Big Mexican Dinner

Many of my readers may have never been to my home, but have probably still heard of Tysons Corner, Virginia. It is an important office and retail district outside of Washington, DC. I have lived here for over three years, which is longer than any one physical place the entire time I was in the Army. In fact, this is the first time I have had constant residence in the same apartment for more than a year or two. The next longest was my barracks room at Fort Myer, where I lived almost exactly two years. Of course, I did have the address in Clarksville for almost three years as well, but I actually only spent about two years there thanks to my vacation in Iraq.

Anyway, Tysons Corner is an interesting community. The 2000 census had population estimated around 18,000. However, during the work day, the population is over 70,000 due to all of the office space. What that means is that there are actually more office chairs than people in Tysons Corner at night and on weekends. In the three years that I have lived here, I have never once met any of my neighbors for a long enough period of time to even ask their name. I do know some people who live nearby, but those people are from work, and so they don’t count. In general, it seems that the people around here tend to outright disregard one another.

Anyway, today I was out walking and driving around and this all began to really hit me pretty hard. I began to realize that as a society, we’re all very unaware of the people around us. This became even more evident when I noticed a very large population of people that rarely get a second look. Many of them play very important roles in our society, but go unnoticed. They serve to inform us, warn us, and keep us from harms way (often times catching hell themselves), and we totally take them for granted or ignore them outright. No, I’m not talking about the large number of Hispanic workers who fix roads, dig ditches, and cut the grass around here. Continue reading These Are the People In Your Neighborhood…

As the only sanctioned author here at Big Mexican Dinner, I want to point out to everyone that I reserve the right to edit any and all comments. Now, I’m 100% against censorship, so as long as your comments aren’t spam I’ll let them fly. This applies to anyone, whether I know you or not, or if [...]