You are trying to be happy. It is the summer in 2014 and you have never had any money but somehow you are attempting a vacation to someplace unnoteworthy, but the kind of place where the hip kids from the surrounding backwoods have escaped to. You know the place -- you're never getting to live in NYC or California or Denver or the PNW, but you can live here and you won't ever have to see your high school again as long as you live. You can tell yourself it's hip or under-estimated. ...
Under-estimation is the coin of this realm. You'll never get the best of anything. You'll never even get anything good because you have no money and no one thinks you're even worthy of employment. But you act as if you have the eye of a connoisseur: you can see the rough gems, uncut from the vein. And as part of this self-concept you will go to the coffee shop next to the vinyl store and none of the tables will ever stop wiggling. You will wince when you pay two hours' wages for two coffees.
You don't really want to live here. You have told yourself that it might be acceptable to live anywhere so long as there's a coffee shop like this, a beacon of culture slathered in the worst paint job you've ever seen. But now you're here and you're trying to be happy, and so you know at last that this is not enough. It is not enough to be better than expected. You will never get to make good on scouting an under-valued life because you will never be able to cash in on the speculation.
You have the sense that it's never going to get much better than this. You saw the sites once. That's better than most people ever get. Your cousins don't understand. They want to say something kind but it just makes you cry. You had a brief moment in the sun but you haven't proven useful to your superiors in years. So you ask some embarrassing questions in the hipster coffee shop and you'll start to learn the technique at home. But at least you'll be at home and not here.
