where you're supposed to be

It never occurred to me when I was younger that I wouldn't settle down in Minnesota.
But not just Minnesota. I planned on settling down in Buffalo.
I would go to school in Utah, and get hitched. The two of us would spend several years living in California, New York, Washington, and Europe. Then we would settle down in my hometown, and I would teach English at my old high school.
We would raise children the same way I was raised: ice skating, swimming, boating, and fishing on the lake. Baseball and grilled food in the summer. Snow forts, and days off school in the winter. Small schools where my kids were among a half-dozen Mormons.
That was the plan.
Today I was talking to Lauren, and I realized, that plan is long dead.
Yes, I HATE Provo. I hate the pollution, the mountains, the desert, the cityness of it all. I cannot raise my kids here.
But sometime in the last two years, Buffalo stopped being my home. I cannot raise my kids there, either. Buffalo was still my home when I went back for Christmas halfway through my freshman year. But when I returned two months later for foot surgery, it was not.
My house was my house, and the city was the same, but the lights all went out at nine, and there was no where to go out if you weren't fifteen. Had I never noticed this before?
My friends were all gone, off at college, where I wanted to be. I saw Eli, Brad, Mariah, and Burns. Sometimes.
But mostly, I realized that the thing I loved specifically about Buffalo was the people.
I have changed too much to be content in that small town.

I never minded that Taco Bell, Taco Johns, House of Lo, and Aloha Chinese were the only foreign food restaurants in town. Look again. ALOHA Chinese? It doesn't make sense.
But now that I live on Thai and Indian food I don't want to go back to Chinese buffets.

AND First Ave is also the only real music venue around. It's an hour away, and these are the bands playing tomorrow night: TWIZTID, DETROIT COBRAS, ALL THE PRETTY HORSES, RITMO CALIENTE, THE BUNGALOW .
As someone who now spends a good deal of time and money at music venues and concerts, I don't think I'd be fully satisfied with Mr. Walsh's Christmas Program.

I don't go to Art museums every day. It would be a lie to say so. But I have been to a couple, and over the last seven months I have gone to Gallery Stroll every month. I watched foreign movies all the time, whether with my friends, or at the International Cinema and Buffalo has no such programs. Buffalonians like to think of themselves as open-minded hippi-types. (yeah they do).
But they are not.

So I thought to myself, I can just live in St. Paul or Minneapolis. They have foreign food, art, and music. I'm not stuck in a super small town.
But then I'm in a city. Which I hate. Then I'm living in a humid, polluted, and slightly scary place, that might as well be any humid and polluted city.
Part way through my freshman year, I started thinking about Washington. I could live in Seattle, or in a small town near Seattle, where my kids could be in a small town, but we'd be close enough to art museums, and Indian food that I could be happy.

Somehow that dream can exist in Seattle, but not in St. Louis Park.
I want nothing more than to go back where I don't need these things. Honestly, I just want to be happy in Buffalo, because without Buffalo I don't have a home.
Can't I be happy anywhere else?