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January 26, 2006
cold snap
This past weekend our friends from CT came up for a visit. Our lives are eerily similar in that our friends are originally from the East coast, moved out to Seattle, lived there happily for many years, then moved back East. Now we are all dying a slow and uninteresting death from re-entry culture shock.
“I feel like all the air has been sucked out of our days!” I yelled to my friend Rock, drinking my 18th beer and clutching my throat for emphasis. “I feel like everything is made of glass!” he drunkenly countered, gesticulating wildly around him. We then gathered our loved ones near and played a smokin’ hot game of states and monsters (pictures coming!).
I myself feel like a monster in this state, or at least, town. None of our neighbors came over to introduce themselves when we moved in. When we see them now, getting in and out of their cars, they duck their heads. No one says hello, no one smiles at strangers, no one says Have a Nice Day during regular transactions of commerce. About 80% of the time I find the situation to be fascinating, and get some pleasure from not washing my hair, pinning it up with bejeweled beetle hairclips, wearing a giant fake fur coat, and going to the grocery store to mouth-kiss my child and buy tofu. It’s like I’m getting a second chance to be the quirky Molly Ringwald character in an 80’s high school movie, only all the jocks have grown up, become businessmen and married the cheerleaders who are now home raising clones of themselves. The rest of the time I am wondering what the hell I did, moving my family across the country to a place where we are so viscerally unhappy that it borders on performance art.
Thankfully, my little family enjoys each other’s company a great deal. The other day I was driving with the Bean and flipping around radio stations. I finally stopped on one station because it was playing music not ads. The Bean listened for a minute and then we had the following conversation:
Bean:Hip-hop, mommy?
Me: No baby, I think that’s salsa.
Bean: Oh.
Me: It’s fun to dance to.
Bean: Yes!
Me: But so is hip-hop.
Bean: Umm-hmm.
Me: But they’re different.
(long pause)
Bean: Yes.
I’m no ethnomusicologist, but I’ll do what I can to keep him in touch with his urban roots while the climate and the residents conspire to freeze us right the funk out of here.
Posted by Max at January 26, 2006 09:39 PM