I’m a geographical mutt. I’ve had over 30 residences in my life (and hopefully not counting). I’ve lived in places that I love. I’ve lived in places that I tolerated, at best. My Midwest experiment was one of the latter. For five years I lived in Columbus, Ohio, even though I travelled so much that I only lived around 3 of those years in the city. I’m not going to bash Columbus, but this is the way I always described it: A perfectly average city that is proud of being perfectly average. Rumor has it (this was pre-internet, so no Googling back then) that Columbus was used as a test market because it was perfectly average. If it succeeded or failed in Columbus, the results were scalable to the remainder of the US.

So now I’m Nashville, that dynamic music and healthcare dynamo racking up the top 10 list trophies like candy. So what gets announced today? That I’m perfectly average once again because Nashville is the most average city in the US. Damn. It’s not comforting to know that Columbus is #15. Oh how the mighty have fallen.

Read more here.