I had spent all my youth in California beaches, primarily in San Diego and Santa Barbara. By the time I reached a college age I started feeling suffocated by the idyllic southern CA culture and decided to attend Cal-Berkeley as my only choice of school. I fell in love with Berkeley and the bay area culture and wanted to make the area my permanent home, but there were no job opportunities upon graduating, so when the first job offer came from Boston, I took it. That was in the 90’s, and the whole time since then, I’ve been dreaming of returning to CA to retire. But funny thing happened. Each time I visited my parents’ home in San Diego, as well as the bay area, or L.A., which I have done often and continue to do for family reunions, I started getting suffocated and really disliking my CA visits. A couple of years ago, when I took a vacation in San Francisco and Napa Valley because my wife and my boys had never been there, we decided to tour both Berkeley and Stanford campus. While Berkeley, as a town and not the campus itself, seemed to have dilapidated quite a bit since my student years, Stanford campus, by contrast, had the appearance of being immaculate and sanitary in cleanliness. Yet, what struck me was that Stanford, in its seeming beauty at first impression, started making me feel suffocated again as if it represented that boring, idyllic and clean southern CA culture, probably due to its uniform Spanish architecture that resembles San Diego’s Barboa Park. In fact, I have a large canvas poster photo of my wife on my wall from our trip to Barboa Park, and a friend of mine, upon seeing the photo, asked me, “was that from Stanford?”
The point is that, if you’re coming from the east coast, moving to the west probably would do you a whole lot in terms of broadening your perspectives, just as it did to me when I did the opposite, enough that I long ago gave up the youthful idea of wanting to retire in the Golden State. But this whole argument and the selling point using the superior weather thing is all up to individual preference, not a universal thing. I met someone while waiting for a T ride in Boston one time, and his image of San Diego was “heaven,” while for someone like me, I could only tolerate San Diego for a short stay for a family reunion. I need snow, palpable subtleties of four seasons, a sense of history about the place, etc. It’s an individual thing, and as an individual preference, I’d much rather be a part of the place with so much rich tradition, history, culture, seasons, etc. Of course, all that I love now in my life’s stage might just as well be suffocating to another who can hardly wait to experience something entirely different…
