TheLionRampant.net

May is quickly drawing to a close and I’m trying to start gearing up to work on my PhD. It seems a bit daunting as my brain hasn’t been in high gear for the last few weeks as I’ve been grading and getting my courses more in order for the fall. I hope to get one chapter revised and another written before Baby Hales makes his appearance towards the end of August.

In other news, life continues on quite normally. We still seem to be a bit amazed at the pace of southern California life. It’s somehow “cool” to be super busy, I guess. I miss the opportunities we had for casual get-togethers, dinners with friends, going to the pub on a whim, and probably most of all, the chance to think and reflect while walking the thirty minutes to Uni each day. I’m not sure if the busyness is some sort of prerequisite to life here or if it has more to do with living in LA versus living in a city center. LA is so spread out and there are millions of people living here that it takes so long to get anywhere. Plus we’re all holed up in our cars (of course only one person in each of them) with our air conditioning and our music and we’re so far away from creating community.

I guess that’s my vent for today. We’re trying to integrate many things we liked about living overseas and living in a city with our life here, but it needs to be a corporate effort. And that’s the hard part, I think. If there aren’t a few people who are willing to shirk busyness expectations, actual, open and authentic relationships really have little chance of growing. I realize that people around us are in different stages of life — getting married, having kids, working 80 hours a week, and so these make it difficult to even meet with one another. But c’mon, if life is more than work or family, more than the isolated houses we like to separate off from our neighbors, than surely we could give up some of our “responsibilities” that we so cling to in order to really grow a community?

This entry was posted by Ashley on Monday, May 28th, 2007 at 7:48 am. This entry was tagged with Culture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.