Letters to the Editor
-
Wait a while
There's nothing wrong with changing your mind and going back home if that's what you want. But everyone I know who has relocated to a new place feels alienated and lost when they've been there about as long as you have. The novelty has worn off and you suddenly feel "is this all there is?"
Give it another six months or a year before you uproot yourself again, so that you don't end up asking yourself the same questions in 3 months, but in the same place where you started.
(Having said all that, I don't think I'd like San Diego for the long-term either. But you must have had a reason to go there. Give yourself a little time to figure out what that is.)
-
Regional snobbery
The bi-coastal snobbery exhibited in these letters is palpable. Is it really possible that y'all can only be comfortable in 2 or 3 extremely crowded, expensive cities? My sympathies.
Oh, and don't look down from 35,000 feet as you cruise above "fly-over country". We're doing just fine, thank you very much.
Buzzardcheater
-
Welcome to the Badlands
>I'm a native-born Californian who's spent significant time in LA, SF, and SD. And I gotta tell ya, dude: It's not you. It's San Diego.
Could not have said it any better. San Diego is a thinly-spread, culture-less wasteland. The job market is tight, housing is astronomically expensive and traffic is a bona fide nightmare. Corruption is open and runs deep. The whole of southern California from Santa Barbara is hideously overbuilt and oversold. Recently someone asked me what I liked best about living here and my best answer was "It was a nice place up until about 1972."
I mean, San Diego has two large colleges but none of the experimentation or fun you'd expect. The very creepy military omnipresence makes the hair on the back of your neck stand up. Your will be the only car without one of those military parking stickers on the windshield.
Single exception: Ocean Beach. Check it out.
-
Not surprised
It has been my experience that East Coasters have a much more difficult time assimilating in other parts of the country than other people do, like a southerner moving to New York. The bitter side of me wants to say it's because they're all incredible snobs but I'm not sure that's it. (Although I live in Austin, and I once got into an argument with a guy in a bar who had just moved here from New York who said that the only original ideas in the country come from New York. A friend of mine said they have to tell themselves things like that to justify living in that hell-hole.) Admittedly, the East coast is the most unique part of America, resembling Europe more than the rest of the United States. But few could probably deny a pretty intense cultural snobbery going on. I can't say that's what's going on with this guy because I don't know him, but he might want to look really deep within himself and make sure he isn't just prematurely writing everyone off because they're not "New Yorkers."
-
Exhibit A: Neil Diamond’s “I Am, I Said”
This is a universal phenomenon, LW. You can see it graphically on display here from the other writers—and the song I reference in my subject line; give it a listen if you haven’t.
And me too. I’ve lived in Santa Barbara, then Connecticut and Boston, and now Portland Oregon, with a couple of other stops as well. In fact I have never lived longer than 8 years in the same rough geographical area. Generally I had little choice in these moves for various reasons; my trip to Portland from Boston and my life discovered here sounds almost identical to your journey and experiences. The people, the new money, the cultures, all of it. I know exactly where you’re coming from.
And I know at this point that it would be basically the same between any two wide points for any thinking person. You’re going to be the stranger in a strange land for a while no matter where you go. Point being the constant is you, stranger, and not the strange land itself, whichever one it is.
I myself am dealing with it this year by visiting. Plane tickets from coast to coast ain’t so bad, even if you are making next to no money. If it’s a priority you can make it happen. For you it might be enough to just visit a few times a year, and you don’t necessarily have to BE one thing or another—BE a West Coaster or BE an East Coaster in your own mind, et cetera, and that being the one means you’re not the other.
Because in the end this question is “what is home”, and how you’re tied to certain things by blood, developmental experiences, your own mental bent, and on and on and on. I won’t tackle that one here as I also still wrestle with it and I know my eventual answer will be mine and nobody else’s.
So, you know. Give it some time AND give it some visits. You may find that in the end you do want to BE that one thing or another and return to that particular place. You may not. And it is OK to feel that way no matter which way it goes. There’s nothing supernatural about either place; this is the geography of you that’s being explored. Cary doesn’t have that answer and neither does anybody else. Best of luck to you, sir or madam.
-
Not a big deal
I lived in California for a few years years (mostly in SF) and I absolutely hated it! I got off the plane in New England in mid-October and found I was home. Loved the outdoors in Califonia and the Northwest, but was never that comfortable with the people or the culture. And most of the friends I made were from back East, even if they had been in CA for twenty years.
That said, stay a while. A friend of mine moved out to LA in her early twenties and absolutely loves it. She's never coming back. But as other have suggested, try LA or San Francisco -- SD is a little weird. It's not really a "city" city. Or try Portland or Seattle.
Some people just aren't West Coasters. That's not good or bad, it just is. But eight months isn't long enough to find out.