Saturday, August 29, 2009

Little Boxes Made of Ticky Tacky

Of recent my pursuit of higher education has come to an unfortunate and unexpected halt temporarily, damn you recession, and I've been forced to relocate back home until further plans make themselves available to me. Catch is, home is new for me, as my family now lives in good 'ole Cary, North Carolina, a growing city that matches every suburban stereotype from gas-guzzling SUV's to gaudy homes with no yards, this means a whole new, not so pleasant adventure.

Cary is known to many North Carolinians as the Concentrated Area of Relocated Yankees. This is not an exaggeration. A typical response to this acronym is, "Well great James, your Drescherian style speech patterns must be no big thing to these people, right?" Wrong. What's unusual about Cary is although it is geographically located in the south and inhabited mostly by outsiders, they all seem to have adopted the stereo-typical southern attitude of shunning difference and encouraging conformity and old fashioned values. Low taxes. Focus on the Family. That kind of shit. This makes being a comfortably queer person with no pretense a little inhibiting to live in this setting.

On top of this, the city planners of this montrosity ought to be embarassed of themselves because the overwhelming absence of small businesses and the car-centric culture encouraged by the town's and surrounding towns' infrastructures is at the very least inefficient and sooo not green.

What I tell people to liken it to are the establishing shots of America Beauty and Weeds.

It's also worth noting Cary's proximity to an area of North Carolina known as Research Triangle Park. This attracts many people who work in the ITech industry, an industry that doesn't necessarily pride itself on social skills and sparkling personalities, moreso encourages efficiency, practicality and is generally attracts less than personable and interesting individuals. (All of this is SO not J-Wo). As a side note, this proximity also accounts for the very prevelant Indian presence in the area, because for one reason or another many Indian people get into this industry. That's really neither here nor there though.

Due to some sort of combination of the aforementioned attributes, Cary as a community becomes a community that is bound together not by common histories (as everyone comes from somewhere else) and not by common interests (because how many stimulating bar conversations have you had around the issues in ITech?) but primarily by the overwhelming consumer culture that has developed (strip malls and housing developments for as far as the eye can see) and by conversations revolving around heteronormative familial structures, i.e. WHOSE HAVING A BABY NOW?!* And as Cary was reported to be the 3rd fastest growing city in America in 2008, it shows little sign of slowing down.

The absence of a culturally rich environment is really the least of the detrimental affects of this rapid development in this area. Although, I'll admit, it's one that bothers me the most. In addition there are obvious environmental affects manifested on a large scale, and on a local scale with the overwhelming runoff expediting the destruction of Jordan Lake just west of Raleigh, not to mention, state legislation has gotten unjustifiably lenient on restrictions protecting the lake.

There's plenty more I could bitch about this personality-less wasteland of a city but really this was just intended to be an introduction explaining why I'm starting this blog. In sum, Cary's just not gonna cut it as a conversational lotus for my fabulosity so I'm doing what every good disgruntled twenty-something year old student aggrivated with the job market is doing, bringing it all to the internet.

And believe me you ain't seen nothing yet.

*said reasons for Cary's lack of charm are admittedly speculative, but believe me when I say it lacks charm!

1 comment:

  1. What I love most about this first post is that 1) it reads like it's from my own life story at this point, and 2) because we know each other I can hear your voice coupled with the already colorfully written text.

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