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More December meme questions
On the December question post ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
sheron asked why I choose to live where I do and what I like about it.
Mostly I think that I chose to live in Alaska for the same reasons a lot of people live anywhere: because I grew up here, and because my husband and I were able to get good jobs here. (Though I later quit mine for various reasons, which I'll get into a bit in the next meme post.) There are some pretty significant downsides to living here -- the weather, the isolation, and the lack of amenities, to name three. I mean, it's not the ends of the earth; obviously Fairbanks has all the stuff you'd expect from a medium-sized town, and Anchorage is a small city with all the small-city amenities. But we are very isolated. Travel is expensive and takes a long time; ditto for shipping anything to/from Alaska, and some companies won't ship here (or can't ship here, since most forms of shipping have to go through Canada and sometimes regulations make it impossible). Sometimes in the middle of winter weather delays will cause the stores to run out of fresh produce -- never for longer than a day or two, but going into the big chain grocery store and having nothing in the produce section AT ALL except a bunch of bagged carrots (i.e. items that can be stored in bulk for a long period of time) is a painful reminder that we are at the very end of a really long highway.
... oh, right, I guess those are all the reasons not to live here. :P
But I still really love it here. Like I said earlier, I guess I feel like I stumbled into living here rather than really choosing it, because growing up, I fell so much in love with the place that I couldn't imagine ever leaving. A not-at-all comprehensive list of some reasons why I like living here:
• I love the weather. Which probably sounds ridiculous, because -40 is awful, there are no two ways about it. But the summers are glorious: warm but not hot, breezy, low humidity. I hate being hot and sticky, and I would much rather deal with cold weather than have to be hot. And the summers, despite being short, pack a lot of punch into just a few months. After the long cold winter, things explode in the summer. Fairbanks is so far north that it doesn't get dark, and people take full advantage of the daylight; stores stay open 'til midnight, people go jogging or walking their dogs at midnight. Wildflowers are everywhere. Alaska is wonderful in the summer, and all you have to do is put up with 6 months of hell to enjoy it. :P
I actually like winter too, but in a different way. Summer is so intense and busy -- staying up late, traveling, doing, being. Winter is a time for resting and recovering and staying indoors, quietly working on projects. As busy and productive as I feel in the summer, I think I actually get more done in the winter, at least as far as writing and art and things of that nature. I get caught up on my reading in the winter too. And then I'm all rested and prepared for another wild summer.
• I love having so much space without people in it. There is just so MUCH of Alaska, it's mind-boggling. We live north of Fairbanks, and there is literally NOTHING for several hundred miles north of us except tundra and mountains and small, scattered villages and cabins. No stoplights, no shopping malls, no highways except the one to Prudhoe Bay. I think this goes along with having grown up here and having gotten used to having all this elbow room, but during the 4 years we lived in Illinois when my husband was in grad school, I felt like I couldn't breathe. It just felt like there were people everywhere, all around me -- and we lived in central Illinois, in an area that other people would probably consider rural! But I grew up in a place where I could walk out the backdoor and tramp across miles of trails without seeing another person. I think I could deal with it if I had to, and I know there are places where I could get more isolation and wild beauty than Illinois (I actually really like the New England area where my sister lives) but for now, I am really enjoying having all this space at my fingertips. We have 11 acres that backs onto a huge tract of state land, and the nearest neighbors are far enough away that it's up to me whether I want to go visit or not. I can breathe here.
• It's a laid-back place to live. The pace of life is slow. You run into people you know all over town. You chat with the clerk in the checkout line. No one really cares about getting ahead or having more than the next guy. People don't judge you by how you dress; that guy in boots and overalls could have a PhD and a six-figure income, and everyone knows it so no one cares. I know it's a small-town cliche, but it's so true, and Alaska still has such a small population overall that the whole state, in some ways, is one big small town. This also goes along with typical small-town social ills, such as racism and xenophobia. It is certainly no utopia. I understand why people leave. But I also know from talking to people that it's not just me, this is a remarkably mellow and informal sort of place, and that's a big reason why people stay.
The story that comes to mind is from back when I was first learning to drive a manual transmission. I got stuck in third gear at a stoplight on one of the busier roads in town, and couldn't get the car into first. I went through an ENTIRE LIGHT CYCLE without receiving a single honk from all the people stuck behind me; all that happened is that one of them got out of her car and came up to see if I needed help. That's Fairbanks in a nutshell.
And I can totally understand why someone would find living here stultifying. I can particularly understand people wanting to live in places that are big enough to have a proper night life, a decent-sized LGBT population, restaurants that serve more than two kinds of cuisine, or neighbors who don't target practice in their front yard on Sunday afternoons. Honestly, I think I'd probably be less enamored of this place if I didn't have my Internet social circle, because it allows me to enjoy all the benefits of living in a slow-paced small town while still having a lot of the social benefits of living in a city. :) And I do like visiting other places, I really do. But I also love having somewhere peaceful, quiet and secluded to come back to.
sheron asked why I choose to live where I do and what I like about it.Mostly I think that I chose to live in Alaska for the same reasons a lot of people live anywhere: because I grew up here, and because my husband and I were able to get good jobs here. (Though I later quit mine for various reasons, which I'll get into a bit in the next meme post.) There are some pretty significant downsides to living here -- the weather, the isolation, and the lack of amenities, to name three. I mean, it's not the ends of the earth; obviously Fairbanks has all the stuff you'd expect from a medium-sized town, and Anchorage is a small city with all the small-city amenities. But we are very isolated. Travel is expensive and takes a long time; ditto for shipping anything to/from Alaska, and some companies won't ship here (or can't ship here, since most forms of shipping have to go through Canada and sometimes regulations make it impossible). Sometimes in the middle of winter weather delays will cause the stores to run out of fresh produce -- never for longer than a day or two, but going into the big chain grocery store and having nothing in the produce section AT ALL except a bunch of bagged carrots (i.e. items that can be stored in bulk for a long period of time) is a painful reminder that we are at the very end of a really long highway.
... oh, right, I guess those are all the reasons not to live here. :P
But I still really love it here. Like I said earlier, I guess I feel like I stumbled into living here rather than really choosing it, because growing up, I fell so much in love with the place that I couldn't imagine ever leaving. A not-at-all comprehensive list of some reasons why I like living here:
• I love the weather. Which probably sounds ridiculous, because -40 is awful, there are no two ways about it. But the summers are glorious: warm but not hot, breezy, low humidity. I hate being hot and sticky, and I would much rather deal with cold weather than have to be hot. And the summers, despite being short, pack a lot of punch into just a few months. After the long cold winter, things explode in the summer. Fairbanks is so far north that it doesn't get dark, and people take full advantage of the daylight; stores stay open 'til midnight, people go jogging or walking their dogs at midnight. Wildflowers are everywhere. Alaska is wonderful in the summer, and all you have to do is put up with 6 months of hell to enjoy it. :P
I actually like winter too, but in a different way. Summer is so intense and busy -- staying up late, traveling, doing, being. Winter is a time for resting and recovering and staying indoors, quietly working on projects. As busy and productive as I feel in the summer, I think I actually get more done in the winter, at least as far as writing and art and things of that nature. I get caught up on my reading in the winter too. And then I'm all rested and prepared for another wild summer.
• I love having so much space without people in it. There is just so MUCH of Alaska, it's mind-boggling. We live north of Fairbanks, and there is literally NOTHING for several hundred miles north of us except tundra and mountains and small, scattered villages and cabins. No stoplights, no shopping malls, no highways except the one to Prudhoe Bay. I think this goes along with having grown up here and having gotten used to having all this elbow room, but during the 4 years we lived in Illinois when my husband was in grad school, I felt like I couldn't breathe. It just felt like there were people everywhere, all around me -- and we lived in central Illinois, in an area that other people would probably consider rural! But I grew up in a place where I could walk out the backdoor and tramp across miles of trails without seeing another person. I think I could deal with it if I had to, and I know there are places where I could get more isolation and wild beauty than Illinois (I actually really like the New England area where my sister lives) but for now, I am really enjoying having all this space at my fingertips. We have 11 acres that backs onto a huge tract of state land, and the nearest neighbors are far enough away that it's up to me whether I want to go visit or not. I can breathe here.
• It's a laid-back place to live. The pace of life is slow. You run into people you know all over town. You chat with the clerk in the checkout line. No one really cares about getting ahead or having more than the next guy. People don't judge you by how you dress; that guy in boots and overalls could have a PhD and a six-figure income, and everyone knows it so no one cares. I know it's a small-town cliche, but it's so true, and Alaska still has such a small population overall that the whole state, in some ways, is one big small town. This also goes along with typical small-town social ills, such as racism and xenophobia. It is certainly no utopia. I understand why people leave. But I also know from talking to people that it's not just me, this is a remarkably mellow and informal sort of place, and that's a big reason why people stay.
The story that comes to mind is from back when I was first learning to drive a manual transmission. I got stuck in third gear at a stoplight on one of the busier roads in town, and couldn't get the car into first. I went through an ENTIRE LIGHT CYCLE without receiving a single honk from all the people stuck behind me; all that happened is that one of them got out of her car and came up to see if I needed help. That's Fairbanks in a nutshell.
And I can totally understand why someone would find living here stultifying. I can particularly understand people wanting to live in places that are big enough to have a proper night life, a decent-sized LGBT population, restaurants that serve more than two kinds of cuisine, or neighbors who don't target practice in their front yard on Sunday afternoons. Honestly, I think I'd probably be less enamored of this place if I didn't have my Internet social circle, because it allows me to enjoy all the benefits of living in a slow-paced small town while still having a lot of the social benefits of living in a city. :) And I do like visiting other places, I really do. But I also love having somewhere peaceful, quiet and secluded to come back to.
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