Well, my current living situation makes posting here slightly more difficult, not to mention what it bodes for my already lackluster writing habits. I will complete this story though, I promise. Ideally once I get my very own upscale yet affordable apartment, though at the worst I will just go hide in the library and try not to get distracted by all the books.
Elsewhere I've written about what I'm doing these days, so I won't repeat that here. I would like to talk about cities and why they seem to make me uncomfortable.
Growing up on a farm, my boundaries were fairly expansive and well delineated. Farmland and unfarmed wilderness (for certain values of wild) are clearly seperate entities whose differences stand out at even the most cursory glance. Especially in deserts carefully modified to modern agricultural standards, where the green of orchards and fields gives way to the grays and yellows of sagebrush and dry wild grasses. I know where I am on the farm.
What cities we have here may sprawl a bit, but they never lose themselves in the landscape. They are, at least in my mind, geographically fixed in place, stuck to the surface of the Earth in such a way that I know where they are, and where I am in them.
But cities, real cities, aren't like that. Seattle isn't like that, at least. It isn't placed in a clearly defined spot of ground, seperated from its surroundings. It oozes into its surroundings, so that behind every seeming patch of woods lies more city, and the only boundary I am aware of is the horizon.
OK, so this is a perceptual quirk I've got, I admit, and it hardly says anything about what being in a city is really like, but walking through Seattle I can't shake off the feeling that I'm stuck in some sort of topographical oddity, a finite but unbounded space, continually stretching out in front of itself.
Plus, like, the University of Washington campus makes me feel like a yokel.
Elsewhere I've written about what I'm doing these days, so I won't repeat that here. I would like to talk about cities and why they seem to make me uncomfortable.
Growing up on a farm, my boundaries were fairly expansive and well delineated. Farmland and unfarmed wilderness (for certain values of wild) are clearly seperate entities whose differences stand out at even the most cursory glance. Especially in deserts carefully modified to modern agricultural standards, where the green of orchards and fields gives way to the grays and yellows of sagebrush and dry wild grasses. I know where I am on the farm.
What cities we have here may sprawl a bit, but they never lose themselves in the landscape. They are, at least in my mind, geographically fixed in place, stuck to the surface of the Earth in such a way that I know where they are, and where I am in them.
But cities, real cities, aren't like that. Seattle isn't like that, at least. It isn't placed in a clearly defined spot of ground, seperated from its surroundings. It oozes into its surroundings, so that behind every seeming patch of woods lies more city, and the only boundary I am aware of is the horizon.
OK, so this is a perceptual quirk I've got, I admit, and it hardly says anything about what being in a city is really like, but walking through Seattle I can't shake off the feeling that I'm stuck in some sort of topographical oddity, a finite but unbounded space, continually stretching out in front of itself.
Plus, like, the University of Washington campus makes me feel like a yokel.
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