Everytown, USA
Today, we rented a car and drove up to Austin for lunch and things. Travis needed to check out apartments, so Yuliy and I hung out at a mall. The mall was pathetic, so I went walking around looking for a comic book shop (I need a tetrahedron, cube, octahedron, icosahedron, and dodecahedron for geometrical purposes, not D&D). While sulking about the "horrible" location of this year's contest, I realized that every single midwest town is exactly the same.
Anywhere between the Rockies to the Appalachians, I might as well be in Minneapolis or Lincoln or Austin or Denver. Other than climate, they're all the same. Suburbia has rendered each town's identity into a cookie-cutter society. You need a drastic geographical/historical difference to find something interesting about a town. There are certain distinguishing parts of cities: KC has the Plaza, San Antonio has the Riverwalk, Austin has 6th street. But, each of these examples is not enough to claim that any are significantly different. In fact, they are all the same in that they have some attraction that is "unique" to make the place seem interesting.
Oh well. I've never really been one to travel for the sake of locations, but what you can do at a location. San Antonio has had little to offer until registration tonight. I'll get busy with the contest soon and will stop being bored. I'll hopefully stop being nervous that I'm not working on homework.
3 Comments:
Trust me, suburban blandness is not just a flyover country phenomenon. Outside of the city cores of America's largest/most interesting cities (NYC, DC, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, etc.) every large urban setting has a depressing sameness to it.
Let's not get depressed about it...it's only depressing if you let it be! There are people everywhere, and people are interesting, therefore everywhere can be interesting.
It's only depressing when I'm travelling, trying to get to a new place. I love living near/in suburbs, because they are good neighborhoods to live in (because of the people you mentioned) but you never meet and socialize with the locals much when you travel.
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