Last night was amazing. Huge crowd, great music, and not a lonely moment. I think I may make a habit of starting my nights with a martini; it’s expensive, but it seems to put things into the right perspective from the get-go.
Roll call (damn, these are getting long): Saw jadedat25, skunque, ratspy, maggot93, chibitig1, saintmathew, grindcorean, fenix_grimwolf, Tony, Brian, and probably others. Met Czar Peter, Brit, Grace, Dominic, Careta(?), and a lot of other lovely people who have unfortunately overflowed my name buffers.
avivahg got something she’s been wanting for a long, long time… but you can read about that on her journal.
Conversed, enjoyed terrific sets by skunque and maggot93 (that Sirian (Cerean?) tune was beautiful), gave and got massages, learned to dance in platforms and long-ass skirt, discussed the will-sapping properties of The Couch with chibitig1. Spent a surprisingly little amount of time on the 80’s side – the couch kept luring me back. Was surprisingly non-spooked, given the number of people there.
The only bad part of the evening was driving out of the parking lot… all the other… um… for lack of a better term “ghetto” clubs were letting out their patrons with their ghettomobiles and alcohol-enhanced attitude problems… avivahg kept her cool at the wheel admirably, though. I’ve said it before, and everything I see confirms it: cities turn people into ugly, inconsiderate, belligerent assholes. I don’t understand how anyone can stand to live in the city.
that couch will be mine someday. oh yes! it will! it and it’s sub and it’s energy sucking powers! MINE! ALL MINE! MWAHAHAHA!!!
I’ve said it before, and everything I see confirms it: cities turn people into ugly, inconsiderate, belligerent assholes.
I tend to think most people are assholes regardless of whether they live in cities or not. Living in cities merely reduces their efforts to hide the truth of it. The most savage, prejudicial, violent behaviour I’ve ever encountered never occurred in a city context, always in suburbs or rural areas. Yes, you’re less likely to get your car broken into, but you’re more likely to get beaten up for being the ‘wrong’ race or sexual orientation, or for looking ‘wierd’ – not a step up in my book.
give me a burb right outside the city so the city is easy to get to…but i don’t have to be there all the time. i like having a backyard and a driveway.
I hear this all the time from city dwellers, and I always wonder where they had their experiences, and why they are so different from mine. In my experience people in the country and suburbs may be be naive, insulated, and have opinions that don’t agree with mine, but however odd they found me, they left me alone. The worst I’ve experienced has been comments on my appearance. People in the city, on the other hand, seem ready to take anything they don’t understand as a personal offense. There’s a tendency towards provocation that I just don’t see outside the city.
The few bad experiences I have had living in more rural areas really weren’t with rural people – they had more to do with the rednecks who live in the middle of shitty run-down little towns and drive jacked-up pickup trucks. They don’t count as country-folk to me, they’re just the boondock equivalent of degenerate city-folk. The suburbanites, sub-suburbanites, and farmers that actually live in the country may not be the most scintillating of conversationalists, but they are respectful and most of all, they have some sense of manners. That was really what struck me last night – the simple lack of common decency. In a gridlocked parking lot situation, people were deliberately preventing us from entering the stream of traffic – zooming ahead to keep us from squeezing in, and then making threatening gestures at us for trying to get in line. The deliberate, calculated rudeness shocked me. Out here the guy in the pickup truck might give you a funny look, but he’ll wave you on ahead of him. There seems to be a difference in values – in the city, being different seems to mean, to some people at least, that the common rules of behavior don’t apply. Or maybe they just never learned any manners in the first place.
i think it’s a bit of both. to a lot of city dwellers, i have noticed, they think of it as “their city” and if they don’t like something in “their city”…*rolls eyes* give me a headache. i love the city, it’s a great place to visit…but i don’t think i could live there for very long without going postal.
those specific sorts of driving issues, i do not believe to be linked to being in a city so much as linked to being in a city in the dc area. the underlying attitude, believed or feigned, is always ‘who i am/where i am going is more important than who you are/wherever you are going and therefore excuses my selfish idiocy”
many large cities elsewhere display much more evolved notions of traffic behaviour
I’m used to the general rudeness, but even in the parking lot at Towson mall on major shopping days a certain level of grudging decorum is maintained. This was something different. The looks, the gestures, the threatening yelling (words not heard, because of the overall noise level) were beyond the general undirected self-absorbtion of yuppies in their SUVs (obnoxious in it’s own right). This was bordering on hatred.