I'm dying for a city. I need a city. Granted, I love that it is quiet here (save for crickets and coyotes) but I need a city. I need coffee houses, and live music, and operas and arthouse theaters. I need a liquor vendor who sells a 20-year Glenlivet. I need butchers who know what hanger steak is. I need a public park that I can walk to, and a gym that I can jog to, and a grocery store that isn't inside a Wal-Mart. Maybe I should move to Austin. I've always wanted to. As soon as my mother is doing well enough for me to leave, I have to find a new place to explore. I wasn't meant for the middle of nowhere. I need something more exciting. 

Driving down he rain-spattered, partially paved roads of rural Texas, I realized today how totally isolated and ostracized so many people must feel. Growing up in a town with one cafe and no stop light, I always thought I knew what isolation was. I had no idea. At least I had the culture of my parents, the privilege of frequent travel, the escapism of books. These days, I spend half of my life in the middle of nowhere, trying to help people who can't even scrape together five bucks for gas (but who always seem to have half a pack of cigarettes tucked casually into their shirt sleeves). I can't blame them--five bucks only gets you to Wal-Mart, not the Louvre, and very little I can say can alter the perception that their lives just aren't going to take any major turns any time soon. If I had to pick between a one-way ticket to a dingy shelter and a pack of smokes, I would probably go with the latter and take my chances in the parking lot outside a CVS. Which is what many people seem to do. In the epic battle between short term benefits vs. long term consequences, short-term wins out every time, because the five year plan may be fine for prep school kids but it's damn hard for people living below the poverty line in a county that doesn't have the resources to wipe its own ass. I try my best, and I try to help people feel less lonely, less isolated, like someone actually cares...but how much good can I really do? I guess all we can ever do is out best, even if it falls short. Okay, this is sounding cheesy, I guess I'd better go to bed...

In forty minutes or so, I'll be twenty-eight years old. I'm not sure what to make of that. I still don't have a family of my own, and while I have a career of sorts, I'm still sort of drifting through life, looking for new things to experience with nothing anchoring me. That doesn't bother me so much, as I'm all about new things. But sometimes I think about how short my life is and what I may be missing. I only have so much youth left and there is still a lot I want to do, like learn to sew, learn to ski, get good at poker, write a book, start a comedy burlesque show (that sounds odd, but its an interest of mine), work in a bakery, brew my own beer, and, if I ever figure out what I want to study for six years, go back for my PhD. Yes, these are some of the things I would like to do. So I guess now all I have to do is figure out which ones are the most important and then start doing them. Most of all, though, I just want to be a decent human being. And that's something that I'm going to have to work on every day for the rest of my life. 

So I've read the book "The Paradox of Choice," by Barry Schwartz. Dr. Schwartz points out that people in the U.S are faced with so many options as consumers that we are virtually paralyzed (rather than liberated, as many advertisements would have us believe). I think that's a good point. I don't need five hundred kinds of toilet paper. I once stayed in a hut in the rain forest for two weeks, and I didn't miss quilted, scented, printed, painted toilet paper. When you only have one option, life seems pretty simple. 

I read over my profile and realized that I have a lot of freaking items in my interests section. Too many, I think. But when I tried to take some out, I had a difficult time. Each thing seemed, in its way, to express an aspect of myself. I suppose we define ourselves in terms of values, and frequently tastes appear to represent values. Perhaps that is why we see tastes as a method of gauging our similarities to others. 

Of course, the way it is now, I'll be lucky if anyone even makes it to the end of my list of preferences, so what's the point of listing all of them? 

The irony here is that I am able to pack a bag with almost nothing in it and travel around another country without a care in the world. Yet, when asked to choose my favorite movie, I feel the need to list a thousand. Now that, my friends, is bizarre. 

 

Please post your comments or send me an e-mail! I grew up in rural Texas but have no experience living in Dallas. Is it cool? Is there stuff to do? Are there good theaters and record stores? What neighborhood should I pick? I am considering Lakewood or Oak Lawn...what do you think?

I am moving to the Dallas, Texas area in four days. Wish me luck! When I get there, I will change my profile city. I am hoping that Texas will treat me right. I grew up there, but life as a adult is very different from life as a kid. Will I find a niche? Only time will tell.

So in six days I'll be returning to Texas, to the land of brisket, beans, skillet pone and jalapeño everything. I grew up there and I love it. It's like no other place on earth. Growing up in Texas was always a great topic of conversation when I moved up north. I went to college in PA and grad school in Chicago where I still reside (at least until next week). When you grow up in a tiny town in Texas, you can spin all sorts of colorful anecdotes for your yankee friends. Now that I'm going back, I won't be able to do that. It sounds strange, but I am going to miss describing Texas to people who have never lived there! When I move back I am going to regale my townsfolk with tales of the North. It ought to be interesting.

So I elected to stay home tonight, having gone out the past few nights. In addition, there is a huge, drunken brawl in my neighborhood known as Mayfest going on right now, and I just can't handle the crowd. Too many stumbling drunk people.
I live right on a busy street around the corner from the whole affair, and I can't help but notice that everyone driving by seems to be blasting songs that used to be popular. To wit, the first car came by blasting Kris Kross' "Jump," followed almost immediately by a car that was blasting Soul Asylum's "Misery." If that weren't enough, another car came by playing "Block Rockin' Beats" by The Chemical Brothers, followed by a car playing Kid Rock's "Cowboy." What the hell? This is truly the day for 90s throwbacks. I'm not knocking it, mind you, I just find it strange.

So as I walk though the streets at night, and stand out on by back porch, and carry on in my nightly routine, I can't help but notice that a lot of people seem to drive while drunk in Chicago. Now, I'm only speculating here, but the screeching of tires, random swerving, driving too slow or too fast...all of these things suggest drunk driving to me. I know people who drive after they've had more than a few. In a city that has so much public transportation and plenty of cabs, I don't get why people choose to do that. I'm moving to Texas in two weeks. It's a state where everyone drives everywhere. I've been to L.A. numerous times; it's a place where everyone has to drive, and a lot of people drive drunk. In face, it's the worst drunk driving place I've ever been to in this country, hands down. I wonder what it's going to be like in Texas?

I don't know how much things have changed since I was in high school, but I'm thinking of this topic today after seeing a few prime time news pieces on adolescent obesity and after re-watching Morgan Spurlock's "Supersize Me."

When I was in high school, the food choices engendered truly weird eating habits on my part. We had so much fast food in the cafeteria (nachos, french fries, hamburgers, pizza, snack cakes, candy, soda) that I felt like I either had to bring food (which I sometimes did) or just buy weird meals made up of the best possible choices. At first I tried to be sensible, bring my own lunch, enjoy my sandwich or yogurt or whatever I could scrounge up. But let's face it, when you have to be at school at 7:15 am and you barely get five hours of sleep a night, the last thing you want to do in the morning is make lunch. So I ate weird lunches. My standard was a bagel and a mealy apple (the only kind available). Or sometimes I would have a granola bar and milk, and a nasty iceberg lettuce salad (again, the only kind available). Eventually, I just started spending my lunch in the library reading. There was no point in struggling through a thronging hoard of kids just to get lousy crap. From what I see on the news, things aren't any better now than when I was in school. SO my question is, what the hell are we feeding our kids? Why do schools keep contracting out to fast food businesses? And why isn't someone doing something about it?