und1sk0: (Default)
[personal profile] und1sk0
let loose on the roommate after hearing one too many jokes about cleveland..

if you grew up in SF, listen up:

* your public transportation is embarrassingly bad; privatization of the SF municipal rail, BART and Caltrain are all failed experiments and the "free market" wants it both ways: cheap transportation of labor but restricted public funding of transportation. sorry, public transportation needs to be truly publicly funded and not run as a for profit business; and industry must chip in it if expects to reap the benefits. why can't the bay area get this right? [ETA: bad in SF, nearly nonexistent in Cleveland.. I am comparing SF to Europe/Canada, etc other places that get pub. xport right.]

* if you grew up in the bay area, chances are you are a dullard, entitled, smug gadabout with no class and no sense of culture (beyond, perhaps, 1960s counter culture and its offspring or your chosen gender/race identity). this is not universally true, but there is a softening of the mind that happens to people who live sheltered, entitled lives. i am not immune, but the hardships of coming from an economically depressed, yet vibrantly multi-cultural place like cleveland has i think better prepared me to truly be open to new ideas, arts, music and culture than many of the insular SF natives I have met. sorry, but it's true and everyone from outside of the Bay Area knows it (although few openly acknowledge it). part of it is poor education, part of it is geopolitical isolation, and part of it is, i don't know, not having real weather. who knows why?

[ETA obviously i am exaggerating.. but have you ever noticed that ppl in SF tend to talk about the same four or five topics over and over, endlessly, until the brain numbs? maybe it's my fault for having boring friends..]

* yours is a racist, segregated city. and I know racist, because east side cleveland = black and west side = eastern european / german / polish. still, clevelanders manage to intermingle better than natives of san francisco, who often give lip service to diversity without actually being diverse at all.

* bagels. can't get 'em in San Francisco.. what passes for corned beef is horrid. you have to go to mt view to find a decent deli (dittmer's).. san francisco's food scene lacks soul. oakland's doesn't, but oakland is quickly going the way of the mission in terms of gentrification. there is wonderful food in san francisco, to be sure, but it is not the same as a street-corner gyro in the flats or perogies out in rocky river or venison jerky in ashtabula. and yes, there is some terrible, terrible food in the midwest. skyline chili? awful. these days, sf is no more a food mecca than las vegas. why is that?

* SF politics are near anarchy. now, i love the newsome/daly show as much as the next liberal wonk, but sometimes it is just embarrassing to have to explain to a normal person, a normal progressive even, the machinations of myopic SF identity politics and the clowning around in city hall. progressive politics in places like oakland, cleveland, detroit, baltimore, etc are about solving real hard problems. it should be the same in SF. often, it's about looking and sounding like a fucking idiot to the rest of the world. I am talking to you, Chris Daly.

Now, I have lived in SF for nearly 15 years and I will probably continue to live in it for many years to come. I imagine living most of the rest of my life in california somewhere. but I get sick of hearing about how much better it is than everywhere else on the planet, especially from people who haven't really traveled outside of the bay area at all.

San Francisco, you are not the only city in the world. i love you, but get the fuck over yourself.

Date: 2010-04-21 11:54 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] loic.livejournal.com
Yes.

So much douchebag arrogance.

Date: 2010-04-22 02:07 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] hep.livejournal.com
srsly? ur from ohio. call me with a rant when yr not from a flyover state that relocates over half its population to my city yearly. if i had my way i would evict every states foreigner from this town and let only foreign national immigrants in from now on.

the reason this fkn city sucks so goddamn bad is because fools keep moving here for a year and then trying to tell people how it should be done. all i see from this rant is "the problem with sf is other people moved here". almost all of these points are directly attributable to out of state immigration, with the exception of bagels, but i am just not that big of a bagel fan, but politics, city feel, food, douchebags telling people what sf is or isn't, etc, all ruined by people moving here from the midwest and fucking up my chi. evict everyone, lets go back to yerba buena days, and only mexicans are allowed in from here on out.

Date: 2010-04-22 02:38 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] und1sk0.livejournal.com
i could live with a mexican only sf..

Date: 2010-04-22 02:39 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] und1sk0.livejournal.com
and sorry, but most ppl from sf are boring and daft and smug..

smug

Date: 2010-04-22 02:48 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] und1sk0.livejournal.com
"flyover state"? come on listen to yourself, you prove my point right there. natives are stuck up!

anyway, loosen up. you know i love you, but sf is not the center of the universe. it needs to be knocked down a few pegs now and then.

besides, you know you love us refugees.

Re: smug

Date: 2010-04-22 03:02 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] hep.livejournal.com
my point is that if sf were so terrible there wouldn't be DROVES of people moving here every year, PARTICULARLY from ohio. yes, sf has huge issues, and MOST of them lead right back to people moving here from out of state so they can tell people from here how bad it is or how terrible we are doing or what we should really do now. read your OWN post again, and you will see what i mean.

i realize it must be super annoying to move somewhere and then have someone tell you how awesome it is for forever, and how much where you are from sucks. but if where you were from was so awesome and spectacular, you would still be there, and if you don't want to hear how awesome somewhere new is, then don't move there. this just reads off as "OH SF, LET ME TELL YOU HOW YOU SHOULD BE" which is yet another privileged out of stater coming around to act like their commentary on sf is worth something. it's not. because you are either from here or from there (in the heart, not where you were born), and if you aren't from here, your commentary on here isn't genuine, because it means you are just another flyover *person* who lives in sf for awhile before middleage, whines about how terrible it is, and then moves away eventually. about the only group worse than people who move here to spend their youth then flee are people who voted for prop 13.

Re: smug

Date: 2010-04-22 03:42 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] und1sk0.livejournal.com
i'm not saying sf is terrible, i'm saying its not perfect. and the natives take as much blame as anyone for that. i'm sick and tired of bay area nativism and chauvinism.

Re: smug

Date: 2010-04-22 03:43 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] und1sk0.livejournal.com
as much *to* blame

Re: smug

Date: 2010-04-22 03:49 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] und1sk0.livejournal.com
FWIW I didn't vote for prop 13 (as I was 3), and I wouldn't vote for it today.

Date: 2010-04-23 02:58 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] etler.livejournal.com
Slight correction, Dittmer's is in Mountain View. But yes, the delis are few and far between and Dittmer's is about the best I've found. Even still their corned beef is pretty much crap compared to NYC or the midwest. I have been searching for real honest to goodness delicious neon pink corned beef for about 10 years in CA and I have yet to find anything that comes close to what I grew up on.

Date: 2010-04-24 04:34 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] und1sk0.livejournal.com
Noted, will edit.

Hopefully Ravi's sous vide gizmo will be operational by the time I get back to CA and we can just make corned beef en masse (potential career change, pay it forward to SF by bringing them the good meats? [livejournal.com profile] hepkitten, would this atone for my sins of being from the Midwest?)..

Date: 2011-09-03 06:07 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] fonem.livejournal.com
sf ain't that great

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