you're depriving me of some damn good reading material here about Central Asian weddings involving men with golden guns and "jet-skiing under the influence."
It's infinitely more interesting than celebrities who are dying digitally by quitting Facebook and Twitter to tell us that AIDS kills people. No duh. Also, Janelle Monae, you are way too awesome to be a part of this ridiculousness. And L7 beat you all to it anyway.
It must be nice to feel like you've really given up a part of your life for a cause by just not being on the Internet for a few days. Way to really sacrifice. Aung San Suu Kyi would be so proud of you.
Thursday, December 2, 2010
believeland
I'm working late tonight so I'll miss all of the drama that will go down a few blocks away from me. It seems like people are getting hyped up but since the Indians lost the World Series in '95 and '97, it's hard for me to get worked up too much about Cleveland sports. There's enough sadness in the city enough to grieve over without factoring in the antics of multimillionaire athletes.
And I can't stand Mr. Loan Shark Bloodsucker I'll-Put-A-Parking-Lot-in-Your-River Mr. Comic Sans Dan Gilbert.. But that's another rant for another time.
ESPN did a surprisingly good writeup of our love/hate relationship with our sports teams and ourselves that's really worth a read, especially if you're not from here.
And I love Harvey Pekar, because he tells it like it is. He wrote this 10 years ago in regards to the Rock Hall, and it's so true.
"Reason No. 1 is because it's supposed to exemplify Cleveland, the comeback city, the city that bounced back from the Cuyahoga River catching on fire. But Cleveland's not a comeback city. So what if there are more clubs around downtown. That's papering over the problems. Unemployment here is relatively high. There's a lot of poverty, which leads to poor school performance and more poverty. I would hope the performance of Cleveland school kids, which was the worst in Ohio, would mean more to local residents than a rock n roll show in a football stadium. But it doesn't. The connection between boosterism and the Rock Hall is nauseating..."
Speaking of boosterism, nothing says regional culture like Mr. Michael Stanley singing about our basketball team. I still hope that someone revives the production of Michael Stanley Superstar someday.
And I can't stand Mr. Loan Shark Bloodsucker I'll-Put-A-Parking-Lot-in-Your-River Mr. Comic Sans Dan Gilbert.. But that's another rant for another time.
ESPN did a surprisingly good writeup of our love/hate relationship with our sports teams and ourselves that's really worth a read, especially if you're not from here.
And I love Harvey Pekar, because he tells it like it is. He wrote this 10 years ago in regards to the Rock Hall, and it's so true.
"Reason No. 1 is because it's supposed to exemplify Cleveland, the comeback city, the city that bounced back from the Cuyahoga River catching on fire. But Cleveland's not a comeback city. So what if there are more clubs around downtown. That's papering over the problems. Unemployment here is relatively high. There's a lot of poverty, which leads to poor school performance and more poverty. I would hope the performance of Cleveland school kids, which was the worst in Ohio, would mean more to local residents than a rock n roll show in a football stadium. But it doesn't. The connection between boosterism and the Rock Hall is nauseating..."
Speaking of boosterism, nothing says regional culture like Mr. Michael Stanley singing about our basketball team. I still hope that someone revives the production of Michael Stanley Superstar someday.
frail children of dust...
It seems like every other parish church is boarded up now, and from what I hear, it's very hard to buy them. I think about St. John's Byzantine in the heart of the east side, with its beautiful murals and the light streaming through its missing windows. There is still a peace there even in the ruins. It makes me sad to see these places fade from the memory of their neighborhoods as the reverberations of white flight and lost faith continue to manifest themselves.
Every ethnic group had to have their own building and when most of those ethnic groups cleared out, they left so many places behind. It might have been "one holy Catholic church" but my Irish side of the family couldn't get baptized at the neighborhood Slovak parish back in the day.
I listened to people talk this week about new congregations and new communities and new directions forming in different neighborhoods and I was frustrated because as beautiful as something like this is, I still felt like I was being sold something. I get squeamish when I hear about five-year-plans and growth projections and recruiting charismatic individuals who will be catalysts in their communities.
It seems too business-like, too franchise-ish. The best people are not always the ones who know how to shake hands and kiss babies. I don't trust a lot of charismatic people because it seems so often that people are so easily blinded by their light and that they themselves can't always see beyond their own halo.
Maybe it's just that my weirdo artistic mind doesn't work that way and I'm being a bit harsh. If I read these words as true that we all say are true, we can do planting and watering all we want, but only God can make anything grow. Somehow that gets lost in the conversation.
Conversely, I don't know how I feel about churches that are trying so hard to be different and not like the often graceless sociopolitical force that came out of our parents' radios, but it ends up being just a bunch of social services where God is a spice rather than the sustenance of our existence. It's easy to feed the body in this society with so much excess but our souls are starving.
It all seems like a business enterprise or a "We Are the World" endeavor rather than something that has a whole lot to do with the Divine. We seem to make so many plans but God with His infinitely strange and fascinating sense of humor seems to turn them back around constantly because it's all about Him and not us.
Somehow it seems like we stopped talking about God and started talking about us talking about God along the way. We act like our stories and sufferings are so damn unique and important, that our generation "gets it," and is going to "change things" but as I look back and listen to those older than me talk, look at movements throughout history, and it's the same things and same cycles with different haircuts and pet causes.
He continues to do His work through so many reluctant ones, people who made bad decisions and made excuses and ran away and got profoundly depressed. It wasn't the best and the brightest and the coolest. I love that. There's a humanity in the scriptures that just resonates with me because these weren't perfect people being awesome all the time, they were just as messed up as anyone I know.
They get mad at God, they question Him, doubt Him, and praise Him, and get fed up with the messed-up-ness of the world and repeat that cycle over and over again.It resonates so deeply because I understand those feelings more and more.
There is nothing that I read that says to blindly follow, to believe everything someone says. It's loving God and others with heart, soul, mind, and strength. It's the difficult path of an intellectual engagement with something that empirically unprovable and yet deeper than I ever dreamed even if I doubt I'll ever have all the answers I want or be able to comprehend everything I see in front of me, but to know that others have been there is so beautiful and reassuring even as it seems like the world grows more cold and everyone around me falls away.
Every ethnic group had to have their own building and when most of those ethnic groups cleared out, they left so many places behind. It might have been "one holy Catholic church" but my Irish side of the family couldn't get baptized at the neighborhood Slovak parish back in the day.
I listened to people talk this week about new congregations and new communities and new directions forming in different neighborhoods and I was frustrated because as beautiful as something like this is, I still felt like I was being sold something. I get squeamish when I hear about five-year-plans and growth projections and recruiting charismatic individuals who will be catalysts in their communities.
It seems too business-like, too franchise-ish. The best people are not always the ones who know how to shake hands and kiss babies. I don't trust a lot of charismatic people because it seems so often that people are so easily blinded by their light and that they themselves can't always see beyond their own halo.
Maybe it's just that my weirdo artistic mind doesn't work that way and I'm being a bit harsh. If I read these words as true that we all say are true, we can do planting and watering all we want, but only God can make anything grow. Somehow that gets lost in the conversation.
Conversely, I don't know how I feel about churches that are trying so hard to be different and not like the often graceless sociopolitical force that came out of our parents' radios, but it ends up being just a bunch of social services where God is a spice rather than the sustenance of our existence. It's easy to feed the body in this society with so much excess but our souls are starving.
It all seems like a business enterprise or a "We Are the World" endeavor rather than something that has a whole lot to do with the Divine. We seem to make so many plans but God with His infinitely strange and fascinating sense of humor seems to turn them back around constantly because it's all about Him and not us.
Somehow it seems like we stopped talking about God and started talking about us talking about God along the way. We act like our stories and sufferings are so damn unique and important, that our generation "gets it," and is going to "change things" but as I look back and listen to those older than me talk, look at movements throughout history, and it's the same things and same cycles with different haircuts and pet causes.
He continues to do His work through so many reluctant ones, people who made bad decisions and made excuses and ran away and got profoundly depressed. It wasn't the best and the brightest and the coolest. I love that. There's a humanity in the scriptures that just resonates with me because these weren't perfect people being awesome all the time, they were just as messed up as anyone I know.
They get mad at God, they question Him, doubt Him, and praise Him, and get fed up with the messed-up-ness of the world and repeat that cycle over and over again.It resonates so deeply because I understand those feelings more and more.
There is nothing that I read that says to blindly follow, to believe everything someone says. It's loving God and others with heart, soul, mind, and strength. It's the difficult path of an intellectual engagement with something that empirically unprovable and yet deeper than I ever dreamed even if I doubt I'll ever have all the answers I want or be able to comprehend everything I see in front of me, but to know that others have been there is so beautiful and reassuring even as it seems like the world grows more cold and everyone around me falls away.
Monday, November 29, 2010
things you wish you didn't know...
I came home last night after being out all day to get my life back in order before starting another week, putting things away, digging out some of the Christmas decorations, and doing the dishes that had sat in the sink a few days since I hadn't planned on being gone this weekend.
I get stressed out at the start of the Thanksgiving season, having the existential life crisis that comes with marking another year of being alive combined with having to hear "Walking in a Winter Wonderland" every ten minutes when I venture into any place of commerce, or finding myself veering near trouble at social gatherings when politics are discussed. I just got texting last year and I don't know what's in the theater or on tv or what the kids are listening to these days.
I straddle this gap of relative affluence (full time job, functioning car, and extra income due to a low standard of living) compared to many of my neighbors and peers, while those I grew up with are buying apps for their iPhones, eating out at places where I can swing food or a drink but not both, going on vacation, living in places that people aren't afraid to visit after dark.
And I'm content and honestly happy, but sometimes I feel embarrassed when some see where I live or it's awkward when I hear people stereotype neighborhoods or certain groups and those places and people are friends and places where I've hung out.
I'm wondering why I feel so okay with most of my life except when I'm faced with feeling out of place in places where others feel so comfortable and so at ease in places and with people that others avoid.
And then...
I wasn't expecting to see a cockroach last night, a pretty big one, and the only thing I had on hand was the bottle of Ajax dishwashing liquid and I drowned it the best I could before calling my landlord who's going to call an exterminator.
Of course, one roach always means there's more. The people who lived there before me weren't the cleanest and my landlord had told me that there had been problems in the past but we also found one the same week I moved out of the old apartment.
And just to be on the safe side, I'll be buying some plastic containers, boric acid, and all manner of other fun things tonight. I'm not really freaked out, I just want the damn things gone. When I was living in Kent, I was the go-to girl in dorm rooms and apartments to kill vermin because I'm good at it and don't get freaked out.
My mom says that out of the three of her kids, I could live in a third world country most easily. Sometimes when I drive through the surrounding neighborhoods where everything's falling apart and there's this sense of hopelessness and impending violence and look at the mansions just around the corner, I feel like I do.
I get stressed out at the start of the Thanksgiving season, having the existential life crisis that comes with marking another year of being alive combined with having to hear "Walking in a Winter Wonderland" every ten minutes when I venture into any place of commerce, or finding myself veering near trouble at social gatherings when politics are discussed. I just got texting last year and I don't know what's in the theater or on tv or what the kids are listening to these days.
I straddle this gap of relative affluence (full time job, functioning car, and extra income due to a low standard of living) compared to many of my neighbors and peers, while those I grew up with are buying apps for their iPhones, eating out at places where I can swing food or a drink but not both, going on vacation, living in places that people aren't afraid to visit after dark.
And I'm content and honestly happy, but sometimes I feel embarrassed when some see where I live or it's awkward when I hear people stereotype neighborhoods or certain groups and those places and people are friends and places where I've hung out.
I'm wondering why I feel so okay with most of my life except when I'm faced with feeling out of place in places where others feel so comfortable and so at ease in places and with people that others avoid.
And then...
I wasn't expecting to see a cockroach last night, a pretty big one, and the only thing I had on hand was the bottle of Ajax dishwashing liquid and I drowned it the best I could before calling my landlord who's going to call an exterminator.
Of course, one roach always means there's more. The people who lived there before me weren't the cleanest and my landlord had told me that there had been problems in the past but we also found one the same week I moved out of the old apartment.
And just to be on the safe side, I'll be buying some plastic containers, boric acid, and all manner of other fun things tonight. I'm not really freaked out, I just want the damn things gone. When I was living in Kent, I was the go-to girl in dorm rooms and apartments to kill vermin because I'm good at it and don't get freaked out.
My mom says that out of the three of her kids, I could live in a third world country most easily. Sometimes when I drive through the surrounding neighborhoods where everything's falling apart and there's this sense of hopelessness and impending violence and look at the mansions just around the corner, I feel like I do.
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