Dear Mamacita:
Rebecca and the boys are going drive back to Ohio to help Ruthie with the twins. They are leaving Tuesday night and will stay till the end of the month. Same as last time, I will drive down with Rebecca and take the bus right back.
As you know by now I broke down and got a mobile phone. The cheapest, thinnest one Verizon has. I do not expect to have it for long.
Meanwhile I am changing my telephone at the house over to Vonage. Hector has Vonage and says it works fine. It sends your telephone calls over the Internet. That means you pay less than half for unlimited calling in North America. Even calling overseas is cheaper. In fact, calling France costs just as much as calling California. I wish calling Jamaica was that cheap.
We did get the stimulus check. Rebecca had it.
I used to think the suburbs was the best place to bring up children, but now I am not so sure.
My thinking was that there is way more trouble that teenagers can get into in the city and that the public schools are bad. That is all true and yet, on the other hand, the suburbs are so mind-deadening. I start to feel it myself whenever I am away from New York for more than two weeks. What effect, then, must it have if you grow up that way?
I told Hector all this at that Haitian place. He kind of just looked at me and said nothing. Which is strange since he bringing up his two daughters there, though they are still too little to go to school. Maybe I was not making sense. Or maybe I was making perfect sense, so there was little he could add. Or maybe he does not know enough about the suburbs to disagree. He is a city mouse all the way.
I think from ages 0 to 8 it does not matter where you live so long as you are with both parents. They could be living on the street, it would not matter. From 8 to 12 I think the suburbs are best, especially for boys, because of the wide-open spaces. But after 13 it starts to become a prison.
If it was not for Rebecca I would seriously think about moving back. She is a country mouse. She grew up in the hills north of Kingston. The Poconos is like where she grew up, only it has Wal-Mart, television and water pumped straight into your house. (When she was little she was the one sent to get water, so even now she hates it when we waste water.)
This coming year will probably be Jacob's last being homeschooled. Kind of sad, but even last year he was starting to get beyond where Rebecca's could help him. At nights I would have to help him with his math.
Till next week,
Your son,
Abagond,
Sun Aug 17 11:20:28 UTC 2008
This is right on the money on each and every count.
Luckily, I went to university at age 16 and got out of prison.
I think the best design for living is an environment that is urbanized, but with plenty of wide-open spaces. Maybe a design where housing is clustered around transportation nodes which has easily accessible transportation choices within walking distance and some commercial centres that can easily handle the needs of the residents (eg, banks, doctors, supermarkets, grocers, drug stores (pharmacies), some lawyers and accountants, but also libraries, cinemas, restaurants and social venues) surround by fields and woods that give people plenty of open-spaces — mostly natural settings, but could even be farms.
The current design of suburbs have the worst of both worlds. It has some wide-open spaces, but none of the advantages of urban living nor of rural living. And they are so inefficient and unsustainable from an energy perspective.