It's Me Again, or, a Lament for the City

Hello again, blogosphere. I know; you nearly gave me up for dead. You think I've been lured away by Facebook, and that's partly true. But life is just different for a working woman.

Suddenly, I can't say whatever leaps to mind about work, which is where I spend eight or more hours of my day. I have to be *gasp* discrete. If you know me, you will find that impossibly funny.

I'm enjoying certain things about Missouri. Like renting my own house where no one can bother me unless I want them to. I can close the shades and belt out Gilbert and Sullivan stark naked...as a purely hypothetical example. I'm in a serious relationship with a meltingly handsome, if slightly overweight, gentleman with a soft gray coat and long white whiskers. He doesn't like traveling much, but we share the same principles of domestic happiness.

Other things are more difficult. You would think that one part of the Midwest is much like another, and that I should adapt from Michigan to Missouri with relative ease. I thought I was immune to culture shock. I grew up in Puerto Rico. I summered in the northern wilderness. And then there was my college experience. Still, I've never lived two hours away from the Gap. In Puerto Rico, I may have mothered a flock of geese, worn a loin cloth, and subsisted on bananas, but San Juan was only an hour away. This summer, I was in a community with a bunch of other city people. And that's the shocker -- not the lack of the Gap, but the lack of an urban mindset.

I am repulsed by the mindless, mediocre traditionalism that dominates rural areas. I have affinity to both progressive liberals and ultra-conservatives. With anyone who is strange, basically, I can find some common ground. You want to legalize drugs? Great! You think daycare is not that far from Dachau? Me too! But people who have not rethought their political positions since the Kennedy administration? People who view the Christian Church in much the same way they view the Elks Lodge? We're going to have a hard time being buddies.

But I will stop griping now and go play Mozart. Because I have a piano now. And I play it at whatever hour I want. And I can burn incense and eat lentils and generally feel cosmopolitan and multicultural in my own house. And tomorrow I will get up and go to work and smile politely when someone says they need to find evidence to disprove global warming. Because that, at least, I've heard before.