the marches of stepford

toria referred to our apartment community as "stepford" the other night, and the name stuck for me. except that instead of being a place where lots and lots of perfect-looking but bored domestic-robo-moms plot world domination, our stepford is a place where otherwise promising and intelligent underclassmen plot debauchery, liver poisoning and the conferring of sexually transmitted diseases upon one another.

nonetheless, there's an air of the surreal around the entire place. i love my apartment; don't get me wrong. but i think if i could transplant this apartment to the westview terrace hill, i would. for years, i've argued that the rhetoric that describes post-college as "the real world" is disingenuous. for me, my four years of college, while filled with a fair amount of partying and good-time-having, was much, much more work than the two years i spent afterwards working the kinds of jobs "normal" people work. also, during my time in the "real world", my partying, drinking, etc. increased exponentially on account of, well, the fact that the real world isn't that hard to live in. it doesn't require thought and work most often, just repetition. however, a large percentage of the students i see at stepford every day and night couldn't possibly be farther from the real world. they seem intent on extending adolescence as long as possible, and not, i assume (perhaps unfairly) out of a desire to explore their options or anything half so interesting, but instead simply just because it's easier, more fun, and you get laid more often.

i was walking to class yesterday at 8:20 or so, the same route i've taken to campus every day since i got back here from ohio, when a huge fucking flock of underclassmen descended from the hills of stepford, upon the bus stop and the sidewalk. i turned off at harvey st. (or whatever that road is called) and climbed the c street hill rather than follow the fifty-some odd students up b street. it was weird. it was like that lemmings game, only in real life. everyone on their cell phones, etc. if we had been in seattle or new york, it would have been fitting. here, it held the air of too many people insisting on taking their reality with them. which just rubs me the wrong way. so i'm actually considering getting up like 20 minutes early to bypass this spectacle every morning. it just feels wrong. maybe i'm just jealous because i don't have a pre-destroyed trucker hat that i can wear ironically.

my jeans do actually have holes in them (a few pair) but that's because they were on sale at penney's for 15 bucks and they were the only decent-quality jeans i could find in canton that were under 25 dollars that fit my oddly-shaped ass correctly.

one last thing about stepford: the insane amounts of water waste. as i've gotten more and more into environmental concerns and sustainability in the last year, this just annoys the fucking shit out of me. there are sprinklers seemingly every five feet in the whole of the allotment, anywhere that there's grass. which is a lot of places. this wouldn't be a problem by itself if the sprinklers didn't run seemingly 24/7. i've heard them at 7am, at noon, at 5pm, at 5am, and so on and so forth. the best (worst) part is that ostensibly they're meant to improve the lawn (hence "emerald downs"). however, all that fucking happens is that the water oversaturates the soil, and when the water table moves, all the water fucking seeps out into the bottom of the hill near stadium way, essentially turning the entire entrace of the allotment into a marsh. you literally sink into it to your ankles, even if it hasn't rained for weeks. and if it has rained (like it had today) then it's nigh impassable. so fucking weird. what purpose could this possibly serve other than to be back-asswards and wasteful?

i dunno. i have to go to class.