Most people either live to eat or eat to live. I live to write about what I'm eating.

In my intro to sociology class in college, we spent a great deal of time talking about what some book called "McDonaldization." Basically, it's that chain restaurants create some magic formula for their food so that no matter where in the world you visit, their restaurant/fast food chain's meals will always taste the same. A big part of this class was spent discussing the "Iron Cagers," "Rubber Cagers" and "Velvet Cagers." The velvet cagers were the ones who loved this about restaurants, and stick to major chains because they like what is familiar. The iron cagers are the ones who always try to break free of the chains, primarily visiting local restaurants only. The rubber cagers were kind of in between, liking a little bit of both. This class bored me to tears, so I'm sorry I had to explain it.

My family has always been iron cagers. They like trying out every local place when we travel somewhere new, and my dad gets restless with eating the same foods all the time. One of my biggest goals since moving here (far aside from finding a job) has been finding local restaurants. I would consider myself more of a rubber cager. But along with being sick of fast food and enjoyment of cooking for myself came a desire to try a lot of local food places.

Today I wanted to try Firehouse Subs, a place that I thought was local, but my mother informed me a little while ago that there's one off the highway up by her house, so that's kind of a bummer. BUT, it was AWESOME. They have amazing subs, and Matt and I decided that it was way better than Jimmy John's, and we couldn't decide if it was better than Quizno's. The only problem was that the sandwiches were HUGE, and I couldn't finish mine even though I ordered the smallest size. The interior was really cute too, with Dalmation-spotted tabletops and fireman-themed everything.

My current adventure has been looking for a church down here. What makes this interesting is that I'm pretty flexible about church-going; I went to a Presbyterian kindergarten, but soon after that we stopped attending church altogether. In high school my now-former-roommate Julie started dragging me to her Methodist church, and I continued going to a Methodist church through college because that's what I was used to. I don't really consider myself to be of any particular denomination though; I prefer to label myself a Christian and leave it at that, because sometimes the labels cause too many problems among different groups. So we've been trying out a lot of different places. So far we've found the Church that Feels Like School and the Rock Concert Church, both of which we've nixed. I don't know what I'm looking for, but I haven't found it yet. But the search has been fun. I think I'll just know when the place is right.

By the way, now because of this town, I keep trying to capitalize the word "college," even when used to informally describe the university which I attended. Thanks for that.