Small Town, Big City

The time has come for me to take a step back and let some other phillygrrls (and guys), have their say. Thanks to DB for contributing a post (and keeping my brain from exploding today).

Salivations, PhillyGrrl readers. The name is Don Bito, and I’m here to drop some knowledge on you. (It’s officially talk-like-you’re-on-Dark-Angel week in my head. There’s your first little nugget.)

But seriously folks. Bito and the PhillyGrrl go way back, all the way to that dark and treacherous time we all long to forget: high school. So perhaps our rivalries stem from some needy adolescent hangover… or perhaps from that time in college when we made a $20 bet to see who could score the highest on our British Lit papers (me) and someone took one look at their paper and started a premature celebration until they saw someone else’s score (mine) and then someone walked away both richer and more irritatingly self-satisfied (me).

Well, anyway, what matters is that I am here, writing to you lovely folks, as good as looking at you now for all you cannot see me and all that crap. So I spent the evening trying to figure out what I could blather on about that might be remotely interesting you. What do I know about the city of Philadelphia?

Well, to quote my neighbor, whose drunken sidewalk relationship drama I observed through my front window while sipping a cape cod one warm summer night, “Live it. Learn it. Love it.”

I grew up in Philadelphia. She is my first and, presently, only love. (Layyyyydieeees!) The only passion of mine that could possibly place even a distant second is gossip.

Me and my friends at our Survivors of Decapitation Meeting.

So in a world-premiere Don Bito exclusive sure to shock and amaze, my inaugural post at PhillyGrrl will miraculously merge these two passions in what’s sure to be this year’s most irrelevant news item.

If you’ve lived in Philly for even a few years, you have no doubt already discovered the ways in which our booming metropolis sometimes seems to be an incestuous spiderweb of personal relationships. At times you find yourself wondering how, in a city of a million and a half people, you could possibly have ended up throwing up in the bathtub of your high school sweetheart’s old college roommate a week ago and why you can’t find a cheaper text plan to cope with all of the worried/smug messages you’ve been getting from your ex ever since.

For realsies, though, for a big-ass city, sometimes Philly can sure feel like a town the size of Avonlea. The good news is that makes me Rachel Lynde.

You don’t want to see these steely grays peeping through the blinds at you.

So today, for your consideration, I bring you an article from my former place of unpaid employment, the Philadelphia Weekly. (I haven’t been keeping up with the publication, but I hear it all went downhill after I left.)

This week, Christopher Wink brings us this article about proposed renovation of the Parkway Central Library or some crap like that.

The English major in me longs to lampoon the article itself, which features lines like the syntactical extravaganza that is

“But Philly-library news is today gloomier.”

Or even just share the chuckle I had over this clunker of a paragraph and its hilarious last-minute attempt to nurse some journalistic thrill from what is surely the most mundane topic ever:

“Every one of the city’s 54 library branches have been renovated or seen altogether new construction—most recently in 2005 with the Widener branch in the Glenwood neighborhood of North Philadelphia. Every one, that is, except the central branch.” (My emphasis.)

But what really drew me to comment on the article is it’s author. Now I’ve never met this fellow “Christopher Wink” who gets some sort of faux-noir undercover journalism kicks from public library funding discrepancies, but his antics are well-known to those in my inner circle. And to one spurned sorority girl in an Old City a bar on Temple’s June graduation day.

So my message today is for the ladies of our urban Avonlea, from the space between my blinds to yours: Steer clear of miracle boy. He’s a playa playa from the Himalayas.

(Dark Angel Slang Win.)