Cars

Somehow, I keep talking about this phenomenon, but never remembering where the video was: http://technology.newscientist.com/article/dn13402 Traffic Jams for no reason!

I really enjoy not having a car.

My family reunion was... relaxing. Kind of amazing. I could definitely get used to Lake Tahoe. Or being on speed boats in general (but going slow, and having a beer now and then). I need to seek the outdoors more often. And realize that I'm going to be traveling for a while, so that's no excuse not to do things I want/need to do for my life. My aunts had a "weirdest thing in your purse" competition the last morning I was there. And my grandmother can use a slingshot like nobody's business, and is moving into a double wide. My family does cool things like have relay races where you have to string each other together, run around in a circle, open a bottle of martinellis, chug it, and then burp simultaneously. What else could you ask for?

And I might as well post this, because I mention it a lot when I talk about moving to Chicago and how I felt as recently as a year ago, from A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius:

After graduating he tried Chicago first, but was tired of constantly running into people from Champaign. They were all there, the whole school — so few make it out of the state. To most, Chicago was Oz, anything beyond it was China, the moon.

So far, I'm rather enjoying myself here. Living in a big city, with people from school, isn't so bad. Especially when I'm so very rarely here. And its kind of cool to live in a place where people are so proud to be from here. And lets face it, people outside of the midwest are just _different_. Not necessarily bad... just... different. "People in the midwest" leads me to suggesting you should check out Ryan Groff, if you havent.