After a month off, I think I need to come back here and talk things out on my blog again. I ended up back in Toronto lately and took a nice skyline photo, though.

I’m back at home now, and I’m sitting in the new Starbucks that just opened last year within scootering distance of my house. I’m lucky enough to live near the downtown center with the highest walk score of anywhere in my entire state (96! Rivals New York City, but definitely not as big).

I would’ve gone to one of the other infinitely better coffee shops around here, but I’ve wanted to sit down at the Starbucks and do the blogging here like I do in Rochester, and besides, all of those other coffee shops close at 3 PM anyway (as I write this sentence, it’s 2:54 PM. Not really a chance to get in there for any significant time).

The past month or so has been a little bit much. I got torn away from Rochester at the beginning of August, just as I was starting to have fun and get to know the area with the help of friends who have more of a life than I do and have the courtesy to show me how to exist a little bit more actively than I have in the past.

Since leaving my internship in Rochester, I’ve gone back there twice: one to help a friend move and then once to help me and my roommates move in to my new apartment on-campus.

While I was staying in my Airbnb for the few days before I left, I couldn’t help but notice what a neat little neighborhood it was in and how charming the house was (I was on the third floor, in the attic, and the stairs creaked but in a sort of endearing way, something that other guests had commented on in the guestbook left on the desk in the room).

Rochester has some nice historic scenes. The house I was staying in was built a little over a hundred years ago, and aside from the possibility of asbestos insulation, that kind of three-story home in a small city downtown is, personally, my ideal living environment. Especially for how well-decorated the Airbnb studio loft was.

And besides that, when I came back for the weekend about two weeks later to help the other friend move, that friend had done the math out about the potential money-savings of living off-campus: a 1-bed, 1-bath apartment in downtown Rochester seems to be about ~$1,000-1,200 per month on average. Split it with a roommate (even if they’re sleeping on the futon in the living room) and that’s only $500-$600 a month: a lot better than the cheapest student housing, which averages out to $625/month for all the time you’re allowed to live there as a student (so the full year minus the three summer months).

Besides, those downtown apartments (or the ones in neighborhoods near downtown) are all pretty walkable, and Rochester has a slew of interesting places that are well-established and thoroughly charming (South Wedge, 19th Ward, North Winton Village, Pearl-Meigs-Monroe, and the east end are all pretty dense).

So I’m a big fan of Rochester now. Me and one of my new roommates walked around downtown a while ago taking pictures of buildings and scenes:

Every Rochester urbanist’s favorite topic of conversation is, of course, the subway. There’s even a whole dedicated website, rochestersubway.com, complete with a subway map replicating what the system might look like today if it had been let to continue development instead of being decommissioned in the mid-1950s (one of which, of course, I ordered).

The Rochester community wiki, too, rocwiki.org, is fairly out-of-date on a lot of the pages but serves as a great source of patriotism for the citizens of Smugtown nonetheless.

After doing more exploration, both in-person and on the Internet, I’m much more in love with the city than I had ever been when the only parts of the region that I’d seen had been RIT and Henrietta. The thought entered my mind to try to renew my driver’s license in Rochester after it expires next year, so that I could register to vote in the city and become a little bit more involved in local politics and that sort of thing (being an active citizen, the should-be and would-be favorite pastime of every American).

Even if I don’t, I’m still beginning to browse Zillow across ZIP codes 14604, 14607, and 14609 pretty religiously and thinking about my future helps me feel better after a past month that hasn’t been great.

Besides, a New York driver’s license is portable to anywhere in New York City, and if I ever become too ambitious in the future, that might be a nice bit of leeway to provide myself. As a Google Street View hobbyist, images of upscale Park Slope neighborhoods are promising.

Until then, though, I still have my October-December Taichung City internship to work toward. That’s an exciting travel destination, for sure, but now that I’m starting to make friends in Rochester and that I have roommates who I really get along with, I’m a little sad to be leaving it all behind to venture 8,000 miles away so soon. I guess I’ll have to tell myself I’ve learned how to make friends. I’ll have to prove it to myself by seeing how active I get to be with my coworkers around the great second-largest city in Taiwan and the homeland of the KMT’s next presidential candidate, Lu Shiow-yen (I’d say I called it, but actually, I read the prediction in a Taipei Times column).

Not that any of that matters, because if registering to vote in Rochester was a stretch goal, it’d take an entire lifestyle shift to meet the goal of registering to vote in Taiwan.

It would seem like my sphere of influence is growing every day. It now stretches from Portland, Maine to Toronto, down to Boston, and with exclaves in the Sea-Tac airport and across northern and central Taiwan. I can at least say that I’m going places physically, even if my life feels like it’s at a little bit of a standstill.

But if there’s one thing I’ve learned over the course of the summer, it’s that ambitions are a little bit meaningless, influence is pretty useless, and all the money and resources in the world won’t do anything for you if you don’t have friends. And I can definitely say now that I have friends.

Picture below.

I’ve heard that the best way to live a long life, feel the most fulfilled, and even avoid cancer is to stay social, get out, be friendly and meet people. So no matter where I am over the course of the next few months and then the next few years, that’s what I’ll be trying to do.

Thanks for the read. I’ll be back at some point (maybe not soon, but soon enough).

And, of course, I’ll see you then.