my favorite thing in the whole wide world is when white people try to give interesting facts about themselves and try to make themselves sound worldly
and the best they can come up with is "I studied Japanese in college" or "I lived in China...for two months."
like IDK I lived in Japan for a year on my own where I had to work and pay rent and get healthcare but it doesn't feel like something to brag about so much as a fact of life that usually gets dragged out of me unless it's relevant to the conversation
like you want a cookie for venturing outside the US to some ~exotic foreign land~?
maybe this is a super privileged take because I move from city to city (I get uncomfortable if I stay somewhere too long) so basically every city is the same to me but like
the way they exotify something like it's a personal achievement is what bothers me
in the same way that they think wanting to retire in South Carolina is a personality trait.
@guerrillarain I knew a woman who went to college 40 minutes away from where she grew up, then stuck around and lives there full time now.
my hometown buddies from when I was a teen might have gone somewhere a few times (college and maybe Mexico), but they live within 20 minutes of parents.
not gonna lie, that's probably half the people I've met in general in my life. To some of them, visiting the Big City 6 hours away is the trip of the decade.
@pnathan I understand that, but it is always the ~exotification~ of somewhere else.
i.e. I grew up never traveling anywhere and then one day I took a trip to Atlanta.
but I didn't go back bragging about how foreign it was and talking about how I survived.
like living in china for two weeks isn't a personal achievement because Chinese people do it all the time
is what I was trying to get at but idk how to vocalize that
@pnathan But I'm not talking about Seattle or Atlanta or Pittsburgh, I'm talking about non-white majority places like China and Egypt that are regularly exotified in media and then white people wearing the "I ventured into this place and survived" as a badge. It's the racial aspect of it that isn't incorporated into traveling within the US.
Calling Seattle exotic because a poor person hasn't had the exposure isn't the same to me as a white lady bragging about "surviving" China or becoming an expert on Egypt because they went to see pyramids on a guided tour.
@guerrillarain Hmmm. I'll have to chew on that.
But, what do you think about...
Surviving Detroit, Chicago, Atlanta?
@pnathan .....................................touché
I dunno how I'd process that. Our country is so segregated that white people venturing into places where they have to "survive" seems to rare.
Hmm.
@guerrillarain so I recently moved into the old "black" neighborhood of Tacoma. bought a "inexpensive" house, what can I say.
it's..... bad. almost no stores. The Safeway has half the SKUs a typical Safeway does, bad roads. a lot of semi-abandoned houses. there's NO ONE on the sidewalks/roads almost 100% of the time. I've been around a few towns by now and this neighborhood, after living there for a while, pegs my weird-o-meter.
gotta find an old timer and talk a bit.
@pnathan If I didn't know any better, I'd say you were describing my grandma's old neighborhood.
@pnathan I wonder if there is some reason for the development of these ghost towns
They are entirely different from ~the hood~ which is run down but still... you know, alive. In my grandma's old neighborhood like that, everyone died off and moved away and no one ever filled their places, leaving entire blocks of abandoned houses...
@guerrillarain I think you are missing the boundaries of people's heads?
When certain people from other states in the US visited us in Seattle, it was *visiting an exotic city*, because it is exotic in their head; their local place is normal, where this other place is fancy! foreign! weird! strange! and they come back gushing about the strange behaviors and the Amazing Weird Experience of those Exotic people!