Good Thing

October 11th, 2005

When I first told people I was moving here, there were a lot of people who made it a point to tell me what a gargantuan mistake I was making. My guess would be those people had only been to the parts of Florida we drove through on our way down here. At one gas station, I swear the attendant was thisclose to commenting, “You sure do got a pretty mouth!”

In other words, not here. While there are certainly downsides, there are some pretty cool things, too. Yes, yes, there are anti-abortion billboards and gunslinging locals, and yes, I spied a bumper sticker today on a monster truck that said, “My Other Toy Has Tits,” but it’s lovely! Erm. Really. No, seriously…

For example, the people are odd, but at least borderline tolerant. I was rather impressed at the way the gentleman reacted when he found two teenage boys having sex in the bathroom stall of the gym. Yes, teenage sex in the gym bathroom in broad daylight. This after a local Lolita hit on Adam poolside while I was standing next to him. Anyway, I’m convinced he didn’t make any bigger of a deal of it than he would have if it were two teenagers of the opposite sex. This impressed me. But there is still the issue of teens having sex in the gym bathrooms. For chrissake.

It’s multicultural! For all of our Northeast snobbery, Boston is an extraordinarily segregated town. Swampscott was as lily white as it gets – I think there was one black family, and it just reeked of tokenism, not that a town can really do that, but you know what I mean. Here, our neighborhood is a marvelous melting pot – our neighbors are Indian, the folks across the street are from Singapore, and there are infinitely more African Americans in my neighborhood than I ever saw in the whole of the neighborhoods I lived all over Boston. Many, many Latin Americans, too. Spanish is spoken everywhere. It’s really so refreshing. This is by far one of my favorite things about living here.

I’m not sold on the people, though. I can’t stand perfect people who always say the right thing and remember to send thank you notes on time, and smile pleasantly but reveal nothing about themselves. How boring it must be to BE them. Talk to me for five minutes, and there is a near 100% chance that I will do or say something embarrassing for both of us, but at least I’m real. Yes, sure, I scream “FUCK!” in my driveway and cry hysterically outside because I think I’ve lost my cat in the neighborhood (who was, by the way, sitting inside on the couch the whole time), and maybe my clothes don’t match and I’ll reveal some sort of ridiculously personal information that falls under the “TMI” category. And yes, going out to dinner with me can be a challenge, as evidenced by tonight’s Thai outing, where I scratched my eye with a finger that had just been intimately involved with some chili powder, causing blindness and swelling for a full five minutes while I tried in vain to order another iced tea. Maybe perfect people don’t do those things. But for God’s sake, you’ll never hear me say, “Isn’t that nice?” and smile politely.

How fucking boring. I’d rather be friends with the Monster Truck Tit Man. Please god, tell me there are people who are comfortable enough to be human somewhere around these parts.

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