So now you're wondering what this town is all about. Austin has long had a reputation as a pinko, liberal hippie haven. This is only partly true. We are a diverse community of many cultures and influences. We do not all wear algae from Barton Springs behind our ears.

Sure, we're tolerant of screwballs and darned proud of it. So what? It's part of our charm. What other city in America can you name where a guy with a beard hangs out in the middle of town modeling women's underwear?

But the fact is the city has grown up. It is, in fact, so grown up that it is entirely under construction. This is not so much the Live Music Capital of the World as it is The Large Hole For a Coming Building and Orange Traffic Cone Capital of the World.

Our new city motto is "Merge Left."

Now it takes more than braiding your armpits, having known singer/songwriter Blaze Foley in an earlier life, thinking it was a great idea when Matthew McConaughey played his bongos naked in his Tarrytown home, sucking up to a salamander, smoking a big fat doobie out behind the Continental Club, then going over to Amy's Ice Cream and giggling at the guy who can toss the ice cream scoop behind his back and still catch the Mexican vanilla in midair, to be a true Austinite.

With that in mind, here are a few observations that paint a more accurate picture of the real Austin, today's Austin, the one with more e-mail and less Eeyore, if you catch my drift. We have changed. And here's how:

* Austin property values have gone up to the squealing point. In the '70s, many people lived together in rent houses because they wanted to start a garage band, and it made the rent easier to pay. These days, many people live together in houses because it makes the rent possible to pay.

* We pride ourselves in being a political city, but on election day sometimes 91 percent of us stay at home and avoid the polls like there's a bug infestation going on over there.

* We are a laid-back community, so in 1989 many Austinites moped, cried and left poetry at the beloved 500-year-old Treaty Oak on Baylor Street after some idiot tried to murder it with a dose of herbicide. On the other hand, after leaving our poems, we'll tailgate somebody on the interstate at 89 miles an hour.

* We're proud of the various types of hoity-toity cuisine available in town--the sushi, the fine wines and the latte drinks. But when it comes to breakfast, we usually eat it sideways because it commonly arrives as a breakfast taco.

* We're an educated university town, and we brag about how the University of Texas led us into the high-tech boom. Yet, the number of people in Austin who can name the starting quarterback at UT outnumbers the folks who can name an English professor on the 40 Acres by several hundred thousand. (No one ever scalped tickets to English 101.)

* We are proud of our live-music scene, but our police march up and down the Entertainment District measuring volume levels and telling bar managers to hold it down.

* To stay fit, we jog and we bike. But we drive around in circles in our SUVs in the Whole Foods Market parking lot, fighting to get a parking spot a few feet closer to the front door.

* We consider ourselves a kind and considerate bunch. But our neighborhoods are filled with speed bumps, traffic circles and other traffic-calming devices to keep us from driving over each other's trash cans.

So, welcome to Austin. And enjoy the construction dust.

John Kelso's humor column appears on Sundays, Tuesdays and Fridays in the American-Statesman.  Contact him at at 445-3606 or jkelso@statesman.com.