I'm impossible at editing myyself down so hhehere:
I immigrated from the Netherlands to the US (suburb area in Texas) in 2009 as ssssome of you probably know. I'm kinda mixed on it, I'm glad I wasn't sheltered my whole growing up in a small farm town and being here has "widened my worldview", and I like being an inside-outsider of both Dutch & US culture, that makes you a little more conscious of the quirks of each.
On the other hand I haven't really enjoyed living in Texanal at all, I've never felt like I'm able to make any connection with people here and ended up as kind of a lonely little bitch. I used to attribute that entirely to me just being introverted but then I just spend a few weeks back in the home country and I had no trouble hitting up conversations with strangers or family members I haven't met in years, it felt amazingly refreshing to be in the presence of people again who you just click with. I dunno about other places in the US, but I find people in my area to have something really sterile and insecure about them. People always seem hostile to conversation and afraid to burst someones bubble, and it ends up in this weird thing where everyone just kind of fakes a smile and acts a little too excited about simple things - Texans would be the kind of people to say dumb shit like "No way, I wish I was as pretty as you!" to someone with a deformed burned face and not realise how shallow they're coming across.
The area also just really lacks something, it's a fairly new suburb and completely devoid of personality. I kind of miss just little touches like how the town I used to live in has a weird mish-mash of old and new homes, or the nearby city has a bunch of weird alternative people living in it or you turn a corner and you're suddenly in the Polish immigrant block. Over here everything is freakishly organised and structured, everything is plastered in corporate logos and you can't find an alternative to big chains, and you can tell the only reason anything here even exists is because a big company decided to invest in creating homes and shopping malls.
So yeah h h h h I don't intend on staying here much longer, but I don't want to leave the country because US politics have become the thing I wanna dedicate my life too and I need to be at the frontline for that. I'm eyeing Washington DC, I was there a few months back and it was grate, really epiccc city.