champaign in winter

it's -15°F outside and i'm from Fremont, California. i did not grow up with this.

the thing about central Illinois that nobody tells you isn't the cold. it's the flat. you can see the weather coming from an hour away. the sky is the biggest thing here. in the Bay Area you have hills and fog and buildings and it always feels enclosed. here there's nothing between you and the horizon except corn, and in winter there isn't even corn.

i've been here three and a half years now and i've started to like it. not the cold, specifically. but the way campus feels at 2am in the Grainger library when it's snowing outside and you're the only person on your floor and the heater is making that sound it makes. there's a specific kind of focus you get when there is genuinely nothing else to do. no beach, no hiking, no "let's go to the city." just you and the work.

my roommate, who's from Chicago and thinks anything above 20°F is t-shirt weather, dragged me to the climbing wall at ARC last year. i think she felt bad for me. i ended up liking it more than she does now. it's the only physical thing i've found that shuts my brain off completely. when you're on a wall you can't think about compiler optimizations. your body won't let you.

one more semester. i'll miss this stupid flat town more than i want to admit.