In 2007, my mother was sick and I spent many weeks/months back and forth to Columbus, Ohio. I had to run errands and shop, and I had forgotten how nice people were in Ohio. They actually paid attention, said hello and made brief eye contact. Those small things made a difference in making a difficult time a little less stressful, even though no one knew what was going on in my life. They were just nice. Demographics do make a difference, though Columbus is a big city, there is still a somewhat rural approach to others.[/quote]
How true. We went back to Ohio over Christmas, and several of our old friends basically dropped whatever they were doing, and threw a big party where everyone got shitfaced. The key poing being we didn’t call ahead and get on their “schedule”. They figured out some time that everyone could get together and partayyy, and have a great time. I lived in that community for 5-5.5 years? (Not quite my hometown, a few miles away).
I’ve been here now for 3.5 and my wife said you know if we moved away from Encinitas and came back to visit I can’t think of a single person who’d make time to hang out. Well that’s not true, I can think of one or two individual guys who’d meet me at a bar, but I am talking about whole families who do things together. When we first moved here my little guy was in 3rd grade and the teacher asked the kids about what family activities they liked best. Since he’d only been here a month all of his memories were of back in Ohio and he promptly said “Margarita night at the smiths”. Of course the teacher was shocked, but to the kids it was fun, we all had 1-2 kids around the same age and generally once a month during soccer or baseball there would be a big cook-out/drink-out somewhere.
We do the exact same things here that we did back there in terms of being heavily involved in youth sports, and other activities where you meet a lot of people. The difference is here most show up to the required events and that’s all you see of them. Jr. has his other 85 activities to get to, such as study classes for SATs in 8th grade, scouts, personal trainers, etc. People don’t really slow down and talk all that much. I don’t really relate to the parent types who’s child “must get to Stanford, Berkley or UCLA, or they are failures”, but they are all around us here. I am a blue collar mindset guy living in a white-collar world with a white-collar job, but not relating well to the intense pressure kids are under here. I think that is why people don’t have time to hang out. You can’t fart around on Sunday when little sally who is 8 has foreign-language school.
I’m hoping this year is a little different, but we’ll see (as LL is kicking off).
