The city specifically.
Me too. Who said anything about terror?
That’s too bad that it provokes such strong emotions. Yes, my bad, you only said stress and dread. I would hate to have such a visceral reaction too. I’ve lived in so many different cities and countries at this point that they’re all beginning to run together except for cost-of-living issues. Even Boston seems quite pleasant in hindsight. I can no longer work up a real sense of like or dislike for any place…L.A. is just okay.
I would really like to try San Francisco out for a year because it seems lively and the area is so beautiful, but I really like my Los Angeles based co-workers and I’m not sure I’d trade the SF experience for a stress-free environment 40 hours a week.
Gee, that’s kind of too bad. I hope you can find someplace that you really do like. At least, one of the great pleasures in my life is the love I have for my town (which admittedly befuddles some of my neighbors, but others understand). I love where I live, just driving around makes me happy. It’s just a really wonderful place, and we hope to stay forever.
(I’m not trying to put this in the North/South argument; I’m sure I could find a town to love in another state, too. I just mean that a love of place is a great thing to have.)
Yes. I love Santa Barbara. It is my home. I will never leave. I have been on some amazing vacations and it is never a let down for the vacation to be over because I am coming back home to SB and I miss it when I am away.
Umm yeah, so what are you doing to curb our population growth down here? We didn’t wake up one morning and decide to build another diversionary canal, the pressure of population growth compelled it. Yet, population growth in California is virtually entirely due to immigration, if we count children of first generation immigrants. And to suggest repatriating illegals or restricting illegal immigration is pretty much taboo.
I’ll second this, and I went to UCSD and UCLA. “Cal” or even “California” is just the old traditional name for UCB; they were there first, and they were entitled to it. However, IMO, “UC” means any or all of the campuses and should be used that way.
I love SF and would probably like to live there some day, but the “smoggy cultural wasteland” barbs get really tiresome. We’ve got so much going on culturally in this city–museums, theater, live music, dance, you name it–that those epithets just don’t make sense anymore. On the other hand, I admit that no place has suffered as much as L.A. from the callous disregard of history and aesthetics by developers, and that is really too bad.
I’m not sure about this “wheel” you speak of. I haven’t seen many farm animals but the land is indeed fruitful in what we call “nerds”. I think these nerds could be useful to you in the special effects you use for your films. 
Not much to report about the women. They tend to avoid me. 
Don’t take that personally but yeah that’s kinda what I meant. My brother did exactly what you said and sold his house in san jose to relocate to Redding.
Every time he comes back to visit he makes some declaration on how much better it is up there. I’ve been up that way to see him (in fact I’m going up there for thanksgiving) many times and while I think its very pretty, I would die of boredom.
Hmm…UCSD (class of '89) and UCLA (grad school, class of '96) grad here too, perhaps we’ve crossed paths at some point.
My wife was born and raised in the Sacramento area, I was born and raised in the LA & Orange Co. area. When we met at UCSD I’d constantly rag on her about her “cowtown” hometown. Whelp, she finally won me over, and we’ve spent the last 7 years here in the suburbs of Sacramento. I don’t miss LA one bit, when I visit there I re-experience a palplable level of tension and weariness that I don’t get here. Unfortunately, the suburban sprawl in this area is transfoming it more and more into something like metro O.C., such that I’m not sure I’ll remain happy here.
I’ve been secretly harboring a dream of selling everything and buying a house with an ocean view along a sparsely populated stretch of coast north of Fort Bragg. Until I moved to Sacto, I’ve always lived within 5 miles of the ocean, and I kind of miss it.
Given Colusa’s proximity to a notable geological formation, I’d say you weren’t in the armpit but more like the butte. 
Oops, I meant to say, restricting legal immigration.
Nope–UCSD '80 and UCLA (master’s, '84). And yes, there was a little bit of intrastate rivalry in the dorms back there in San Diego. You couldn’t hate a place that had beaches like San Diego’s. The anti-southern animus was aimed squarely at L.A.
Sometimes it bordered on the ridiculous: once when we were having one of these arguments, a guy I knew who came from Torrance insisted how “different” it was from L.A. “Like night and day”, I remember him saying.
For those who don’t know So Cal, Torrance is across the street from L.A.
I was at UCSD from '82 to '90. (Revelle, BS and MS in Mechanical Engineering). Freshman year in the dorms was the first time I was made aware of the NoCal/SoCal rivalry.
See, I always hear the opposite. I swear, everyone south of Pismo, west of Nevada, and north of Escondido says they’re “from LA.” It’s like half a state full of Anaheim Angels.
In the Bay Area, the most general you’ll get is “the East Bay” or maybe a county. But if you’re from Daly City or Sausalito or Oakland, you ain’t from San Francisco. Which is probably why all these sports teams playing outside their namesake confounds the shit out of me.
Yeah, like I always marvel at the gorgeosity of Daly City on my way back to the airport. And Oakland, there’s another beauty spot.
To make a fair comparison between San Francisco and Los Angeles you have to take in the whole metro area of SF, not just the City and County.
One thing about L.A. is that as big and sprawly as the city proper is, there’s still dozens if not hundreds of communities within L.A. County, a couple completely surrounded by the City of L.A., and others in outlying areas. So anyone who lives in the county, which is large, can justifiably confess to being from L.A.
The other thing about being so geographically spread out is the city takes in the bad as well as the good. You guys just cherry picked the best 25 square miles of the bay area and called it San Francisco, but L.A. takes in everything.
That is totally incorrect. People from OC, Ventura and most certainly Santa Barbara would never in a million years say that they are from LA.
Well, by all means don’t move here. There are plenty of people as it is.
One man’s meat and all that. I would hate living in a large city (I still love Berkeley, but I couldn’t live there!), and I’m never bored.
Very true. I lived in Santa Maria for a long time, and we’re from the Central Coast, not LA. No one would ever dream of saying that–though that does make it tricky when you’re trying to tell someone from, say, Denmark where you’re from.
I’m sorry, I’ve just joined this thread at the bottom. Is it about some kind of fight between Nicholas Cage and John Cage? I’d Pay-Per-View to see that.
That’s funny, I experienced the same thing. I never realized the hate that L.A. had heaped upon it until I moved to S.D. I found that I had to deflect the animosity somewhat by saying that while born in L.A., I spent most of my life up to that time in O.C. (although, the distinction between the two is gone by now, IMO.)
hajario , I was AMES at Muir starting in Fall 1985. Maybe you were one of the evil TAs that made me see the light and decide that a life as a pocket-protector wearing, slide-rule-stroking engineer wasn’t for me. Instead, I found torturing small rodents for fun and profit in the name of science was more my style (I changed my major to Cell Biology/Biochemistry in Fall of 1986).