Home State.

I'm originally from Alaska, and I still take great pride in calling myself Alaskan. I moved away for graduate school, then to take a job, but even though it has now been 20 years I still consider it but a temporary move!To be more precise, I'm from Southeast Alaska (geographically, about midway up British Columbia), and at this point my feelings of being from the Pacific Northwest has sort of become stronger than my feelings about being from Alaska.So I guess it's becoming the fact that I am now identifying more with my home region than my home state.By the way, yes, "American" is just what it says in my passport. I consider my US citizenship more of a legal fact than an emotional tie. My emotional ties are to the Northwest in general (including the Canadian part of it), and Southeast Alaska specifically.

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Speaking personally, I find few things more awesome than contemplating this vast and majestic process of evolution, the ebb and flow of successive biotas through geological time. Creationists and others who cannot for ideological or religious reasons accept the fact of evolution miss out a great deal, and are left with a claustrophobic little universe in which nothing happens and nothing changes.
-- M. Alan Kazlev

Probably because its where I grew up, so it seems most familiar to me. The scenery is gorgeous -- still has a lot of wilderness areas left. There are both mountains and the ocean -- in fact, in Southeast Alaska the mountains come right out of the ocean: (Thanks to imageshack for free picture hosting.)Also the politics are much more to my liking -- much more to the left than most of the rest of the US. Not so much in Alaska, but even there when I grew up the conservatism was much a more libertarian, leave other people alone, mind your own business thing than the more hateful religious right bigotry that came in during the Reagan years.In Washington and Oregon you have your rednecks and your biker gangs and your new age hippies and your high tech yuppies -- a pretty cool diversity of people, if you ask me. (I like the people here in Oklahoma and all, but everyone is so...square.)Speaking of diversity, there is also a pretty large Asian community (where I grew up, mostly Filipino), and also a lot of American Natives that have retained more of their culture than they have in other areas. Even as a kid I was always fascinated by Northwest Coast Native art (this site has a representative sample of the sort of thing I like).