Yippee-IA, Motherf***ers! IRRATIONALLY ANGRY PT. 2: Irrationally Angrier

Yeah, don't do that. Plz.

A Young Professional of my acquaintance (who is a local celebrity blogger, ad/marketing pro, one of those "kind of a big deal" types who everyone knows) is about to get married. She currently owns a beautiful new-ish townhouse in the city in a very desirable area, just outside downtown; and she works downtown. (Total travel time, like 10 minutes.) She and her husband-to-be just mentioned on FB that in anticipation of the upcoming nuptials they're going to look at houses together . . . 20 miles outside the city, in a place where commuting requires an hour or so on the most congested freeway in the region. Why?!! You've got a perfectly good place to live for two people! You don't have to move to the fucking outer-ring suburbs just because you get married! GAAAAAAAAH!

Like the first time I hear her complain about traffic after she gets married it's going to be very hard not to tell her publicly to STFU.

Wow, yeah. The automatic path to the suburbs on marriage/reproducing makes me IA, too.

Yes, daycare in Chicago is o_O expensive but public schools are fine to great if you live in the right neighborhood. It just means you need to rent and/or inhabit a smaller space, which bfd.

Diff ppl have diff priorities so it's not like I get angry at people for wanting different things than I do, but I do get IA when ppl dont want to leave the city but move to the burbs bc they think they have to or when people smugly tell other ppl living in the city that they too will move to the suburbs one day, just you wait.

It especially makes me IA because her whole public persona is to be Ms. Cleveland Boosterism, it's what her whole blog is about, she's miss woman about town, then immediately plans a move to the suburbs the second she's married.

Ugh. I'm IA with you.

As someone who wants to stay in the city, I half agree with you on this, but there are many things that are harder about having kids in a city, and I assume most people who move to the suburbs after marriage have a family in mind.

I mean for example, I can't afford to live walking distance to any of the big city parks that actually have enough room to really run around, at least not in a neighborhood that checks the other boxes (decent schools, access to public transit, etc.). So when my kids are older, assuming I'm still where I am, they would have to walk 30 mins or ride bikes or take a train or drive just to get to a place where they can throw a ball back and forth. Of course NYC is not Cleveland and the financial considerations are pretty starkly different.

She lives in CLEVELAND, FFS. It feels almost like a suburb itself.

IDK what Cleveland is like. I don't imagine there are a lot of options for neighborhoods with good schools, and I don't know your friend's financial situation. I do know that once the baby came along I was shocked at how few places there were within city limits that were actually affordable and had decent schools.

I chatted w/ a 40-something guy on OKC who lived in a far-flung suburb of Chicago (Naperville, I think?) and he complained that so many single guys were "still" living in the city. He said he wished he'd had the experience of living in the city when he was young and asked me how long I planned to stay here. I said I was happy here and the only other place I'd really want to live would be New Orleans or New York. He was a little befuddled, and asked something like, "But don't you want to get out of the city? It just seems like someplace you live when you're young, but it's just so dirty and expensive!" And he said he never rides the El b/c the people are terrifying and dangerous.

Anyway, this fucker had that same idea that kids sow their oats in the city and but when they grow up, they move to a "normal" "clean" spacious suburb.

My dad's wife will occasionally make anxious comments that make it clear that she sees living in the city as constantly rife with the potential for danger. Asking whether I feel safe in my neighborhood, etc.

it's just so dirty and expensive

i imagine this is a guy who would always be laying down pristine white handkerchiefs on everything before he sat down except that the laundry service on them would be too costly

my stepfather's only complaint about cities is that greater density = higher likelihood of his car getting dinged. he actually rented a car rather than drive his own to visit me in dc

my real father routinely expresses amazement that companies headquarter themselves in nyc when it's 'so expensive'. he would find it more logical to situate people in the same way fedex situates its superhub at the memphis airport

people aren't packages!

yes, it's very easy to come up with reasons to feel smug about the fact that anyone would actually want to live in the suburbs

My dad's wife will occasionally make anxious comments that make it clear that she sees living in the city as constantly rife with the potential for danger. Asking whether I feel safe in my neighborhood, etc.

― Geoffrey Schweppes (jaymc), Friday, August 2, 2013 5:13 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

But there are places in the city you wouldn't live, right?

people are packages, my friend

The only thing I'm smug about is certain people's assumption that they have to move to the burbs as a necessary life step, like Jesse's ok cupid guy, and that failing to do so is bad for your children or heralds some kind of fundamental immaturity. Also get annoyed at people who have never loved in a city getting all pearl clutchingly scared about them, see ie my entire family.

i want to puke when people give me that "oh you don't have kids" thing about living in the city. there are hundreds of thousands of actual human children there.

OTmfingM

But there are places in the city you wouldn't live, right?

Sure, but there are places in the suburbs where I wouldn't live, either.

Also get annoyed at people who have never loved in a city getting all pearl clutchingly scared about them, see ie my entire family.

yes. my family does this too and it is terrible.

that said, I really like living in the suburbs again.

many cities were a lot less safe in our parents' lifetimes, so I'm not surprised older people perceive them that way. When my parents lived in Hell's Kitchen in the 70's it was inevitable that several people you knew had been mugged at least once (my dad and mom never were but my aunt was several times). Shit was a lot more desolate-looking, subway crime was a much more regular occurrence, etc. My mom still has a kind of devil-may-care attitude about the whole thing but I don't blame someone for not having that.

want to puke when people give me that "oh you don't have kids" thing about living in the city. there are hundreds of thousands of actual human children there.

― veryupsetmom (harbl), Friday, August 2, 2013 6:26 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

um, including my own. I live in New York City. And I am telling you that I 100% understand why someone, particularly someone not RICH, would want to leave once they had kids, assuming they could (my guess is that most of the kids in the city are either rich and can have a nice life in the city or are poor and their families don't have much choice).

don't um me. it's not that i don't understand why people would leave when they have kids. we have terrible public schools. these are just always small-minded people.

Anyway, I just feel like my stepmom has this preconceived notion of the THE BIG BAD CITY that somehow gets in the way of her being able to look around my tree-lined neighborhood full of strollers and boutiques and brunch places and realize, "OK, this is probably not a dangerous area." I mean, sure, crime is a possibility! But it's a possibility anywhere.

xp
Hurting OTM about cities being less safe when our parents were our age, so I do understand where the perspective comes from. The city's dangerous and dirty and cramped, and the suburbs are safe and clean and spacious. What gets lost in that dichotomy is not just that it's reductive or facile but that someone might have other considerations besides those: culture, transportation, diversity, etc.

we feel safer in inner city apartment blocks because the flats are harder to break into

the only time we were burgled was in a big spacious house on the fringe

^ i think about this all the time. the number of burglaries in the suburban county where i work is insane. i'm sure it's bad here too but it feels easy to not be burgled.

although my coworker who had a rowhouse was burgled, then she had kids and moved to a house on a golf course

I feel safer in the city bc if something happens I can yell and my neighbors will hear me. And presumably send for help, though they may still hold those couple of noise complaints against me and let me die.

Anyone else notice that more and more people make their voices go up in tone at the end of every sentence as if they were asking a question? Seems like I hear it mostly from people in their 20s-30s....someone please tell me they're noticing this too!!

isn't that something that people in Maine do?

question intonation, or high rise terminal

imo it's an indication that the speaker is lacking confidence

(unless you are idk welsh maybe)

xpost ugh I heard a political reporter on NPR do this the other day, rising inflections and a weird kind of lazy casual delivery. She sounded like a 25 year old talking about her weekend. It made me v annoyed.

also known as 'moronic interrogative', according to wikipedia

yesss

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=568

yeah getting grouchy about uptalk is nagl imo

telling me what not to get IA about is nagl either so THERE

every way every person talks makes me IA

yeah getting grouchy about uptalk is nagl imo

― i too went to college (silby), Friday, August 2, 2013 9:04 PM (20 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

you mean, "is nagl imo?", right?

got a message from a certain torrent site saying that something i had uploaded four years ago was being deleted for 'bad labels'. i was like wtf, the labels are fine, they even have the fucking composers listed

i was told the problem was that i had listed the album title as '[compiler] - dj-kicks' rather than simply 'dj-kicks'

at least it wasn't due to an argument about the hyphen in 'dj-kicks' i guess

I water things thinking it will be sunny judging by the way things look outside during the time I'm lying in bed reading. Then an hour after I've watered tehm it starts p-ing with rain. So I'm worried I'm about to drown things. Rain comes down like a blooming monsoon so it does.

Wind lifted one of my ball courgette plants and knocked it on its side so I'm wondering if it's going to bear the fruit/veg it was just visibly developing.
Wind also knocked my hat back into the middle of the road I'd just crossed yesterday. So I just avoided getting tyre tracks on it. Damn thing.

How do you get the weather bureau to leave it the f*** out?

A friend from Pennsylvania once that people from her area do that making every sentence end like it's a question? And she said she was glad when she finally stopped doing that after living in NC for a few years.

I guess the topic of moving to the burbs is over, but I just want to say that I don't judge anyone for where they want to live or for deciding they're better of raising kids in the suburbs. My annoyance w/ what carl said: certain people's assumption that they have to move to the burbs as a necessary life step.

And that OKC guy is not unique in refusing to ride public transit b/c it's "scary," i.e., there are sometimes loud people of color and they sometimes talk to themselves and they sometimes ask for change.

It's cos in the burbs whenever they watch the evening news it's all the scary shit that happens in the city.

The only issue I have re: city and burbs is like in Phil's example when you rep hard for a city but live 20 miles outside the place. Maybe this is due to being from Michigan where so many people are "woohoo I'm from Detroit fuck yeah" but actively hate the city proper due to fear and racism and only go there for a ball or hockey game once a year and flee immediately afterwards to Oakland county.

Also not IA but having been partnered up since long before the rise of online dating I still read OKC as "Oklahoma City" and am wondering why it fits in to the social lives of so many people that I know do not live in Oklahoma.

With you on OKC. Every time. Wonder what a bunch of single hipsters are thundering about.

Along those lines, two websites I work on are inarkansas.com and innovatearkansas.com. Needless to say, I see some familiar initials pop up a bit, but they always make me think of this thread instead of the other way around.