So, I tried to make the title of this post “Where in the World USA…” and apparently you can’t format a post title, which seems unnecessarily stingy.
My thought process behind the sous rature (sorry, THANKS HEIDEGGER (and if I’m being honest, without google, that would still say thanks Heidigger (now who invented the double–now triple–parenthetical??))) was that I’m always dreaming of other countries to visit (then feeling guilty at the prospect of flying too much; now this paragraph is vomitously self-referential) but rarely thinking about places in the US that I would like to see.
It’s a false allure, the idea of a place being so drastically different because of a passport stamp (which you often don’t even get anymore…when I was entering France from the UK recently the man at passport control sort of smirked at me and asked if I wanted a stamp, so I must have been projecting the aura of someone desperately hoarding evidence of travel)–or, it’s not false, but there are places within the US borders that are just as drastically different. I’ve never been to Yosemite, for one, or the Southwest. My only time technically in Texas was in the Houston airport. And though I’ve wanted to experience a Portland summer (because I associate those with 1) roses and 2) symphonies outdoors) since I was eleven, I’ve never been to the Pacific Northwest at all.
I stopped writing this for a few days and sort of lost the thread, though if I were sticking with signs and signified I might attempt a digression about semiotically checking off/crossing out regions once you’ve visited them. Anyway, that’s breadth, not depth…but if we consider smaller and smaller regions, moving from “Southwest” and “Mid-Atlantic” to proper states and then to cities, depth becomes more possible.
(I tutored a lot today. I think my brain is compromised, or to quote the Magnetic Fields, I’m not Sau-sure I know what this is).
