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Thirtysomething

Another bland generic apartment complex is being marketed as the hippest thing to hit Charlotte in years.

I can get past the requisite “creative class” mumbo jumbo (ground level retail space for art dealers? a climbing wall? yeah, right…) and the absurdity of the notion that one can actually build a “hip, urban village” from scratch. I can get past Doug Smith’s erroneous assumption that “shiny, brand new, and above all, dense” is synonymous with “urban”. I’m used to it. I’ve been reading his columns (not to mention sites like Urban Planet) for years.

What’s bugging me specifically about this article, though, is the fact that Doug is still using a stale, trite term like “thirtysomethings”. For god’s sake, can we please retire this hackneyed cliché and its younger sibling “twentysomethings”?

For those who don’t remember, a largely subpar TV series that went off the air about fifteen years ago is responsible for this annoying shorthand for the more digestible “people in their thirties”. You can’t find reruns of the show anymore (there’s at least some justice in the world) but the title will apparently haunt us forever.

Ten years ago when “thirtysomethings” was still being used regularly in the bar reviews of almost every magazine in the country, it was already stupid and annoying and not at all “fresh”. Today, it grates on the nerves in sort of the same way it used to horrify the Brady kids to say “groovy” in 1974, long after the rest of the world had moved on.

It must be stopped. Now.

Earthquake

I lived in California for thirteen years but still got freaked out by a little bitty earthquake in Winston-Salem this morning. I was freaked out mainly because I didn’t know what the hell had happened. It didn’t feel like any California earthquake I ever experienced; it was just one loud boom and a thump that shook the whole house. I sort of thought one of the big trees out back had fallen, perhaps into the living room.

Afterward, I assumed it had probably been a quake, but there were no panic announcements on TV, so I dismissed it until I saw it on the news a few minutes ago.

It’s strange that we’ve had about five of these in the past month, one of which apparently scared hell out of my parents when they were checking up on the house while Mark and I were gone. I don’t remember this being such an active fault area when I was a kid.

Aunt Lucille

Aunt Lucille was always one of my favorites. She was my grandmother’s sister and she was a member of of that last generation of semi-helpless and often rather silly southern ladies. But Aunt Lucille wasn’t like that. Unlike her sister and many of her contemporaries, she drove a car and had a full-time job all her life. She was independent. And she had a sense of humor, something that was also in short supply among southern women of her generation.

She was a sweetheart in every possible way. She was not overbearing; in fact, she even seemed rather humble, but she could exhibit a very refreshing sassiness from time to time as well, which I think the photo above captures. She didn’t like to moralize; she liked to laugh. I know she helped my mom through some very rough times as a little girl during the Depression, and I suspect my mom wasn’t the only family member to benefit from her presence.

Similarly, my generation of the family never dreaded being around her as we did with certain other relatives either. Aunt Lucille was firm, but she was also unfailingly upbeat and happy. She didn’t exactly “spoil” us, but neither did she spend all her time telling us what bad manners we had for not saying “yes, ma’am” in a snappy enough tone, or telling us how coddled we were. If you’re of roughly my generation and grew up in the south, I think you know what I mean here. We acted our best around her because we respected and loved her, not because we were afraid of her.

When Mark met her a few years ago, at the end of an arduous day of relative-hopping, he remarked that she seemed younger and livelier and happier than anyone he’d met that day, despite the fact that she was ten to fifteen years older than any of the rest, not to mention already in failing health. Aunt Lucille was never one to piss and moan and complain about her assorted maladies and aches and pains, even though she definitely had her share of troubles through the years.

I last spoke to her on Thursday. She asked about Mark and about the new house, and told me she loved me. When I saw her again on Saturday, she wasn’t talking anymore, but she still held my hand.

Aunt Lucille died this morning at 8:30. She was 89. I’m going to miss her quite a lot.

Randomly Thursday

Random stuff for a Thursday night:

  • There is good and happy news in my health insurance universe thanks to these people. As one of the uninsurable masses, I’d been pretty worried about this over the past month or two, so I feel much better about life tonight.
  • Thanks to everyone who sent condolences and sympathy notes. There are nice people in internet-land.
  • With two projects up in the air, I probably won’t be any better about answering email for the next few days than I have for the past two weeks.
  • The holidays musy be close at hand: the Hardee’s on Cloverdale is already lit up like (pardon the expression) a Christmas tree.
  • Which are the bigger price gougers: guys who work on cars or guys who work on teeth? It’s pretty much a toss-up in my book.
  • So how ’bout all those bleeding heart liberals in Arizona? And Mexico? Damned activist electorate and legislators…

Site-related

FYI, many of the journal archives are offline right now, as I’m in the middle of a revamp project involving them and the road trips section. Look for them to return in a few days.

Busy

Horrendously busy couple of weeks, as I wedged lots of work and one funeral in between two big trips. I leave tomorrow for Thanksgiving in California with the in-laws, so don’t expect any exciting commentary for at least a few more days. And no, I don’t have those road trip pictures ready to go, thanks.

Anyway, may all your turkeys be happy ones, and may none of them turn out to be tofurkey.

(Not) Home for the Holidays

What a very insane month. I’ll try to do better in December. Really.

The holidays in Fresno were very nice. We were well-housed, well-fed, and haad good company. The only big souvenir I brought back was a cold, but it was a mild one. As sucky as Thanksgiving air travel can be, I was actually pretty lucky all in all, and only had one really wretched flight, the return leg from Chicago to Winston-Salem on Saturday.

I didn’t have to spend too much time in San Francisco, which was nice. Unfortunately, most of the time I did spend there was spent walking around the Financial District, either looking for bathrooms or doing some emergency client work from assorted FedEx Kinko’s locations where I’d been employed several years before.

I’m home now, trying to catch up on the past five or six weeks, which somehow got lost in the shuffle.

More soon.

Curtains for Eastland

It looks like the end for Eastland Mall in Charlotte as it loses one of its two remaining credible anchors. It’s sad, really, but I saw it coming twenty years ago when I managed a surf and skate shop across the street from the place. I’m actually pretty surprised that its taken so long for it to get to this point.

I guess when you’ve worked in a dying mall, you recognize the signs earlier when another one starts to go south. Back in 1986, after only eleven years in operation, the lustre was already fading at Eastland. The more upscale Southpark, a few miles away, had stolen all the “buzz” with a remodel and a generally more impressive array of stores. Eastland never recovered; it was still healthy, but no one seemed very excited about it. It was just sort of a utilitarian place that was starting to feel just a little bit tired, not unlike the entire neighborhood surrounding it.

By 2005, when I moved back to Charlotte for a year, the mall and the neighborhood had pretty much had it. It’s an unfortunate truth in the United States that as an area’s complexion becomes increasingly brown, capital tends to start fleeing to other areas. Regardless of whether this flight is due to racism or economic reality, the disinvestment eventually becomes emotional as well as financial, and the area begins a slow, steady decline into urban decay. East Charlotte is well into that slide now. It was inevitable even before the gunshots and gang violence started that the mall would be an early casualty.

It’ll take a year or two before it all comes to an end. The really ugly period, though, will be about five years from now, when Eastland is a big, vacant, rotting carcass whose stench has befouled the entire neighborhood surrounding it. This will be the period just before it’s either torn down and replaced by a Wal-Mart, or perhaps taken over by some government entity.

It’s too bad. Eastland had a good, thirty-plus year run. That’s more than Carolina Circle got.

Welcome to December

Why yes, my new decoration really does put me in the Christmas spirit, thanks. After all, I’ll probably be doing a significant chunk of my Christmas shopping there. And it’s so cute with the little skylights and all.

And no, I don’t really care how much they paid the person who hand-painted it.

Things I love today:

  • Pop-up Video re-runs on VH-1 Classic: my only complaint is that no one ever shows my favorite: the Pop-up Behind the Music with Leif Garrett, which was one of the single funniest things I’ve ever seen on TV.
  • My fast food cup overfloweth: The McRib and Burger King’s Italian Chicken Sandwich have returned simultaneously.
  • Best of all, in only six more days, I get to have my boy home for nearly an entire month. Which is nice, because it’s getting cold here.