Coffee heat rising

Idle essays

Why Do I Hate Arizona?

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LOL! Truth to tell, I probably don’t. “I hate Arizona” is a jingle that intrudes into my dainty little mind any time anything here annoys me, inconveniences me, overcharges me, or makes me wish I were back in Northern California.

That’s a fair amount of jingling, to tell the truth. 😀 But the reality is…well…I don’t exactly HATE it. At least not most of it; not most of the time.

Let’s think about this…

What do I like about Arizona?

* Clear blue skies
* A swimming pool in every yard
* Warm winters
* Horses
* Two above-average universities: the University of Arizona and Arizona State University
* The Grand Canyon, and its hiking trails
* Sedona and its amazing scenery

What do I madly dislike about Arizona?

* Ubiquitous extreme right-wing politics
* Mediocre grocery stores
* Heat that’s enough to roast a pork loin
* Piss-poor public schooling
* Public transit that leaves a lot to be desired
* Phoenix
* Tucson
* Enough blacktop to coat half of Southern California…
* Too damn many people

This morning I really needed to take Ruby to the vet who practices about six or eight blocks down the road. But…

* I can’t take her on a bus.
* The pavement is WAY too hot for her feet to walk on.
* Basically it’s too hot for me to walk on, come to think of it.
* As we scribble, the ambient temperature outside is 104 degrees; headed to 107.
* I need some groceries, but what with Dear Son having purloined my car, I can’t get to the nearest market to buy those groceries. It’s just too hot to walk that far.

So, yeah. I hate Arizona. If I could get outta here, I would. And…well…come to think of it, I may.

 

Biggest Mistake of My Life…

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Loafing under gray skies, I find myself gazing back on the major decisions of my life. Ever-entertaining….

It strikes me that the single worst decision I ever made was NOT to have majored, as an undergraduate, in a subject that would have landed me a decent job. Without benefit of a graduate degree.

As it is — stupidly having majored in English and pursued not one but two graduate degrees — I can’t get a “decent job” for love nor money.

Consider the likely possibilities:

An Ed.D. would have gotten me a principal’s position in some high school in a desirable location — like the San Francisco Bay Area, for example.

An MBA almost certainly would have led to a decently paying corporate job. Just about anywhere.

An MS in microbiology (my favorite subject) would have landed a job at a hospital or a university, pursuing interesting challenges.(nevvermind that women were not welcome in the sciences at the time…TOTALLY not welcome!)

Any of those jobs could have led me to a career far, far away from hot, muggy, intellectually backward Arizona.

But ohhhhhh  no!  I had to chase a Ph.D. in English…so that I wouldn’t have to go back and change my undergraduate major to a subject that would have made economic sense.

What? Me? Make sense? 

Surely you jest…

Augh!!! The Joy of Living in Arizona

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Yeah. In the absence of a car, Ruby and I didn’t make to the vet through the 110-degree heat.

This morning she’s still squawking HORK HORK HORK! very time she laps up a drink of water. Dayum!!!!!  

It seems a little better today, though: doesn’t go on and on and on. Whatever the problem is, she may be throwing it off.

Sure hope so. I could do without another $100+ vet bill.

Arizona: what a horrible place!!!! 

My mother used to go on and on about how much she loved it here. And I suppose by comparison with Saudi Arabia, where we spent ten hideous years on the shore of the Persian Gulf, it looks…uhm…good.

To my mind, it looks like an outpost of Hell. You can be sure I’d be someplace else –– a good long way else — if my son weren’t here.

We’re here because his dad landed a job, fresh out of law school, with one of the most prominent firms in the Southwest. After 20 years of marriage to that guy, I was well established and in no position to seek a job anywhere else than in the Phoenix area. And our son had no desire to move away from where his dad and I lived.

So.

Here we are. 

Ugh.

There’s a fate for ya.

I do hate it here, and if I could escape, I’d head for the Bay Area in a trice.

But a) I ain’t leavin’ where my son lives; and b) I couldn’t get a decent job in San Francisco or the East Bay on a bet. A Ph.D. in English a decent job does not buy…

But honestly…

I hate Arizona!

Rasty-Nasty Redux

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Ahh! COLD TEA!!!  What a relief!

Just back in the house after a peculiarly unpleasant doggy-walk. At eight in the morning, it is SO HOT and SO HUMID out there that it feels like a day in Rasty-Nasty, the horrible American compound where my parents and I spent nine years on the shore of the Persian Gulf.

What a gawdawful experience that was! I can remember days when it would be so humid that rain would start to fall out of a clear blue sky.

Oh, well. At least we don’t have any Arabs standing around hating on us here. That’s something. I guess.

Where would I go, if I could get away from this sylvan spot?

Well…

The San Francisco Bay Area for sure, if I could afford it. My mother’s family lived in Berkeley, which at the time was a lovely suburb of the City, up in the East Bay hills…just as pretty as could be.

But of course, I can’t afford it.

Where else?

Some parts of Colorado have their appeal. Problem is, it gets too cold in the winter there.

New Mexico, maybe…but I suspect the summers there are about as balmy as they are here…

All of which is about as irrelevant as irrelevant can get. Because… As long as my son is here, this is where I’m gonna be.

Melted!!!

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Argh! I overestimated the heat when I went for today’s exercise stroll. As we scribble, Wunderground claims the temp is 111 just now. “Feels like 117.”

Is THAT all?

Yeah…well, I’d have guessed 119. 😀

It feels like freaking Saudi Arabia out there, where we lived on the edge of the Persian Gulf: hot, humid, and suffocating. And yes, that place was capable of reaching 120 degrees. Nooooo problem!

So, 117 degrees doesn’t seem THAT out of the ordinary. Eh?

This is one of many days that make me wish I were back in San Francisco. Where I belong.

Ohhh well. That ain’t ever gonna happen again. My son is here, and I’m not leaving as long as that’s the fact.

{sigh}

Most of the time, Arizona has a tolerable climate. It does get absurdly hot in the summertime, as we can see by today’s balmy afternoon. But the winters are lovely, as are most of the spring and fall days.

That notwithstanding, I do wish my parents had never discovered Sun City, the garden spot that drew them here. Boyoboy! Imagine a whole gigantic subdivision where NO KIDS ARE ALLOWED!

Goodie.

You were allowed to live there if your brats were over 18 or off in college. I was 16.  So…

They engineered a deal with the University of Arizona whereby I would start my freshman year there a year early. So it went: I dropped out of high school at the end of my junior year, and they dragged me to Arizona. Soon as we got here, they exiled me to Tucson.

That I was all set to go to UC Berkeley the following year meant nothing to my father. (Well…he himself was a high-school dropout, and the truth was he understood little or nothing about universities and university education…) They yanked me out of school, sent me off to Tucson, and with great delight moved themselves into a pleasant tract house under the flight path of the war planes from Luke Air Force Base.

The cute little Sun City house was my father’s lifetime gift to her. And she was SO delighted with it! Seriously: she even made herself relish the roar of those damn fighter jets: as the pilots practiced, she’d sit out on the back porch in the morning sipping her coffee and simper, “Ohhhh! it’s the sound of freedom!”

Yeah, Mom… The sound of World War III comin’ our way…

She loved it, though. So it was a beautiful thing he did for her, after decades of marriage living in difficult conditions.

Charging off to college a year early was a nice ego trip for me…though it wasn’t the greatest of all possible ideas. At 16, I really was too young to go off by myself. I did OK — the UofA was hardly the most challenging of all possible higher ed institutions.  But I would have been better off waiting a year or two. And FAR better off going to one of the University of California campuses.

Not that I did all that poorly: I did graduate Phi Beta Kappa. But my social life left something to be desired. Like, for example…a social life.

So…heh! I guess you could say my life was melted. Just as I was melted by today’s blasting heat on the sidewalks of the ‘Hood.

And that was one of the first reasons that the phrase “I hate Arizona” became my byword. 

How I Got to Arizona…

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And  now, after yesterday’s astonishing mercury level, it’s only 108° in shade of the back porch. That’s comin’ on to 5:00 p.m.

Brrr! Get out the sweaters!

Can  you imagine? Honestly! I could brain my parents for dragging me to this hellish place. They made me skip my senior year in high school, betook themselves to Sun City, and shipped me off to the University of Arizona in Tucson. This, so that my father could retire to Sun City.

Understand: I planned to attend the University of California at Berkeley…and was well on my way to qualifying for that when they yanked me out of high school.

Did they understand that there was a qualitative difference between the universities?

My mother certainly did. I doubt if my father did — or if he cared. He wasn’t interested in giving me a fancy education. He was interested in retiring. ASAP.

What a mean thing to do to me, after I’d worked my butt off through high school to get into Berkeley!

Did he understand that? Sorta. Kinda. But…I doubt it.

He was a blue-collar boy, through and through. In fact, I’m not sure he even graduated from high school. The minute he qualified to get into the military, he joined the Navy. From there (his health sagging), he went into the Coast Guard. After that, the rest of his work life was dedicated to the Merchant Marine. Well…except for the ten hellish years with Saudi Aramco.

He did pretty well in the Merchant Marine, by the way. Especially for a guy who had exactly zero higher education.

Give him credit: he paid for all four years of my time at the University of Arizona. I graduated Phi Beta Kappa, and, after marrying a lawyer, transitioned into a Ph.D. program at Arizona State University.

But…know that it had been understood that after high school I would go to Berkeley, move into with my great-aunt and great-grandmother in their  bungalow (which had room to accommodate me nicely), and get the bachelor’s degree from the University of California.

Which, we might say (by way of understatement), was a far cry from the U of A. And an even farther cry from ASU.  Did he know that? Well…I kinda doubt it.

He was a workin’-class boy; grew up in Texas chasing the rear ends of cows until he made his escape by running off to the Navy.

And he was not about to diddle away his retirement cache to send his girl child to some fancy college. After all, what was a girl supposed to grow up to do? Be a wife and mother, of course. And ya sure didn’t need a college degree for that!

Today the UofA has a much improved reputation, regarded as one of the top 25 U.S. universities by Times Higher Education. Well…it wasn’t like that then: back in the day it was renowned as a party school. And I got in a year early with a middling-high grade average after three years of taking five solids in high school.

The upshot was that I landed a degree from what was then a mediocre institution but what is now pretty well regarded. Who’s to know, eh?

So…here we are in 2026, still in Arizona.

Do I regret not going to UC Berkeley?  Damn right!

Do I regret taking three degrees from the University of Arizona and Arizona State University?  Not really.

Hey. It’s better than nothin’, eh? 😉

Those degrees did get me a high-test husband and a university faculty job, so I can’t complain too much.

But still…sometimes I do wonder what would have been the outcome if even one of those degrees had come from Berkeley.

Well. We’ll never know.