So today, in an effort to finally get the HUD paperwork out before my vacation ends, I brought in an electrician to give me an estimate for 4 outlets in the basement, one in the garage, and one out in front of the house so I can plug in the mower.
The guy shows up 25 minutes early, for one thing--which, for a morning appointment, is not terribly forgiveable in my world. But okay--he's punctual.
He proceeds to tell me that I need $3800 worth of electrical work--including an entirely new circuit breaker box. Okay--fine, not what I was hoping to hear, but shit, by now I've gotten used to revoltingly-huge estimates on bills for this place. Fair enough.
We go upstairs for him to write the estimate. This is where the fun begins.
He's about 45 or 50, I would imagine, maybe a little older. Shortish, white guy, fairly articulate but absolutely secure in his supremacy as a skilled white male. One of those types who think he's a hardass because he beat someone's ass when he was in his 20's, or fought in some war or another 30 years back.
He brings up the issue of financing, and I tell him I can't finance jack shit at the moment, what with all the other bills--but that I'll shortly have this lawsuit going against the shitstick that sold me this albatross of a house. He raises the point, and admittedly a good point, that it'll take years for that to go through--and then begins to tell me a pointless and unrelated story about his issues with some satellite-dish company and a carpet-cleaning company--making himself sound like Mr. Uncompromising Hardass, of course.
Halfway through the story, he pauses. "Hang on a minute," he says. "I wanna look at my truck--there's a convention outside, and I don't wanna have to kill anyone."
"Oh, they won't hurt anything," I said, "They're mostly harmless."
"Harmless?" he said, in that oh-you-stupid-girl tone of voice. "NO convention is harmless. I was in Viet Nam and I can tell you--no convention is harmless. I was a street kid, and I can tell you the least harmless thing around--me!"
"Well, that may be," I tell him, "but I'm still probably the safest person on the block. Who's gonna mess with the one white girl on the block when they're trying to conduct business fifty feet away?"
"Yeah!" he says. "That's what I'm telling you--they're conducting business fifty feet away! You call that 'harmless'?"
"Harmless to ME," I tell him.
He gives me the stink-eye, but goes on with his story. Once he's done--I still have no idea what the point was--he sits back on the chair and advances the issue of financing again. "Can I ask, what do you do?"
"Computer tech," I tell him, and mention where I work.
"Not that it's any of my business," he says, and immediately I know what is coming--"but why in the world did you buy a place HERE?"
I look him dead in his beady little eyes and tell the absolute truth:
"Because I like it here."
He laughs, and I just smile my most I-dare-you-to-say-a-single-word-against-it smile until he looks away. Then and only then do I give him his reward: something he can contradict. "Plus, the yuppies are moving this way, and it'll be worth something someday..."
"It'll take ten years or more before they get this far," he tells me, and I make some noise of agreement, though I'm fairly sure that's horseshit; if it's five years I'll be surprised. I would have dearly loved to see the look on his face if LJ had walked in right then, but he didn't; in the end, electrician-man and I wound up our conversation, and he left. But of course, once again, I've been asked that eternal question: why in the world would you want to live THERE?
And maybe today--my 34th birthday, by the time this is posted--maybe today I'm finally ready to say it at last:
I live here because I cannot imagine living anywhere else. I cannot imagine being the woman I was in 1993, for example--living in the suburbs in a cushy air-conditioned apartment, throwing dinner parties for people who I didn't even know or care about. I can't imagine sleeping in a room above a silent street, or in a place where no one says hello when you walk past them on the sidewalk. I want to learn to be more like the people who live here, and less like the people who live there. For the last four years, before I bought this house, I lived in an apartment building where I knew no one. Not ONE person; not a single individual who I would pass in the hall every day, or say hello to in the laundry room. I would see their names on their mailboxes, but I never knew any of them. I don't want to live like that anymore.
I look at my mom's neighborhood, the street where I grew up. There are no kids outside; no one goes out unless they're going to their cars or tending their lawns. They all stay inside in the perfectly climate-controlled air, out of the rain, safe and secure. It's sterile and desolate and absolutely not the life I want.
Then there's the issue of why I associate with the people I associate with; why I don't date white men, why I don't move in the same circles as some of my co-workers. And really it's fairly simple, broken down into its component reasons. As I grew up in an all-white neighborhood, and a family where I was considered the "mutt" for not being 100% Irish, I absorbed a set of expectations that I could not live up to. In no way did I fit the definition of a "normal" girl, as defined by my environment. I was not pretty; I was not delicate or graceful or flirtatious. I was extremely intelligent and opinionated, and I used a lot of big words. I didn't even listen to the "right" kind of music. I was interested in books and computers rather than cheerleading and cliques, and I was absolutely pathetic at sports. As I grew older, my strangeness just became more and more apparent. I had waterfights and played laser tag with my friends, instead of going to someone's basement and drinking beer. I read science fiction instead of romance novels. I never learned to accessorize, never learned how to find the right clothes, never learned to braid hair or put on makeup like they did in _Seventeen_. My friends and I created maps of fantasy worlds, plotted to take over the world, wrote novels. The only boys who liked us were the ones who were just like us: intelligent, strange, misunderstood. From the time I was six I knew I was different; by the time I was nine, I had begun to consider suicide.
It was never up to me what I wanted to do in my life; or perhaps it was, but no one ever bothered to show me what the options were. I knew of only the jobs I'd seen in my family or my neighborhood: engineering, nursing, education, police and fire, and writing. I wanted to write but I was told I had to have a "real" career to fall back on; there was never any notion of taking a chance, of working without a net. It had been decided soon after my birth that I would go to college; I never even thought to question any other possibilities, not that it would have been accepted if I had thought to question. My career choice was made by default, as the thing I imagined I would hate the least, the thing that would free me up to write for the greatest amount of time. I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of independent decisions I made at any time before my 24th birthday--and yes, I'm taking into account things like dating, sex, and marriage. I dated Chris because Chris wanted to date me and because you had to date someone. I had sex with him because, well, we'd been together for a year and he was pressuring me--I went along because I wanted to, but I'm not sure I wanted to right at that moment. I think breaking up with Chris was maybe the first truly independent decision I ever made; I did it despite my fear and despite the objections I knew would be forthcoming. I married David because I was 23 and it was time to get married, and because if I broke off a second engagement, people would have thought I was flighty. It was only when I started seeing JP behind David's back that I started to feel like I was in control of my own destiny.
All of this is to say: In the world I grew up in, I could not be what I was expected to be; much less could I try to force myself into that mold and still be happy. I -tried- to mash myself into that mold, most notably the summer I was cheating on Dave with JP; I spent so many hours trying to convince myself to stay, and I did so many things to try to force myself into being a good wife. In the end I realized that I either had to be myself or I would kill myself. And to be who I truly am, I had to leave that place of unreachable expectations and go somewhere else. For some people, "away" is a place; for me, there is no "away", no safe haven as there is for anyone else. I do not fit into the society I was born into; therefore, I had to walk away from that society and go somewhere where the expectations are different. Here, it's not necessary to be thin and graceful for a man to find me attractive; it's not necessary for me to be a career woman to gain respect. All I have to be here is me, and being me is enough to get me attention. Not that I want attention, not like that--but even just to fit in, back in my "own" world, I have to be someone other than who I really am, and I just can't do that anymore.
Therefore: I am here because I can live up to the expectations here--and I can live with myself if I don't live up to them. There's no sense here, as there is back in the white world, that I'll be a failure in anyone's eyes, no fear of disappointing anyone just by who I am and who I'm not.
So that's the answer, or one of them, to the question behind this blog: why do you want to live there? I want to live here because I know who I am and I don't feel like there's anything wrong with being who I am.
Oh--and it is now my birthday. Happy birthday to me.....
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