Been absent from both forums and (mostly) IRC for some time. I'm sorry for all the bad news everyone's had on this page. Ciato, I wanted to say something to you much earlier but just never caught you, and, I dunno, somehow saying something on Facebook felt trite. This is the first I've heard of all the other events, so you all have my sympathies.
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It may surprise you, El-Cid, but I'd honestly say that Michigan, In the right places is a nice place to live. You pretty much want to avoid:
1)The rural areas
2)The dense urban areas
And you're gold. I've bitched a lot about my state in the past at various times, but remember I used to live in the Rural bits, where the closest not-rural bit was Port Huron. The cities people tend to remember exist in Michigan are Detroit and Flint, and while living anywhere in Flint is just about the dumbest or unluckiest thing you can do, the sub-urban areas surrounding Detroit are decent.
Where my state really shines, though, is the middle sized cities, and I've personally lived in two of them for extended periods of time. I really like my current city of East Lansing (Not to be confused with Lansing, which is also pretty OK, honestly). You have a very reliable bus service with unlimited rides for 35 dollars on a monthly pass. There's rapid growth going on, I'm watching several apartments, some condos, and what I think are two hotels going up from within walking distance of my house. It is a major college town. I am not mentally well. If I have major social problems, that is not a failing of my home state, it is a severe deficiency within myself. I see more mind-splittingly gorgeous young women on my daily commute to work every day than the poor bastard version of me that grew up Rural thought he'd ever see in a lifetime. This is only a slight hyperbole.
Kalamazoo housed me for my college years and it is a hip place. I was pretty much always able to find (good!) live bands if I wanted to go out. There are bars that cater to the college students, and somehow, the most "Collegey" of them all manage to stay to those, while there are a ton of other places where there would be single people of less "Dumbass kid" age hanging out. If you can't find something to do walking around downtown Kalamazoo at night, any given night, you're fucking bent. I managed to have a decent time most nights and I might be the most socially inept person I personally know. If you decide to NOT be a singular organism, kids that go to high school in the Kalamazoo Public School system get 4 years (or 130 credits) of college free tuition and mandatory fees.
I've never lived there, but Grand Rapids seems to be on every "Best cities to live in the US" list I've seen over the last several years. It's definitely a pretty city.
I can't put the best commentary on the Saginaw Area, honestly, because my semester at SVSU was an enormous, personal mistake. I DO know that Midland, Saginaw, and Bay City are all right next to each other and may as well be the same place.
The worst part about living in Michigan is the weather. Weather here is insane mirror-world weather, where it can jump from 25 degrees up to 80+ in under a week.
The flipside of the weather is the climate. Michigan is probably the safest place in North America. I can't say that as a for sure, 100% true thing, but i'd honestly be willing to make a small prop bet on it. Very rarely, we might get a tornado that actually hits something and does damage. Other than that, you have no natural disasters. The lakes just insulate the state from so much. About the worst possible weather is a really bad snow, and, all that lake generally makes the worst of it pile up on either side of us without actually hitting us too bad. The North East gets way more major snowstorms. Minnesota and Wisconsin will get hammered. The rest of the midwest will have way more, way more devastating tornadoes. The west coast has Earthquakes and Landslides, the Southwest has draughts and fires, and even the extremely placid Pacific Northwest still is within blastin' range of an active volcano. Afraid of climate change accelerating? I'm not. My state is goddamn fine. Sorry about your guys' water scarcity, brah. (or being consumed BY water, just not the potable kind)
Cost of living in the state is hilariously low. I'm annoyed I have the financial problems I currently do, but I have a slowly growing bank account on a <15 dollar an hour job, and I own my own house. If I didn't get screwed out of my unemployment check a few years ago, and I didn't follow that up with an uninsured trip to the Emergency room and then follow THAT up with a surgery that took a month to recover from where I had to have daily nursing care, I would be in extremely comfortable financial shape. It's amazing the difference between "Broke" and "Able to consider major life purchases" in this country. I think Michigan, a living wage is considered about 10 bucks? Slightly more?
