Depressing List of Things I Did Not Do This Summer

1. Go to Denali National Park.

2. Go to the annual mycology festival/conference in Girdwood to listen to experts talk about spores and shrooms.

3. See the play put on by a local theater group, How to Make Love Like an Alaskan.

4. Listen often to the local NPR music shows put on each evening by people I know in town.

5. Fish.

6. Visit Whittier, Alaska.

7. Sign up for Netflix to watch Northern Exposure, the tv show supposedly based on Talkeetna, and Sled Dogs, the Cuba Gooding, Jr. movie set in a town pronounced "Tal-KET-na" that has a general store called "Neeleys" (aka Nagleys).

8. Pick berries and make jam.

9. See the circus that came through town.  (Not an elephant-torturing circus; a group of weird acrobat people circus.)

10. Take the Hurricane Train, which is the only remaining flagstop train in America.

I could make a similar list of things I didn't do in Utah.  And actually, I could make a much longer list of things I haven't done in Los Angeles and the surrounding area. 

In Italy, by contrast, I did every tourist thing, but that's because the study abroad program organized it all.

Thoughts on this:

1. In Alaska it's partly that I don't have a car, partly working weird hours, partly a natural aversion to making plans.  The first and third reasons cover Utah as well. With Los Angeles it's traffic/parking horror, having many friends who would rather hang out at home than go do something, and the New Yorker-who's-never-been-to-the-Statue-of-Liberty thing.

2. You'd think I go live other places because I "love" to "travel".  I don't know, though.  The summer I worked at a national park in Utah I baby-sat three kids under the age of six who live in an RV because their parents got dressed up like wranglers every evening to sing, dance and serve food at a local variety show.  Here I spend many days curled up on a couch at the Roadhouse reading back issues of Harper's, staying long enough to eat two meals.  In Florence I liked to hang out in piazzas and people-watch, liked going to the grocery store because it was so subtly alien. 

Being a tourist is really fun but I don't particularly have a knack for it.  I go live other places because I like daily life somewhere else.  Next summer I am going to push myself to be more of a tourist.