Gimme! Some white settlers

This past weekend, in a rather sad attempt to find snowfall and bucolic living, I journeyed to a much-hated town where I lived out a rather tortured graduate student existence. Let's set aside the fact that I long-ago pledged that I would never return to this god-forsaken place--I was trying to be open-minded, and figured that maybe my hatred was due to my own immaturity while living there, and the fact that I was racking up thousands of dollars of student loan debt while slowly having my intellectual ego being crushed into hundreds of tiny little bits. Things would be different now, surely.

Well, no. Admittedly, there were some improvements since I last left, like this:



















Some things remained endearingly the same:

























And other things were just as horrifying on the hundredth viewing as they were on the first:
























I guess the whole experience made me reflective: why is it, do you think, that when you get a whole bunch of "smart" and ambitious people together not much good comes of it? I mean, you'd think with all those brains crammed in together for a period of several years, the revolution would be plotted, art movements would emerge or someone would at least invent a teleporter. But no! Instead everyone sits around in the coffee shop and bemoans their crummy life, or fling themselves off bridges or drunkenly stuff themselves into chimneys as a prank, only to be incinerated later. I don't get it. Perhaps the first white settlers should have kept moving?