Every morning after I drop the kids off at school, I take a drive up to the new house. I love to drive up to the neighborhood. It’s beautiful. The streets are lined with trees. The homes are large and gorgeous. It’s peaceful and quite. People are out walking their dogs, or riding their horses.
It’s nothing at all like the ‘hood we lived in.
We’re so not going to fit in. Most of the people there are wealthy. They are dentists, they are doctors. They are attorneys. They drive Escalades and Hummers.
We are construction workers and Headline Rotaters**. We drive 95 Galants and Mini-vans.
It’s only a few minutes up the road from where we used to live, but it’s an entirely different world up there.
In my old neighborhood, it wasn’t out of the ordinary to see shirtless men with hairy beer belly’s walking across the street with a rifle resting on their shoulder. It wasn’t even the slightest bit weird to have drunk men knock on your door at 10pm to tell you “not to worry if you hear loud noises” coming from their backyard because they were going to be “playing with their potato launcher.” No one batted an eye when ex-boyfriend’s made the hill across the street their “home” because they got kicked out of the house and slapped with a restraining order. It wasn’t unusual to see 30 kids running crazy in the streets, most of them without socks or shoes and a couple of them in diapers.
I’ve been down the street of my new neighborhood at least 20 times and I have yet to see a kid playing outside. I have yet to see a shirtless man drinking a beer while yelling at His Woman. I have yet to see cops in front of a house while a young drunk mother shouts “IT WAS SELF DEFENSE” at them. I have yet to see a grown man come running out of the backyard with his shirt on fire. I have yet to see a mother of 5 kids having sex on the front lawn.
And while I’m pretty happy about that, I would be lying if I didn’t say a small part of me is crying on the inside because how boring.
Seriously, my old neighborhood was trashy in every way, but it was exciting and often times, hilarious. (Except for the time when me and my friends were out front at midnight, drinking smirnoffs and doing cartwheels and someone decided to pull out a shotgun and KILL A MAN across the street. That wasn’t hilarious at all.)
The silence in our new neighborhood is a little creepy because I’m not used to it. I’m not used to hearing crickets, I’m not used to hearing the leaves on the trees as the wind blows, but I’m looking forward to sleeping in peace and not getting woke up at 2 in the morning by my neighbor stabbing his dad while the mom throws furniture out onto the driveway.
I'm also looking forward to having The Jesus Approved Sex&trade without having my husband put his hand over my mouth to mute The Moans, because, you know, my Dad might hear us.
GROSS.
Two more days, people. Until Sex! And privacy! And MY OWN BED! And! And! ANNNNNDDD!
[Howard Dean Scream]YEeeeeaAAAAAAH[/Howard Dean Scream]
We just moved to a new city, and in the process decided that if we needed to give up food altogether, we were going to live in a slightly better part of town than what we were coming from. It's nice (and we can even still afford food, which is nice too), but the other day Rj and I were standing outside and I looked at him and said 'Our neighborhood is so damn boring'. When you spend all your time at home and the neighborhood is your free entertainment, it does kinda suck in a way to move up.