...which isn't necessarily a bad thing, depending on how well you like a good sucking.
I guess I'm in a smallish town. Cedar Falls has maybe 40 thousand residents, although it is adjacent to the county seat, Waterloo, which has maybe 70 thousand residents. I think within a ten-mile radius there are about 130 thousand residents. Still, the Waterloo-Cedar Falls SMSA is probably a small town. Disadvantages: obvious to you--and to me, admittedly--so I'll not waste the typing. Advantages: Here, the cost of living is very low. We got a house for about 300K that I'm sure would be much, much more expensive in, say, San Francisco. Or Los Angeles. And non-existent in New York. The public schools are much better (at least according to the mean fourth- and eighth-grade composite math and reading scores), but then that's not an issue if you're single. I can appreciate that. Driving is a breeze. I live about 1.5 miles from where I work. Mind you, most of the time I cycle, but when I do drive it's like, I don't know, a nanosecond to get to work. Okay, I'm exaggerating. I don't know how long it actually takes, but I have driven 1.5 miles to work in New York, Boston, and Arlington, and I'm certain that here it takes a shorter time than that. My wife drives 17 miles to work, and again home. Here that's like 17 minutes. Definite advantage for her. On the other hand, you'd think it might be quiet here, but that hasn't been the case. I lived in Manhattan for a period, and in Boston and the DFW metroplex for five years each and in the SF bay area for about three years, and believe it or not, here is not more quiet than any of those areas. There are motorcycles, lawn mowers, snow-removal devices, and any number of noise-making gadgets in suburban population densities that you don't have to put up with when you're sixteen floors above street level. So don't move to a "small town" thinking it'll be peaceful and quiet.
But really, small towns suck only if you're over 12 and under 30, which I gather describes the overwhelming majority of the posters here. Before that, when the world is enormous and your bicycle takes you most everywhere you want to go (and after that, when the world is quite small, and your bicycle takes you most everywhere you want to go), then small towns are no worse or better than big ones. In between, amid the sturm und drang und angst of early adulthood, when we're drawn like moths to the light but can't really say why, it certainly must suck to be so far away from those bright lights. I wouldn't know, because between 12 and 30 I avoided being to far away from them myself, but it seems to be the case.
Still, just remember: it's not always a bad thing to find things that suck. And if you've ever had a broken vacuum cleaner, you'll appreciate that.
