There are nice things about Houston and Austin (and probably other university towns), so you may have been overreacting.
My sister lives in a suburb of Houston. You know how in the In Death books, Eve Dallas thinks of suburbs as inhabited by pod people? Well, that's what I think of when I visit. I mean, I grew up in a rural area and now I live downtown, and I lived briefly in Columbia (Rouse's totally planned community) but I find the strangely uniform urban sprawl of Houston to be poorly planned and vaguely disturbing. And the high school football is mind boggling -- the stadium for the local high school is larger than the stadium for my university (which was not small). The athletic facilities are larger than the school proper. And this is suburban Houston. I can only imagine that it is the same only more so in small town middle Texas, in places like Midland, Odessa, etc.
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Date: 2007-01-02 01:32 pm (UTC)My sister lives in a suburb of Houston. You know how in the In Death books, Eve Dallas thinks of suburbs as inhabited by pod people? Well, that's what I think of when I visit. I mean, I grew up in a rural area and now I live downtown, and I lived briefly in Columbia (Rouse's totally planned community) but I find the strangely uniform urban sprawl of Houston to be poorly planned and vaguely disturbing. And the high school football is mind boggling -- the stadium for the local high school is larger than the stadium for my university (which was not small). The athletic facilities are larger than the school proper. And this is suburban Houston. I can only imagine that it is the same only more so in small town middle Texas, in places like Midland, Odessa, etc.