thinks big suburban houses r weird

So, blogging seems to be becoming obsolete... because Facebook status updates are taking over its functionality. As far as I can see, the only reason to blog is because you want to express something that's longer than the allowable characters in a Facebook status update (or Twitter for those other people. All my friends do it on Facebook.)

But, I still want to blog occasionally- usually it's when I'm inspired (often near the beginning or end of semesters), have lots of things going on, but not too much, and have not conveyed the information that's potentially bloggable to (m)any of the people that I think read this. All that is true in this case.

My professor who lives WAY out (past the highway) in suburban southwest Champaign hosted another potluck, and I had to suppress the urge to ask her if she found it bizarre to live there- I'm sure she would have said no, but it's probably a rude thing to ask. You see, my template for "places it's okay to live" is heavily based on Alfred.

Almost every house in Alfred is one-of-a-kind, built at least 50 years ago, and separated from its neighbors by some kind of topography: hills, creeks, trees, or brush. They don't all have immense lots, but they usually have a little bit of land on all sides. They also tend to be imperfect in some way, or at least not have weekly cleaning ladies. I think the majority of them have a place where you could dump a compost pile without anyone noticing.

I decided that to sum up those differences, at most of them, you would not really find it feasible to walk barefoot to the house next door.

The closest things to suburbs were Pine Hill and High Street. Both of those are at least on hills, and while Pine Hill had suburban curvy roads, High Street is like most real streets in real towns- just trying to get around the natural obstacles as well as it can. And while the houses on Pine Hill were newer, they weren't McMansiony- and if the trees were smaller, they at least weren't saplings with fresh mulch.

The southwest Champaign McMansions are unlike that in every way. They're new, they're huge, they're surrounded by strips of bizarrely weedless grass, they have paved driveways flowing into freshly paved artificially curvy streets with sidewalks, and let's not even mention the 100% flatness (or the artificial lakes that some of the developments boast.) They're pretty much completely disgusting to me.

In Guatemala, the houses are built on hillsides every which way with permanent temporary solutions like dirt stairs and outhouses, lack of running water, etc. Some of the rooms have floors, some don't. It's pretty obvious that I'd be exactly as physically comfortable in a McMansion as in a normal house, but psychologically, I think I was more comfortable with the Guatemalan houses than I am in the flat suburbs. They just feel wrong and computer-generated to me.

Incidentally, my strong sense of what kind of house is acceptable is quite a bit more relaxed for apartments. I do find the quirky ones better, but the standard new ones are not completely revolting. I guess I learned about apartments later. Standardization in dorms doesn't really bother me, because those tend to be fairly cluttered and random. The only standard apartments I have ever lived in were briefly in Ireland and for 2 months in Valencia, Spain, and the latter was nice and filthy with furniture we sometimes found on the street... oh yeah, and that one partially-working bathroom. Aside from that, I have a 100% quirky housing history.