During my 33 years, I've lived in (at least) 23 different domiciles, 13 cities, nine states and three time zones. Still, I've always considered myself a midwesterner at heart. This is mostly because I lived in Kansas and Missouri from the ages of 3 to 12, and after a five-year sojourn in New Mexico, I returned to grab my sheepskin at the University of Missouri.

Since the fall of 1993, though, I have lived in the eastern time zone, and for the past nine years I've lived within shooting distance of the Atlantic Ocean. When I visit cities like Baltimore, Philadelphia and Washington, I feel right at home.

I used to feel that way when returning to the midwest. But not anymore.

A couple weeks ago my family gathered at my grandma's house in Manhattan, Kan. Manhattan is an extreme example of the midwestern college town: a metropolis of some 45,000 folks, about half of whom are students. It's difficult to go a block without encountering some sort of K-State regalia.

There is an air of decay in cities like Manhattan, small midwestern towns that never quite achieved critical mass. The university will always keep the town afloat, but unlike Lawrence (home of the University of Kansas) or Columbia (my own private college town), there's not much else going on.

The drive from Kansas City (where my parents live) to Manhattan is similarly depressing. Some of the small towns outside Kansas City and Topeka are growing, but they're sprouting dreadfully ugly moonscape developments, patches of land mowed down by bulldozers and then re-seeded with some of the dreariest and unimaginatively-designed houses you can imagine. The centers of these towns are still alive, but barely. The new occupants work in the cities, and they apparently also drive "into the city" for most of their needs.

During my stays in Battle Creek, Mich., and York, Pa., I saw similar things, but I was always close enough to real cities (Chicago, Detroit, Philly and Baltimore) to go out and find some adventure now and again. The rust belt, which has been decaying for more than 50 years, has a glorious history to rely upon. Cleveland, Toledo and Detroit are still magnificent cities, even if the streets do need a little work and some neighborhoods aren't exactly golden. Out on the Great Plains, Kansas City and Minneapolis are growing a little bit, smaller centers like Topeka, Omaha, Wichita and Oklahoma City are holding on (if barely) and towns the size of Manhattan and smaller are declining year by year.

But it's not just the spectre of slow decline that unsettles me. It's the people themselves. Midwesterners are famous for their earnestness. Down south, the tradition is to smile to your face and then whisper behind your back. Up in the northeast, you're more likely to be denounced loudly, on principle if for no other good reason. Out west you'll simply get a smile and a dismissive wave. In the midwest, however, folks will detail your faults dispassionately and then tell you they don't care much what you do as long as you do it out of sight. This tradition of libertarian tolerance is currently being challenged by the self-righteous Christian conservative types, but so far the old school is holding off the Huns.

I'm still mostly midwestern in the way that I approach people, but I've come to prefer the southern or northeastern ways when it comes to how people treat me. It's not that I've become more accepting of hypocrisy, but more that I simply don't have the time to listen to a lengthy discourse when I know it's going to end with "but, hey, it's your life."

For better or worse, the last ten years that I've spent "out east" have transformed me into someone who appreciates brusqueness. And since my little corner of the New South is home to more displaced northeasterners than any other spot between D.C. and Miami, that's what I get to deal with on a regular basis. I still prefer the vagaries of midwestern weather (85 degrees one day in February and 5 below two days later), but I must also admit a strong attraction to the ocean, which is something I experienced only once during my first 15 years.

So now I live three hours from the coast and four hours from the tallest mountains of all Appalachia. The current tourism ad campaign here is "I can do it all in North Carolina." This isn't completely true--I have to get back to Kansas City to enjoy truly superior barbecue, and there isn't a decent roller coaster park to be found in the entire state--but it's still a reasonably accurate slogan.

Come December, I will have lived in Durham for a longer period of time than I have lived anywhere else, eclipsing my five years in Clovis, N.M. Maybe it's natural that this is the time I finally realize that my birth in Rochester, N.Y., may not have been a fluke. I might have spent most of my formative years in the middle of the country, but my home is somewhere close enough to the Atlantic to see seagulls on a regular basis.

I've never really claimed a hometown. Kansas City probably comes closest, but I can't and won't go "home" again. Durham certainly isn't my hometown, but it's where I live. I like it here, and after four-and-a-half years, I'm still happy here. That's gotta mean something. If they fix the beer laws, I might even stick around a while longer.

Jon Worley always tells people "I was born in Rochester, New York, and lived there for six weeks." This is basically true, though he neglects to mention that his parents simply left for the summer and then returned for another academic year.