On Saturday I wrote a post about a woman who moved from New York City to Texas to clutch her pearls at Texas gun culture.

One of my faithful and valued readers linked another article by this woman in his comment, and it was too good to pass up.

The writer is Isobella Jade, and if you want to understand this woman, just look at her Wikipedia page.  It is among the most obscenely self-lauding thing I have ever read.  Her claim to fame is writing a biography at 25 years old about being a petite model, which she self-published through Amazon, and wrote entirely on display laptops at the Apple Store having not bought an Apple computer.

She became known as one of the first people to do something notable inside an Apple store, typing her first draft of her manuscript Almost 5’4”, a modeling memoir, at the Apple Store on Prince Street in SoHo in New York City.

What I’ve learned is that the Dunning-Kruger Effect is a cruel joke of nature.  I can’t imagine having the ego to write an autobiography at 25 or to be a motivational speaker unless I did something monumental like create the next Facebook or climb Mt. Everest with no legs.  Then someone like this writes a book about herself and becomes a syndicated author.

But I digress.  On to her other article:

Devoted to the Manhattan Subway, a Transplant Learns to Drive in Houston

When I moved to the Houston area from Manhattan right before the summer of 2016 started, the sweltering heat was no bother, the moving truck being two weeks late was only a temporary sigh, because nothing could beat the anxiety and annoyance in the pit of my stomach of having to learn to drive here and finally get my driver’s license.

I’m already done.  This woman was born in 1982.  She would have been 34 years old when she first got her driver’s license.

I hear all the time how “New Yorkers are tough.”  That is horseshit.  Growing up in Florida, every kid I knew was chomping at the bit at 16 to learn to drive.  At more than twice that age, this woman was terrified of what everyone outside the NYC bubble things of as normal.

My husband, originally from Houston, had tried to swoon me into the thought with a used BMW X3 from the Manhattan dealership. It had good mileage (because no one drives in New York City, I thought to myself), with a dark leather interior and leather steering wheel, at first glance from his text message photo it was stunning, but after packing for Houston, I started to feel tense and uptight thinking about this SUV, my first car.

Humblebrag some more about your luxury SUV, why don’t you?

We had the X3 shipped down to Texas, and when it arrived I had never driven it before. I hadn’t stepped on the gas or tried to in over 15 years, back in high school when I had practiced driving for a few weeks in my mother’s compact Mazda, but then I moved to Manhattan for college, where there was no need for a car.

I hope that move was a corporate move paid for by her husband’s employer because otherwise, he spent way more buying and shipping a used car from NY than buying a new one in Texas.  So maybe the whole family is made up of idiots.

There is no evangelical like a convert.  One would think that someone who grew up in Syracuse would have no fear of driving.  I have spent a bit of time in the stretch between Syracuse and Albany, you absolutely need a car up there.  But she moved to Manhattan and became a Manhattanite, eschewing all vehicular self-reliance.

As I practiced parallel parking that first summer in the Houston area, I wasn’t ecstatic for this new freedom, I didn’t want it, and felt ridiculous watching the teenagers nail it. I was probably the oldest one in America at 33 without a driver’s license and everyone was staring.

She is, they are, and she needs to learn how the rest of America works.

I had been fine waving down a taxi or as a passenger on the MTA subway lines in New York City.

Livestock transport for human cattle.

Learning to drive meant tucking my Metro card away as a keepsake, and letting go of the grid streets of Manhattan that I had walked miles on every day since I was 19. It meant putting on flat shoes for more stability when using the brakes in my SUV and swallowing my biggest fear of driving, instead of the convenience of grabbing my heels and hitting the pavement toward the 4 train on the East Side of Manhattan, the wind at my back, zipping and dodging through foot traffic, the journey from one side of the city to another was never a chore.

I have taken the NYC subway a few times.  Chore does not begin to describe it.  A stygian excursion through the bowels of hell is more like it.

If I were to create an app to guide tourists through the NYC subway system, I’d name it Virgil and make the download cost two cents.

Also, I call bullshit on any woman crossing NYC on foot and by subway in heels.

When my Texas driver’s license card came in the mail I wasn’t excited; life officially was driving in unknown territory alone, and being patient with this southern way of taking forever to get anywhere, coupled by the Waze navigation app.

You mean the southern way of getting wherever you want whenever you want because you control the car, instead of being tied to subway schedules and routes?  I’m sorry that freedom was too much for her.

The worst day driving was in northwest Houston, on FM 1960 when I backed up into someone. I was crossing an intersection near Willowbrook Mall with the yellow light and felt I couldn’t make it, so I stopped, reversed quickly and didn’t look at my rear mirror. I bumped right into a humongous Texas truck. I rushed out of my car and blunted out a million sorries. And the sweet older man simply said, “That’s what those things are for,” he was talking about the truck’s bumper. I knew it could’ve gone much worse. I’ll never forget those boys selling water on the street corner who yelled that I was so lucky that man had been so nice. I swore to myself that I hated Texas, hated Houston, hated driving, missed Manhattan, shouldn’t be here, wanted to leave, and I was a terrible driver.

Why did this woman move to Texas?  At this point, if I were her husband I think the alimony would be worth the convenience of leaving her in her happy Manhattan bubble of ignorance.

But there is no quitting driving in the Houston area. Besides backing into that truck, another shocking moment was when I was driving on FM 2920 and my contact popped out of my eye, I pulled into a gas station and thankfully had a spare in my purse. Another time I got lucky was when I left one of my car doors open at a retail store parking lot for over an hour and nothing was stolen.

She left her door open?  What is wrong with this woman?

Perhaps the biggest shock was my first experience of “Pay it Forward,” with the car in front of me paying for my coffee in the drive-thru line, just a few weeks ago.

People in the South (and most of “flyover country” too) are nice.  New York City is where people randomly curse or jabber nonsensically for making eye contact on public transportation.

I think she’d feel more at home if people walked up to her and told her to “go fuck yourself.”

In the past two years I’ve mastered eating Whataburger with one hand and although moving here has meant driving in a completely new direction, I want to believe I get braver each day.

Am I missing where it is some Herculean Labor to eat a fast-food burger?

If she can finish a Double-Double and parallel park, she deserves a fucking Silver Start.  Screw those soldiers who charge entrenched enemy positions, outnumbered and outgunned.  Getting someone from Manhattan to do the most pedestrian of Texan tasks is the sort of thing troubadours penned epic odes about.

When I-45 is slow, I really don’t mind, because the pause in my car allows me some solitude to take in this new landscape of Texas and think about what’s ahead. Sitting there, one of many in the jam of different lives and different cars on this Houston highway, I get to think about how this move has made me face my fears and welcome change even when it’s been nerve-wracking.

Until she starts to bitch at her neighbors about their guns and the concealed carry permit holders that pose no threat to anyone or anything but her delicate sensibilities.

And while waiting to move forward, I’ll wonder if the truck behind me will notice that the frame around my license plate reads: Manhattan.

What a fucking bitch.

I bet he has, and I bet it’s entirely out of Southern hospitality he hasn’t run her off the road with his lifted Powerstroke.

Between this article and the last one of hers that I covered, it’s time to go all Escape From New York on that city and isolate it from the rest of America.  I think we’ll all be happier.  They can live inside their bubble, believing in their own superiority even though they are incapable of doing the most banal of Flyover State tasks.

Also, I need to figure out how to get one of these paid freelance writing gigs, because if this woman can make money humblebragging about her own incompetence, I should be able to make bank on actually accomplishing something.

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By J. Kb

17 thoughts on “A New Yorker leaves her bubble and is overwhelmed by what the other 300 million Americans find normal”
  1. She reminds me of nothing so much as Zsa Zsa Gabor in Green Acres, the TV series in the mid-60s. (Or was it her sister, Eva Gabor?)

    The reluctant, self-superior, Manhattanite whose husband moves her to the country, and the opening is all the things she hates about it – except for learning to drive – sung as point/counterpoint with her husband loving those things.

  2. “Also, I call bullshit on any woman crossing NYC on foot and by subway in heels.”

    I had to take a business trip to Boston. I added a few days of vacation and did the tourist thing. Even rode the “T.” What struck me was the number of attractive women dressed in (expensive looking) business attire wearing sneakers to walk and ride the “T,” with their heels in their handbags. so yeah B.S. on walking any distance in an urban area in heels.

  3. There’s a reason why urbanites, especially those from NYC are overwhelmingly liberal – they cannot function in society without the government to help them. This woman views as alien the concept of self defense. She views as alien the self reliance and freedom that comes with being an adult and having a driver license. Her sneering condescension towards those outside of that swollen dystopia she came from couldn’t be more palpable. Her safety, her freedom of movement, these are both things that she has purely at the behest of NYC’s totalitarian government. She’s proud of that.

  4. What an ubber-sheltered, self-entitled, egotistic waste of skin.

    Every time she whines about being outside of the libtard city bubble, I’d just tell her to just go the hell back.

    I so do love to tell that to unwelcome libtard transplants here in Floriduh, who bitch endlessly about how good it was back in *insert name of a libtard sh!thole of choice.* RME

  5. Having grown up in the metro NY area, I can assure you, this woman’s opinion is EXACTLY how most of the people there think. Your average NYer will acknowledge that a city with a professional sports team exists, even though they are still not 100% sure about Oklahoma City despite the Thunder. But, the rest of the world? No. It is nothing but a bunch of rednecks that sleep with their cousins.

    Not only that, they are 100% convinced that everyone wants to live in NYC as well. That someone might actually want to live anywhere else is laughable to them. Manhattan has everything, etc… etc… etc… even though they personally never do any of the things Manhattan is famous for; Broadway shows, five star dining, ice skating in Central park. Nope. Can’t afford it, or do not want to take the time to travel there.

    And JKB, you make a really good point. NYers “think” they are tough, but in reality, they are a bunch of sissies. Remember the absolute chaos following Sandy? The number of people who did not even have a day’s worth of food in their homes was mind-boggling. Tough? About what? Having to wait five minutes for your Uber to show up? Aside from the occasional idiot that gets into bar fights regularly NYers are not tough at all.

    1. I don’t get that attitude. I left New York to escape the city and liked Portland (Oregon) because it wasn’t New York. Sadly Portland is doing its damnedest to become San Francisco, so I moved away.
      For pure amusement I’d like to take this fragile flower and drop her in a one traffic light town hundreds of miles from the nearest Starbucks surrounded by farms and ranches.

      1. Portland’s city government has a massive inferiority complex. The leftists are desperate for Seattle-sempai to notice them; the far leftists are desperate for us to become the new San Francisco; and the farther far leftists still think Moscow will make us an autonomous soviet oblast any day now…

    2. “Not only that, they are 100% convinced that everyone wants to live in NYC as well.”

      I’ve met quite a few of those characters. Bless their hearts.

      There ain’t enough money in the world that would convince me to live there.

      1. For the last six months, there’s been a job posting to work in a technology I’d love to work with, for a company I’d love to work with — but it’s in NYC. So I’m not the least interested.

      2. Curiously, it is only the folks in NYC that disagree with you. Overwhelmingly, everyone wants to stay away from NYC.

  6. My husband, originally from Houston, had tried to swoon me into the thought with a used BMW X3 … with a dark leather interior and leather steering wheel[.]

    Dark leather interior in the Houston summer?

    Your husband isn’t trying to lure you with it, he’s trying to murder you.

  7. if the author is open minded, these fish out of water stores can be entertaining and even enlightening as to how people deal with things outside their comfort zone. She is not open minded.

    I used to follow a blog called ‘lee in China’, written by a guy who accepted a contracting gig in Hong Kong. He detailed his experiences there as an American trying to adapt, learn Chinese and having all the locals want to learn about America. Was good reading, until he died of a heart attack while over there…
    https://web.archive.org/web/20110413052152/http://www.leeinchina.com/

  8. Look at it this way.

    The more people who live in NYC, San Francisco, LA, Seattle, etc. who read this, the fewer who will decide to move from there to places like Houston.

    This is not necessarily a bad thing. While there are exceptions (as I noted earlier, I hope Mrs B and I qualify for that), a lot of transplants bring the bad with them, including (perhaps most importantly) voting habits.

  9. She put her car in reverse on the road? And wasn’t doing a three-point turn? Revoke her license — she’s not competent to drive.

    Cars in the intersection have right-of-way — if the light changes while you’re in the intersection, your job is to finish going through so everyone else can get on with their lives.

  10. Imagine if this idiot damnyankee had written something similar about moving to Nairobi or Brasilia. She’d rightly be accused of Ugly Americanism and cultural myopia.

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