I'm just here to ask Julian if he needs a roomate for when I go to Austin this August, cause I need all the help with rent I can get. I'll be working on a PhD, so I won't bother anyone.

But also, go to Maryland. VERY easy to get to Baltimore, D.C. and Virginia all from a 30-minute Metro ride. Amazing. Loved that experience.

Thanks for visiting my home town of DFW, Justin. Hope you loved the super simplistic airport every out-of-stater loves more than their own children and I say that with zero sarcasm. None whatsoever.

If I had room I'd be down, actually. But I don't think I could move the shit in my game room to give you space without making the rest of the house barely liveable. 

Also my cat pees on the carpet between the office and game room, so it's kinda gross.

For anything less than $1000 in Austin, I'll take it! I got pretty used to earning a median (for the country)) income in Nacogdoches and am VERY aware that will stop being my reality, so that cat can pee on whatever it wants really. 

In all seriousness though, I'll be in Austin in July/August and would love to hang out (assuming you haven't left the state by then; my initial goal before they let my dumbass get a PhD was Maryland where my friend moved).

I lived in Baltimore for a couple of years. Expensive AF, especially car insurance. Not to mention your car pretty much has to be driven right off the dealer lot to the nearest inspection station to have any hope of passing Maryland's motor vehicle inspection.

We hoofed it pretty much everywhere when I visited, so ... Hmmm ...

You can hoof it in DC, MoCo, PG County, and NoVA pretty decently due to the Metro. Baltimore, unfortunately, doesn't have comprehensive mass transit like DC, NYC, or Boston do. Most of the city is serviced by an inadequate bus system. There is light rail, but it mostly connects Owings Mills and Timonium to Downtown, with a couple of stops in Glen Burnie. It does connect to Penn Station and the Acela line that services the BosWash corridor. 

When I lived there, I was as stranded without a car there as I would be in Phoenix. And that's a shame, because the city really needs something more than a bus that comes by every few hours to service a lot of its poorer neighborhoods.

There is definitley lots of interesting stuff there. One of my favorite places there was Boring, home of the Boring Volunteer Fire Department and the Boring United Methodist Church. It's northwest of Baltimore.