This is my town

A couple people from school have asked me what my miniature town is like. Here is their answer.
Sebastopol has about 7500 people in it, but a bunch more live outside the city limits, in the countryside. The countryside consists mostly of knee-high wild grasses that are always crisp and brown by the time I get home for the summer. I am violently allergic to these, even though they seem dead, and spend most of my time sneezing through mid-July. My dad keeps halfway thinking about considering maybe buying a house out in the country with a granny unit, which would be his recording studio.
Our current house has no granny unit. It is soundly inside the city limits and sits on the corner of two streets that are lined with similar-looking houses. At least one of the other houses on our street has the exact same floorplan as ours does. Our house is tan, but it has a red front door, which I think is pretty neat. A lot of kids under age ten or so live on our street, and sometimes they ride their bikes in the street, or skateboard, or whatever. It's a really quiet street - there's not much reason to be driving on it unless you live on it - but for some reason they feel the need to put up these little plastic signs up in the street that say "Caution: Children at Play" in the middle of the road so that you have to wait for them to move the signs out of the way (another Seb Fact: gas is now $4.60 a gallon). Once my friend's dad told me he wanted to run the signs over. He drove an SUV, so it'd probably be more effective if he did it, but I'm pretty sure someone needs to.
When I was in high school, I hated living here. I thought it was small and homogenous and boring, and I semi-frequently harrassed my poor mom about why we had chosen to move here (we migrated from Seattle when I was five, which I still miss a whole bunch and love dearly). One time she said it was a "nice place to raise children". I can see that; it's very safe, and tranquil, and there's a pretty strong sense of community. However, half the people who live here are crazy hippies.
Here is a thing that happened this past spring: a wireless company wanted to install free WiFi in the whole town. Everyone who lived in the city limits would get free wireless. People loved it. It would have been great for the schools, for businesses, for people who lived here, etc. Everyone won. Everyone, that is, except a tiny coalition led by this woman who was absolutely convinced that the "radiation" from the wireless would give everyone cancer. Some people, she claimed, were very sensitive to certain types of electromagnetic currents, and the free WiFi would cause her and her followers to become physically ill. People pointed out the inherent ridiculousness of this, including one guy who said that despite receiving fifteen different private wireless signals on the corner of Main Street, people did not seem to be dropping dead. Others cited articles from people like researchers and scientists. Crazy Tinfoil Hat Woman, however, skillfully deflected these arguments with a series of poorly designed and even more poorly researched GeoCities websites claiming that wireless internet would be the downfall of humankind. The city council eventually nixed the plan not because they agreed with CTHW, but because they didn't want to offend anyone. Also, our mayor drunkenly keyed someone's car out by the river (which is kind of like the setting of "Deliverance" but with more tie-dye). A trial started but eventually the whole thing settled out of court.
Sebastopol is the only town in the US to have a majority Green Party city government. This is neat in some ways, because it generally keeps the Republicans out, but annoying in others, because in a town this small having such a "fringe" political view in the mainstream makes for a very homogenous mindset. The main political challenge to the Greens is provided by the PTA Moderate Democrats, who are constantly striving for more parcel taxes that go towards education. The parcel taxes are sorely needed because when I was in AP American History, our textbooks listed Jimmy Carter as the current president. Fortunately, nothing post-Kennedy was on the AP test that year.
The liberal way of life manifests itself in our "downtown", which is a block long. (MAYBE two, if you're feeling generous.) It has two head shops and one Thai restaurant, which reeks of misplaced priorities, and at least five stores selling hemp clothes and those little Tibetan peace flags. There are also a couple of independent coffee shops, which hold their own against our three Starbucks, a restaurant that makes excellent Veggie Benedict, a record store, and at least three yoga studios. The undisputed jewel of the Downtown Block is this ice cream place called Screamin' Mimi's, which makes their own amazing flavors like lavender and coffee oreo and mojito sorbet. (I wrote about the mojito sorbet in my admissions short-answer section, so I like to think that it's good enough to get people into college.) The downtown is bordered on one side by a gas station that charges at least ten cents over the going rate and on the other by a local bank that has really cute baby bears in its advertisements.
The busiest street corner in town is the one that turns into the highway leading out of town.
Our high school served the whole town, the people outside it, and some people who defected from other towns around the county because it was a good school. Unlike schools depicted in teen movies, the football team and cheer squad went largely uncared about except for the people who were on them (our football teams were about good enough to beat the rival school but nobody else). However, most of the sportsball people did something else. Band was big, as was choir, and both of those were actually cool things to do because the teachers were rad and we got to do neat things like play in the San Francisco Symphony Hall and go to Disneyland. The drama people were the cool kids who had the best parties, and the debate team was probably the highest concentration of sarcastic, uppity, elitist, probably-a-little-too-smart-for-their-own-good group of people to be found in the county. I was on debate team. My coach was an amazing, warm, funny woman who was like my third mom (my aunt is my second mom), and although I don't debate much anymore, I still have some vestigial impulses from that point in my life, like when I see a really nice wool suit for sale and my jaw goes kind of slack. All the people I dated in high school were on debate team. Sometimes this was a problem: once I got blown off for lunch because the person I was with had to cut cards for Nat Quals the next weekend. If you don't know what that means, be happy; you probably escaped high school with your soul mostly intact. Most of my high school was spent going to tournaments, hanging out with other people on the team, or eating French bread in the Mariotts we'd invariably stay in at invitationals. It made me very happy, and I met some wonderful people.
The big business in Sebastopol is wine. We grow some of the best in the world in this county and the one to our east, Napa. Frequently, tour buses can be seen idling at the traffic lights, ready to disgorge yuppies from across the globe into the tasting rooms that dot the countryside. Whenever restaurants have wine lists, I can always recognize some of the wineries and tell my dining companions how to drive there, which probably is very annoying to them. A couple people I know here even have their own hobby vineyards. The region produces all kinds of wines - red, white, blush - and you're just as likely to find a $4 bottle from the area as a $400 one. Before the wine industry got here, Sebastopol was an apple town, and there are still a lot of orchards here. One of my best friends' parents are apple farmers; they own roughly a gajillion acres of land, and they always give me apples to snack on when I go over there, which are delicious.
Someone from school asked me what there was to do for fun in my town. There really isn't anything to do here except leave, although we do have a movie theater. The good times I've had here had nothing to do with the place and everything to do with the people I was with - the liberal atmosphere here breeds a very easygoing, open-minded variety of teenager that I've found surprisingly rare at Northwestern.
I can appreciate how someone would want to live here. It has a nice, small-town feel to it, and it's relatively undiscovered by the wine tourists so it still has its own definite character. It's also close enough to bigger cities - San Francisco, Oakland, Berkeley, San Jose, Sacramento - that you can day-trip to do cool things relatively easily. It is very safe, the schools are good, the people are mostly quite friendly, if a little weird, and the restaurants are nice. That said, it's small, homogenous, and without much of its own entertainment. I doubt I'll be back here that much after this summer. I feel like there's too much to do and explore in Chicago or Seattle or the other cities I could see myself living in, and I have pretty much exhausted what the Seb has to offer. Except the mojito sorbet, which I could eat until I collapsed from gross pancreatic failure.
I am also taking a hiatus from posting in Chinese. My computer at home doesn't have the text conversion program, and thanks to the Crazy WiFi Lady, there's no wireless so I can't use the laptop. It'll probably make a reappearance in the fall, assuming Bei Wai, my school in China, doesn't run me into the ground.