pebblerocker (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
pebblerocker) wrote2014-10-14 11:43 am
pebblerocker) wrote2014-10-14 11:43 am
A new place
Every time I think I might post something here, I realise that a lot of it wouldn't make much sense without context, and I never get around to posting the "where I'm at" post.
I moved house. I moved from a smallish and cheap house in a noisy street to a beautiful roomy new house on the edge of town. This has been cause for some happiness and some distress. I love living in a really nice house, where the walls are a colour I chose and there are no neighbours zooming up and down the driveway past my window twenty times a day and it's wonderfully quiet and dark at night. I am distressed that not everybody gets this sort of thing. Life isn't fair and that bothers me even when the unfairness in my favour.
I am filled with shame when a person in my life says that I must have been doing a lot of positive thinking to attract such wealth from the Universe. According to her beliefs I wouldn't have received this if I didn't deserve it, and therefore I must be better than her and she'll have to do more affirmations until she deserves it too. This thinking is horrifying to me; being praised for winning at capitalism is not the sort of approval I want.
I'm trying to invent a system of town planning in which everyone can have a bedroom window looking out over trees and croplands instead of streetlights and roads. My ideal town needs to have fractal edges so everyone can live at the edge. Although perhaps there are outgoing types of people who wouldn't mind living in the middle with people all around them. I love being at home and not having to see or hear any people at all.
When the people in my old street heard I was moving out soon, several different people approached me to ask when my moving date was and whether they could move straight in after me. I'm happy to be out of that ticky-tacky box of a house, but it was at least sunny and dry and that makes it a very desirable house on that side of town. I met someone whose landlord had given her the minimum amount of notice right before Christmas and she'd had nowhere to go, so she was sleeping on her daughter's couch while her husband, who has a bad back, had to live in their car. And someone else whose place was mouldy and her children had bad asthma and the landlord wouldn't do anything about the pool of standing water under the house. And all I could do was say what rental agency to apply to. My few near neighbours in the new place are all middle-aged white people.
I do love this new house though. All the peace and quiet, the row of pine trees dividing my place from farmland, the grey warblers and tui and moreporks I hear in the trees. I started a bit of a herb garden and I like gardening better now I'm not being squashed by the weight of people's eyes looking at me whenever I'm outside. Moving house was very stressful but living here is taking away a lot of strain I didn't really know I could escape from.
I moved house. I moved from a smallish and cheap house in a noisy street to a beautiful roomy new house on the edge of town. This has been cause for some happiness and some distress. I love living in a really nice house, where the walls are a colour I chose and there are no neighbours zooming up and down the driveway past my window twenty times a day and it's wonderfully quiet and dark at night. I am distressed that not everybody gets this sort of thing. Life isn't fair and that bothers me even when the unfairness in my favour.
I am filled with shame when a person in my life says that I must have been doing a lot of positive thinking to attract such wealth from the Universe. According to her beliefs I wouldn't have received this if I didn't deserve it, and therefore I must be better than her and she'll have to do more affirmations until she deserves it too. This thinking is horrifying to me; being praised for winning at capitalism is not the sort of approval I want.
I'm trying to invent a system of town planning in which everyone can have a bedroom window looking out over trees and croplands instead of streetlights and roads. My ideal town needs to have fractal edges so everyone can live at the edge. Although perhaps there are outgoing types of people who wouldn't mind living in the middle with people all around them. I love being at home and not having to see or hear any people at all.
When the people in my old street heard I was moving out soon, several different people approached me to ask when my moving date was and whether they could move straight in after me. I'm happy to be out of that ticky-tacky box of a house, but it was at least sunny and dry and that makes it a very desirable house on that side of town. I met someone whose landlord had given her the minimum amount of notice right before Christmas and she'd had nowhere to go, so she was sleeping on her daughter's couch while her husband, who has a bad back, had to live in their car. And someone else whose place was mouldy and her children had bad asthma and the landlord wouldn't do anything about the pool of standing water under the house. And all I could do was say what rental agency to apply to. My few near neighbours in the new place are all middle-aged white people.
I do love this new house though. All the peace and quiet, the row of pine trees dividing my place from farmland, the grey warblers and tui and moreporks I hear in the trees. I started a bit of a herb garden and I like gardening better now I'm not being squashed by the weight of people's eyes looking at me whenever I'm outside. Moving house was very stressful but living here is taking away a lot of strain I didn't really know I could escape from.
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I'm glad you're in a house that makes you comfortable.
I love your idea of an ideal fractal city where everyone can be where they are most comfortable.
I agree wiith you about "positive thinking."
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If I put large fractal-shaped parks and reserves inside my city, it can get even more "edge" area! Plus, natural waterways already make the right sort of shapes.
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As someone who doesn't drive, in many ways, I find the idea of vertical, compact, city living ideal. Before I went off to college "for real" I went through six weeks a sort of college training camp in the Bronx (a borough of NYC) for students with disabilities, so we could practice strategies of getting around campus, time management, and dealing with the bureaucracies of "Special Services" My dorm mate and I were the only ones staying on campus. It was noisy, sure. But it was also nice to be able to leave the campus with no other transportation than our wheelchairs, and go down to the local deli for a slice of justly famous, real New York cheesecake.
Really, the only reason I moved to the suburbs was because I needed a living space that was wheelchair accessible for me, who not only uses a wheelchair and needs grab bars and wider doors, but is also nearly a foot shorter than the people of "standard" height for whom all pre-adapted spaces are designed. That's workable, kinda, for occasional use, like restaurant bathrooms, and hotels, but I wouldn't want to live that way 24/7/365. If I'd been able to get a city apartment and customize it, I would have.
On the other hand, I need access to green, living things out my windows. I think, in my make-believe city, I have the roofs of all the high-rises engineered to support vegetable gardens and orchards, and the same for balconies to individual apartments. Some roofs would be reserved for meadow species and grassses -- basically figure out how to build a city with as much green space, as seen from the air, as asphalt. That would help migratory birds, and also allow everyone to "Eat local."
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I don't think you need to feel guilty about it, though: you didn't set up the unfairness. The unfairness is sad and angry but not your fault.
If you wanted to, you could help out at the next election for whichever political party is most supportive of good quality affordable public housing?
In addition to regular public housing (which is state government funded and owned), there's also a new thing now where, as a condition of development approval, the private developers has to include a certain amount of housing that is reserved for low income people.
- - -
Every time I go to my GP, who is surrounded by hills covered with trees and horses and streams, I think "this is beautiful, it would be lovely to live here."
And then I remember that that area has *no public transport*, let alone wheelchair accessible public transport, and I am happy that I live somewhere there are wheelchair accessible trains every 15 minutes on weekdays.
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We just had an election here last month and the party in favour of selling off all the state housing got an even bigger proportion of the vote than last time. I have been thinking of finding what I can do for the fairer parties other than voting.
Trains!! I envy you your excellent trains! I am now in a part of town where I can walk up a steep hill to flag down a bus that comes along twice a week, or carry on down another steep hill and walk for quite a distance to get to a bus that goes every hour. At the old house I had a 20-minute walk on flat ground to the bus stop. Not exactly an improvement. I haven't used a bus since I got here because it's so inconvenient.
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not being squashed by the weight of people's eyes looking at me whenever I'm outside
THIS IS THE BEST THING.
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I actually really don't like being around people. I don't like people very much in person; I care about them a lot in the abstract but I don't want to talk to them. Not being looked at by people or needing to talk to people is the best thing; it makes going to work and buying food much easier to deal with if that's the only people-contact I need to have and I don't have to do it every day.
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I always thought of positive thinking as looking around and trying to figure out how to make the best of a situation BY MYSELF, not by 'attracting universal benevolence'.
I guess this is a new definition. Maybe it's something like an offspring of 'Dianetics'.
I hope you continue to enjoy your new home despite other people's peculiar beliefs.
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In the case of my Nana, this theory could be made to fit the facts, because she spent her whole life complaining and looking for the worst interpretation of anything that happened, and by golly she never found herself short of things to complain about. But it's silly to believe that she caused further misfortune by dwelling on negative thoughts. In my case, I consider the whole idea utter bunk and often feel quite gloomy, and my life contains a mix of good and bad (and an excellent house), neither of which I consider proof of anything.
These distressing spiritual beliefs come from someone who's close family and who matters a lot in my life; I am getting better at turning the subject when it comes up, but I may soon need to tell her I am not interested in hearing further from her on the subject.
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I hope you can figure out a way to keep your Nana's beliefs from negatively affecting you. *hugs*
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Just enjoy a new page of your life!!!!
*HUGS*
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