All the Children Were Above Average

[rynling]

Here is a fun fact about me: I cannot abide the Midwest.

Here is another fun fact about me: I paid $349 to move my flight from Sunday evening to Sunday morning. This means that I will pay $35, per hour, for every hour I don't have to spend in the Midwest.

I'm being cute here; I had to go home early for other reasons (long story), but I was still happy to leave. The air was too clear. The water was too clean. The people were too nice. The weather was too perfect.

Comments

[raisedbymoogles]

True story: I grew up listening to my parents listening to Prairie Home Companion (lots of long car trips in my childhood), and so when the movie came out we went to see it as a family. We were a little late getting to the theater so we found seats while the previews were playing and it was dark in the theater.

After the movie was over, the lights came up and it was just this SEA of white heads. Not only was I the youngest person in the theater, my PARENTS and I were the youngest THREE people in the theater. We all felt very awkward on the drive home. And we listened to the classic rock station for a while after.

[rynling]

My mom used to make me listen to Prairie Home Companion, and I didn't much care for it at the time, but my memories of the program have made me appreciate what Welcome to Night Vale is doing in its positioning of itself as a dark mirror to a community like Lake Wobegon. In Prairie Home Companion, there is no Other, while in Welcome to Night Vale everything is Other. The unthinking acceptance of outsiders and minorities in Night Vale highlights just how oddly uncanny the normative majority of Lake Wobegon actually is.

From one survivor of Prairie Home Companion to another: If you haven't given Welcome to Night Vale a shot, I highly recommend it. I used to not be into podcasts, but this podcast changed everything for me. There are story arcs, but you can jump in anywhere and still be as amused and bewildered as the rest of us. If nothing else, the fandom creates gorgeous art and writes lovely tentacle porn.