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Discuss Amongst Yourselves - May 8, 2006

What do you love most about your hometown? While we're there, what do you hate most about it?

Comments

Anonymous said…
LOVE --> I love how everyone knows my name; when you stand at the top of one of the rolling hills, the land looks as if it were carpeted with green, green trees; canoeing is THE thing to do on the weekends; and family is still considered the most important thing in life.

HATE --> I hate how everyone knows my name - case in point - everyone knew I was dating Matthew before we actually WENT ON A DATE, and when I was in high school, I could do something and my parents would know before I made it home.

Small towns - a blessing and a curse.
Anonymous said…
Hometown?

You need to qualify this.
Do you mean the place where we spent the majority of our youth?

Or the place where we developed the most before we hit 18?

Ah, the joys of moving several times before I graduated high school...
Beth said…
No fair! Katie stole my answers!
Anonymous said…
Bless you. I am having a massive crisis of my own making but can rest a little easier now, as I have been waiting my whole life for someone to ask me that question.

I love:

That it claims to have the tallest Golden Arches in North America

That the goldfish I got from the Zellers' grand re-opening lived for four years before I freed them in what I called 'the green green valley' but was really just a small creek running through a grassy divot, right beside the A&P

That it gets so hot in the summer that the tar bubbles up from the asphalt and you can sit in the middle of the road prodding it with a stick

That it was named after a man-made pond and is bordered by a man-made lake

That is has a sixteen mile creek, so named

That the weekly newspaper is all bad photos and re-prints and Shopper's Drugmart fliers but is still called the Champion

That growing up we always had the same mayor because no one ever ran against him

Rattlesnake point

That the bus system was two schoolbuses painted white

That the cemetary is right beside the sewage treatment plant (but was still one of my favourite places to walk around)

That I went to school with a kid named Maurizio who moved back to Italy

That everything felt simultaneously mythic and suffocating

That my high school used to sit in the middle of a field, bordered only by teen smokers

The fifth wheel truck stop

That a friend's father remembers it being, in the fifties, a town 'full of greasers'

That I could walk to the mall in winter and pretend, quite convincingly, to be trekking across the Siberian steppes

That the movie theatre was a warehouse dressed up with a zebra theme

I hate:

That it's all different now.

Sorry for the length -- blog as therapy.
Jay said…
Love: the thumbs up/thumbs down section of the local newspaper. Although it publishes 6 days a week, it could publish monthly and still not have enough city news to fill the pages. So they invent stuff, like the thumbs up column, wherein citizens call in to complain about specific things. Often seen:

Mrs Theresa So and So of Penelope Lane gives a BIG thumbs down to whoever stole her garden gnomes last Wednesday night while she was at Bingo. She asks that they be returned in mint condition, and no questions will be asked. Also, she says that you are a scoundrel and that your Moma should have beat you harder and/or longer as a child.


Even better is the "scuttlebutt" column in the county paper that publishes weekly. Scuttlebutt contains gems such as:

"Somebody" went on a date with "somebody else" last Tuesday. Rumour has it they really "enjoyed" the "popcorn" at the "movies."


Hate : that none of these things are ever intended ironically.
Anonymous said…
Hi Dave,
I've been sent over by Jorge who tells me that you are an expert on Windsor. I'm heading over this September to start a year of teacher's college and I was wondering about the city.
Courtney
Anonymous said…
Courtney (not "O", mind you) ===> Since Dave is clearly slacking in his replying responsibilities, I'll take this moment to relay to you that Windsor has the highest strip club per capita ratio in North America.
Enjoy!
Lushy said…
Love: The mountains
Hate: The jerks that live here and I don't mean just the ones in the dating pool. Not everybody that lives here is a jerk, but I think there is a higher saturation of mean people in this pocket of the Rio Grande Valley.
Love: Within a five minute drive of my house I can be in the city, or look at cows and goats. The strange little mish-mash of radically different cultures shattering the myth of suburbs being homogenous whites-only areas.

Hate: Soccer moms, insular thinking, the sprawl.

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