A Different State of Mind
When I used to visit NYC, I’d always meet lots of people from Texas. Almost without fail, they had a tattooed outline of the state on them somewhere. I joked “if you were really a Texan, you wouldn’t have left”. Yet here I am, living out of state, not even in a state at all. What is a district anyway? I surrendered my TX driver’s license for a DC dl and I feel conflicted about it. While now I am able to drive legally, it still feels like I’ve somehow betrayed my loyalty to the greatest state. The irony is I hardly drive here at all, and I certainly do not miss arriving to work in a blind rage over traffic patterns.
It came as a great shock that moving across the country after 30 years wasn’t really a shock at all. There’s BBQ here, though very little brisket (which sucks), but the pizza and sandwiches are so good that I barely miss Tex-Mex (admittedly blasphemous). The bread in DC is clearly better, though I haven’t seen anything remotely resembling a tortilla since I left. My quality of life is tied heavily to dining options so I am delighted to find out DC is a thriving food town.
I had this assumption that Texans, and Houstonians in particular are friendlier than the rest of the country. Desperately looking to confirm my own bias, I honed in on the worst behaviors of strangers, namely bad holding-the-door etiquette. I was wrong though, and there’s about the same level of general courtesy, if not more. Chalk it up to spending more time outside, but I find myself having way more conversations with people I do not know. It reminds me a lot of being in Austin, a city largely comprised of transients. Very few people are from DC, and if they are, they are the first to tell you that it “didn’t used to be like this, at all”.
Downsizing seemed like it would be painful. A man of many hobbies, I have a lot of crap. I jettisoned a great deal, and instead of missing things, I am much happier with what I kept. It’s easy to be fooled into the consumerist lie, but the adage is true, what you own will eventually own you. I took great pride in owning a home, but it is refreshing to assume 0% responsibility for maintenance expenses. The toilet in my new apartment was running, but someone came to fix it within 30 minutes for free. I would have spent an entire weekend going to the hardware store and cursing my futile existence before eventually shelling out for a professional.
In the process of looking at a house full of stuff and helplessly wondering “how am I going to do this?”, eventually you just do it.
