Turkey Day Weekend in Review, 2003:
The Texas Longhorns, to nobody's surprise (but that of Reed T. Shaw), were
victorious over the lowly Texas A&M Aggies this year, clinching a #6 in BCS standings and coming close to securing some sort of chance for a real bowl game this year. Let's not screw it up, Longhorns.
But, of course, the Dallas Cowboys lost.
Turkey dinner went well. I managed to maintain my vegetarian diet through Thanksgiving dinner and also a wedding reception. No meat for this boy. So very dizzy...
Jamie's cousin Jeff got married to his longtime lady-friend, Shelley, sometime back in August. They got married in Hawaii, and so had a very nice official ceremony here in Phoenix where family could attend, and followed with a reception at a country club somehwere out in the mountians. I was terribly out of place among the golf-set, but I could get used to country club life. I just need to make another $300K a year and learn what the holes are for in golf courses.
In 1989 I, and a few friends, forcibly took the 14th hole at the Spicewood Golf Course in Austin. It was freezing out and we wanted to play football there, and so we bombarded the golfers with gourds we found growing on the bottom of the hill. I am sure it was the most alarming golf game ever played on that course. Long live the heroes of Gourd Hill.
Played and lost a few rounds of the surprisingly un-geeky table-top game "
Settlers of Catan". I needed clay. Clay and wood. Curse you unlucky dice rolls!
Last night I met with my group from my class. We're doing a project and will be presenting a week from today. In the usual chatting that occurs off-topic, one of the girls remarked upon how she knew I was from Texas, and how her boyfriend was travelling to Waco for a month on business and started asking me some general questions about Waco, but I was honestly a little hard-pressed for answers, not having ever lived in Waco. But what alarmed me was when she told me how she knew how racist Texas was, and as a precaution, her boyfriend, who has a Spanish surname, would be travelling under a pseudonym in order to avoid any discrimination.
"That's, uh... that's completely unnecessary," I insisted.
"Well, you know, we know how it is out in Texas."
And it really, really bothered me that this is the reputation the state I consider home has somehow garnered. So danergous is the place considered to be, so racist, that people coming in from out of state believe they must travel under a false name in order to do business and avoid discrimination. But with cities like Vidor and cases like that of James Byrd, is it really any wonder?, I asked myself.
But the truth, which i did not share with her (and probably should have) is that these "good 'ol boys" (as she referred to her boyfriend's clients) will be ultimately more suspicious of a 20-something kid from California coming to wheel-and-deal with them than anyone not of anglo appearance or heritage.
But who knows...? Waco is it's own place, and has people of many mindsets, just like anywhere else. Sure, it's got the Baylor influence, or the influence has Baylor (you decide!), but assuming conservativism equates with racism is, at it's best, silly and in no small way discriminatory in itself.
Texas is a vast place geographically, ethnically and culturally. To assume Beaumont holds to the same norms as Austin or Abilene, South Padre, Dallas or El Paso is a pretty bold assertion. Let alone Waco, which sits at the epicenter of the Texas Bible Belt and is large enough yet to accomodate hundreds of thousands of points of view.
But Texas is huge, legendary for it's orneriness in the minds of outsiders. In it's way, Texas is like unto California in a mythical sense. No movie stars here, but isn't it a place run by bible thumpers and cowboys and outlaws, too? Yeah. Sure it is. But that's half the fun now, isn't it? It can live up to the legend and still be a place where that accomodates a million off-shoots of the sterotypes. Hippie cowboys and outlaw politicians running for governor... And why is football so all-encompassing from August to January?
Can you tell today I'm feeling a bit misty for the Lone Star State?
God Bless you, Texas. For you never fail to surprise nor to live up to surpass the dourest of expectations. And you always do it in the most ostentatious way possible.
Man, i need to get back to Texas, just for a little while.
