Those of us that grew up in more rural areas can't understand the love people have for the Big Apple. I get a really bad attitude when I get in large crowds, so if I was in NYC I would have "gone Postal" by now. 
TV show on NZ
- Thread starter Darryl Hattenhauer
- Start date
Those of us that grew up in more rural areas can't understand the love people have for the Big Apple. I get a really bad attitude when I get in large crowds, so if I was in NYC I would have "gone Postal" by now.
Darryl - maybe I am warped - but as you well know, there's so much to enjoy in this world - from our loved ones to literature to guitars to what have you.
Don't feel guilty - our generation was great in so many other respects - for one, the "do your own thing" mantra - we were encouraged to think from early on (at least in NYC public schools). Today, kids are discouraged from thinking - happened to both my daughters in my wonderful suburban school system.
When my wife passed away suddenly almost 6 years ago, my then 15 year old had the most horrible time in school - I can't begin to get into it here. Suffice to say, she survived and is so much the better for it today - as did my older daughter who unselfishly stood by her sioster despite her own issues.
Their mom would be proud.
Don't feel guilty - our generation was great in so many other respects - for one, the "do your own thing" mantra - we were encouraged to think from early on (at least in NYC public schools). Today, kids are discouraged from thinking - happened to both my daughters in my wonderful suburban school system.
When my wife passed away suddenly almost 6 years ago, my then 15 year old had the most horrible time in school - I can't begin to get into it here. Suffice to say, she survived and is so much the better for it today - as did my older daughter who unselfishly stood by her sioster despite her own issues.
Their mom would be proud.
Darryl - maybe I am warped - but as you well know, there's so much to enjoy in this world - from our loved ones to literature to guitars to what have you.
Don't feel guilty - our generation was great in so many other respects - for one, the "do your own thing" mantra - we were encouraged to think from early on (at least in NYC public schools). Today, kids are discouraged from thinking - happened to both my daughters in my wonderful suburban school system.
When my wife passed away suddenly almost 6 years ago, my then 15 year old had the most horrible time in school - I can't begin to get into it here. Suffice to say, she survived and is so much the better for it today - as did my older daughter who unselfishly stood by her sioster despite her own issues.
Their mom would be proud.
Don't feel guilty - our generation was great in so many other respects - for one, the "do your own thing" mantra - we were encouraged to think from early on (at least in NYC public schools). Today, kids are discouraged from thinking - happened to both my daughters in my wonderful suburban school system.
When my wife passed away suddenly almost 6 years ago, my then 15 year old had the most horrible time in school - I can't begin to get into it here. Suffice to say, she survived and is so much the better for it today - as did my older daughter who unselfishly stood by her sioster despite her own issues.
Their mom would be proud.
Darryl Hattenhauer
Venerated Member
Squawk,
Sounds like you and your daughters are adjusting well to your loss. I'm hoping the same will happen for me in the long run, but it hasn't happened yet.
Don't get me started on the schools. It's not just that the kids don't think. They are aggressively opposed to it. The game is to get the highest grades possible with doing the least amount of work possible. Learning has nothing to do with it.
Sounds like you and your daughters are adjusting well to your loss. I'm hoping the same will happen for me in the long run, but it hasn't happened yet.
Don't get me started on the schools. It's not just that the kids don't think. They are aggressively opposed to it. The game is to get the highest grades possible with doing the least amount of work possible. Learning has nothing to do with it.
Darryl Hattenhauer
Venerated Member
Squawk,
Sounds like you and your daughters are adjusting well to your loss. I'm hoping the same will happen for me in the long run, but it hasn't happened yet.
Don't get me started on the schools. It's not just that the kids don't think. They are aggressively opposed to it. The game is to get the highest grades possible with doing the least amount of work possible. Learning has nothing to do with it.
Sounds like you and your daughters are adjusting well to your loss. I'm hoping the same will happen for me in the long run, but it hasn't happened yet.
Don't get me started on the schools. It's not just that the kids don't think. They are aggressively opposed to it. The game is to get the highest grades possible with doing the least amount of work possible. Learning has nothing to do with it.
P.
I'm with you on this issue.
I was raised, until the age of 12, on a Dairy Farm in Rural Oregon. Needed binoculars to tell of the neighbors were home. It was so quiet you could hear the grass grow at night.
A big crowd to me was a couple hundred people showing up for the local High School football & basketball games, everyone knew everyone & behaved accordingly.
Large crowds spook the bejeebers out of me. First pro football game I attended disturbed me. 60,000 people, drinking a few thousand gallons of warm beer, booing & hissing, no way of telling who of the 60,000 were totally whacked had me looking regularly at the exits. I still do it afer 40 years of city living. Newspaper & TV news stories of Soccer crowds gone mad in S America & Europe haven't helped cure my aversion.
My city girl wife wife on the other hand thrives in big crowds & has some trouble relating to my phobia.
P.
I'm with you on this issue.
I was raised, until the age of 12, on a Dairy Farm in Rural Oregon. Needed binoculars to tell of the neighbors were home. It was so quiet you could hear the grass grow at night.
A big crowd to me was a couple hundred people showing up for the local High School football & basketball games, everyone knew everyone & behaved accordingly.
Large crowds spook the bejeebers out of me. First pro football game I attended disturbed me. 60,000 people, drinking a few thousand gallons of warm beer, booing & hissing, no way of telling who of the 60,000 were totally whacked had me looking regularly at the exits. I still do it afer 40 years of city living. Newspaper & TV news stories of Soccer crowds gone mad in S America & Europe haven't helped cure my aversion.
My city girl wife wife on the other hand thrives in big crowds & has some trouble relating to my phobia.
Bing k
Senior Member
Jeff,You should have felt fairly comfortable here in Montana. Probably never saw more than five people one place! One can get about as secluded as one wants to out here.
Bing k
Senior Member
Jeff,You should have felt fairly comfortable here in Montana. Probably never saw more than five people one place! One can get about as secluded as one wants to out here.
West R Lee
Venerated Member
I suppose I'm somewhere in the middle on this issue. I grew up in a town of 40,000 (75,000 now), and so got a mix of country and city. I could never live in a place like Dallas or Houston...just too much hustle and bustle, but I do like to spend the occasional weekend there. There's just so many places to see and so much to do that wasn't offered in my rural setting, and still isn't.
As far as music is concerned, Austin is a good choice as it has been the Nashville of Texas since I can remember.
On the educational front......man, how do I say this without sounding like a bigot? With the number of minorities in public schools here, there has been a consistent and rapid degredation of the quality of education here since I was a kid. Testing standards have been lowered to accomodate minorities. Every year I read that Asian and whites excel in all aspects of college entrance testing (ACT and SAT) and high school exit testing, while minorities are far behind. Instead of bringing minorities up to standards, they lower the standards for minorities. Go figure?
All in all, I love it here. Not too far from the convenience and excitement of the big cities, yet small enough to enjoy country living and not feel confined.
West
As far as music is concerned, Austin is a good choice as it has been the Nashville of Texas since I can remember.
On the educational front......man, how do I say this without sounding like a bigot? With the number of minorities in public schools here, there has been a consistent and rapid degredation of the quality of education here since I was a kid. Testing standards have been lowered to accomodate minorities. Every year I read that Asian and whites excel in all aspects of college entrance testing (ACT and SAT) and high school exit testing, while minorities are far behind. Instead of bringing minorities up to standards, they lower the standards for minorities. Go figure?
All in all, I love it here. Not too far from the convenience and excitement of the big cities, yet small enough to enjoy country living and not feel confined.
West
West R Lee
Venerated Member
I suppose I'm somewhere in the middle on this issue. I grew up in a town of 40,000 (75,000 now), and so got a mix of country and city. I could never live in a place like Dallas or Houston...just too much hustle and bustle, but I do like to spend the occasional weekend there. There's just so many places to see and so much to do that wasn't offered in my rural setting, and still isn't.
As far as music is concerned, Austin is a good choice as it has been the Nashville of Texas since I can remember.
On the educational front......man, how do I say this without sounding like a bigot? With the number of minorities in public schools here, there has been a consistent and rapid degredation of the quality of education here since I was a kid. Testing standards have been lowered to accomodate minorities. Every year I read that Asian and whites excel in all aspects of college entrance testing (ACT and SAT) and high school exit testing, while minorities are far behind. Instead of bringing minorities up to standards, they lower the standards for minorities. Go figure?
All in all, I love it here. Not too far from the convenience and excitement of the big cities, yet small enough to enjoy country living and not feel confined.
West
As far as music is concerned, Austin is a good choice as it has been the Nashville of Texas since I can remember.
On the educational front......man, how do I say this without sounding like a bigot? With the number of minorities in public schools here, there has been a consistent and rapid degredation of the quality of education here since I was a kid. Testing standards have been lowered to accomodate minorities. Every year I read that Asian and whites excel in all aspects of college entrance testing (ACT and SAT) and high school exit testing, while minorities are far behind. Instead of bringing minorities up to standards, they lower the standards for minorities. Go figure?
All in all, I love it here. Not too far from the convenience and excitement of the big cities, yet small enough to enjoy country living and not feel confined.
West
Bing k
Senior Member
You're welcome, Good to have you stop by our little berg and enjoy our music store.
Bing k
Senior Member
You're welcome, Good to have you stop by our little berg and enjoy our music store.
john_kidder
Senior Member
Well, now, what a wavey thread this turned out to be.
I was brought up in the far North - I used to tell my kids without much exaggeration that "when I was your age, I could walk out the back door and go 500 miles in any direction without the threat of another human being." Family moved to Vancouver in the mid '60s, I dropped out of life about '66 and went to work as a camp cowboy on a couple of very large ranches here in BC - no humans there either, just cowboys, cattle, horses, and dogs. When I happened to come back into Vancouver in the summer of 1969, I was wearing a hat, boots and jeans, driving my pickup truck with the gun rack (ropes only in Canada). I drove down Fourth Avenue - for any of you who weren't able to be around Vancouver then, it was Canada's Haight-Ashbury. And I was knocked for a loop.
There were people all over the place wearing long cloaks, wizard hats, hair everywhere, colour all about, and the smell of burning herbs filled the air. And there was music on the streets, and beautiful girls, and hey, you know what? It beat the hell out of cow camp. So I stayed a little while. And when I made my way back to the range a couple of years later, I had hair to my shoulders, a 12-string guitar and a little something extra in my tobacco pouch.
Now I'm sort of a grown man, live mostly in Vancouver, work takes me travelling to bigger cities in the US and Europe a lot, but I write this from our country place in Ashcroft - not a sound here but the river, the occasional magpie, and crickets still in the September evenings. So I've got good footing in all those worlds. And I don't see much conflict between any of them. Bing - I've spent a fair amount of time in Montana, sister lives in Livingston, I'll try to get to see you sometime. I'm sure you know that Ian Tyson song about Charlie Russell "God put the stars over Judith Basin, God put the magic in young Charlie's hand"? Same stars here in Ashcroft, about three times as many people as Stanford, but still reasonably quiet.
My kids are grown - their schools were good (more than half the kids who enter Grade 1 in Vancouver have English as a second language - mostly they do just fine), their friends were good, they ran into the weed as well but survived so far. Seems to me that our generation did a lot of dumb things, a lot of good things, and left a hell of a lot of things still undone. Here's to all our children - may they pick it up where we left off, and may the world be a better place for them.
I was brought up in the far North - I used to tell my kids without much exaggeration that "when I was your age, I could walk out the back door and go 500 miles in any direction without the threat of another human being." Family moved to Vancouver in the mid '60s, I dropped out of life about '66 and went to work as a camp cowboy on a couple of very large ranches here in BC - no humans there either, just cowboys, cattle, horses, and dogs. When I happened to come back into Vancouver in the summer of 1969, I was wearing a hat, boots and jeans, driving my pickup truck with the gun rack (ropes only in Canada). I drove down Fourth Avenue - for any of you who weren't able to be around Vancouver then, it was Canada's Haight-Ashbury. And I was knocked for a loop.
There were people all over the place wearing long cloaks, wizard hats, hair everywhere, colour all about, and the smell of burning herbs filled the air. And there was music on the streets, and beautiful girls, and hey, you know what? It beat the hell out of cow camp. So I stayed a little while. And when I made my way back to the range a couple of years later, I had hair to my shoulders, a 12-string guitar and a little something extra in my tobacco pouch.
Now I'm sort of a grown man, live mostly in Vancouver, work takes me travelling to bigger cities in the US and Europe a lot, but I write this from our country place in Ashcroft - not a sound here but the river, the occasional magpie, and crickets still in the September evenings. So I've got good footing in all those worlds. And I don't see much conflict between any of them. Bing - I've spent a fair amount of time in Montana, sister lives in Livingston, I'll try to get to see you sometime. I'm sure you know that Ian Tyson song about Charlie Russell "God put the stars over Judith Basin, God put the magic in young Charlie's hand"? Same stars here in Ashcroft, about three times as many people as Stanford, but still reasonably quiet.
My kids are grown - their schools were good (more than half the kids who enter Grade 1 in Vancouver have English as a second language - mostly they do just fine), their friends were good, they ran into the weed as well but survived so far. Seems to me that our generation did a lot of dumb things, a lot of good things, and left a hell of a lot of things still undone. Here's to all our children - may they pick it up where we left off, and may the world be a better place for them.
john_kidder
Senior Member
Well, now, what a wavey thread this turned out to be.
I was brought up in the far North - I used to tell my kids without much exaggeration that "when I was your age, I could walk out the back door and go 500 miles in any direction without the threat of another human being." Family moved to Vancouver in the mid '60s, I dropped out of life about '66 and went to work as a camp cowboy on a couple of very large ranches here in BC - no humans there either, just cowboys, cattle, horses, and dogs. When I happened to come back into Vancouver in the summer of 1969, I was wearing a hat, boots and jeans, driving my pickup truck with the gun rack (ropes only in Canada). I drove down Fourth Avenue - for any of you who weren't able to be around Vancouver then, it was Canada's Haight-Ashbury. And I was knocked for a loop.
There were people all over the place wearing long cloaks, wizard hats, hair everywhere, colour all about, and the smell of burning herbs filled the air. And there was music on the streets, and beautiful girls, and hey, you know what? It beat the hell out of cow camp. So I stayed a little while. And when I made my way back to the range a couple of years later, I had hair to my shoulders, a 12-string guitar and a little something extra in my tobacco pouch.
Now I'm sort of a grown man, live mostly in Vancouver, work takes me travelling to bigger cities in the US and Europe a lot, but I write this from our country place in Ashcroft - not a sound here but the river, the occasional magpie, and crickets still in the September evenings. So I've got good footing in all those worlds. And I don't see much conflict between any of them. Bing - I've spent a fair amount of time in Montana, sister lives in Livingston, I'll try to get to see you sometime. I'm sure you know that Ian Tyson song about Charlie Russell "God put the stars over Judith Basin, God put the magic in young Charlie's hand"? Same stars here in Ashcroft, about three times as many people as Stanford, but still reasonably quiet.
My kids are grown - their schools were good (more than half the kids who enter Grade 1 in Vancouver have English as a second language - mostly they do just fine), their friends were good, they ran into the weed as well but survived so far. Seems to me that our generation did a lot of dumb things, a lot of good things, and left a hell of a lot of things still undone. Here's to all our children - may they pick it up where we left off, and may the world be a better place for them.
I was brought up in the far North - I used to tell my kids without much exaggeration that "when I was your age, I could walk out the back door and go 500 miles in any direction without the threat of another human being." Family moved to Vancouver in the mid '60s, I dropped out of life about '66 and went to work as a camp cowboy on a couple of very large ranches here in BC - no humans there either, just cowboys, cattle, horses, and dogs. When I happened to come back into Vancouver in the summer of 1969, I was wearing a hat, boots and jeans, driving my pickup truck with the gun rack (ropes only in Canada). I drove down Fourth Avenue - for any of you who weren't able to be around Vancouver then, it was Canada's Haight-Ashbury. And I was knocked for a loop.
There were people all over the place wearing long cloaks, wizard hats, hair everywhere, colour all about, and the smell of burning herbs filled the air. And there was music on the streets, and beautiful girls, and hey, you know what? It beat the hell out of cow camp. So I stayed a little while. And when I made my way back to the range a couple of years later, I had hair to my shoulders, a 12-string guitar and a little something extra in my tobacco pouch.
Now I'm sort of a grown man, live mostly in Vancouver, work takes me travelling to bigger cities in the US and Europe a lot, but I write this from our country place in Ashcroft - not a sound here but the river, the occasional magpie, and crickets still in the September evenings. So I've got good footing in all those worlds. And I don't see much conflict between any of them. Bing - I've spent a fair amount of time in Montana, sister lives in Livingston, I'll try to get to see you sometime. I'm sure you know that Ian Tyson song about Charlie Russell "God put the stars over Judith Basin, God put the magic in young Charlie's hand"? Same stars here in Ashcroft, about three times as many people as Stanford, but still reasonably quiet.
My kids are grown - their schools were good (more than half the kids who enter Grade 1 in Vancouver have English as a second language - mostly they do just fine), their friends were good, they ran into the weed as well but survived so far. Seems to me that our generation did a lot of dumb things, a lot of good things, and left a hell of a lot of things still undone. Here's to all our children - may they pick it up where we left off, and may the world be a better place for them.
Bing k
Senior Member
I listened to that song just the other day. That's us, right smack in the middle of the Judith Basin.
Bing k
Senior Member
I listened to that song just the other day. That's us, right smack in the middle of the Judith Basin.