The suburban desert

Still contemplating the last post. Thinking about how where we live dictates who we are, or at least how we perceive the world. How can a kid raised in this rarefied atmosphere really know what real life is like? How can adults continue to really know the problems of the other 99.9% of the humans on this planet when we are so.... comfortable?

We saw Juno last week, and when they had the montage of driving into the sterile, yuppie neighborhood where the sterile yuppies lived, I recognized our street. It's just that kind of place.


From Cary Tennis, Salon's resident advice guru:



But then, after all your hard work and some measure of feeling deprived of the good things in life, you get a job with a big salary and someone who sells real estate puts you in her car and drives you around and some person inside you -- not the careful-planning you but this other more spontaneous and sensuous you, a you who always wanted to live in a big house with a yard -- sees a big, pretty house with a lawn and goes, "Wow!" And you buy it.
And as soon as you move in you feel a profound sense of loss. You can't put your finger on it but the place you are in does not make you happy. The place you are in is big and pretty. So that makes it hard to explain. Why does big and pretty not make you happy?
It doesn't make you happy because it's not made for humans. It's made for cars. These suburban houses are basically huge garages with attached living quarters for servants -- meaning us. We are the servants. We work for the cars who live there. The cars have a very good life. We make sure of that. But our lives are not so good there.





So is it possible to live sustainably and aware in these walled-off communities that are so self-absorbed, self-indulgent, self-unaware? I wonder.













I don't mean they all have to be Hobbit Houses (although isn't this just the cutest!) They can be much more conventional, or reverse-engineered. It's all in what we can do, and it'll start when I can get away from a home owner's association. Among other things!