Studenting

I was starting to get a little disappointed this summer. Before we moved, we were excited that we were moving to a college town. We believed the smallness mixed with the coolness of a college community would offer us light traffic, kind locals, fab hangouts, and big-city culture.

Well, let’s pretend those are objectives for our “life surge,” and I’ll be General Petraeus and report our progress to you In all honesty, Lansing feels like a dying city, following the same path as Detroit. The economy has been shrinking, thanks to the idleness of the American auto industry, and people keep moving out into the surrounding suburbs, leaving the downtown area to rot. Some time in another post I’ll explore the issue of white flight. But for now, I’ll just say that life is peachy in the suburbs, but the area around our neighborhood is plagued with low incomes, dilapidated property, and a “for sale” sign in front of every other house. This summer, there weren’t any sort of great art events or lectures at MSU. I was ever longing more and more for life in the big city of DC or Chicago. I missed the culture.

But now that school’s back in session, things have picked up. Now that I’ve finished a long-running PHP project, I’ve decided to delve into the world of Ruby on Rails. Yeah, I’m 2 years behind, but now I have plenty of time to do it since I’m home alone 3 nights out of the week while Julie’s at class. Last weekend I attended the Grand Rapids Ruby Users Group. It was nice to get together with people interested in new and better ways of development. It was very refreshing and I learned quite a bit. For now, I’m working on a pet web application using Rails and the Google Maps API. I decided to throw an app together that would let you quickly plan trips - sort of like Dopplr or Yahoo!’s trip planner, but more focused on a precise Itinerary and less on the social aspect.

On Thursday I’m going to see Helvetica The Film. I’ve always been mildly interested in design and typography, so it should be really interesting. Later this fall, I’ll get to hear Julie perform Carmina Burana with the MSU choir and there are plenty of other performances going on in the music department.

So things are looking good in the culture department.  The locals are friendly and traffic is an absolute breeze.  There are some cool cafes as well, such as Espresso Royale and Beaner’s.  Lansing also seems to have the highest number of ice cream parlors per capita.

This summer has been nice, getting above 90 degrees only a few times.  But now it’s quickly changing to fall, and I don’t know if I can handle the cold weather again after living in Virginia for 4 years where temperatures in January stay around 30 degrees.

I think we need to give our “life surge,” just like the real “surge,” more time.   We’ve been meeting most of the benchmarks!