memes of association

A meme from wordsofastory: Comment on this entry, and I'll give you three themes along the lines of "username and [some idea or concept or thing]". You then post what you have to say on these themes in your own livejournal.

tsarina and Austin
When I was very young, it didn't entirely register that I lived in Texas. My great-grandmother was born in 1880 and would tell me about getting to ride her pony to school. I was predictably pretty envious of this story and did not mind that she told it to me every time we visited. When my parents decided to move back from the Panhandle plains back down to Austin something finally clicked that this would be Texas. I was somewhat disappointed with the lack of ponies and other storybook trappings.

I've lived in Austin since 1987. Long enough to see the city undergo a vast, convulsive change. I remember Highway 183 as two lanes on each side, with stop lights all the way up to the vast wilderness. Now it is an elevated 6 to 8 lane freeway up to the mushroom sprawl of the suburbs. I have to admit I feel kind of weird every time I'm at some hipster place east of Interstate 35, because growing up you never crossed the interstate thanks to Austin's institutional racism. East was for the poorest poor, the black and Hispanic families and crime and drugs and there was nothing you would ever go there for that didn't exist somewhere safer. My neighborhood wasn't even in the city limits back then, so far north.

There are a lot of terrible things about Austin. Our public transit system is half assed and it is very difficult to live here without a car if you don't have money. Our city's infrastructure was built on class and racial lines. The hard won environmental regulations are being eroded by developers everywhere. The traffic situation is stupid because of poor city planning, explosive growth and that terrible public transit. Schools might be marginally better here than other places but sometimes I'm still ashamed of the weakness of my grade school education in comparison to other people. Austin may be the blue island in red Texas, but we still have bigots and assholes. I still haven't forgotten the kid who threatened to rape me because I was gay. We have a terrible, terrible drunk driving problem in this city. Our new courthouse is the ugliest thing built downtown in twenty years and I include the Frost Tower which I still hate because they drove Ted's out of business. (Ted's was a tiny Greek place that served me whole baby octopus cooked in lemon and olive oil with some pita bread. It was a perfect, perfect meal.)

At the same time, I find it hard to imagine living anywhere else. It took going overseas to make me understand that I did love my troubled homeland. The sky here is not like any other sky I have seen. Austin is settled into some of the most beautiful land in the state. You can drive a few hours and see pine forests, or the edge of the desert, or the spare rolling Hill Country or even the Gulf Coast. We have the world's largest urban bat colony, so big it tracks on the radar and flight patterns are changed at the airport. We have food, so much food. I can eat avocados almost entirely year round. There are the tacos. (Being away makes me miss Mexican and Tex-Mex foods so much it hurts.) We are the home of the greatest chain of movie theaters in the world, the Alamo Drafthouse. They serve beer and burgers and they will kick you the fuck out if you talk. Everywhere there are trees, especially the ancient old live oaks older than the country itself. It is a hard town now to live as a musician after the tech booms but there's still so much music. I spent some of the best nights of my teen years in a converted lumber warehouse listening to bands on a tiny stage. There are really, really good people here who care, people for whom the idea of Southern hospitality is alive and genuine. There is my tiny house painted like a big green and white mint, with the hammock and the cats. There are the wildflowers in spring.

Sometimes I wish very much I could be living somewhere that wasn't so far away from everyone else. But I know I'd come back here in the end.

tsarina and birds
I like birds. I should clarify - I like wild birds. Birds as pets seem sort of weird to me. But I love watching the red tail hawks soar and the turkey vulture glide across the sky. Our pear tree has a bird's nest this year, and I'm pretty sure it is a mockingbird living there. I consider that a good omen. Plus there are grackles, which are hilarious, raucous corvids. We have lots of doves, the grey and brown kind that people hunt. I myself have been dove hunting though it has probably been twenty years since then. Doves are pretty tasty. I would really like to get a bird feeder but I'm afraid squirrels will just eat everything.

tsarina and languages
I have formally studied French, Russian and Czech. My language skills are very rusty. Perhaps I should run away and crash course them into some functional fluency. I think I started studying languages because I was so painfully in need of some explanations and I thought maybe I would find them somewhere else. I didn't. But I did learn it was possible to think in other ways. I studied these languages because I found them beautiful and because I personally loved literature that grew out of them. I probably should have taken Spanish as it would have been a practical thing in a place where about half the population speaks it. I would have liked to learn some Asian languages but I feel like my hearing is just damaged enough to make learning a tonal language impossible.

Learning to write in Russian destroyed my handwriting. It wasn't the neatest before, but crossing the Cyrillic and Latin alphabets in my head made it messier than ever.