Age 6: I read and reread my mom's old geography textbooks because they have cool maps of world resources (it was here that my social skills began to decline and crashed and burned soon afterwards).
Age 7: I dream of growing up and becoming a postal worker, so I can hang out with envelopes with different zip codes all day.
Age 8: I am gifted all of our family's National Geographic magazines so that I can begin map-hoarding in earnest.
Age 11: A real estate agent stops by our house, leaving her two maps of Northampton County and Lehigh County, which I then look at until they fall apart.
Age 12: I create my own wallpaper in my room, plastering National Geographic maps on every inch of wall space in my bedroom. Sisters complain that there's no room to put up their movie posters without accidentally tearing or obscuring Lithuania.
Age 14: I begin a years-long search to find a map of Bucks County (it really was that difficult pre-Internet).
Age 15: We purchase a copy of Microsoft Streets and Trips. I won't tell you how much time I spent with this thing.
Age 17: On a Starcraft kick, I download and print multiplayer maps so I can plot my strategy.
Age 19: I discover GoogleMaps. My life reaches a high point.
Age 23: I discover GoogleMaps StreetView. My life reaches a new high point, more awesome than I could ever possibly imagine.
Age 25: I realize that there are other people as weird as me out there somewhere who devote their lives to creating nifty web-based maps. I make it my mission to find them all.
Age 27: I find the New York City Snow Removal Map. My life is complete.
But I digress.
Anyway, I thought I'd share a pretty cool map today. This is the Subway Inequality Map. Some unwashed person with no friends matched NYC subway stops with the median income of the stop's census tracts, so you can take a virtual ride down the 7 line and guess where the tourists go and don't go. It really is pretty neat!
I know how you feel exactly...I grew up 27 miles from NYC (in NJ) and was always hearing traffic reports on WCBS NY, which named all the traffic clogged highways, bridges,etc. Then one day I found my parents map of the NYC boroughs, and was enthralled. All those places I'd heard of now on a map. Another fond memory of childhood was seeing my father painstakingly plan our summer trips using his old Esso maps and this little gadget that tracked mileage. I have loved maps ever since, and almost deplore GPS devices, because they have caused people to have absolutely no clue about where places are located and how to get to those places.
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