The worst part about this place isn’t the cold, or the snow, or the flatness, or the fact that there isn’t really any decent non-corporate chain food places to eat, or the fact that even the cool people here are so unbearably whitebread.
The worst part about being in Iowa is how easily it is to become completely isolated from the world. I used to be unable to walk down a street in Portland without running into someone I knew, no matter what the neighborhood or context; in Iowa, if I time everything just right, I can actually leave my mum’s house, go to the grocery store and back and the only people I’d encounter in any substantial way are the people being paid to endure my presence. Not that this isn’t without its benefits, mind you, but sometimes one wants to embrace, acknowledge, and immerse oneself in the presence of people they love. I’ve loved intensely and often (and often to my detriment, depending on whom you ask), but the staggering amount of people that simply don’t do anything in this state is mind-boggling to the point of confusion.
It leads me to speculate whether or not the who;e “Iowa being boring” stereotype isn’t at least a part of how people try to program Iowa, not only in the minds of others, but in its citizens as well. Iowa isn’t boring, at least no more so than any other place forgotten and under-appreciated by the “cultured” world, but people seem so comfortable with it being this way that they only really accept the comfortable, “Portlandia”-type weird in a way that other cities don’t fuck around with.
Probably because they’re too busy actually being vibrant.
But not Des Moines, where it’s easy to just slink back into whatever hole from which you crawled and, for instance, fall asleep before 2am.
Time’s up.
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