infobong.com

At a party last night, a fellow reveler noticed my T-shirt with Ben Franklin dribbling a basketball and asked me if I got it in Philly. I told him yes and that I had moved here last summer from Philadelphia. He was all, "Oh, that must be a change. How do you like Austin?"

"Oh, I like it allright. I grew up in Tulsa, so it seems pretty normal to me."

This created a bit of a stir on the front porch, as I had unintentionally uttered a heresy in a town where seemingly every third car bears a sticker exhorting us to "Keep Austin Weird."

Austin has an abundance of what I call "bohemian infrastructure" - record stores, coffeehouses, comic book shops, and the like - but living here just doesn't seem that weird, at least coming here from West Philly. In my neighborhood there, I would go get coffee and bagels at a dingy grocery store run by anarcho-syndicalists and sit outiside on a motley assortment of park benches and plastic lawn chairs while older granola types watched their kids play on the sidewalk as they passed around a bowl. My corner featured two Ethiopian restaurants, a Senegalese cafe that sold the spiciest falafel you'll ever try, a storefront Industrial Workers of the World office and the W.E.B. DuBois bookstore. At my gym, I would lift weights while huge African men shouted at each other in French and the laundromat provided free copies of The People's Weekly World. Living there, I was constantly exposed to new ideas, cultures, and lifestyles.

In contrast, Austin seems crazy stoopid whitebread. I keep wondering what's so weird about Austin. Granted, I've got my head down most of the time, preoccupied with grad school, so I may have missed out on the weird part of Austin. I have run across some lovably weird stuff here, like the "hipster stripmall" on North Loop or the Rhizome Collective, but weirdness doesn't seem to be as woven into the fabric of daily life here as in other places.

A few months back, the Austin blog community held "Austin Blog Day," where participants all blogged about the same Austin-related topic and shared their responses. Perhaps a great topic for the next event would be, "What makes Austin so weird, anyway?" so newcomers like me can have a tip sheet for finding Austin's weirdness.