ann arbor is overrated.

Ah, Cafe Zola, my beloved Cafe Zola. The one place in town where you could get good coffee in a ceramic cup and sit alone until midnight, rising occasionally to get free refills from the cute-but-disaffected counter person and stir in lumps of crystallized sugar.

Sure, you played far too much jazz and Broadway music, but you had the right spirit. You are where I met that friend of a friend who completely blew me off over e-mail later when I first moved here, and you were there when I needed to look vaguely aloof while reading papers.

Now you are a full-service restaurant, with waiters and waitresses. Maybe I’ll bring my grandma for brunch next time she’s in town.

The problem with Ann Arbor is not that it is a hick town. It’s the continued insistence that it is a very sophisticated place.

Consider the top story of the The Ann Arbor News’ most recent free weekly. It is a piece about a woman who owns many colorful hats. Complete with a headline that makes reference to “hat couture,” it keeps up the tone of the small-town newspaper throughout, preparing the reader for police reports of a dog who’s been attacking woodchucks. The “hat lady,” as she is known, says that, when you wear a hat, “you take on the personality of that hat.” She wears flowered hats in spring and straw ones in the summer.

The story concludes by noting her fondness for collecting rocks. “They make me feel connected on a spiritual level with nature,” she says.

I’ve been reading other diaries from Ann Arbor, and it seems like a common complaint at the moment is that the diarist is stuck at home (i.e., his or her parents’) for the summer (which begins in April, on the U-M academic calendar.) But there are a number of reasons not to be in Ann Arbor just now.

1. Everything closes at 6 p.m. Special new summer hours make it near impossible to read papers while sitting in a coffeehouse. There’s no one to provide atmosphere while you’re doing so except for other freaky grad students like yourself anyway.

2. If you do stick around, you’ll be assumed to be a freaky grad student.

On the other hand, there are some reasons why being in Ann Arbor may be the best of all possible worlds.

1. Your friends in that other city you lived in? You’d be having the best time with them right now if it weren’t for the fact that you’re stuck in Ann Arbor, since you’re so incredibly popular in your old city. You’d be going out with them every night, or maybe just staying in your apartment, which has become a sort of literary salon for those in the know. It would be just like last sum…oh, wait.

2. There are plenty of shows going on, since to have it otherwise would be to admit that people are on the U-M calendar. Which is not cool. EMU is okay, Wayne State is okay, dropped-out-of-State-and-working-at-ERC is okay. But not the ‘U.’ If you go there, at least have the decency to post to your favorite indie/hardcore list with your Hotmail account.

3. Your landlady’s painter’s band is playing the Lager House sometime soon.

All I wanted was some aluminum foil, preferably within close walking distance. I live in “downtown” Ann Arbor, so that shouldn’t be too difficult.

Unfortunately, the closest grocery store is a few miles away from my house. That leaves me with the People’s Food Co-op, which doesn’t carry aluminum foil, the gourmet market in Kerrytown, which I assume doesn’t carry aluminum foil (platinum foil, maybe) and a little convenience store that does happen to have aluminum foil, but has virtually no other groceries that don’t have hydrogenated vegetable oil or high fructose corn syrup in the top two ingredients.

There are three New Age candle stores within close walking distance of my house.

Welcome to Ann Arbor Sucks, the Web’s main source for examining and quantifying the off-the-charts suckiness of this seemingly harmless little Midwestern college town.

After living here about nine months, I feel that I’m ideally qualified to report on the lameness of Ann Arbor (or A^2, if you’re one of those locals who insists on this cutesy, gag-inducing nickname. That’s pronounced “A squared.”) Why? I’ve been around just long enough to absorb the soulless, yuppified, no-fun atmosphere, but not long enough to forget why these things are wrong.