So now I get to be one of the beautiful people doing wonderful things for at least a little while as I vacation in Houston and next week in Florida. It's funny because I feel like I'm totally blowing the opportunity. While I'm totally overjoyed, it is dawning on me that the wonderful things I'm doing are probably not so wonderful to the normal residents of any given metropolis or even Charlie Brown. I've gone to my favorite Houston comic book store a couple times and I've seen Transformers in IMAX. That's it. That's the extent of my wonderful adventures. Even worse, I fear I may have missed out on some mexican wrestling that happened here last weekend. It is dawning on me that I may have forgotten how to be truly wonderful.
I've always suspected that living in harsh, desolate hellholes of nature like Antarctica, a Turkish air base, or Rapid City, South Dakota can take a toll on you. My current isolation from normal pop culture consumerist civilization makes me Han Solo living in the figurative carbonite that is South Dakota. Now my inability to exploit all the rich cultural resources of Houston (like mexican wrestling) has me wondering if I've been living with the penguins and cowboys too long. If you think about it, Han Solo never really did anything all that great after he got out of the carbonite. He used to be awesome in the first two movies but then anything he did in Return of the Jedi after he got unfrozen could have been done by any anonymous rebel soldier or even C-3PO. It's like whether you're frozen in Carbonite or South Dakota, it affects you and makes you a dud.Just as Han suffered from hibernation sickness and was all blind, I'm worried that I'm becoming unable to appreciate different places. Honestly after constantly moving every few years, visiting relatives all over the place and going to the occasional Botcons, everywhere I go seems like one big blur. Everywhere may as well be anywhere because it´s all lost its vacation appeal. About the only thing that changes from one city to the next is some stores I like go out of business or they move and are no longer there when I visit them. That happened this week when I found out one comic book store moved a couple blocks only after I showed up to the empty shopping mall where it used to be. That was annoying. It's like each city I've lived in is a room in my house and the stores are the furniture. So if Houston is my living room I'm a bit mad that they moved the sofa. I'm feeling pretty bad because if Antarctica is my backyard I haven´t gone outside in ages.
Well now I´m off to a certain Houstonian comic book store that is only open Friday through Sunday. To me that is still pretty special and something I can definitely appreciate. Even if it may not be all that fantastic in the larger scheme of things, it beats blogging from the carbonite.
2 comments:
You know what I miss most about living in a big city? Not having a Chinese place that will deliver.
Yeah, and that's part of why I've decided that my missing the big city life is absurd. It used to be that big cities had the nicer stores with bigger selections but with the internet there is no product availability advantage to living in a city anymore. In fact the other day I spent an hour and a half hunting down a comic book on the other side of town, spending more in gas than the cost of the comic itself. I was thinking, well so what if Houston or Florida have awesome comics stores. I can get it all on ebay or Amazon.com anyways and for cheaper. The only real advantage of city life is that a wider range of food is available via home delivery.
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