Home and sick.
Home now. Happy Thanksgiving.
I've been feeling homesick lately.
It's becoming increasingly difficult to keep from screaming out "The east coast is a soulless pit full of pale people who dress in tasteful collared shirts and short skirts and pointy-toed high heels all carefully matched in seasonally-appropriate color schemes and live in boxy houses and who relax by sitting in bars and getting drunk and only work hard in search of some kind of external validation and eat beautiful food that tastes uniformly like cardboard and nobody touches anyone unless it's sexual," where by "east coast" I actually mean the ivy-league Princeton microcosm that I spend most of my time in.
I mean, I know that isn't entirely fair. East coast people who get stuck in California complain about the lack of seasons and black-and-white cookies.
But really, instead of mountains and sea, there are strip malls and wimpy trees. What am I supposed to do?
The weather is dipping towards winter. Last week the temperature dropped 30 degrees within a couple hours, and when I woke up yesterday morning the sidewalk was dotted with frozen plates of ice covering the puddles from the rain the day before.
When I took my bike out, the gear shift and brakes were stuck until I pulled on the cables and little chunks of ice fell out.
With other students from the bay area, we reminisce about cheap food that doesn't suck, about living in Berkeley co-ops, about Gaskell ball. With students who aren't, I end up trying to explain what exactly it is about long-haired bi Pagan poly geeks that I miss, and tell probably inappropriate stories about food orgy and naked hot tubbing that are sure to brand me as a hairy hippy for years to come.
Am I so fundamentally a west-coast person that I'll never be happy anywhere else?
(Update: Mike, native east-coaster and former Princetonite, responds to my holier-than-thou grousing.)
Comments
The bay area is the only place to be.
Posted by: Ian Hickson | November 25, 2005 02:48 AM
I so identify with many things you've mentioned in this entry. One of my favorite things to do is talk to my east coast/midwest friends about things that happen in the co-ops like the food orgy at Loth (and I've never even been to it)!
Down here in the South, it's different than the northeast in certain ways though. People are friendly. The food is interesting (NC BBQ, okra, sweet tea, etc.) although the variety of international options is limited. The mountains and beach aren't really too far (3 hours in each direction), which means outdoorsy things are accessible.
Still, it's not the west coast. That spark of quirkiness that defines what it is to be from the west coast just isn't there. For example, people being mortified when I talk about large self-governing houses full of students (i.e., co-ops), drug experimentation, social nudity, etc.
And the drinking thing does weird me out. Maybe it's just part of living in a college town far away from a real city? I mean, this is CS grad school and I have friends who still drink to the point of puking *every week*. At Cal, people drank, but not like this or at least not the people I knew.
Lucky me, I get to move to Seattle soon though (:
Posted by: Jeff | November 25, 2005 08:34 PM
I so identify with many things you've mentioned in this entry. One of my favorite things to do is talk to my east coast/midwest friends about things that happen in the co-ops like the food orgy at Loth (and I've never even been to it)!
Down here in the South, it's different than the northeast in certain ways though. People are friendly. The food is interesting (NC BBQ, okra, sweet tea, etc.) although the variety of international options is limited. The mountains and beach aren't really too far (3 hours in each direction), which means outdoorsy things are accessible.
Still, it's not the west coast. That spark of quirkiness that defines what it is to be from the west coast just isn't there. For example, people being mortified when I talk about large self-governing houses full of students (i.e., co-ops), drug experimentation, social nudity, etc.
And the drinking thing does weird me out. Maybe it's just part of living in a college town far away from a real city? I mean, this is CS grad school and I have friends who still drink to the point of puking *every week*. At Cal, people drank, but not like this or at least not the people I knew.
Lucky me, I get to move to Seattle soon though (:
Posted by: Jeff | November 25, 2005 08:36 PM
Sorry for the multiple posts. When I hit 'Post' I got a 501 error page and didn't think it had gone through.
Posted by: Jeff | November 25, 2005 08:37 PM