#ex-urban

[sweetmakinmama]

Unexpected find. Under a metal tray, we found a teeny grassy oasis. The chickens said: "Hell, yes!"

[sweetmakinmama]

Exciting times. “Life is either a daring adventure or nothing at all.” Helen Keller’s words ring oh so true for me. I wasn’t always the risk-taker or daring adventurer. My big brother gave me this knowledge, this priceless gift. So begins our ex-urban adventure. We’ll make mistakes. We’ll sometimes feel in over our heads. We may even question our sanity. :) But we’ll also feel alive. We’ll teach our little man to embrace life with all its challenges. Teach him to work hard and play harder. To live. To learn. This is our new home. Tiny, rural, cozy, and already converted, thank goodness. ;) We are not the handiest of households. We have chickens and quail and an assortment of subservient quadrupeds. I love to experiment in the kitchen, hunt down rare spices, play with makeup, surround myself with critters, read classical and obscure texts, play a surprising variety of video games, and most of all, I love to share. xx Rose

[ex-urban-blog]

(ex)Urban: Suburban Culture Shock

"We are not from here..."

We spent much of Friday morning in the suburban house of our choosing.  We have an accepted offer and our inspector was out making sure that the house was not money pit and that it was, as it appeared, just as sturdy and wonderful as all of the other house on the street WHICH LOOK EXACTLY THE SAME.

Even in a few hours in this different environment, I felt a bit...unfamiliar?  Out of place?  Foreign?  Yes, that's it.  Foreign.

We have become inner city people.  Between Austin, Africa, and San Antonio, I have now spent the majority of the last TWELVE years living in generally urban, walkable environments.

The roads in our future suburb feel different.  The school-children run around freely (although they are tracked at a distance by helicopter-moms).  People look different, dress differently, and (likely) think differently than we do - for now. To paint the picture: I drive a Yaris, don't own cowboy boots, and may have been the first male to wear man-capris in this wonderfully friendly (and incredible conservative) hamlet outside the outer loop.

I am sure I'll have a Canyonero, boots, and one of those vented fishing shirts soon (soon = probably never), so let's hope I don't become the victim of the first man-capri related hate crime in history before then.

The way that culture shock works (both in my own experience and from research) is that, basically, after a few frustrating ups and downs, the human being eventually adapts and assimilates to whatever cultural situation they're dropped in. 

This bodes well for the family and the next 20 years of life that await us in the foreign lands of suburbia.  The hinterlands will not be quite so weird once we've been grafted into the culture better.

Of course, I am not exactly anxious to trade my love for the more urban setting.  Perhaps we can merely become accepting of the new environ and quietly look forward to that spot in the graph (after the dotted line on the right) where the line shows us again returning to our native (urban) culture.