Yo. So here I am, back in my country home! Weird. It's like NYC was just a craaaazzzy dream. A hot, sweaty, stinky dream.

Only a few things have changed here in N-town: State Street was repaved. Something horrible happened to Good Thyme and it has tipped from borderline gross to really, don't eat here if you can possibly afford it gross. The askew block of sidewalk that tripped many people in front of 10,000 Villages has been gnawed down to a gentle slope by some insane machine. Cafe Casablanca became something I'm not interested in. Um... They just replaced the pinball game (it's always been pinball) inside of Hugo's with the exact same Buck Hunting game that, for some reason, is in 90% of the bars in the city. So of course I played it, and used my previous urban experience to bag me a Triple Buck Bonus. Onlookers pretended to share my excitement.

Things I kind of forgot about this town: The concentration of homeless people here is WAY higher here than in the city. There's no place to get a good lunch to go here, unless you want to pay $8 for sushi, or get Quizno's. I got very depressed today at lunch, walking through town looking for a nice pasta salad or something semi-fresh and semi-healthy, missing the Whole Foods' food bar like crazy. It might be time to actually start bringing my lunch to work! The horror...

p.s. to clarify my post below and the ensuing comments: In reality, symbols do not actually, physically embody what they symbolize. That means I can, say, criticize a WWII memorial, and also believe that it was very sad that there was a war where a lot of people died.