Open Letter #5 : Dear Cleveland Part 2

Dear Cleveland,

The last time we talked, you reminded me of a lousy significant other, now you seem like a whiny teenager.

So the cool kids are dissing you again. They said you're lame and miserable. Are you surprised?

That + sign at the end of your name was corny to begin with because everyone knows that we don't have it all together.

And that's ok. Nobody does.

See, rebranding only takes you so far. It's like transferring to a new high school with a totally new wardrobe and identity as the prom queen or the hipster but then you run into someone from the past who remembers when you had a stupid haircut, played Magic and Yugi-Oh!, and listened to nothing but Korn and has the photos to prove it.

I just don't know if talking about how awesome you are on the Internet is going to do all that much good. It's like being one of those middle schoolers in Sticksville posting pictures of themselves on Myspace with their sweet new haircuts or whatever. You still have nothing to do on Friday night, not that many friends, and you're just calling attention to that fact. Making fun of Detroit only signifies how low on the pecking order you really are.

See, you just need to find your group of people that don't care about being in the top 10 or the popular crowd. You're not New York City, Los Angeles, Portland, or Vegas. You're not going to be one of the beautiful people so why even try? They've got their own thing going on and so do you. Do you really need a casino or a snobby music scene?

You've got a lot of great qualities that you ignore because you don't want to be who you are. You've got a great sense of humor, an unpretentious vibe, and great taste in art and music without being totally pretentious. You can cook anything. You can watch sports without being obnoxious. You're not the most glamorous or fashionable but you've got your own style and it's fun and the people that are going to be drawn to you are the people you'd rather hang out with anyway.

And that's just my two cents, my little motivational pep talk for you. Screw the facelifts on your downtown, go to some museums, dig into your local history, write a damn novel, support your friends' artistic endeavors, hang out with your awesome neighbors, chow down on those pierogis and thank me later.

love,

that girl.

open letter #6, dear anonymous

From the comments of my previous Open Letter

Anonymous said...

Dear Blogger,

I feel your pain. The solution is to find another city to love. You can give all your youth, energy and passion to Cleveland, and it will bleed you dry. Yes, Cleveland has some interesting aspects to it, I myself have always enjoyed Cinematheque, Westside Market, the Orchestra, etc.; however, it is the attitude of people and the overall economic climate that cannot overcome a couple of hotspots. Move on and move up.

Dear Anonymous,

That's easy for you to say. I wonder what constitutes "moving on" and "moving up." Is that the Sunbelt, the East Coast, the West Coast, Chicago? I wonder where you grew up, and what shaped you and where you are now.

Yes, there is a lot of unemployment and despair. But I don't think that we're unique in that regard. That's a good chunk of our country right there. And when I hear people talk who've moved out and moved on, they don't seem that much happier because happiness is not where you live or what you have.

I've never been all that ambitious. If I was, I would have left long ago. I've never cared about moving on or moving up. One of my friends lived in DC for a few years and she said it was horrible because even though there were all these amazing things going on everywhere, she had no one to hang out with and it just made the loneliness worse.

At this point, I'm surrounded by such a great crew of friends and family. We don't need much to be entertained. Give us some cans of Arizona and a five-dollar pizza and we'll hang out all night. We love cultural events and history and going out, but that's not why we exist. That gets pointless too.

This is the place where God has put me, and I'm content here. I could be happy somewhere else but there's a part of me that's inevitably drawn to places that people write off. My heart breaks for this city, but it'd break if I was in Chicago or DC or Seattle too. I'm sure that I could live almost anywhere if I could find a sense of community and people who are real, but right now, here is where it's at.

open letter #5: Dear Cleveland

Dear Cleveland,

It's really hard to love you sometimes. All your empty homes and broken dreams, annually reselling our souls and our firstborns to men in suits who suck us dry, and girls go missing but no one pays attention because they're from "that side" of town. You get drunk and complain about your losing sports teams. You listen to the same old songs on WMMS or KISS FM. Like a codependent girlfriend, I just can't quit you. I don't mind that you haven't shaved or that you smell funky.

One of my friends tells me that you're like Detroit's younger sister... where she is in 5 years is where you'll be. I think about all those homes going for about what I pay in rent a month, the casinos like alien spaceships landing on a deserted civilization sucking the life out of the city. More people on the street, more desperation. The suburbanites say "oh this will give us something to do!" but they don't like going anywhere anyway because it's "too ghetto" once you hit even the inner ring suburbs.

I think about what you'll look like in a few years, bloated with the salaries of lazy self-serving civil servants, starved in every other way, filled with self-loathing as your lifeblood hemorrhages out of you, leaving behind streets of empty homes and sordid tales. I hope there's something left of you, that you don't die on me.

I sometimes feel like I'm in a dysfunctional relationship with you.

Open Letter #4

Dear Cleveland Municipal Court

You suck.

It must be nice to only show up to work 7 hours a week and take home $150,000 a year and then some for not doing anything and having a crappy website that doesn't work and hasn't been updated and for leaving you on hold for indefinite amounts of time when you finally DO get through, we get to deal with your minions who don't know anything except how to be rude and bureaucratic. Yay nepotism. Too bad I'm not Democrat so I can't get a slice of that pie.

I know we're poor and all and it seems like there's a lot of revenue generating action going on right now at $190 a pop since evidently the traffic cameras aren't doing the trick anymore. I got pulled over a few weeks ago, my brother-in-law got a ticket, my dad got pulled over, and you'd think that there'd be, you know, bigger problems in the area, like, you know, gangs and slumlords and crack and people getting murdered.

Hello? We're in Cleveland. We're poor. You might not realize this because you're taking so much of our paychecks. But most of us can't come up with that kind of money. Heck, most of us can't afford to take the RTA anymore.

So I call your office of to see if I can mail in my ticket and check and you say it takes 7-10 days to get there. I got my ticket on Saturday and my court date is this Friday.

Awesome. It REALLY takes that long for the mail to get there? What the HELL do you do all day? Because I have a desk job too and I KNOW it doesn't take mail that long to get there.

Thank GOD I didn't mail in that ticket the same day and hope it'd get there in time.

As for you, thanks for nothing.

another open letter

Dear Male Species,

This goes out to you. Actually, most of my open letters have been addressed to members of the male species, but this one is more general than the Angry Guy on the Bike that I Almost Hit But Didn't Mean To, and the Dear John McCain open letter.

So, this has to do with how you treat your lady friends. Evidently we live in more enlightened times where we females have jobs and drive cars and aren't fainting in our corsets anymore while the maid runs to get some smelling salts to keep us from swooning again at inopportune moments. Thank God.

But, my friends, this doesn't mean that chivalry needs to go by the wayside just because we're more independent and self-sufficient than we used to be. The truth is, as much as we like to hate on you for being insensitive and sometimes clueless, we do like having you around. And we do like it when you treat us well. This goes far beyond "I don't beat you up," by the way. It involves some measure of just being awesome and standing up for us when we need a little extra help.

If you see something that might be making her uncomfortable, it probably is. This isn't just a violation of physical space. When what someone's saying starts sounding like an obscene phone call, that's not ok either. Honestly, we would love it if you would intervene.

And we hate when you just stand there all passive and let us take it, because you're allowing it to happen, you're contributing to the objectification and degradation of women. Because it shows that when it comes down to it, you don't really respect us either, and we just lost any respect we had for you.

But before I get all man-bashing on here, I want to say this.

Sure, we can hold our own with a lot of things, but there's nothing that makes many of us more angry than to have you standing by instead of standing up for us. It could be as simple as "hey, don't talk to her like that," when someone more or less thinks it's ok to suggest all sorts of things he wants to do with her, or pulling her out of the mosh pit when it gets too crazy, or if you're out at the club putting your arm around her to ward off the advances of that drunk guy who's trying to grind on her.

Trust me on this, they will love you forever.

why i could never run for office.

dear john mccain,
while your whole getting rid of nukes eventually plan sounds nice, i really don't see how working with russia and china to reduce nuclear weapons is any different than the much mocked negotiating with iran. i could be wrong here, but it doesn't seem like they're very trustworthy friends.

if we're going to talk about oppression and human rights violations, i'm pretty sure that there's not too much of a difference, except that one of these countries is religiously motivated and the others aren't. are you going to talk to north korea about this too?

just sayin'

an open letter...

dear guy on bicycle at 6:00 in the evening,

i'm sorry that i didn't see you coming until you were right on top of me. i was trying to be sure that i wasn't going to get plowed into by people coming the other way and you came out of nowhere as i was backing out of the driveway.

you were crossing the driveway next door when i was backing out so i'm sorry that i might have killed any of your momentum. but was that any reason to start yelling at me, and when i say i'm sorry, to throw the race card in my face and say that i'm not sorry and shouldn't pretend to be and that i don't care about people like you? because evidently, i run over people riding bicycles for fun because life is just one huge game of grand theft auto?

i don't know what happened to you or what people have done before, and i know that you're probably not going to ever read this, but damn, did you make me feel bad. maybe that's all you wanted, i don't know. but having ended up on peoples' windshield as a bicyclist, i understand any anxiety you might have about stupid people in cars.

and i really am sorry. on several levels now especially.