"Why would he break off half of a banana and just leave the other half sitting out like that?" was one of the examples of what I would gripe about when Brad would do something that disturbed me. About Two and a half years ago, my mom decided that she should invest in a renovation of the old, rickety, and almost dangerous deck surrounding the swimming pool in the backyard. Who better to do this than one of her old rowing buddies, Brad, who just so happened to be the person that I would loathe for the next nine months.

    At first it wasn't that bad, it was actually fun and interesting having a new face around the house. I guess the initial idea was for him to do some repairs to the deck, but what ended up happening was him transforming into a freeloader living in the basement for what seemed to be forever. The deck repairs started off fine until my mom and him eventually decided to basically replace the entire deck. At the time I just thought this was a ploy because he is somewhat of a loaner, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it was at the time.

    The best way to describe Brad is unnaturally quirky and incredibly myopic. He would say the rudest things to me as if it didn't matter, "Hey Ben here's an idea: how about you cover your mouth when you cough so people don't hate you." What do you say to something like that? The only way I could accept his behavior was to tell myself that he didn't mean to be rude and that he just didn't realize what he was doing. Toward the end of his prolonged stay, it felt like he was milking his time at the house by creating new projects that "needed to be done." It all eventually came to an end when he moved out and bought his own place in Austin, then sold his house for profit and is now traveling with a woman named Trisha, but I don't know or want to know anymore than that.

    I have changed my mind now about Brad. Some of his traits I respected, and some not so much. Sometimes you have to just accept the person for whatever sliver of their personality is appealing to you.

The Other OP

In order for this to make any sense at all I need to tell a story first. My friend and I were driving on Lamar, coming from Barton Springs going towards Whole Foods and Waterloo and Amy's and 6th Street. We had the windows rolled down and the Hip-hop was bangin' -- I say bangin' because it was pretty loud. There is a bridge that you pass under with some blue metal artwork, and then a light that we were stopped at. To the left of us walking up and down on the median is a homeless person. He is African-American, very dirty, and very skinny. As the homeless man walks closer to us my friend does the following things in this order: looks at the homeless guy, turns down the bangin' hip-hop, and rolls up his window. I didn't say anything until we started moving, then said, "Would you like to tell me why you rolled up your window?" I will remember what he said for while. All he said was "hobo." He said it like he rolls windows up at "hobos" all the time. This angered me because after I asked why he rolled it up, he told me he did this so the guy didn't steal his car. This is illogical. "We are large football players. Do you really think he could have taken the car from us?" "He could've had a gun." That argument sucks because bullets go through windows. Even a fist can go through a window. I'm going to address the race issue that came up in this situation. From what I saw, my friend was embarrassed to be listening to Hip-hop, a dominantly black genre of music, in the presence of a black person. This is my opinion: if you can't listen to hip-hop around a black person, you shouldn't listen to hip-hop at all. So that's that and we are moving on. When I thought about it even more I realized it's not much of a race issue at all (He just happened to be black, I don't think that had anything to do with it.) What happened obviously wasn't racism. I guess you could call it classism. My friend's suburban instincts told him that this person of a lesser financial status was possibly going to attempt to steal the car with both of us inside of it. This is a huge problem in the suburbs of America. Why were suburban communities created in the first place? Parents wanted a safe place to raise their children. But what makes it safe? If it wasn't safe in the city for whatever reason, is running away from the problem and leaving it unchanged the right thing to do? I don't mean literally sprinting from a metro area, and it didn't all happen at once. Suburbanization is a fairly gradual process. This just made me think about how suburbs across the nation seem to be rolling up their windows to inner cities. Suburbanites in Chevy Suburbans driving through the suburbs shielded by a gigantic window of lies. Okay you know I don't really mean that so calm down everyone, and by everyone I don't mean everyone. You know who you are. So lets open those flood gates and discuss this honestly. Yes i actually wrote that. And that.*

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