I have spent much of my early life in the suburbs and after a brief stint in the big city - with its noise, crowding and cramped spaces, I find myself immersed again in this familiar realm - an environment that seems part of my destiny. I've always thoughts of the suburbs as a place meant for children - where children can feel safe and protected - with non-busy streets and clean sidewalks - room to ride one's bike or go door-to-door selling cookies. To consider how many of our early impressions and sensations were spawned by this largely artificial world...How different such a milieu is from other places on earth, war zones, rain forests, Siberian outposts, tiny mountaintop villages or large sprawling mazes of high rise apartments in vertically-inclined mega metropolises...The suburbs are a place where a definite order and routine can be imposed...where regularity is king... lawns get mowed on time, shrubs are trimmed, garbage bins are placed at the curb and returned to their places...Each house provides a structure, a self-contained reality for each family or each couple...And the streets meander aimlessly in a non-grid-like fashion, allowing for long walks...I don't think I could live without this beautiful facade; it's too much to think of all the chaos that would intrude and envelop us otherwise...
Prologue - > We are fortunate to live in a time, or so it is said, when we of the future no longer feel the burden of gender to such a degree as in previous ages; nowadays there is no pre-established norm or "role" for us to perform or hold onto like a chain about the neck. There was a time, of course, and not so long ago, when men were de facto expected to be tough strong, resilient, athletic, assertive... and which to judge by the role models in movies and popular culture which we could add on silent, stoical, protective, while no great shock was registered if there should be a woman or more than one who in some degree was known (also through popular culture, movies, novels, songs, etc. in comparison with her male counterparts) as: soft, demure, flirtatious, sociable, wise, and to which one might add on: practical, prescient, intuitive, gregarious, solicitous, nurturing and perhaps multi-tasking, socially-aware, loyal, resilient . With regard t...
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