The White City.

Photo by nevermindtheend.

In January 2003, when I was twenty-four and punch drunk on city life, I moved to Minneapolis from my home town of Chicago.

Once I arrived in the Twin Cities metropolian area, I moved into Jonny's colonial-style suburban apartment complex, a vanilla variation on the "brick shitbox" school of architecture. The building looked municipal from the outside, like a White House ringer erected on the cheap. Inside our unit, we had white walls, white appliances, white noise and carpets the color of untrammeled sand in Kauai. In Chicago, I'd lived in a cluttered walk-up adjacent to a liquor lounge and a center for homicidal youth. My new lodgings, by contrast, were pin-drop silent. My life felt like a dry-erase board that had been wiped of all its past transgressions and left turns into sordid moral territory. In Minnesota, I could be the the most anonymous girl in the world. I could reinvent myself as a lacrosse champ from Topeka if I wanted to. I could deign Mafia ties and carry a teacup Maltese about town. I could change my name to Lynn, get bulimic, and hork ZonePerfect bars into the talking garbage cans at Ridgedale Mall. It was magic! I had erased myself, just like Lisa Loeb in that one supergay video.

After two days spent wandering shell-shocked around town, I somehow got a job as a copy typist...as I filled reams of paper with dopey radio scripts, I watched the snow fall past my twenty-sixth-floor window. The flakes plummeted so swiftly from the gray strata of clouds that they didn't seem to going up or down. That winter, I dubbed Minneapolis the "White City" because the world around me looked like a blank answer bubble on a standardized test.

- Diablo Cody, Candy Girl: A Year in the Life of an Unlikely Stripper, 2005