I'm a Texan Too!
Upon reaching 32 years old, I was beginning to assume that I'd unearthed most of the major peeves I had. I mean, really, after over three decades of dealing with the world in multiple countries, how many new things could there really be which piss me off?
Well, yeah. You'd think. But let's add pet peeve number five-thousand six: Canadians who argue with me about what Texas is like.
Sure, in their defense, it starts off innocently enough: "Oh, you're from Texas? I went to Austin once. It was alright." That's followed by more innocuous banter about where I was born, where I lived, a couple of random observations about how Texas is different than British Columbia (kind of a shooting-fish-in-a-barrel sort of a conversation topic, really, but it can still be fun), but then, somewhere into the conversation it always seems to cross a line. And that line is usually demarcated by the Canadian-born participant saying something like, "No. That's not how it is at all. I was in the DFW airport for nearly 36 whole hours once, so I know Texas, and let me tell you. . . ."
Uh, yeah.
I didn't mean to overstep my bounds regarding everything you experienced while sleeping on the floor of the D Terminal.
At any rate, for sake of example, here we go. . . .
Canadian Misconception of Texas #1
"Houston is a fantastic city. Clean and cosmopolitan and very progressive."
Anyone who's ever been to Houston and actually stepped foot outside of IAH airport, especially in the summer, can attest to you that Houston is a sprawling, overpopulated, overpolluted, crime-ridden, nasty, sweltering, seedy shithole of a city, built on a smelly mucky bog of land, adjoining an ocean which is either brown or black, depending on whether the number of recent oil spills exceeds the standard solution of industrial waste products.
For my friends and relatives who do or have lived in Houston, this is even a point of pride, sometimes. "Oh yeah? You think you're so tough? I grew up in Houston! So bring it on, tough guy! Let's bathe each other in bacon grease and stick our heads in the microwave, and then battle a horde of pissed off unemployable wage-laborers, and see who comes out still fighting." My cousin was hours late for his own wedding because flash flooding had raised the levels of brown septic water almost to the porch of his second floor apartment.
Is it like this all the time? No, I'm exaggerating, because there are some good things too — the office buildings of the corporate headquarters of various corrupt money-grubbing oil and energy empires are quite nice, actually, and some of the suburbs far enough inland to escape the roiling acrid smog cloud of the city are downright nice if you don't mind a 30 mile commute, but otherwise, Houston? Fantastic? Heh.
(Incidentally, Steve just sent me this online travel review of the city, having found the corroboration between it and my comments simply uncanny, especially since they're trying so hard not to be all-out negative. I stopped trying a long time ago.)
Canadian Misconception of Texas #2
"It's really pretty striking. All the times I've been there, the climate of Dallas is almost identical to Vancouver."
This prompts the inevitable question of when those times were, the answers invariably being something like, "Well, Christmas of 1998, Christmas of 2002, Christmas of 2003, and I think once in January. Why?"
A real life experiment: bring a whole software development team from India to Dallas in early February, and calmly smile while they tell you how wonderfully mild and pleasant the mornings are, and how unbearably hot and humid New Dehli gets in the summer. "Oh wow, yeah that must be pretty miserable there sometimes?" you tell them. Then watch their outlook slowly erode throughout the summer months until in late August or early September, after literally three solid weeks where the temperature hasn't dropped below 43C (110F) even in the dead of night, and the humidity is pegged at somewhere between 90 and 100%, and these guys are screaming that the cruellest trick in the history of international labor has just been played on them.
Is every Dallas summer like this? Of course not. Every three or four years, there's a "cool" one. 40C can feel pretty nice those years.
Canadian Misconception of Texas #3
"Most Texans have never seen snow."
Honestly, until my visit last month to Edmonton, I'd never felt anything colder than some of my childhood winters in Lubbock, TX. I'm still the only person in their 30s I know who's been treated for frostbite as a kid.
(A notable exception to this misconception are people who have never left Houston or Galveston. Truly no snow there. Unless the occasional city-wide dusting of carcinogenic asbestos fibers counts. . . . Okay, okay, I promise, enough of the Houston bashing. Sorry.)
Canadian Misconception of Texas #4
"The Texas Chainsaw Massacre WAS true! A friend took me to the town where it happened!"
Wait a minute. . . . Hm. Actually, most Texans believe this, too, so I guess it doesn't really count. Regardless, if somebody were to set up some kind of fake museum in the hill country, purporting to be the official site, it would make millions. Except, on second thought, since its location would conflict with each individual's lifelong held beliefs about where the supposedly true story actually did happen, they'd still all think it was a fake, just for different reasons. [Sigh] people who don't get the concept of Fiction. Anyway, nevermind. Moving along.
Canadian Misconception of Texas #5
"Yeah, I flew into Dallas, and we decided while we were there, we'd take the quick afternoon drive down to Austin and San Antonio and back to check it out, too."
I don't even bother arguing this one. Why do people invent stories like this especially when talking to someone they know knows better?
While in university, I had several friends who could claim making the similar-length 300+ mile drive between Lubbock and Dallas in a ridiculous speedometer-melting three hours or less. Many of them are still alive today to tell you about it.
Canadian Misconception of Texas #6
"Texas being a landlocked state like it is. . . ."
Uh, yeah, genius. Check a map. Or see #1 Houston, above. You wouldn't believe how often I hear this. Usually in conversations about sushi, coincidentally enough.
Canadian Misconception of Texas #7
"Texas isn't that conservative. I went to Austin once, and it was pretty hip."
Okay, I admit there's a little truth to this one. But it's like saying, "Bangladesh isn't that hot. I stepped into a walk-in freezer there which was quite pleasant."
In the 2002 or so timeframe, out of all 20+ million people in the state, you might have been able to find about 750 thousand who didn't think G.W. Bush was the most brilliant celebrity leader of the century. Supposedly they've smartened up a tad in the last couple of years, evidenced by the quietly disappearing "Support Our Troops" magnets on all the gas-guzzling SUVs growling across the urban-sprawled landscape there (seriously, between my visits in Christmas 2005 and Christmas 2006 the ribbon-magnet/SUV ratio had dropped from about 70% to about 5% — and who ever said the ribbons were about the troops and not the war in the first place? Nice message, guys. When you got tired of your fearless leader and tossed those damn things in the garage closet, you kind of logic-looped yourselves on that argument, didn't you?) War weariness, president-shame, and rhetorical dupedness notwithstanding, I'll still take the first bet with anyone willing to argue that the next governor of Texas will not be a Republican.
And don't let the list of previous Texas governors fool you — it wasn't until the mid-1970s that most rural Texans (and the candidates themselves) finally got the news that a few things had changed since way back in 1865 or so when the Democrats were still the more conservative party, in favor of "keeping negroes in their rightful place."
"Oops, you mean the Democrats done become the yaller-dog liberal ones, now? Waieeellll sheeeit, we'd better hurry'n switch parties, then, ya'll reckon?"
* * *
At any rate, long Texas rant aside, you want to tell me about your trip there and what you liked and didn't like? Go for it. I'd love to hear about it. Want to know what it was like growing up there? I can tell you about it, sure.
But don't try to pretend you're some kind of remote Texas expert. You'll just end up looking kind of dumb. That's all.
Well, yeah. You'd think. But let's add pet peeve number five-thousand six: Canadians who argue with me about what Texas is like.
Sure, in their defense, it starts off innocently enough: "Oh, you're from Texas? I went to Austin once. It was alright." That's followed by more innocuous banter about where I was born, where I lived, a couple of random observations about how Texas is different than British Columbia (kind of a shooting-fish-in-a-barrel sort of a conversation topic, really, but it can still be fun), but then, somewhere into the conversation it always seems to cross a line. And that line is usually demarcated by the Canadian-born participant saying something like, "No. That's not how it is at all. I was in the DFW airport for nearly 36 whole hours once, so I know Texas, and let me tell you. . . ."
Uh, yeah.
I didn't mean to overstep my bounds regarding everything you experienced while sleeping on the floor of the D Terminal.
At any rate, for sake of example, here we go. . . .
Canadian Misconception of Texas #1
"Houston is a fantastic city. Clean and cosmopolitan and very progressive."
Anyone who's ever been to Houston and actually stepped foot outside of IAH airport, especially in the summer, can attest to you that Houston is a sprawling, overpopulated, overpolluted, crime-ridden, nasty, sweltering, seedy shithole of a city, built on a smelly mucky bog of land, adjoining an ocean which is either brown or black, depending on whether the number of recent oil spills exceeds the standard solution of industrial waste products.
For my friends and relatives who do or have lived in Houston, this is even a point of pride, sometimes. "Oh yeah? You think you're so tough? I grew up in Houston! So bring it on, tough guy! Let's bathe each other in bacon grease and stick our heads in the microwave, and then battle a horde of pissed off unemployable wage-laborers, and see who comes out still fighting." My cousin was hours late for his own wedding because flash flooding had raised the levels of brown septic water almost to the porch of his second floor apartment.
Is it like this all the time? No, I'm exaggerating, because there are some good things too — the office buildings of the corporate headquarters of various corrupt money-grubbing oil and energy empires are quite nice, actually, and some of the suburbs far enough inland to escape the roiling acrid smog cloud of the city are downright nice if you don't mind a 30 mile commute, but otherwise, Houston? Fantastic? Heh.
(Incidentally, Steve just sent me this online travel review of the city, having found the corroboration between it and my comments simply uncanny, especially since they're trying so hard not to be all-out negative. I stopped trying a long time ago.)
Canadian Misconception of Texas #2
"It's really pretty striking. All the times I've been there, the climate of Dallas is almost identical to Vancouver."
This prompts the inevitable question of when those times were, the answers invariably being something like, "Well, Christmas of 1998, Christmas of 2002, Christmas of 2003, and I think once in January. Why?"
A real life experiment: bring a whole software development team from India to Dallas in early February, and calmly smile while they tell you how wonderfully mild and pleasant the mornings are, and how unbearably hot and humid New Dehli gets in the summer. "Oh wow, yeah that must be pretty miserable there sometimes?" you tell them. Then watch their outlook slowly erode throughout the summer months until in late August or early September, after literally three solid weeks where the temperature hasn't dropped below 43C (110F) even in the dead of night, and the humidity is pegged at somewhere between 90 and 100%, and these guys are screaming that the cruellest trick in the history of international labor has just been played on them.
Is every Dallas summer like this? Of course not. Every three or four years, there's a "cool" one. 40C can feel pretty nice those years.
Canadian Misconception of Texas #3
"Most Texans have never seen snow."
Honestly, until my visit last month to Edmonton, I'd never felt anything colder than some of my childhood winters in Lubbock, TX. I'm still the only person in their 30s I know who's been treated for frostbite as a kid.
(A notable exception to this misconception are people who have never left Houston or Galveston. Truly no snow there. Unless the occasional city-wide dusting of carcinogenic asbestos fibers counts. . . . Okay, okay, I promise, enough of the Houston bashing. Sorry.)
Canadian Misconception of Texas #4
"The Texas Chainsaw Massacre WAS true! A friend took me to the town where it happened!"
Wait a minute. . . . Hm. Actually, most Texans believe this, too, so I guess it doesn't really count. Regardless, if somebody were to set up some kind of fake museum in the hill country, purporting to be the official site, it would make millions. Except, on second thought, since its location would conflict with each individual's lifelong held beliefs about where the supposedly true story actually did happen, they'd still all think it was a fake, just for different reasons. [Sigh] people who don't get the concept of Fiction. Anyway, nevermind. Moving along.
Canadian Misconception of Texas #5
"Yeah, I flew into Dallas, and we decided while we were there, we'd take the quick afternoon drive down to Austin and San Antonio and back to check it out, too."
I don't even bother arguing this one. Why do people invent stories like this especially when talking to someone they know knows better?
While in university, I had several friends who could claim making the similar-length 300+ mile drive between Lubbock and Dallas in a ridiculous speedometer-melting three hours or less. Many of them are still alive today to tell you about it.
Canadian Misconception of Texas #6
"Texas being a landlocked state like it is. . . ."
Uh, yeah, genius. Check a map. Or see #1 Houston, above. You wouldn't believe how often I hear this. Usually in conversations about sushi, coincidentally enough.
Canadian Misconception of Texas #7
"Texas isn't that conservative. I went to Austin once, and it was pretty hip."
Okay, I admit there's a little truth to this one. But it's like saying, "Bangladesh isn't that hot. I stepped into a walk-in freezer there which was quite pleasant."
In the 2002 or so timeframe, out of all 20+ million people in the state, you might have been able to find about 750 thousand who didn't think G.W. Bush was the most brilliant celebrity leader of the century. Supposedly they've smartened up a tad in the last couple of years, evidenced by the quietly disappearing "Support Our Troops" magnets on all the gas-guzzling SUVs growling across the urban-sprawled landscape there (seriously, between my visits in Christmas 2005 and Christmas 2006 the ribbon-magnet/SUV ratio had dropped from about 70% to about 5% — and who ever said the ribbons were about the troops and not the war in the first place? Nice message, guys. When you got tired of your fearless leader and tossed those damn things in the garage closet, you kind of logic-looped yourselves on that argument, didn't you?) War weariness, president-shame, and rhetorical dupedness notwithstanding, I'll still take the first bet with anyone willing to argue that the next governor of Texas will not be a Republican.
And don't let the list of previous Texas governors fool you — it wasn't until the mid-1970s that most rural Texans (and the candidates themselves) finally got the news that a few things had changed since way back in 1865 or so when the Democrats were still the more conservative party, in favor of "keeping negroes in their rightful place."
"Oops, you mean the Democrats done become the yaller-dog liberal ones, now? Waieeellll sheeeit, we'd better hurry'n switch parties, then, ya'll reckon?"
* * *
At any rate, long Texas rant aside, you want to tell me about your trip there and what you liked and didn't like? Go for it. I'd love to hear about it. Want to know what it was like growing up there? I can tell you about it, sure.
But don't try to pretend you're some kind of remote Texas expert. You'll just end up looking kind of dumb. That's all.