Tramping Tampa: Six Years of Tea

The place is called Kaleisia--none of us know how to pronounce it yet--and I'm afraid that there'll only be coffee and black tea, that I'll have to shuffle to make some excuse to my new friends, but once inside I see rows of herbal blends and fruit tisanes. Once seated and laughing over steaming cups, an older woman comes up and tells us how pretty we are. Gabby, with her long black curls and big eyes, is "exotic," Shauna is "like a Victorian doll" in her lace dress and creamy headband, and I, apparently, look like I should be in Channelside--a part of the city I know nothing about. Nevertheless, the odd compliment combines with collegiate chatter and aromatic tea to create my first real sensation of being out in the world.

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My sister thinks it would be fun to bike into Ybor and so we set off, and by the time we cruise up Rep de Cuba we're sweating. Thankfully a cool new coffeeshop has opened recently at a squat brick building called the Bunker and now we have a reason to give it a test-drive. The homemade hummus is good, the iced hibiscus tea even better, and we feel unbearably hip, sitting on the back patio with an issue of Creative Loafing.

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Record Store Day happily coincides with the opening of the better-faster-stronger-more-caffeinated version of Mojo Books and Music, and I am lost in the shop, strolling expansive stacks with an iced citron green tea in hand. It's everything I ever wanted from a used bookstore: vinyl and irrelevant hardbacks and good tea and staff just unfriendly enough to be cool and just pretentious enough to play Rumours on the turntable (but skip the best tracks).

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It's late morning on a Sunday, humid as balls and bright. I am on an errand to pick up a friend from across the bay, a vastly hungover friend who requests a sharp cup of something-or-other, and so we jaunt down Beach Drive to a place I've seen but never had a chance to visit. It's there that we discover the miracles of Dr. Feelgood, Hooker Tea Company's famous detox tea, and gigantic muffins, and cush places to sprawl in the dusty sunlight and gossip lazily as the vagaries of the previous night seep away.

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When Anna texts to see if I want to go study at Sacred Grounds it finally sinks in that I've never been there, despite living ten minutes away from it for the past five years. Out we roll, because it's 10:30 on a Tuesday and Kaleisia is closed and neither of us can bear to be in the library any longer. And if we study less than we lounge, if we find reasons to get refills and snoop around the shop and study the pizza options for longer than necessary, well, that's grad school.

The dynamic advantage of beauty (Tampa spoilers)

I felt like [the title] nicely represented the dualism of her character. With the text being so overtly sexual and boisterous on the inside, it seemed appropriate to title the book something ambiguously general—it mirrors the way Celeste represents herself as a harmless beauty with mass-appeal when she’s actually a complete monster. Alissa Nutting talks to Roxane Gay about Tampa. 

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Florida was epithetically “south of the South" and racial incidents that would have likely attracted national attention had they occurred in Mississippi or Alabama somehow managed to escape national scrutiny because they’d taken place in the forgotten land of sun and surf." Gilbert King, Devil in the Grove.

Just in time for a scorching Fourth of July weekend, Alissa Nutting’s debut novel Tampa arrived to much anticipation and gossip about its female pedophile protagonist, based loosely on Debra Lafave, with whom Nutting attended high school. I’d heard of the book some weeks prior, its title being of interest to a former denizen of the Big Guava, and as the reviews rolled in I combed through them eagerly. Nabokovian! Raunchy! Balls-out! Good words, and interesting blurbs, and thoughtful interviews--but few of them addressed my burning question: is it about Tampa? Why is it called that? Does this book do that thing that I love, where the setting is a character all its own?

The short answer is: no. The longer answer is: yes, but obliquely. In two hundred-odd pages only three firm locales appear--the Price home, Jefferson Middle School (and, may I note, having gone to a Jefferson Middle School in central Florida, this was a deeply unsettling name choice), and Jack Patrick’s home. Yet the psychogeographic ideal of Florida bleeds out of Celeste’s tunnel vision; in the first pages she reveals her desire for her body to appear as a “model house,” perfect in every detail, on display and welcoming to select visitors. Flies and honey, tourists and Disney World. Worship of exteriors is the foundation of Celeste’s worldview--she’s cruelly judgmental of an overweight, aging colleague, and devotes much time and effort to cultivating herself as juicy, youthful, sunny, and enticing. The reward for her success at this venture is leeway to molest students, for even when she’s found out, even when the termite-infested walls crumble, the media, the law, and fellow coworkers dismiss her actions. She is young and beautiful and instead of a rape conviction and prison time, her lawyer scores lewd and lascivious battery and four years' probation. Debra Lafave went to trial when I was a freshman at the University of South Florida; many jokes of the “lucky kid”/”hot for teacher” variety were cracked, by students I knew as well as the local rags, in line with Jack’s father’s comments in the novel about teachers he had in school. Nutting has emphasized in many interviews the ways in which we handwave sexual assault of boys and men, and once Celeste is arrested, details from Lafave's trial are used in the text--including her defense's assertion that her beauty would make her vulnerable in prison, and the idea that her relationships with Jack and Boyd are the stuff of every teenage boy's fantasy and thus no real harm was done.

Incidentally, I was reading Devil in the Grove the week before picking up Tampa. An interesting cocktail of Florida stories, dissimilar on their surfaces, one outrageously satirical fiction and one Pulitzer-winning historical nonfiction, but complementary at the base. We don’t enjoy thinking that the beautiful female teacher is violating our boy children. We don’t like to consider who picks that ripe citrus, whose backs our destination industry is built on. Too, Florida as a paragon of Girls Gone Wild-style sexuality, spring break shenanigans, and bikini bodies lends itself to corporealizing in the form of one such as Celeste. Here is a woman who has completely bought in, from moneyed husband to red convertible to endless spa treatments to keep age at bay--and who commoditizes her sexuality for her own ends and turns conventional good looks into weaponry. Celeste is the dark reflection of the male gaze, the living embodiment of concealed carry. At times she is a victim herself--of her husband, of Jack’s father--but never for a moment does the narrative allow readers to forget her essential monstrosity, nor is Celeste herself unaware. The book has drawn comparisons to Lolita, but American Psycho is another forebear in terms of ruthlessness. Celeste acknowledges her deviance, then dials it up to eleven; covers up deaths; proceeds in every aspect of her life with nothing but self-assurance and focused pursuit. In a word she is exploitative: of her own body, of the boys she molests, of the power and comfort her husband’s money and her own appearance gift her.

Gratuitous in every sense of the word, intentionally so, Tampa interrogates expectations of female sexuality and male victimhood. But along the way it also holds up a mirror to the assumptions and cultural myths of a strange state. The beach is lovely--the parks are shiny--bring your families to this paradise, where we’ve been having fun in the sun since central air was invented. No Klan activity here, no racial violence, no rape of minors, no indeed. Celeste’s story is one that could take place in any American state, but it carries all the more weight for being set in Florida, reliant on surfaces and capitalizing on beauty.

Sometimes you gotta make your own genre

What is Floridian Gothic? If it exists, how does it differ from Southern Gothic? I suspect that a Floridian Gothic subgenre would take those core themes of racism, poverty, decay, grotesquerie, and alienation and focus them more narrowly as stemming from immigration issues, a specific climate, the veneers of Disney World and other tourist operations, and attempted whitewashing of state history (for a variety of reasons). The values of Florida are wildly variable; sympathies, pastimes, and idiosyncrasies are striated according to region. Surfers and white supremacists exist in the same state, sometimes even in the same person, and the experience of a Cuban-American whose family helped shape Tampa's history differs greatly from that of a first-generation Cuban immigrant in Miami. Plenty of Floridians will tell you that “we’re not part of the South,” and plenty more will proudly wear head-to-toe Stars and Bars. Florida cannot be painted with the broad brush of "the South," and for a state with an image to maintain, it’s always been a chimera. 

(abandoned Splendid China, Orlando)

Florida is a liminal space. As a state with an immigrant and emigrant-heavy population, its continuing history is one of fusing beliefs, values, religions, cultures, and ethnicities. As a place unimaginable to inhabit without modern convenience yet vastly suitable for vacationing, its environment and physicality--the things we capitalize on--are a doomed honeymoon. As a mixed bag of northerners, southerners, and foreigners, environmentalists, real estate agents, and corporate bigwigs, its politics are a jungle. Ancestral magic lies cheek-by-jowl with Disney’s charms and goes out for shots with imported Afro-Caribbean beliefs. The hard history of Florida race relations and its ongoing racism are whitewashed for the benefit of tourists and boosters, yet memorialized in courthouse names; orange groves stationed on burial grounds are overtaken by McMansions whose inhabitants don’t stop to wonder what they’ll do when the citrus is gone and are baffled when bones show up in their backyard.

(strip mall botanica, Tampa)

Floridian gothic is “Everything That Rises Must Converge” on a Magic Kingdom tour bus, or Suddenly, Last Summer with a cast of holy rollers. The natural magic and destiny-making of Janie Crawford's journey is Floridian gothic. The mysteries of the Coral Castle; the gated community of Candor under mind control and its real-life analogue, endlessly creepy Celebration; the reclamation of the Bigtrees' gator park by the swamps: that's Floridian gothic.

The boys of summer

I should probably wait two years to write this post, when Lords of Dogtown is ten years old and the legacy of the Z-Boys celebrates its 40th anniversary. It would appeal to my sense of symmetry. But it's summer now and the heat doesn't stick around in these parts. Not like Florida. In the Cleve you have to do the summer stuff while it's summer, if you have that compartmentalized mindset like me where eating a snow cone in a blizzard is unthinkable. June's one of the rare seasons I can tolerate nostalgia, particularly nostalgia for things I never actually experienced. 

(Grand Isle skaters)

In 2005 I was seventeen, deeply uncool, lonely and dreaming of the West Coast (look I am of a Certain Age I am allowed to quote terrible Everclear lyrics in my reminiscences, go read someone else's blog if you're looking for quality). Growing up in an area known for surfing, in a family of longboarders and Birdhouse devotees and people who have Kelly Slater's number in their phones, with no coordination and a pair of Weezer glasses, I was doomed to fall in love with a particular brand of dude over and over. My immediate vicinity had a good few specimens of this type: the girl-jeans trend hadn't hit yet but they wore their trousers tight; there were Mohawks and possibly-infected piercings. As your average hide-in-the-library dork I wouldn't have had a chance, but as a totally-devoid-of-swagger-substance-free-Mormon-virgin things were truly dire. But they were everywhere! Kickflipping off railings, recording crap videos of themselves faceplanting into concrete, smoking behind the band hall...you know. A lot of them were in bands too, various flavors of punk of course, which was A Problem for a girl obsessed just then with Michael Azerrad, who knew that such music was of the Devil, a girl who wanted to own a wallet with a chain attached, to wear Vans not just for show, to go to tiny rock gigs and not be desperately misplaced. There were stoner-surfer happy punks who played at German Club events and there were psycho-punks who lived in a shabby commune across the river and there were nerd-punks who wrote songs about WarCraft; there were crust-punks who smelled sort of bad but were weirdly friendly and a punk with the same birthday as me who submitted poetry to the literary magazine and had a t-shirt for every Dead Kennedys record. There were even a couple of charmingly anachronistic straightedge types. Every now and then I considered claiming to be straightedge to avoid talking about the real reason I couldn't partake of that rum and Coke (or, LBR, even the Coke itself), but never ground up the nerve. And there was something even beyond the allure of beach hair, snotty attitudes, and torn jeans; the girl punks seemed to be having a better time of things than other girls at school. My most admired lady punk peers wore riot grrrl t-shirts and argued with a history teacher who persisted in referring to the Civil War as "the War of Northern Aggression." One of them even had an egalitarianism logo tattooed on her person. All these intriguing, unquestionably cool people had one thing in common, though: a skateboard.

(Dante Debose in Tampa)

In 2005 I was of exactly the right age and inclinations to benefit from the release of a feature film about 1970s Venice Beach skate culture. I'd already seen the documentary Stacy Peralta directed on the same topic, the rightfully lauded Dogtown and Z-Boys, and though Lords of Dogtown isn't on the same level, at the time it was perfect, full of shriekingly gorgeous guys, cool skate segments, in-jokes, and adorably chaste sex scenes that were for little ol' me all too titillating. There was also the Heath Ledger Factor, which should never be downplayed because, lest you forget, I belong to the generation that came of age on 10 Things I Hate About You and A Knight's Tale, and true love lasts a lifetime even when it's in the form of a drunkass stoned overalls-clad Californian hippie. What a method actor was Heath! Anyway. The 2003 Ataris cover of "Boys of Summer" blowing up my KaZaa account was not, incidentally, included on the Dogtown soundtrack or even used in the trailers (that honor went to "Boulevard of Broken Dreams"), but it blended with my mental image of southern California as the cooler version of my own familiar digs. The Black Flag line, cringeworthy now, really resonated then, man, for a mousy yet godawful pretentious teenager fixated on all things angry. There are NYC people and there are LA people--I've never been to either city but I'm an LA person, chiefly from consuming too many Pacific Sunwear ads and Gidget movies in my formative years. If people up north thought Cocoa Beach was the palm-trees-and-bikinis paradise of the continental US, that was well and good, but metro LA--Long Beach, Redondo Beach, Huntington Beach, Venice Beach--that was where shit was real. The girls were tanner, the guys were more dangerous, the sun was brighter, the waves were bigger. Everything was sharper, harder, more vivid. Blood on skateboards, sex that looked how sunscreen smelled.

(via Fanpop)

In hindsight, of course, I was not fit to be a punk of any sort--skate, surf, crust, or otherwise, because if I had been then I would have been. Recursive rebellion! It didn't occur to me, for whatever reason, to ask my cousins or uncles to show me how to skate and surf. But the aftertaste of secondhand culture remains, neon sunsets and sneakers with the rubber worn down, long hair and pot smoke. I watch Lords of Dogtown at least three times between May and September. I went alone to see We Jam Econo--at Tampa's skatepark, of course--and felt it an appropriate gateway to my adult life. I marathon every Endless Summer film on the hottest day of the summer. I listen to my uncle's stories of the year's Easter surf competition with rapt attention. I finally have that chain wallet.

Republicans in the Big Guava

This Salon article is both deeply depressing and extremely accurate. As you all probably know, the Republican National Convention is taking place in my fair former city, Tampa, starting this weekend. When this was first announced, I shuddered in horror and thanked my lucky stars that I would already be gone when it came time. It would even worse than when we hosted the Super Bowl! And by all accounts it's going to be--the city is playing host to a slew of birther nutbars, and the prison on Orient Road is just waiting for people to be arrested. 

A new billboard greets GOPers as they roll in from the airport, seen below:

Believe me, to live there you would have no idea that this is actually true. The only reason Tampa is occasionally a spot of blue in a sea of red is because there are large amounts of students and people of color living there. Nothing in the city's infrastructure or plans for the future indicates the presence of liberal devils; I've posted here before about the utter lack of parks, the dangers of being a pedestrian or bike-rider, and the terrible public transit, including our idiot governor's rejection of the high-speed rail and Hillsborough County voters' rejection of a one-cent tax raise to fund light rail. On the other hand, the city doesn't display many of the virtues of conservatism, either--the tourism business is a shambles. There is nothing that Tampa has for tourists that every other Florida city doesn't have--Tallahassee doesn't have a beach, but then neither does Tampa proper--and a good bit of what it does have isn't being promoted properly. A rich and interesting history, sure...but where do you go to learn about that history? A lovely waterway...almost entirely ringed with unwalkable roads (the Riverwalk project, mentioned in the Salon article, has been in progress since before I moved to Hillsborough). Beautiful and historic houses...in the poorest parts of the city. Seminole Heights is to date the only successful attempt at gentrification, and frankly, gentrification isn't what the goal should be. The neighborhoods on all sides of Seminole Heights, including V.M. Ybor where I used to live, could see the same level of success that Seminole Heights has, but there's no initiative to make that happen, and even if it did, it would most likely manifest in the same old "push locals out, put Starbuck's in". Hillsborough County is a patchwork of extreme cases, where expensive high-rises sit next to urban-ugly tenements, and there are few hard dividing lines between "neighborhoods" as many other major urban centers have. The "solution" to distasteful urban spaces has been to push ever farther away from the city center, creating white-flight suburbs like New Tampa.

Tampa is a city that displays some of the worst excesses of typical Florida urban hubs: development run rampant with comparably few gains, extreme dependency on automobiles with all that entails (including some of the worst traffic in the nation, high rates of pedestrian injuries, and pollution), and a fatal disconnect between residents of the city proper and residents of the larger county. It has no essential spaces and it's far too spread out to be livable. There is very little that stitches Tampa together--other than 275. There is no overarching meaning to living in the place, little cultural identity unless you've been rooted there for generations, and most folks would rather say they're from somewhere else.

It's kind of a wreck. But I love it: it's home to my favorite restaurants, breweries, and bookstores, it's hot and bright and exquisitely scented, and it's lousy with memories. I'm sad the Republicans saw fit to descend upon it in their locust-like waves. Give them hell, Tampons! Since stand-your-ground is still in place, you might as well make good use of it.

Godspeed, Dr. Ride

In case you missed the news, Dr. Sally Ride passed away on Monday. She was sixty-one years old.

Being that Ride was the first American woman to travel in outer space (as well as the youngest astronaut, aged 32 at her first flight), I heard a lot about her growing up on the Space Coast. She was a staple of Florida history classes and science lessons. As an adult, I have even more admiration for this remarkable woman and her legacy. She did much to break barriers for women in the sciences and provides a wonderful example for youth to look up to.

If you'd like to learn more about Dr. Ride, check out Sally Ride Science.

Thing relevant to my interests #82: Tampa

So, Magic Mike. Here were the things I knew about Magic Mike prior to seeing it:

• Channing Tatum is in it
• So is Matt Bomer, otherwise known as Dick Grayson
• Channing Tatum used to actually be a stripper
• Matt Bomer AKA Dick Grayson wasn't (except in various fics where Dick is TOTALLY a stripper, and, you know, if you want to read those I will link them)
• Strippers
• Lots of junk flying around presumably
• Ew, Matthew McConaughey, please keep your clothes on please please please
• Made by Steven Soderbergh

These things are all true (there is a lot of junk flying around. Also ass). Here is a thing that is also true, which I was not aware of until right before seeing Magic Mike, and which makes me unfathomably happy: Magic Mike is set in Tampa, Florida. This makes a lot of sense, if you think about it; Tampa is known for having oodles of strip joints, and not all of them are geared toward straight men. When I found out this film's setting (it shot there too, AND CHANNING TATUM IS FROM TAMPA WHAT THE HELL) and told some of my fellow Tampa expat ladyfriends, they all made the same expression: confusion, followed by delight. I will be honest; the thought of seeing Matt Bomer and Joe Manganiello shake their stuff in very little clothing is nice, but the thought of another movie paying attention to my fair former city is even nicer. I have my priorities.

image via Just Jared

Anyway, "confusion followed by delight" is a pretty accurate tag for my general thoughts about this movie. I think most people were expecting it to be Showgirls except with dudes, which would have been fine. But Soderbergh wants you to think about the human condition of male strippers. And this movie is actually good. WEIRD RIGHT. The general plot is a tale as old as time--party boy is getting older, trying to figure out what he's going to do with his life--but the acting carries it through. I think I'm turning into a Channing Tatum apologist, but I have great love for She's the Man and I think he's gotten quite a bit better as his career has progressed. Alex Pettyfer was convincing as Adam, the skeezy and irresponsible douchewaffle baby stripper Tatum's character takes under his wing. And Cody Horn, well, haters can hate but I really liked her character, Brooke (Adam's sister). I'm sort of a buzzkill myself and I don't think there are enough characters like Brooke: responsible to a fault, totally aware of what it takes to be an adult without any help, unwilling to put up with shit, sort of stiff and rigid. Let's get a beer and bitch about work and horrible family members, Brooke! All things considered, the three major female characters in the film don't come off too badly despite the strip club owner's belief that audiences of ladies are cash cows and nothing else (though don't be fooled by the marketing--the movie is still largely a male fantasy): Brooke is responsible, controlled, and caring; Joanna, Mike's hook-up partner, is  ultimately sort of villainous but more for not telling him she had a fiance, rather than for being voraciously sexual; and Nora is a person you stay away from because she's into drugs and carries around a piglet, not because she has casual sex. I'm sorry to report that Matthew McConaughey keeps his clothes on for 95% of the film and then you see all the way up his colon. Nas-ty. The rest of the dancing is pretty impressive, though...any excuse to whip out "Pony." All told, Magic Mike is a good choice of film for a goofy night out with friends; the theater I went to was sold out (literally sold out) on a Tuesday night, we smuggled in some hard lemonade (topical!), and had an uproarious good time. My friend was intrigued and amused by my muttered outbursts of "I've been there!" at various points throughout.

Basically, once Magic Mike is on DVD, it will be purchased by me and watched in conjunction with The Punisher on days when I really miss the Bay environs. Maybe that's sort of sad, but everybody gets homesick. Sometimes I like to be reminded of Dale Mabry, drunkass Greek parties, St Pete Beach, the Amphitheatre. And if I was tearing up at the end, it's Steven Soderbergh's fault for sticking "Feels Like the First Time" over the credits.

Once upon a time in Tampa

O Tampa! It's not my hometown, but it's where I spent six of my most interesting formative years, and despite myself I'm very fond of the place--indeed I miss it much, much more than I anticipated since moving to Cleveland.

This longing for a sometimes boring, often frustrating, wickedly humid patchwork city was further intensified a few weeks ago when I watched the 2004 Punisher for the first time since the film came out. In case you weren't aware, the film was partially set and completely shot in the Tampa Bay area. This is one of the only times that my fair city has been committed to film in a reasonably major way (the others being Lutz featuring in Edward Scissorhands, the Lowry Park Zoo used in Goodfellas, and one of the area racetracks in Ocean's Eleven), and watching it was a bizarre, weirdly moving experience for me as a former Tampon. Is this how New Yorkers and Vancouverites feel when they see the thousands of films and TV shows which feature their home cities? Is this how longtime Clevelanders will feel when they view Avengers in the spring and recognize portions of our downtown? Because it is strange, very strange, to see long shots of Tampa's business and club districts, to see Fort DeSoto masquerading as Puerto Rico, to see John Travolta holding court next to a tall downtown building which goes by the local vulgarity "The Beer Can." I even got a little maudlin when a scene happened to take place in a location which looks a lot different now (the old ampitheatre behind the art museum, if you're following along).

(aforementioned Beer Can and the "Saints and Sinners" club)

That paltry night skyline! The neighborhood where my sister and I owned a house! The beautiful mosaics of the Columbia! The bridge to Davis Island! The spires of UT! 2001 Nude Odyssey! That's me: that's my city: a glorious sprawl of strip joints and mansions and tawdry apartment complexes and rotting cigar factories which could be historic if someone would just give a damn. So, Thomas Jane and company: thanks for this, at least.

So long and thanks for all the free space

Things I will be doing during Rapture '11:

• 
  
  
  hanging out with my good friends DR SHE BLOGGO, Princess Slayer, and Alex the scientist at the Wizarding World of Harry Potter


• 
  
  Downing pints of butterbeer at said theme park; searching fruitlessly for firewhiskey


• 
  
  Laughing and carrying on about STAR WARS and Doctor Who and the new pic of Tom Hardy as Bane from Dark Knight Rises


• 
  
  lavishing DR SHE BLOGGO with birthday gifts


• 
  
  eating overpriced food and buying overpriced Ravenclaw scarves


• 
  
  possibly whipping out my kung fu skills to put Jesus on ice should he show up looking for a fight

Things I will not be doing during Rapture '11:

• 
  
  Being raptured

SNOWPOCALYPSE

Hai guys. SO. As you've probably heard, there is currently snow in 49 of the 50 U.S. states.

Can you guess which state remains snow-free? THAT'S RIGHT, YOU'RE JEALOUS. It's Florida. Ah, Florida. Even Hawaii can't match your warmth. Of course, by "warmth" I mean "highs of 54 and lows of 30". So not really WARM. But warm...er. Apologies for those people who like to think of these things in terms of "has it ever been done before?", because Florida is making it hard to create a real record. We like to make things difficult (voting, for instance, and paying teachers what they are worth).

I think this is an opportune time for me to write a love letter to Florida. Even though it is mostly a horrible place I am very fond of my home state. Occasionally I feel like I'm the only person here who likes being here--many of the people I meet at my university are from out-of-state and they seem to loathe fair Florida. I can't blame them for missing or preferring their homes, though; I am a big, big, big fan of Dune, but in one respect (ok, in many, although it is far less dated than, say, Heinlein), Herbert gets it totes wrong: when he has Duncan Idaho say something along the lines of, Parting from friends is sadness. A place is just a place. Not so, Duncan! A place is way more than that. Personally I find that leaving a place that I love is often harder than leaving people. You can communicate with people and visit them, but when you don't live in a place anymore, you...don't, and there is no going back, not really.

So here's to you, Florida--land of citrus groves and cold springs and sinkholes and hurricanes, land of Jody Baxter and Clinton Tyree, land of immigrants and rich white northerners, land of Mickey Rat, land of terrible roads and speed traps. There is no place quite like you, and when I leave sometime this summer I'll miss you awfully, your humidity and your mosquitoes too and your way of doing theme parks which is still unmatched. Who else could produce the Holy Land Experience and Celebration? Jimmy and I raise a margarita to you, Florida. Stay sunny.

HART attack

Bad puns, hooray!

Anyway. Around this time last year, my dear faithful Honda Civic hatchback (vintange 1990) finally gave up and died on me. At the time my bank account was drained on account of some unfortunate dental occurrences (don't forget to floss, kids! OTHERWISE YOU WILL HAVE A ROOT CANAL), and I don't have any credit cards, so I consigned myself to riding the bus until I could save up for a used car.

This meant two things: the University of South Florida's shuttle system, which has reasonable reach (it goes off-campus to Walmart, the mall, and a few other plazas), and the Hillsborough County Regional Transit's bus system, which goes throughout Tampa Bay and surrounding suburbs. The HART buses cover a ton of area, which is good, but are HIDEOUSLY underbudgeted and my conclusion after using HART for nearly a year is that Hillsborough County hates poor people.

Duh, Diana! you say. EVERYONE hates poor people! True. But experiencing it is a whole 'nother ball of wax. HART has over 30 mainstream bus lines; count in the flex routes and paratransit and it edges close to 60. (I think) there are 6 main transfer centers where the routes connect, as well as 4 Park-N-Ride centers throughout the county. 16 of these routes provide late-night service. There are some really good things about HART--free or reduced fares for students with valid ID, bilingual services, a variety of passes (1-day, 5-day, month-long, etc.), but the simple fact that on the bulk of the lines, a bus comes along ONCE EVERY HOUR mostly cancels out the good. If you miss that bus, you're screwed (and not in the I-want-to-hear-you-UPBEAT! "WE'RE SCREWED!" way). If you had a connecting bus to catch, you're doubly screwed. Might as well walk, because you're going to be late anyway.

So basically, in my year of public transportation use (which I admit is not a long time), I grew convinced that the people in charge of our public transit really do hate the poor. "Poor" in this case means "anyone without a car". And I realize that this attitude is really an American one at large, not just a Tampon one ("Tampons" are what citizens of Tampa are called. "Tramps" is also used)--you're walking? you're waiting at a bus stop? YOU MUST BE POOR YOU POOR PERSON WITHOUT A CAR. 'Cause you know, walking is for hobos. Public transportation is for plebes. GAH. Spare me. Maybe in the big American cities this is not the attitude (surely NYC and San Francisco, Seattle, Portland, etc. smile kindly upon those who wish to remain carless), but we are in the parochial hell that is Florida. Here, walking along a street means you are a) homeless or b) a hooker. Dig if you will an image of me sitting at the neighborhood bus stop sometime in May:

Diana: *reads, checks watch*

Dude in car: Hey, let me give you a ride.

Diana: Actually, I'm waiting for the bus.

Dude: So let me give you a ride.

Diana: Are you a BUS? NO? NO RIDE THEN RUN ALONG

I mean really. I got more catcalls, yelling and whistling, rude remarks, and slowing-your-car-to-pace-me when I was walking everywhere and waiting for buses than in the last four years of college.

Know what else bites? The stops themselves. I will hazard a guess that between my home stop and my work stop, there were roughly forty bus stop locations going one way. Out of that, perhaps one quarter were covered. Maybe half were stone or wooden benches rather than plastic ones. PLASTIC BENCHES, people. PLASTIC. IN FLORIDA. You will fry your ass off sitting on one of those. Also, this is Florida...As Eve would say, We have weather. A non-covered stop is a bitch during the rainy season (which, hello? February through October). But come on--only poor people use the bus system! Who cares if they get wet? Their clothes are crappy anyway! Who cares if they get sunburned and develop skin cancer? They're going to die of heart failure by the time they're thirty anyway! Poor people and their terrible eating habits!

Ok, that is another post entirely.

Something else that grates my cheese is that lots of lovely suburbanites in Carrollwood and New Tampa are trying to get rid of the light-rail initiative in our area. That's right, rich white people who've never used public transportation in their sorry lives. What use have they for light rail? Why should the county pour money into something THEY'LL never use? And other whitepeopleproblems.

Where does your heart live? (again)

Several people, presumably sick of hearing me rhapsodize about The Best Place On Earth, have said, But Diana! You LOVE Florida! How can you even think of moving somewhere else?

It's true. I do love Florida. Occasionally it feels like I'm the lone soul in this Bible-thumping, hellishly hot, tacky, swampy, lousy-with-Northerners, sandy-soiled oasis who really enjoys being here. I am a second-generation Floridian, which is only impressive if you consider that about 80% of the population here is from somewhere else, and my third-fondest wish (first-fondest: the offer of a librarian position in the London library and a flat in Bloomsbury; second-fondest: guaranteed expatriation to The Best Place On Earth along with a librarian position in Victoria) is for the clan house in Merritt Island, which currently belongs to an aunt and uncle, to be willed to me. I love marshes, loud birds, really hot sunshine, citrus fruit, narrow old roads, mocking tourists, slow rivers brown with leaf-mold, abundant seafood, heat lightning, water prairies, Disney World, and Florida's greatest treasure, cold springs. By the way--if you have never been in 72-degree crystal-clear spring water, YOU HAVE NOT LIVED. So see to that.

I don't love awful traffic, religious fanatics, bizarre and terrifying zoning laws which allow for uncontrolled urban and suburban growth, interstates, anti-pedestrian cities (did you know that the top four worst cities for pedestrians are all in Florida? Be proud, Tampons! We're number three!), the destruction of a beautiful and unique environment, a hideous attitude toward immigration, the giant Confederate flag flying at the junction of I-75 and Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, despicable medical laws, and being sunburned in the ten minutes it takes to walk across my college campus.

I am not under the illusion that The Best Place On Earth is perfect. However, it is leagues closer to perfection than my dear home state, or any other part of the United States that I have been in. What can I say beyond "I'm in love"? It is true that part of my heart belongs to London and the UK in general, and always will, but my brain has accepted that immigration to Britain is a pipe dream. Immigration to Canada is not. It's within my reach and I want it. My core values and concerns are represented better by Canada in general and British Columbia in particular, and the United States doesn't seem concerned with changing that. A reasonably common subtext to the But Diana! You LOVE Florida! concerned queries is But why would you want to live anywhere other than the United States? I really don't think the concept of immigration occurs to the bulk of white middle-class Americans; they're in the US, and the US is where immigrants come, and that's the extent of immigration for the majority of US citizens. Little thought of themselves going anywhere else.

"Anywhere else" is, I feel, where my destiny lies. Across the continent, three time zones and a country away. I'm almost there.