Since it’s still chilly outside and keeps drizzling off and on, I’ve been sitting here searching for and reading the blogs of fellow Austin gardeners. It’s been informative, but perhaps not in the way they’d like. What I have learned is that a lot of these Austin gardeners are outright big-city snobs.

There is a rant on the horizon!

Having grown up in a very rural county and then spending my adult life moving from up the scale of city size until I landed in the place I always wanted to live, I have a unique perspective on big-city folks vs. small village folks, especially as it relates to those big-city folks visiting small burgs under the guise of being tourists or going “antiquing”. For all intents and purposes, I am, in fact, a city chick. I love my fancy coffees and cocktails. I love being able to go see just about any movie I like at just about any hour of the day or night. I love having a craving for Asian food at midnight on a Thursday and knowing there are places to go to sate the craving. I love not having to wait for catalog orders to arrive and being able to find just about anything I could possibly want to buy within easy driving distance. I love the vast assortment of people, places, and things. I am a city chick. There’s no denying it.

For as much as I love the city life with its hectic to-and-fro and endless opportunities and options, I don’t look down my nose at small burgs. I love them too, and if it weren’t for the fact that I like having as many options as possible in life, and living in a more 24/7 kind of world, I would still live in a small burg. It’s entirely possible that one day I will again choose to do so, when I am ready for fewer options and a slower lifestyle.

Having grown up in a county whose total human population combined would barely equal the population of a small town, that too is a part of who I am. That day when my parents and I set out on a road trip to find a new place to live, had we not run into the little burg we eventually came to call home before arriving at our intended destination of Austin, I would be an entirely different person than I am now. I don’t know that I would have developed the love of green things growing, an appreciation of the subtle changes of the seasons and weather, knowing the stars of the full view of the Milky Way as well as I do the lines on the palms of my hands, a sense of self-sufficiency and knowing how to get by when the getting by is hard, how to care for people, plants, and animals, and the ability to coexist with critters of all manner — even possums who take residence in my laundry room. So many things that make me who I am today were brought forth in my person thanks to having been raised in a place where these things were more important than what style of shoes you wore or whether or not a margarita was made with the proper brand of tequila^†. Fewer options for getting into trouble in the country as well, and with everyone knowing everyone’s business — though often very annoying, particularly during the teen years — meant a level of safety in a way. There were no houses I would not have been able to run to for help and receive it, even if I didn’t personally know the people who lived there. I dare say the same is not true in Austin.

So as some kind of hybrid country chick and city chick mix, it annoys me to see city folk dissing the rural towns they decide to visit in search of bargains for there only being one place in town with a liquor license or not having their preferred flavor of liquor, for not having coffee beans that meet their exacting requirements, for not having vegetarian dishes at every restaurant, for driving slower and obeying traffic signs, and for daring to serve fried potatoes with fried fish^††. I have to imagine these are the same sorts of people who go to foreign countries and play the part of Ugly American. They do it so well right here in their own country, where the culture isn’t all that different, why would they behave any better where there may be vast differences in lifestyles, diets, and ways of doing things?

So I went out in search of peers in my area to perhaps share experiences with, learn with and from, and I found them. Women my age, into many of the same things I am into. Artists, writers, crafters, cooks, yoga-nuts, meditation lovers, people interested in achieving self-sufficiency — all in my peer group, all in my city, and all into gardening — and almost every last one of them was such a snob, I would neither invite them into my home nor meet them for coffee at their favorite coffee shop. These are women I share so many common interests with one would think friendship could develop quickly, and yet, I find myself so disgusted by their attitudes towards small town folk, if I ever recognized one of them out on the street, I’d have to bite my tongue to stop from sneering in their direction.

With all their talk of a love of nature, green things growing, getting back to basics, living a slower and simpler life, wishes of someday living in the country, I think they need to go back out into their gardens and meditate a little longer on these subjects to come to a clearer picture of reality. Their vision of this wonderful existence they seek obviously does not match up with the reality of what that life is really like. The very places they have been visiting, where nothing was to their liking, is exactly where people have been living with nature, getting back to the basics, and living a slower and simpler life for hundreds of years. Alas, with that slower and simpler lifestyle comes the facts that there may not be a bar on each corner carrying every top-shelf brand of tequila, the coffee may be Folgers and come out of a can, and fried fish will be served with fried potatoes. If they can’t accept these realities of country life, they don’t want to live there, and those who are living there and have been for generations would very much like it if they didn’t move into the neighborhood and try to turn it into a smaller version of the big city they just left. And if they want to visit, great! Come visit! But if would be nice if they would please try to not be an Ugly American, a demanding tourist, and realize that the life going on around them is the very thing they say they are seeking and doesn’t need to be improved to city standards.

Interesting Note: The majority of these women are not native Austinites. They also aren’t native Texans. In fact, the vast majority of them have migrated here from California, which is just so much more confirmation bias that I can never be friends with women from California, no matter how many common interests we share. They left a place they didn’t like living in, and the first thing they do is try to change the place I like living in to be more like the place they came from and didn’t like well enough to continue living there. It’s bad enough when they do it in Austin, which is metropolitan enough to have a variety of cultures within its boundaries, but when they extend a want for these changes to the burgs in the surrounding hills, all I have to say is please go home to California, as you obviously loved it there more than you thought you did … and whatever you do, do NOT move out into the country. It will only continue to disappoint you.

I’m going to go pick pebbles out of my garden dirt now and meditate on the fact that I love Austin, I love Texas, I love the area burgs, and I love living where I live and don’t want it changed into some vision (or delusion) of what someone else thinks it is or should be.

And furthermore, if you have chickens in your back yard, and those chickens have had their beaks clipped, f*ck you for being a pussy who can’t deal with occasionally getting pecked. Do you declaw your cats too? Oh, wait, you don’t have cats, because keeping cats as pets goes against your vegetarian/animal rights code. Well, you go girl! I’m sure your chickens with clipped beaks are totally behind your animal rights activism.

Yup, shutting up now and going to pick pebbles. Not going to revisit any of these blogs or seek out any others. I will continue to be a loner and hermit, and my life will apparently continue to go just fine on that path. I can do without people like this in my life.

1. † Hell, I didn’t even know what a margarita was until I went to college. In the country, it’s most often beer, wine, or nothing. [↩]
2. †† In what universe does fried fish not come with some form of fried potatoes?! Also, what the hell do you expect when you go to the only Mexican restaurant in town and instead of ordering Mexican food you order the only fish plate on the menu?! You could, you know, order the Mexican food, which I know for a fact is made by actual Mexicans from Mexico (who own the place), but oh … you’re a vegetarian. But wait, didn’t you just say you wanted fish tacos, which they wouldn’t make special for you? Then how the hell are you a vegetarian if you eat fish?! Last time I checked, fish are not vegetables. Stupid, yes, but not vegetables. [↩]