We spent today exploring the city of Detroit and saw the Saturday Eastern Market and surrounds, the remains of Michigan Central Station, the 8-Mile area of Warren, Michigan, where Eminem’s 8 Mile movie was shot, and lots of examples of urban decay. I was startled when we visited Christchurch, New Zealand, last December to see theaters and buildings completely blown out and hollow from the earthquake devastations the city suffered, but the ruins and decay of Detroit bring about a completely different sullen feeling. It’s a city that once had its heyday, and is now suffering to survive with blocks and blocks of abandoned apartments and storefronts. There were some blocks we visited where there was just weed growth galore where buildings used to stand, and the growth had gotten so bad that it had overtaken the sidewalks; the sidewalks were not even visible anymore. I’ve never seen so many abandoned, massively graffitied buildings with their windows blown out and skeletons struggling to stand.

I have no idea what it would be like to grow up in a city like Detroit, but I’d imagine that overall morale would be low. There’s an invisible line that seems to separate the city – one side seems to be slowly rebuilding with fancy hotels like the Westin and Michael Symon’s Roast restaurant opening. The other side of that line is all despair and ruins and abandoned land waiting for someone, anyone, to claim it and build on it.

Ed and I used to have mini debates since he converted to Christianity that in order to be considered a “good” person, you had to be religious. I used to tell him that religious people can be good, but that doesn’t mean they are all good. You can be a good person without being religious. He vehemently disagreed with me. I would pause and ask him, do you think I am a bad person because I am not a Christian? He would always hesitate and say, no, but you need to accept Christ in your life. It was always what he wanted for me – to be a church-attending, Bible-studying Christian.

Like me, he believed that Jehovah’s Witnesses were a bunch of cult freaks. My mother and aunt are JWs, as they are modernly called today. My aunt is in town for the next four months, and she called today to let me know she is temporarily staying with her friend Maria, a JW friend who lives in New Jersey who is a complete freeloader and who said negative things about my brother being “you know…”  She said this to my face. Anyone who bad mouths my brother while barely knowing him deserves to be burnt at a stake and could never qualify to be a good person. I’m refusing to see my aunt if she brings this judgmental, loser friend of hers. I wonder if she ever feels any guilt that she put my brother down now that she knows he is dead and never to come back.

Tonight, Chris and I met up with his cousin and her boyfriend, who are traveling around the U.S. for two months. For the next month, they are renting an apartment not too far away from ours in Manhattan and will be exploring New York, as well as nearby cities. We had a lot of drinks and ended the night at Otto with even more drinks, great pizza, and pasta.

I’m generally pretty happy to see Chris’s family and friends. Among everyone I have met, they have all been very warm, happy, positive, and entertaining people to be around. What I’ve noticed, though, is that people on my side, especially my family, don’t always tend to fit those descriptors I just mentioned. So Chris doesn’t always welcome seeing them all with open arms. I suppose it’s hard for him to be excited to see them when I am not very excited about seeing them. At the end of the night, Chris asked, “So do you think we could meet up with Russell and Christine and have a night like that?”

No way in hell.

On our way up to Lake Placid in the Adirondacks for the weekend, Chris, his parents, and I stopped by Hyde Park, NY, to visit the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Home. He and his parents are history buffs, and they’d give us all a run for our money with the amount of American history they know vs. what us Americans struggle to retain from our boring U.S. history courses in high school.

The frustrating thing about visiting all these presidential libraries (I’ve now visited six) is that somewhere, you will find mentions of how most of these presidents have cheated on their wives, and it was basically something that was just accepted. Even after falling ill with polio and never being able to stand up or walk on his own ever again, FDR still managed to have affairs with other women despite being married to someone as intelligent, well-written, and articulate as Eleanor Roosevelt. I hate men.

Tonight, Chris, his parents, and I went to see the off-Broadway show The City of Conversation at the Lincoln Center. It’s a story about how after a certain political decision is made, a family gets broken up for 30 years because of differing political opinions and spans the period from the Carter administration to the current Obama administration. The arguments, which get quite heated, are extremely realistic – people argue their points, get spoken over, yelling ensues, and ultimately no one is really listening to the other.

After watching the show, I thought about political debates in my own family between the different generations, mainly my parents’ and mine, and I’ve realized how one-sided they are; my generation, which includes my cousins, Ed, and me – is so scared to ever argue our points because we know that our nearly tea party/right-wing radical parents, aunts, and uncles, would just talk over us, call us naive and make it seem like our opinions are just passing, and then claim we aren’t educated enough (even though we’ve out-educated them all) to understand the “real” issues. It would never be a real “conversation” – it would be a waste of breath. I’m not actually scared to argue against what they say; I’m just so exhausted by how idiotic these conversations end up that I can’t be bothered anymore. Example: the last time my aunt and I argued over gun control, she actually said, “So you want to ban guns? Why don’t you ban pencils while you’re at it because you could stab someone with it!”

Once, I had an argument with my dad about Mitt Romney vs. Barack Obama, and he said near the end, “When you get to the point of making a lot more money, you won’t vote for Democrats anymore.”

A lot of the things that my parents’/aunts’/uncles’ generation get to enjoy, things like social security and pension, were created by the politicians claim to hate, and during their time of creation, were considered socialist. It’s as though they’re happy to reap the benefits of the past without realizing where these things came from and how they even came to be…. And then want to reject anything in the future that might help my generation and future ones to come. It’s just selfish and blind-sighted, and there’s no other way to put it.