It’s possible that “suburban” is superfluous in the clause above…

Restaurants are also a thing, yeah. There are suburbs blessed and suburbs cursed as far as that goes.

Suburbs, in this sense, are not all created equal. There are neighborhoods around here that I know I would hate, hate, hate.

Texter’s also right that the Internet makes a huge difference–I might feel very different if it had never come into being.

Since I’ve lived in Chicago, I haven’t taken full advantage of the cool shit going on (largely because I have no money), but I’ve found it energizing just to know that there is stuff going on — whereas in Kankakee, the biggest event in a given summer would be the festival at the local Catholic parish. There’s a sense of possibility. It’s nice to feel that you’re actually choosing to stay home and read, a sensation that’s difficult to achieve when the only other option is to drive down to TGI Friday’s and wait a half hour to get a table because TGI Friday’s is the only thing to do.

On the other hand, if I weren’t still trying to carry out the functions of being a grad student (at an even more distant institution) until I move away from here I suppose I’d head for the beaches or mountains with my free time. I have a hard time imagining what it would have been like to grow up here; I’m glad I’m only here temporarily, if for longer than I’d planned.

My parents love the house, have put a lot of work into the yard, love the weather, and are retired and have been traveling a lot anyway, so they don’t have commute worries. They have been frustrated by the lack of Chinese and Japanese groceries; whenever our relatives from Long Beach visit they bring loads of food in special freezer bags. Some suburbs have that kind of diversity, of course, but not this one, although like many California counties this one’s still pretty diverse overall. I’m not sure what the percentages were in the most recent elections for political office, but if I remember correctly last year’s vote on the propositions was not as lopsided here as it was where I used to live.

Or in other cases, it leads to people chewing up rural land and then bitching because some people around them live rural lives–like the suburbanites who build in areas near pig farms and then complain about the odor of pig shit.

The kind of suburban development that’s more manorial, about McMansions chewing up farmland, seems pretty undesirable to me, but you can’t just regulate it out of existence easily: it’s driven by some of the same desires that exist in my more modest, established little neighborhood.

When I first drove through the US, from Chicago down to New Orleans and back up to Chicago, each leg on opposite sides of the Mississippi, some of the bits I liked best, and which seemed most foreign, were the suburban communities in Illinois in particular. Foreign because they were so like the realisation of some Platonic ideal of a US suburb, as seen in films.

Of course, we have dificulty over here with American suburbs. A housefront and garden that initially signals to the US viewer that a person is poor looks, to many Europeans, like something rather middle-classed: a crappy but detached house with lawns front and back is usually rather pricy in our over-populated countries. God isn’t making any more Europe (though the Dutch are less easily put off, there).