Things I Don't Get, Part 2

Or, in other words, Criticizing Everything

So, i hadn't planned on making this a multi-volume thing, but I was thinking about hurricanes today, and i just don't get the appeal of the Coast. I really don't know why anyone would choose to live here who could live somewhere else. I get that my Dad works here and gets a lot of fulfillment from that, but for people working at Walmart, or really any occupation that doesn't require the presence of a hurricane swept landscape, why would you stay?

First of all, there's the hurricanes. Having to board up your windows and leave your house with all your most valuable possessions is ridiculous. And there's always the chance that everything you own will be destroyed. Katrina was a bit of a fluke, but there are the average, run of the mill hurricanes that tear up the coast without generating quite as much media. So from a catastrophic point of view, the coast is one of the worst places to live, along there with at the base of a volcano or beneath a large and precariously placed boulder.

Now, i would understand living here in spite of the hurricane if this was a spectacular paradise. But this isn't the bahamas, it isn't even florida. The beaches crappy and fake. The water is brown and stinky. The waves are non-existent. At this very moment there's a cockroach roughly the size of a walnut climbing up my wall. There are these sand gnats everywhere that are even worse than mosquitoes (though on the plus side, there aren't so many mosquitoes as there are in jackson). The summers are hot, humid, and unpleasant, the winters are cold, rainy, and grey. Spring and Fall are ok, but they come and go without any of the spectacular colors of New England and other places. As far as the natural beauty goes, the trees are quite lovely, but there's aren't many things that can really impress upon you the magnificence and the magnitude of Earth. You can't even see the stars.

Then there's life itself. There's no great urban scene, or music scene, or college scene, or many things that are entertaining at all. I've realized, in making friends and hanging out, that there's just not that much to do here. And everything to do is so corporate. Sure, out in the boonies and around some places, you can a few quirky local restaurants or shops, but in biloxi proper, it's all chains, casinos, and shopping centers.

So, redeeming qualities: Sunsets are beautiful and there are lots of thunderstorms. Those were two things i missed in Utah. Utah just doesn't know how to do sunsets, and your average Utahn doesn't even know what real rain looks like. (the drops are really big). For those with a ruddier complexion of the nape, there's lots of good fishing and hunting, and you're never more than 5 minutes from a walmart. You can wade through the dingy water with lights spearing flounder and night, that's a manly thing to do, yeah? It's never gets too cold, so you need not fear the winter just because you don't want to invest in a decent coat. Life is quiet, so if you're the kind of person that just wants to sit on your porch and sweat all day, it's easy to do that here without interruption. If you've got lots of family here, which it seems most people do, you're always close to a bunch of people you love but don't especially want to see every day. There are lots and lots of churches and the people are nice. It's a great place to write a stirring coming of age novella, or make a quaint postcard, or get good barbecue, i just have never felt those were good parameters for a place to live.

Now, i'm certainly jaded by my family's preference to live in an Urban place. I cannot grasp what possesses people to live in a place that's truly in the middle of nowhere, so it shouldn't be a surprise that i don't want to live somewhere that's sort of backwater. Obviously not everybody wants to live in the city and that's fine and good (although i do think suburbs are contributing to the decline of our civilization), but there are thousands of small cities and towns around the country so much nicer than here. I think people wind up here by mistake, either their born here, move here for a job or get stuck here by the military, and they forget what it's like anywhere else. They make friends and form connections and seep so far into life here that they can't imagine moving somewhere else.

I guess what i'm trying to say is i'm not going to miss biloxi much. Which is good. In 3 short weeks i'll be in provo, and in 3 short months i'll be in Portugal. Maybe i'll write a letter about all the crappy things about Portugal. I think it will be rather short.

So, in less critical news, i read Ender's Game and Speaker of the Dead over the past couple days. They were both good, Ender's Game was lots of fun to read, but Speaker of the Dead left me with a sort of empty feeling. It was filled with portuguese, which was unexpected and interesting. It's weird that in around 6 months i'll be quasi-proficient in another language. I also read the whole Artemis Fowl series. Those were all good, although the 2nd and 3rd were a bit dull. I think after i read some more of the Orson Card books, i'll try to find some more mature lit to read between now and my mission. Something i can't read in a day. I ought to read crime and punishment for reals. So we'll see if that happens. Infinity is getting awfully close.