compact

i guess my car does fit into the compact car slot. all of which were totally empty. dozens and dozens of them, abandoned and sequestered. texas is truck country. big honkin' gas guzzlin' truck country.

Leah and i took a 'couples day' over to Dallas to check out one of their little art house movie theaters. turns out it's located in an area not too dissimilar from our own current neighborhood in Fort Worth.

it is still so interesting to me to be living in a city that is so much in transition as Fort Worth. Denver, Austin, and even, surprisingly Anchorage, had all the trimmings of a large city yet their urban areas never felt as "forced" as the developments in Fort Worth. it's exciting being a part of a place that is changing so much, and changing for the best, but it's like we are sometimes trying too hard to catch up, to adapt to what an ideal urbanscape could/should be.

and i don't know the solution, i just know that sometimes things here don't "feel right." but we'll get there and it will be great. it is great. just observations. and it is difficult to articulate all of this and sometimes people get offended (though I shouldn't care that they do). i'm not knocking it, it's just that it's still a new experience for me (and yet I've been here for two years..how is this possible?), living some place that doesn't have the necessary watermarks. yet it wants--and needs!--to be its own distinct urban place. I mean this place we went to in Dallas was no better, and Dallas is a strange, strange place (read: I never want to live there), but traveling over there today was practically like traveling to another world, to worlds that i both knew and didn't know.

probably the real issue here is that the reason i feel so unsettled and uncomfortable most of the time is because i feel that way in my professional life. choosing to become a student (then teacher) again (and questioning that choice multiple times, on a daily basis) surely reflects and refracts on to other facets of my existence here. as in: if I am unhappy in my professional life it therefore must be because of where i am living. i think part of that could be true (why go to school in a town you would never want to live?), but just a small, small part of course. such a statement is obviously quite false. ultimately, we make it what it is, we decide our own happinesses.

again, maybe this discontent is seen as negativity by some. yet it should not be perceived this way, not all the time. there is just too often this general sensation of being lost, of feeling unwelcomed. and that is all entirely my own fault. i know this. that is entirely my own fault.