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I hate cars. I hate them, and I don't understand why people buy them.
My disdain has very little to do with environmentalism or being a disgruntled pedestrian and bicyclist. Actually, I have enough objectivity to see clearly that motorists have a lot more reason to disdain uncooperative bicyclists and pedestrians than vice versa.
To me, a car is a big, expensive liability. Gas, insurance and maintenance are all costly, and one must live in fear of losing the big investment to accident or theft. If a used car costs, say, $4,000, or however much, that's the cost of over 150 taxicab rides, or one every two days for an entire year. That doesn't include the cost of fuel, insurance, or maintenance, nor does it include the many occasions when mass transit, biking or walking will get you there all the same. It seems to me just such a lousy bargain.
As I understand it, people usually buy them for independence. I don't follow that logic. To me, being able to get on and off buses whenever you want, wherever you want, walking wherever you want, is independence, unimpeded by fuel or the sheer bulk of the liability. An experienced cyclist can gain a significant mobility advantage over cars by cleverly exploiting the rule that while on the road, bikes obey the same rules of the road as cars, but a dismounted bicyclist counts as a pedestrian. And one can ignore the former rule if there's no one in sight.
I'm not one of those spandex-clad super-jackass cyclists who run dead middle of the street, I swear.
Anyway, today, I walked to the, uh, Kroghetto. I needed food and sundries for my apartment. Looked around a bit, decided to try the Family Dollar across the street first.
Family Dollar was as ultra-ghetto and grimy as one would expect. I'm pretty sure there were several thefts in progress. I realize it seems strange to some - perhaps it might be read as white guilt gone loco, or self-loathing, or a lack of taste, or "slumming", or whatever - but the truth is I mind these people a lot less than incredibly obnoxious white yuppies, dumbass white college-age women, or guido guys who turn every occasion into a petty struggle for dominance. Perhaps I would mind ghetto dwellers more if I were black. Perhaps the reverse is true as well.
Regardless, the prices were, by and large, better than Krogers, even if the quality was generally low. Krogers had been selling a Farberware scissor for $8, but at Family Dollar I bought a generic of only slightly lower quality for a buck and change. (I am aware that Farberware, in spite of the solid name, isn't generally that good). I bought some brand-name condiments and basic staples - also some pillowcases and cloths.
The one cashier was a very large and overweight but chipper and intelligent (obviously uneducated) young black woman. She was surprised and confused at my purchase of amarillo rice and Nutella - didn't even know what they were, kept turning them over, examining them. Also surprised at my purchase of two dozen rags for $5 ("that's a really good deal", "of course, can't turn that down"). Most of the customers aren't so discriminating. Pun not intended.
She was also surprised at the size of my purchase - a little under $60, three full bags' worth. Probably, again, most of the customers lack the savvy to stretch their EBT cards so far. I needed cash, so I paid by ATM. I was surprised that Family Dollar charged a cash back fee, so I cancelled the transaction. I remarked that this was strange to me, and the cashier seemed to see it the other way around, "it's a lot less than usual". A cynic might say that this is the way the poor who are compelled to shop at Family Dollar are exploited; another might just say this is ghetto dwellers being dumb the same way they're dumb when they waste their limited resources on tacky, overpriced, low-quality crap.
I stopped at the really, really crappy Chinese restaurant next door. Like, worst ever. I knew that before I even headed in, but I wanted the XP for trying a new restaurant anyway. The cashier reacted to me the way most young Chinese females react to me. Whatever. I ordered lo mein (it is so called here as it is on the East Coast and not California; I believe this is true of the world in general), and some garlic bean curd. I asked for chopsticks, and the reaction I got clearly demonstrated that this was the first time she'd been asked.
A middle-class black woman sat down and talked loudly into her cellphone to the effect she was looking for a manager for her property who didn't have a criminal record and wasn't inept. This is, after all, why I moved to Ohio, there are a lot more unemployed here, but there is also a much shorter supply of talents than in Boston, with its seven colleges.
As I waited for the food (there was only the cashier and the one chef, and it took even longer than I thought it should have), I played with my Pokewalker. I had scored over 5k steps on the way, and redeemed them for three Marowaks, a Bone Club, and some shards. The food was terrible. The bean curd actually did not contain a single piece of bean curd, it was mostly barely cooked green peppers and huge pieces of onion and button mushroom. The cashier, perhaps apologetically, offered me a free box of white rice, on her own initiative (I hadn't complained or made any such mannerism). She spoke with an extremely heavy accent, could barely understand her, definitely FOB. I didn't know that Cincinnati was coastal. Learn something new every day.
It had been my intent to take the bus back, but the bus stops were so far from where I needed to go that taking the bus would barely save me any walking. Cincinnati buses run on a one-hour interval and are usually very late; on the other hand, they are in much better condition and are more user-friendly than buses in Boston. I would characterize Cincinnati's bus system as being very comparable to Sacramento. San Francisco, of course, has far and away the best transit system I've ever seen, but I'm sure that Japan, the EU, and probably even China and Russia put it to shame.
Cincinnati, unlike Boston, has actual benches (with dividers to prevent homeless people from sleeping on them, of course), and fully enclosed waiting booths at most of its bus stops. Regardless, after about 20 minutes, I got tired of waiting and simply walked home. Had not been walking for five minutes when the bus passed me. Bet you didn't see that coming. When I got home, I had 15k steps on my Pokewalker. Yay.
As strange as it may seem to some, Cincinnati actually has much better air and water than Boston, and the temperature is more hospitable (checking weather records, it averages 10 degrees warmer year-round). Walking is a lot less obnoxious due to the lack of incidental footsie games seen in urban Boston.
There are still some twits. I stopped at a different Indian buffet, within half a kilometer of the other, the other day. I ate and listened to this dumbass white woman, probably attached to UCinn, rant and rant at her totally passive boyfriend about her desire to adopt a child from a third-world country. She rattled off a number of countries - Kazakhstan, Chile, Russia - I happen to know that all those countries have serious issues with child sales / abduction (for decades, many adopted children from Chile were kidnapped from socialists who were political prisoners, something revealed to neither the birth nor the foster family).
She ranted about her superficial experiences and the "cultural differences" between a darker skinned Latino child of six and a Scandivavian "blonde, blue-eyed family". It is testament to the intense racism of these self-righteous white female university-dwelling scum that they conflate race and culture.
Yet it is not just racism at work. The reason these people conflate race and culture is that they themselves have a cultural value of 0. Proof can be found whenever one talks to these people about issues like cultural development through history, or about differences between discrete cultures. For all their talk about "diversity" (which really is just another word for racism), they always pretend that all cultures, all groups of people, are absolutely the same, and all the differences are superficial and arbitrary. They are completely incapable of analyzing cultural development discretely from technological development; like the chauvinistic Victorians, they fall back on the trite and banal argument that because we have better technology than this or that third-world country, we should tell them what to do (never mind that most of our technology was developed by amusisch chauvinists).
A cultured person can look at another culture, and say, they are different from us, they have different values, morals, etc, some better, some worse, because of who they are as a people. When you say something like that to white college trash, they get all PC and say that all differences are individual. In reality, they are just ignorant and chauvinistic.
But there is something much more evil at work with these white women. The reason that they are obsessed with adopting third-world children, or white kids from this country, or getting artificial insemination instead of being knocked up, is that they are pathologically narcissistic. To be a parent necessarily requires coming to grips with one's own flawed human character, and accepting that the child is a reflection on one's person for good and bad. Accepting that the child may come out not as one would wish, disabled, or maybe even just plain bad. These women are too caught up in themselves to accept that risk, so they prefer to adopt or inseminate rather than extend their personhood to another individual.
It is why they adopt, and it is also the especial appeal of artificial insemination over knock-up to these women - a way of divorcing themselves from the natural process, transferring blame to an unknown vial of semen rather than their own choice or person. They take an attitude more appropriate to adopting a cute puppy than to raising a child. It is a disgusting and evil attitude - reducing a child, a powerless nascent human being, to the status of a pet or accessory for self-indulgence - and it is why these sick women are incapable of raising kids without putting them on drugs.
Most couples who are unable to bear children are capable of bearing them with other individuals. It would thus be most sensible for each parent to have a child with a platonic friend of the opposite gender, then raise the two children as a family. That this very equitable and reasonable option is never taken - but they are okay with borrowing a womb, or whatever - is testament to the true motives of these white women who refuse to birth naturally. Their problems are psychological, not physical.
In characteristic Aestu fashion, as I was getting ready to leave, buttoning up my coat, I simply mentioned the bit about Chilean adoption to the woman. She reacted as those women tend to, with the "talking dog" routine. Then I said, "you know, if you really wanted to help a disadvantaged child, you could just adopt a black child domestically - but of course, no one wants a black child". She almost choked. lol.
Both Indian buffets were almost empty. It's this sort of thing that makes me wish I had a million dollars...or not even a million, hell, a quarter of a million. It would be most efficient to buy them both up, franchise them, shutter one, then hire all the workers from both, have them live in the basement (as they probably do already), put them all on the five-hour-day, then set up a daycare with the spare labor. Such an arrangement would even be profitable for the investor, even with only a marginal markup. Everyone goes home happy.
Instead, we have two restaurants, being worked 20 hours a day, both serving basically identical food, which will no doubt eventually run each other both out of business, neglecting their children due to overwork, and neither with the specialists - marketing experts, furniture people, etc - that could really make either successful. It's totally inefficient, totally unprofitable, and I reject the notion that this "competitive" process actually produces a better product on empirical grounds; all kinds of fail restaurants better than these nice Indian places stick around forever due to sheer momentum and assets. The only people who really gain out of this perversely inefficient arrangement are real estate agents and banks that prefer to ding on interest and fees rather than actually invest in viable business ventures. My experience has always been that firms run as a going concern, upon the principle of mutualism, will command fanatical loyalty from their workers - the typical American style of management inevitably produces cynicism and world of Dilbert.
I realize I have been doing nearly nothing but wandering around buying sundries. I am, uh, still waiting for my clothes to arrive. No, really. My goal remains in sight, however...get residency, go to UC, deceive the world of business into giving me a tiny slice of it, then show them what a colossal mistake they made.
Uh, hands up, who actually read all this shit by me? =P
Aestu of Bleeding Hollow... Nihilism is a copout.
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I wish it hadn't closed down.