Love Train

Oh Wisconsin. I love you so much. It's the kind of love where I want you to be even better than you are because it will be good for you, not because it will be good for me. For what it's worth, Wisconsin, I think a train would have been really, really good for you. Especially a train that went from Chicago to Minneapolis and stopped in Madison. Think of that glittering modern future, laid out on tracks. The movement of people is the movement of ideas, and the movement of ideas is a good way to stimulate a knowledge-based economy. Not to mention ship goods efficiently in an age when oil is increasingly dear (money-wise and environmental-cost-wise). You know, no one outside America really knows Wisconsin? We are a wasteland. North of Chicago, south of Canada. I want everyone to know how lovely you are, how good and caring your people are. Even when sometimes your people are actually a lot like people everywhere - dumb, easily mislead, and yes, sometimes actually selfish and not at all caring.

My 5-year plan, not so much a plan as a "Eureka!' scribbled on a a napkin, includes grad school. Even though I believe firmly in sticking to a thing you love even when it's cranky and run by idiots and not so fun to be around, I've now, today, this minute, decided I am not going to bother applying to Madison. Not even as a "might as well give it a try." I have lived here so long. I am curious about other places. The near future is as good a time as any to seek them out. That's still at least 2012, anyway. Maybe the world will have ended by then, like they say it will.

We live in interesting times, friends.