Is it just me, or does everything nowadays kind of suck? I’m not entirely certain, but I think what I’m feeling has to do with turning 30.

I spent most of the first 13 years of my life in the same small town in South Dakota. It was the kind of town where everybody knew everybody, and everybody knew — or at least thought they knew — what everybody else was up to. Gossipping about your neighbors’ infidelities was practically the unofficial pass-time. There’s a certain degree of smalltalk about sports and world politics, but those conversations generally never went too far because anything outside of the town’s borders might as well have been happening on Mars for how far removed it all was. Getting out of there was the best thing that ever happened to me.

A couple years ago I went back for my first visit in about another 10 years. A few businesses had changed, but there weren’t many businesses there in the first place. The only change that really stood out was how most of the stores’ hand-painted signs now also featured hand-painted URLs advertising their homes on the world wide web. I couldn’t help but smile and shake my head at the quaintness of it. URLs on hand-painted signs for shops that serve the local community. Why? Because ‘why not?’ I guess. Read More »