Michelle is moving to Boston in less than a few weeks. That is not good. Well, selfishly not good for me, at least. It's a Good Thing that she's going to grad school because becoming a professor to teach something that you love is an accomplishment that 99.9% of people can only dream of doing. 'Tis quite the bitter-sweet scenario indeed.
But I'm not here today to talk about my emotional selfishness. No, I'm here to talk about metropolitan areas. Michelle and I have both lived our entire lives in Illinois, with our formative years taking place in and/or around Chicago. As a reminder of what the Chicago area is like, take a quick glance at the map below.
Now let's examine the Boston area. Move your mouse on top of the picture of Chicago and study the differences for a moment. (If the picture doesn't change when you move the mouse pointer over it, your computer is broken.)
I'll wait. Mouse on, mouse off, mouse on, mouse off.
Look at Chicago, all nice and ordered. Numbered streets; intersections that look like nice clean "plus" signs; maybe a few diagonal roads for convenience reasons. Then you have Boston. It's like someone took a normal organized city and ran it in a taffy pulling machine for about 30 seconds only to realize all too late that cities are not made of taffy. Clearly, Boston was laid out by blindfolded drunk people riding in ramshackle carts pulled by crippled yaks. Any city in which a halfway intelligent person can get thoroughly lost while using a GPS (I proudly being halfway intelligent) is a city that needs to just be leveled down and given a second try. New England, it's time to cut your losses and start taking some urban planning cues from the Midwest. I expect a full proposal on my desk by 10:00 tomorrow morning.
