Country Bumpkin

At least I know someplace I can go if I end up in Chicago next fall.

Which reminds me. Kelli and Jeannine are talking about small town life. I am a small town girl. One of my biggest fears is moving to a big city. I'm pretty terrified of just visiting, to be honest.

A couple of years ago, I went to Chicago for work (back when I had a job that paid for travel) and if I could have stayed in my hotel room the whole time, I would have. It was nice. But there was no reason for a 22-year-old communications coordinator to be in a 5-star hotel off Michigan Avenue. When the bellhop (there's probably a fancier name for him, right?) asked to help with my bags, I thought, I'm not tipping you to carry my borrowed suitcase to the elevator, thank-you-very-much. The guy probably got paid more than I did to begin with. The next trial? Trying to figure out what to eat because everything on the room service menu was more expensive than my per diem allowed. I finally decided on an $18 cheese burger and hoped I could slip the receipt past my boss without her noticing. I called my mom that night and almost cried while telling her I wished for the Holiday Inn and a Papa John's pizza.

It never occurred to me to leave my room, go for a walk, look for some cheap hot dog street vendor, experience the city that I couldn't see from my hotel room window. I was taught that sweet country girls shouldn't go out in strange places alone.

I told Mary that I can't fly to New York for AWP by myself because I'll panic between luggage claim and the hotel check-in desk. I know there are airport shuttles, but that doesn't make me feel any better. I don't know why. And you would have to pay me a lot of money to get on a subway alone. I watch Law & Order, I know what happens down there. (I'm kidding!) But seriously. I'm not a fan of public transportation. Sure, it's good for the environment, but not for my nerves.

Another country-bumpkin story for you: Senior year in high school, a couple of friends and I decided to go to Cleveland to see the Christmas lights in public square. We parked at the airport and took the RTA downtown. Everything seemed hunky-dory until we realized we were about to miss the last train of the night (Cleveland is pretty small on the big-city scale, you know. The trains only run until about 11). We run to the terminal and get on the last train of the night. But ten minutes later, the driver gets on the PA and asks us (we're the only ones there) if we know where we're going. We say, sure, we're going to our car at the airport. No. We're not. We're on the east bound train. And country-bumpkins don't belong on the east side of Cleveland, according to our driver. He stops the train and waits with us until a West-bound train comes by to save us. Nothing went wrong, exactly, but the fact that the driver waited with us didn't make me feel very safe.

Anyhow, the point of all this is that I'm a walking target whenever I get out of my comfort zone. And for some reason, I'm still planning to apply to UIC. I guess it would be good for me to move to a city for a while, experience something different, but I don't know. I don't think I'd be happy in an urban environment. Even Akron is too much city for me sometimes. I have to find grass, trees, 55mph speed limits and double yellow lines. What would I do someplace where I would have to learn how to parallel park and read bus schedules?

Whenever I list off the schools I'm applying to, people say, oh, you don't want to go to Nebraska, it's so boring. Boring sounds good to me. Boring is better than bustling metropolis any day. Do they have Target and Olive Garden in Nebraska? Then I have all I need.