My hometown is a town of about 2k people (maybe 4k when the college is in session). It's also in what most people would consider the backwoods. The natives know better - this is relative civilization compared to some of the other places around here, but I digress.

Last weekend I drove to the next town over for Friday night entertainment. You see the next town over is a bit more, well, money-ed. They have a movie theatre, a nice boxcar style dinner, all that nice stuff. So, I got thinking about this somewhat decoupled series of towns and how if one of them wasn't there anymore, well, life would go on, and the region would work around not having that town there. It wouldn't be this horrible thing - and I saw merits in this.

The next day the family and I went up to Rochester. Applying this same concept, I would say that Rochester is almost highly-coupled with some redundancy. That is, if something happened to one of the suburbs, I would think that life would be very much harder - first, the huge loss of people (meaning under staffing, and hardships for those that remain), and the loss of "essential" goods, services - possibly even isolating parts of the city from one another. Now, theres some redundancy - every suburb has its own supermarket, schools - but I can't help but thinking of that region as one big organ - cut off one part and the rest will die.

Irregardless, the family and I had so much fun in Rochester - going to the nice mall, the great BBQ place, the bookstore, Best Buy. It reminded me why I like that area so much - it's actually alive, just like an organ. It breathes, money knowledge, power and activity courses through it like so much heart-blood. Back home its more like 3 stagnant ponds - sometimes refreshed by the errant stream coming down from the mountains, but for the most part just growing algae.

And I'm not sure what to think about this.