Montana

I've been daydreaming more than usual lately about moving away from San Diego to Montana. This didn't help much:

I have lived and been all over the world and if I were to pick a spot in the USA it would be in Montana. There is so much beauty there that is still untouched and unknown to so many people. The weather is not as bad there in the winter time as you would think but most Montanans would not tell you that. The fires there in the summer of 2000 have touched some of that beauty but it is amazing that where they have scorched the earth it is still magnificent. -Dale Majors from World Is Round

This makes me want to go to Montana even more. The Montana photos on Flickr don't help much with me wanting to stay in San Diego. I don't know which is worse, my newfound love of the idea of moving to Montana or my fast-growing hatred of everything in San Diego. Perhaps it's a coping mechanism for me leaving California, but I highly doubt I'll be missing it too much. Sure there will be a few people I will miss. But about the only thing that will be hard to get over is the good weather and the taco shops on every corner. That's it. I won't miss the traffic. I won't miss the overcrowding. I won't miss the snobby people. I especially won't miss the overabundance of illegal immigrants getting in my way, all the way from the highway, to the supermarkets, to housing which they probably get discounted because of government subsidizing. I won't miss the poor air quality or the crappy neighborhood I live in. And more than anything, I will not miss the extremely high housing rates. To make it short, I won't miss much about San Diego, much less California. I will not be the last one to go. With San Diego having one of the highest housing rates in the country, it is bound to cause somewhat of an outpouring of people hoping to find the American dream somewhere else. America's finest city they call it. My ass.

On the job side, I'll be missing my pay and the time off. I won't miss many of the people and I definitely won't be missing any of the higher ups.

I've got a lot to look forward to. Clean air, nice people, reasonable housing rates, and a lot of open space for which to let it all hang out. These are all basic things that California lacks, and people still buy into it year after year. This isn't just something I noticed. I've known it for a while, but I tried to make the best of a bad situation, thus I didn't think about how shitty San Diego is until now. I've gone into full-blown loathing mode for San Diego. Not that Montana is perfect. But for a while it will be.