Why do you hate Cleveland so much all of a sudden, Christine?
Interlude: lest I seem like I'm just picking on Cleveland by talking nice about Chicago, I want to clear a few things up:
1. Since I moved back from New York in 2007, my relationship with Cleveland has gotten increasingly complicated. It was easy to love Cleveland as an abstract idea from afar, from the safety of my job that I could have stayed at for as long as I wanted, or until the company got bought out. Lots of people do this -- look back fondly on the old homestead. I figured that since I had never had a problem getting a job outside of Cleveland, I would have an easy time getting a job in Cleveland, despite what everyone said about the economy. Surely, I thought, the economy would not apply to me. However, in those two years, I have been able to score exactly two temporary jobs, both of which I was overqualified for, and one of which ended a year before it was supposed to, due to funky budget issues. I am not trying to elicit a serenade by the world's smallest violin. I am just trying to tell you that my approach to Cleveland is becoming less, "yay Rust Belt" and more "shit, did I make a big mistake, and did I just compound that mistake a thousandfold by buying a house." I am demoralized and disappointed and not entirely sure what I'm supposed to do. For the record, this is the first time in my life where I've lost sight of the exit door. Where I can't feel out the next right move.
2. You are allowed to like more than one city. You are allowed to dislike things about cities that you like, just the same as you're allowed to dislike things about your spouse. Like how I can't stand Jim's habit of emptying his pockets all over the house and leaving little piles of pennies and wadded-up receipts everywhere. Or refusing to blow his nose when he clearly needs to. There are some things about Cleveland that I really, really hate. If I tell you what those are, should it counteract the whole five-year archive of my blog?
3. Pedestrian culture and public transit culture are at the core of my being, and being in Chicago I realized that I just don't feel like I'm getting enough of that here. I remember my first week living in Queens, after having taken my rustbucket to the junkyard where it belonged. I don't think I'd walked anywhere during the whole 15 months I lived in NJ because THERE WERE NO SIDEWALKS. It felt amazing -- liberating -- to be in a place where people just didn't have cars. Where people walked places not-just-for-fun and used the subway and the bus to get everywhere. I wanted to cry. I felt like I had come home.
4. One of the reasons why I wanted to come back to Cleveland is because I am from here, it made me what I am, and I have felt guilty and responsible for it. In this regard, I really wish I would've grown up someplace blatantly awful with ZERO appeal for me, like Miami County. I wish I didn't feel like there was anything of interest here to me. I wish there was nothing and nobody here that I loved.
5. Sometimes Cleveland is hard to love. Sometimes I get frustrated by the lack of inspired civic leadership, by the lack of vision. Sometimes Cleveland feels like a needy, not-so-bright relative who keeps making the same stupid mistakes over and over and who keeps coming around asking for money, like you won't remember. New York was easy to love, because there was no relationship drama -- it didn't require anything of me. As my friend B.P. Beckley says about D.C., it didn't feel like it was going to fall apart if I left.
1. Since I moved back from New York in 2007, my relationship with Cleveland has gotten increasingly complicated. It was easy to love Cleveland as an abstract idea from afar, from the safety of my job that I could have stayed at for as long as I wanted, or until the company got bought out. Lots of people do this -- look back fondly on the old homestead. I figured that since I had never had a problem getting a job outside of Cleveland, I would have an easy time getting a job in Cleveland, despite what everyone said about the economy. Surely, I thought, the economy would not apply to me. However, in those two years, I have been able to score exactly two temporary jobs, both of which I was overqualified for, and one of which ended a year before it was supposed to, due to funky budget issues. I am not trying to elicit a serenade by the world's smallest violin. I am just trying to tell you that my approach to Cleveland is becoming less, "yay Rust Belt" and more "shit, did I make a big mistake, and did I just compound that mistake a thousandfold by buying a house." I am demoralized and disappointed and not entirely sure what I'm supposed to do. For the record, this is the first time in my life where I've lost sight of the exit door. Where I can't feel out the next right move.
2. You are allowed to like more than one city. You are allowed to dislike things about cities that you like, just the same as you're allowed to dislike things about your spouse. Like how I can't stand Jim's habit of emptying his pockets all over the house and leaving little piles of pennies and wadded-up receipts everywhere. Or refusing to blow his nose when he clearly needs to. There are some things about Cleveland that I really, really hate. If I tell you what those are, should it counteract the whole five-year archive of my blog?
3. Pedestrian culture and public transit culture are at the core of my being, and being in Chicago I realized that I just don't feel like I'm getting enough of that here. I remember my first week living in Queens, after having taken my rustbucket to the junkyard where it belonged. I don't think I'd walked anywhere during the whole 15 months I lived in NJ because THERE WERE NO SIDEWALKS. It felt amazing -- liberating -- to be in a place where people just didn't have cars. Where people walked places not-just-for-fun and used the subway and the bus to get everywhere. I wanted to cry. I felt like I had come home.
4. One of the reasons why I wanted to come back to Cleveland is because I am from here, it made me what I am, and I have felt guilty and responsible for it. In this regard, I really wish I would've grown up someplace blatantly awful with ZERO appeal for me, like Miami County. I wish I didn't feel like there was anything of interest here to me. I wish there was nothing and nobody here that I loved.
5. Sometimes Cleveland is hard to love. Sometimes I get frustrated by the lack of inspired civic leadership, by the lack of vision. Sometimes Cleveland feels like a needy, not-so-bright relative who keeps making the same stupid mistakes over and over and who keeps coming around asking for money, like you won't remember. New York was easy to love, because there was no relationship drama -- it didn't require anything of me. As my friend B.P. Beckley says about D.C., it didn't feel like it was going to fall apart if I left.
posted by Christine Borne at 8:19 PM
6 Comments:
It's all true, I can't deny any of it. I take back all those things I didn't end up writing in response to your reaction to the slow motion of people in downtown Cleveland.
Mrs. Beckley and I share your dilemmas (really!) and your concerns, although our circumstances are less immediately pressing. That can change quickly if one of us loses our job...
I personally think it's time to bring back "Cleveland: You Gotta Be Tough."
Christine, you're making my cold, cold heart warm slightly and my frustration abate because you finally seem to be getting it a bit. My frustration with you always stemmed from the fact that you seem to just dismiss places (like your time in NJ) as not Cleveland while not understanding the cultural influences that shape the place and the people and trying to have some liking for it at all.
And no, you're right--the transit system doesn't work unless you have an excess of time to wait around, there is no economy and it's not going to get better, and after a while Cleveland becomes the person you want smack for being willfully stupid. I hated the fuedalism. I hated the idea that I was so limited by the opportunities available that I had to grasp and hold onto what I had, but couldn't count on anything better coming along. I found the people downright unfriendly, deceitful, and nasty. I hate Cleveland, and I have good reasons to do so.
And no, don't bring back "Cleveland: You've Got To Be Tough" because that assumes you can thrive if you're tough enough and just feeds into the city's negative character; superiority without substance.
Kerry: I'm sorry you've been hating me in silence for so long. If I'd known, I would have sent you a box of chocolates. I hope this liberates you a bit. :)
I think it always goes unspoken that when someone says "I hate this place," what they mean is that they've hated their experience of that place, or the thing they were forced to experience most in that place. For me and New Jersey, it was the fact that I worked someplace that was the textbook example of suburban sprawl, and every day driving to work I felt like my soul was getting sucked out through the nose. My hell would be someplace where I don't find any architectural beauty, where there is half-assed public transit and few sidewalks, and Ocean County was it. And unfortunately, I spent A LOT of time there.
As far as understanding the cultural forces that shaped NJ, particularly the part I lived in, I actually did pretty well at that because of my boss. She was an awesome reference librarian who understood that because I was "from away," I should have an understanding of the place I'd moved to. She made me read an 800-page book about Ocean County and used to quiz me about it at the reference desk. I probably ended up knowing more about the Jersey Shore than I did about Cuyahoga County! If I can put a value judgment on these things -- and I think sometimes you have to -- I didn't like the forces at work in Ocean County. I didn't like the unchecked growth, and I felt bad for people who had lived there for generations who felt priced out.
Of course, there were things I loved about NJ. I loved my NJ friends, and I miss them every day. I loved Ocean Grove and Asbury Park. I loved being alone with the ocean on a winter's day. I loved CBo's pizza in Bradley Beach. I loved Weird NJ and the fact that NJ was much better at wearing its negative image defiantly on its sleeve than Ohio is. I LOVED Delicious Orchards.
So if I've ever said I hated a place unequivocally -- well, that's shorthand. Maybe the Japanese have a character to express that feeling in a few brushstrokes, but it seems the closest thing we can say in English is "I hate this place."
I'm sorry your experience in Cleveland was so bad. I don't think I've been a mindless Cleveland booster these past four and a half years, and if I've come off that way in my blog, well, that's just because my blog has had a specific focus: to talk about the reasons to like Cleveland. The fact of the matter is that I began understanding the forces at play in Cleveland very early on. For example, in kindergarten, when at a school assembly I realized that only about 1% of the kids in grades 1-6 were white. (Bussing had started, but you were still allowed to go to your local kindergarten, so my class was mixed...about 70% white, 30% black. Where were all the white kids going? I wondered. Or, once you got to first grade, did you somehow turn black?)
I hope that when you lived in Cleveland, you learned to keep these things in mind -- these forces that shaped the place -- just like I did when I was in NJ. In the end, you don't have to end up liking people and places, but I agree it is important to understand what made them what they are. It's something that I struggle with every day, and I hope that by the end of my life I will have helped at least a few people understand and appreciate their Cleveland heritage a little better.
Thanks for the excellent imagery of the "exit door". You helped me clarify some of my own Cleveland/employment thoughts today.
You're welcome, Jeffrey.
I have always lived with the exit door in sight, and it always felt right and necessary. Which is why I felt a lot of trepidation towards the house-buying process. But I thought, well, we'll try something new, and since I'd been assured by my former employer that there was money in the budget to pay me for about another year, it seemed like a good idea. A year would surely give me enough lead time to find something else. But then the axe dropped within 30 days -- not long enough for me to even settle into my new commute.
I hope you can figure out where your own exit door is, too. Here's a tip: find and study the other people who have recently gone out of it.
Also, I'm glad you still like my scones. Actually, that sounds good right about now. I think I'll go make some!
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