To say that it's been trying living here would be an understatement. People recently have said I complain all the time. Who, in my shoes, wouldn't complain about the following?
1) Iowa City isn't very diverse. This kind of brings back memories of my high school, which had a pretty much blanket-white graduating class of 200-300-something. Something about this creates a lack of culture that just makes me unhappy.
2) I've realized recently that doing exclusively math was never something that fit too well with me personally. I'm used to doing a variety of interesting things and keeping it spicy. Specializing in just one thing and having to go back to it again and again is, at least at this point in my life, anathema to who I am.
3) I live in a shithole. My roommates are fine, but you can hear everything through these walls and through the floors. Add to that the fact that the people downstairs are stupid as fuck and you get a situation where I basically am not allowed to sleep or do work unless the people downstairs decide it for me. I'm going to call the cops someday.
4) I live in a sea of undergraduates; I am not one of them anymore. I feel like I am not in a city for people my age and of my maturity level. And no, I don't want to be in Boston either. Though being back home would, at this point, be better than this.
5) I'm in an open relationship, yet this isn't exactly gay mecca. I feel like if I want to find people my age or slightly older who are my type, I have to look way more aggressively than I have the energy for. I don't want to sleep around with any undergraduates and I'm finding it potentially unavoidable. And I'm shy so you can imagine the agony of the uncertainty bearing down on me when I get the balls to try looking.
6) I haven't found anyone who enjoys music similar to the way I do here. I'm a musician - this is a problem.
7) I'm nervous about leaving graduate school and going out on my own, and at the same time part of me wants to try it. Still, I feel stuck rather than happy with what I'm doing.
8) There is hardly any natural beauty out here. After having discovered the wonder of going so many marvelously beautiful and stunning places and having so much fun in the outdoors, this sucks.
9) I haven't found an outlet here: a good way to express myself, or to get away from my more than fulltime job and co-workers. This is the biggest problem of them all.
10) There is NO escaping Iowa City without a penalty. You pretty much have to go to St. Louis or Chicago, and boy is the bus ride long, never mind driving four hours. Minneapolis doesn't have anything there either. I might as well fly somewhere and give myself a vacation.
yeah. End rant.
