Well it's Spring Break week here in Texas... and I do mean ALL of Texas is off this week. All high schools. All colleges. And the rest of us working folks mentally take off as well. In my tourist town, this is the busiest week of the ENTIRE year. It's a great day trip, or weekend jaunt for the cities in close proximity, so there's that. Never mind that it was 36 degrees yesterday and we are wearing our coats. That may be normal up north, but I can NEVER remember in all of my Baby Boomer years when it was in the mid-thirties in mid-March in Central Texas. Ever. Fortunately for my high schooler, she went with her youth group to Colorado where it's supposed to snow tomorrow. They are going to be doing volunteer work for her summer camp with painting and cleaning, but she still got to get away.
Too, Austin has South by Southwest this week, which has gotten crazy popular and there are people there from all over the country - heck, all over the world!! It's super trendy to go hear all the up and coming bands and see all the up and coming tech inventions and show all the up and coming films from up and coming directors. Even Jimmy Kimmel came to do his show there all week, which is also kind of cool.
I don't know... It reminds me of when I visited California in the late 70's and early 80's -- there was a bumper sticker that said, "Welcome to California - Now go home." And it's kind of how Texans are viewing all these non-Texans showing up here taking our jobs. I just don't want that to ruin it here, which it almost certainly will. Most Texans are independent, freedom-loving, salt of the earth folks (and I am excluding Austin when I make that generalization. Austin has more foreigners than locals at this point.) Last weekend I took DD to "Explore UT" (University of Texas) which is my alma mater, to an entire campus open house, where we took tours of the school, the dorms, the gym, the classrooms - pretty much everything. As always, there were groups on campus protesting things, which is normal for UT. The sad thing to me was how much it has changed, even in the last 15 years. All dorms are required to leave your bedroom doors shut and have pass cards to each area, so if a gunman starts shooting, there is less chance to do maximum damage. Everything is around that thinking. Also, there are SO many students from other countries now, that the entire feel of the campus is different. It was always liberal, but now it almost feels foreign. DD asked our student tour guide about a church we saw, and he bristled and dismissed her like she had said an obscenity. I had wanted to show DD the student newspaper, The Daily Texan, where I had worked and it was probably the only building locked with no activity. Go figure...
There is only ONE dorm that is all female and ONE dorm that is all male. My older sister had lived in that dorm so we took a tour. I had remembered it as girls like me, and all the girls kept their doors open and were laughing and in curlers and trading clothes, almost like the movie "Grease." But no, instead it was a bunch of females who were snarling at us, and almost half OR MORE were foreigners from overseas, whose parents don't want their daughters living in coed dorms with MALES - gasp. So it's totally different, and DD and I looked at each other as we left and agreed we got a bad vibe. Why can't change EVER be a good thing?? DD really wants to go to UT because I did, and my siblings, and my parents, and my aunt & uncle and cousins and grandparents. It's our tradition, but it's so much worse than it ever was.
Anyway.
While Texas is on Spring Break and Austin is jamming with South by Southwest, and tonight all women under 40 are watching to see who Juan Pablo picks on "The Bachelor," there is a gynormous jet near Vietnam, and allegedly it vanished without a trace. Say what?!? In this day and age?? Where the NSA knows when we go to the bathroom??? Where everything is traced whether we like it or not?? And now we hear that 20 employees from an Austin company called Freescale were on the plane, and had advanced technology on microchips and RFID chips and more. Evidently there is a way to jam all the systems and make it disappear, so did it land somewhere remote?? Did China steal those employees? Evidently the families and friends of the passengers are able to call the phones and get them to ring. If it had nosedived into the ocean, pieces would have risen to the top. If it had crashed on land, we would know. So where THE HELL is it???!!!??? Don't you find it ridiculous, that in 2014, we can lose a humongous jet???And it's been a couple of days now. I mean I'm sure the government knows the reality, but WHY THE HELL ISN'T THE MEDIA MAKING A BIG DEAL ABOUT IT BECAUSE IT IS A BIG DEAL???
I guess I should laugh now, since I already know the answer...
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