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September already? I could never have guessed. August crawled along for me, very sloooowly, like some sort of temporal slug...
Today's topic is alternate history. I'm thinking about how it might have been, and how my perception of the world would have been different, if I'd, say, never moved to Florida. Would I have been corrupted by the big city, and have died in a gang-related incident? Would I have used the city to improve myself, and be a better person than I am now? Would I be the best or worst student in school? Would I speak more than just English and some form of mangled German? Would I be smarter, or dumber, fat, thin, dead? The uncertainty of this is fun to contemplate. Brain gum, I call it. No matter how hard I chew on it, it still won't break down into little bits.
I love cities. I love big cities, more specifically, but if it has a library, a selection of good restaurants, and some place where I can dump the rest of my money, I'm pleased. Tall buildings and heavy traffic always have held some sort of appeal. I like concrete and steel, glass and rebar. I like crowds. I like how easily I can hide in a crowd, how I'm anonymous, although visible. Everyone around me has a history, and if I'm feeling in a contemplative mood, I can come up with a history of my own for everyone I pass.
I'm definitely getting out of the podunkville I live in, and moving to a city when the diploma hits my palm. I don't mind nature; I like the wilderness, but the podunkville I live in is not wilderness; at least not the wilderness I have in mind. There are many wonderful people living in this part of the world, but then again, there are some of the most ignorant, loud-mouthed hee-haws juxtaposed among the wonderful. Nature here has been replaced with highways and farms; trailer parks and big tracts of land for those who can afford it. In a way, a city is wilderness, which may explain why I love it so. A city is an ecosystem in it's own, just as much as the woods behind my house are.
Forest has the solitude factor, but cities have stuff. Forest smells better, but cities have some sort of energetic spirit. It's a trade-off. Noise and cars for mosquitoes and thorns. Performing arts centres and libraries for pine trees and silence. A city, in a way, is the same as a forest for me. Stockholm seems to be a nice place, from what I hear; a city with good weather (to me), in the middle of a forest (from what Stockholmers have told me), in Sweden (I like Scandinavia, and the standard of living's better there than in the US, from what I hear).
Maybe I won't move to a big city when I hit 18...
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