Small Town Girls With Small Town Realities

So it's nothing new that I left Atlanta to come to La La Land for school and life. Blah blah blah. But I was on Myspace - the dreaded enabler of cyber-bullies, child predators, shitty bands, and self indulgent emo kids - recently and I saw something that messed with my head a little. So anyone who's still using Myspace nowadays has noticed how it suddenly has this shitty Facebook-esque feature called People You May Know in which they display the profiles of people in your area/who listed the same school as you/whatever.

The scariest thing is the fact that I recognize half these "people I may know" because they went to my high school. Ugh. I hated HS because the people there were narrowminded, judgmental, cliche, and boring. No one got me. No one tried to. I was that one alt fish in a sea of mainstreamers. Anyways, the fucked up thing isn't the fact that those stupid kids are suddenly popping up again, the crazy thing is the fact that they haven't left their homes.

I went to HS in a retarded backwards area called Duluth, in North Atlanta. It shares its name with Duluth, Minnesota because the rail line runs through both of them. Ugh. It was a stupid place. It was suburban hell. Basically I spent any and all my time downtown or in the East, where people didn't judge and everyone was cool.

When I was a senior and I told people I was moving to CA, they would always get wide-eyed and say, "That's so far!" In a ridic semi-Southern accent, natch. But basically everyone funneled into three schools: Univ of GA, GA Tech, or GA State. Anything besides that was unheard of, and actually moving downtown to attend said schools was equally rare.

So what I am trying to say, in what seems as drawn out and muddled a way possible, is that leaving behind that security was the best thing for me. What if I had stayed there? I could still be living with my mom in the suburban pit o' doom. Take my old HS friend for instance. Homegirl is 19 and she lives with her mom and takes the train downtown because she's too afraid to drive on the highway.

Chances are, I wouldn't have ended up like that because I am so independent and urban. But it's scary to think that if I had stayed there, I might have.

E