A short story about Laurel*

I know a girl named Laurel* (*not her real name). She goes through life in a state of contradiction. On one hand, she claims to be a militant feminist; on the other, she seems to have to have every man near her be in love in with her in order for her to function. Her goal is to be inspirational, yet, she is profoundly pathetic.

Due to her dramatic life and her inappropriate impositions on me (in addition to scores of bad stories I have been written into with her), she hasn't been my friend, Facebook or otherwise, for over three years now. (By the way, thanks to my mom, Lance, and Jory on the intervention to drop her!) It's strange how many people I know that are fighting the feminist cause...but sometimes, some folks' fights really aren't helping.

I don't miss her and her dramatic nonsense. I think if you are working to better humankind, you should at least try to be a good human. It's something I work on constantly and frequently fall short on...possibly including this snarky post about her. So it goes.

And while it sometimes isn't pleasant to be a woman, there are unpleasant things about being a man, too. So overall, it's best to try and be a good person, regardless of your gender(s). And that is the moral of an Erin after several weeks of insanity at the day job and feeling cranky about my past.

Moral of today's story: typing with BBC in the background doesn't make you smarter...it just makes you more distracted.

An Erinku! (In possible judginess):

there is

an orange exercise ball

in my front room.

I have ricocheted, repeatedly, off it.

Big City / Small Town

I've bounced between small towns and big cities. The smallest had just over 17,000 folks living there (pretty big compared to some small towns) and the largest has 2.5 million people. One of the wee towns I daydream about living in only has 9,614 people in it, currently.

I find then whenever I'm in a smaller town, I start to get antsy-pantsy about all the things I'm missing in the city. While in the city, I get so distracted running around adventuring that it takes a long time to realize the things I miss about living in small towns. Which is why I head northwest in the summertime weekends to the little town festivals to visit my friends who live there.

It takes me a while to get used to things at these events. Such as being able to find parking. It's always free and the furthest you have to walk is maybe two blocks. No awkward navigating; no swearing while parallel parking on the left-hand side of the road (who decided that should even be an option, anyway?); and no 24-hour parking meters that charge $2 an hour.

It turns out that I'm pretty bitchy for the first little while. Because I forget that in small towns, the music is going to be at the goodness-level that it's at. Sometimes it's pretty bad, but sometimes it's surprisingly awesome. Big cities get a lot of world-class artists coming through...and they tend to pop around only in big cities.

I have to get re-used to the idea that no one else is giggling about the singer dorkily bouncing around on stage in a silly way. And that people in the audience are wearing their cowboy boots and tie-dye shirts non-ironically. And that people dance around because they like the music and it's ok to dance around, since no one should be being an ass-hat and judging them.

This is just something I noticed tonight as I started off the evening snickering meanly about something. Luckily, no one at my table heard me and I caught myself. Because while I am living the big city life of locking all of my doors all the time, avoiding the sketchy parts of town, and being wary of creepy strangers who follow me, wearing that mantle of suspicion and judgement doesn't work all the time.

Just like meeting people from New York. When acting like a New Yorker out of context (which, dear New Yorkers, is EVERYWHERE ELSE on the frickin' planet!), you are acting like an ass-hat. However, New Yorkers make sense in New York. Big-city Erin makes sense living in a big city. Small-town Erin makes sense in a small town. And both of these parts of me have funny transitions between the two, such as looking both ways before crossing a one-way street downtown.

There isn't a moral, or even a point to my story today. Just that there are good things about all the cities you find yourself in. I've lived in a big city for three years now and I miss a lot of things about smaller towns. Especially not having to parallel park on the left side of the street. Sheesh.

An Erinku:

some days

Denver

smells like

a soggy BBQ potato chip