Year: 2006

Thirtysomething

Another bland generic apartment complex is being marketed as the hippest thing to hit Charlotte in years.

I can get past the requisite “creative class” mumbo jumbo (ground level retail space for art dealers? a climbing wall? yeah, right…) and the absurdity of the notion that one can actually build a “hip, urban village” from scratch. I can get past Doug Smith’s erroneous assumption that “shiny, brand new, and above all, dense” is synonymous with “urban”. I’m used to it. I’ve been reading his columns (not to mention sites like Urban Planet) for years.

What’s bugging me specifically about this article, though, is the fact that Doug is still using a stale, trite term like “thirtysomethings”. For god’s sake, can we please retire this hackneyed cliché and its younger sibling “twentysomethings”?

For those who don’t remember, a largely subpar TV series that went off the air about fifteen years ago is responsible for this annoying shorthand for the more digestible “people in their thirties”. You can’t find reruns of the show anymore (there’s at least some justice in the world) but the title will apparently haunt us forever.

Ten years ago when “thirtysomethings” was still being used regularly in the bar reviews of almost every magazine in the country, it was already stupid and annoying and not at all “fresh”. Today, it grates on the nerves in sort of the same way it used to horrify the Brady kids to say “groovy” in 1974, long after the rest of the world had moved on.

It must be stopped. Now.

No Smoking Zone

I”ve second-guessed plenty of decisions that I’ve made over the years. However, I’ve never questioned the one I made three years go today to stop committing a slow, stinky suicide. It was simultaneously one of the hardest and one of the easiest things I’ve ever done. And tonight, I will be giving myself my annual pat on the back. And if I sound full of myself, well, that’s just too damned bad…

And just for reference, I still don’t believe that a “punishment tax” on cigarettes is a fair revenue stream nor that legislation to ban smoking in bars is a good idea. So there.

Earthquake

I lived in California for thirteen years but still got freaked out by a little bitty earthquake in Winston-Salem this morning. I was freaked out mainly because I didn’t know what the hell had happened. It didn’t feel like any California earthquake I ever experienced; it was just one loud boom and a thump that shook the whole house. I sort of thought one of the big trees out back had fallen, perhaps into the living room.

Afterward, I assumed it had probably been a quake, but there were no panic announcements on TV, so I dismissed it until I saw it on the news a few minutes ago.

It’s strange that we’ve had about five of these in the past month, one of which apparently scared hell out of my parents when they were checking up on the house while Mark and I were gone. I don’t remember this being such an active fault area when I was a kid.

Aunt Lucille

Aunt Lucille was always one of my favorites. She was my grandmother’s sister and she was a member of of that last generation of semi-helpless and often rather silly southern ladies. But Aunt Lucille wasn’t like that. Unlike her sister and many of her contemporaries, she drove a car and had a full-time job all her life. She was independent. And she had a sense of humor, something that was also in short supply among southern women of her generation.

She was a sweetheart in every possible way. She was not overbearing; in fact, she even seemed rather humble, but she could exhibit a very refreshing sassiness from time to time as well, which I think the photo above captures. She didn’t like to moralize; she liked to laugh. I know she helped my mom through some very rough times as a little girl during the Depression, and I suspect my mom wasn’t the only family member to benefit from her presence.

Similarly, my generation of the family never dreaded being around her as we did with certain other relatives either. Aunt Lucille was firm, but she was also unfailingly upbeat and happy. She didn’t exactly “spoil” us, but neither did she spend all her time telling us what bad manners we had for not saying “yes, ma’am” in a snappy enough tone, or telling us how coddled we were. If you’re of roughly my generation and grew up in the south, I think you know what I mean here. We acted our best around her because we respected and loved her, not because we were afraid of her.

When Mark met her a few years ago, at the end of an arduous day of relative-hopping, he remarked that she seemed younger and livelier and happier than anyone he’d met that day, despite the fact that she was ten to fifteen years older than any of the rest, not to mention already in failing health. Aunt Lucille was never one to piss and moan and complain about her assorted maladies and aches and pains, even though she definitely had her share of troubles through the years.

I last spoke to her on Thursday. She asked about Mark and about the new house, and told me she loved me. When I saw her again on Saturday, she wasn’t talking anymore, but she still held my hand.

Aunt Lucille died this morning at 8:30. She was 89. I’m going to miss her quite a lot.

Randomly Thursday

Random stuff for a Thursday night:

  • There is good and happy news in my health insurance universe thanks to these people. As one of the uninsurable masses, I’d been pretty worried about this over the past month or two, so I feel much better about life tonight.
  • Thanks to everyone who sent condolences and sympathy notes. There are nice people in internet-land.
  • With two projects up in the air, I probably won’t be any better about answering email for the next few days than I have for the past two weeks.
  • The holidays musy be close at hand: the Hardee’s on Cloverdale is already lit up like (pardon the expression) a Christmas tree.
  • Which are the bigger price gougers: guys who work on cars or guys who work on teeth? It’s pretty much a toss-up in my book.
  • So how ’bout all those bleeding heart liberals in Arizona? And Mexico? Damned activist electorate and legislators…

Busy

Horrendously busy couple of weeks, as I wedged lots of work and one funeral in between two big trips. I leave tomorrow for Thanksgiving in California with the in-laws, so don’t expect any exciting commentary for at least a few more days. And no, I don’t have those road trip pictures ready to go, thanks.

Anyway, may all your turkeys be happy ones, and may none of them turn out to be tofurkey.

(Not) Home for the Holidays

What a very insane month. I’ll try to do better in December. Really.

The holidays in Fresno were very nice. We were well-housed, well-fed, and haad good company. The only big souvenir I brought back was a cold, but it was a mild one. As sucky as Thanksgiving air travel can be, I was actually pretty lucky all in all, and only had one really wretched flight, the return leg from Chicago to Winston-Salem on Saturday.

I didn’t have to spend too much time in San Francisco, which was nice. Unfortunately, most of the time I did spend there was spent walking around the Financial District, either looking for bathrooms or doing some emergency client work from assorted FedEx Kinko’s locations where I’d been employed several years before.

I’m home now, trying to catch up on the past five or six weeks, which somehow got lost in the shuffle.

More soon.

Getting Lucky

In happy California news, the seven years of supreme suckage brought upon the northern part of the state when Albertsons purchased Lucky Stores may finally be over.

Sorry. I hate Albertsons with a passion usually reserved for Kmart, Rite-Aid, and UPS (that’s some serious passion, folks), and I really had to mention it here since I have to stay sort of objective at the other site.