i still love OAKLAND

so... last week marcel over at pourtout pancakes wrote a blog about why he left new york citing a poster a florida marlins fan made that said, "if new york is soooo great... MOVE BACK." basically it annoys him when people who aren't from the south come to the south and talk about how great their hometown is compared to the south. he goes on to talk about how much better than his hometown the south happens to be. i am from OAKLAND, though i am in the south and have been since 2000. i can't knock marcel for feeling the way he does about new york but i have to disagree... i STILL fucks with my hometown...

only one thing about marcel's post bothered me, but i'll get back to that in a sec. i just want to point out 2 main things first. to contrast new york with the south, marcel writes:

I loved being out in nature, sitting in the back yard, just relaxing. It
was so different then New York, where there was so much stress.

The biggest difference was the people. In New York, everyone stayed to
themselves and never looked at each other. People were scared to make eye
contact with another person in fear of pissing them off and causing a problem.
New Yorkers were also rude and would shove each other in the street to get
somewhere.[…]

However, in Atlanta, it was different. I would be at Kroger or Home Depot
and people would just walk past me and say hello. […]

first of all, human contact is over rated. my own desire to be alone aside, life in the city can be stressful. san francisco appears to be more laid back than new york, but usually when people are walking down the street in a city, they are trying to get somewhere. i'm sure they don't mean to bump into people, but it happens when there are a ton of folks going in both directions. my experience in the city taught me not to bother people walking down the street with minor pleasantries. we save them for places that matter, like a grocery store or a department store. i'm sure there's nobody walking down the street saying hi and smiling in downtown altanta.

next, he compares the south to new york in terms of technological and occupational expansion, and sports access... i can concede that there probably isn't that much difference between the south and anywhere else in these areas for the most part... many companies have come to the south, in turn creating jobs. he also illustrates that the south is a central location for a variety of sports and teams. in his words,

Say you’re a New Yorker in Nashville like me. I can see my SUPER BOWL
WINNING CHAMPIONS (sorry!) Giants play the Titans or the Bengals and Falcons,
each three hours away. I can see my Mets play the Reds or Braves. I can see my
Rangers play the Predators or Thrashers. I can see my Knicks play the Hawks. You
get the idea.

...another valid point. however, technology has made it possible for people to congregrate across the country without leaving home. cable tv has given everyone access to pretty much anything they want to see in terms of sports. these are points i'm sure marcel would agree with. however they don't help his argument that the south is somehow better than new york when you can do these same things there.

alas, i have no dog in the new york versus nashville argument. my main problem with marcel's post is that my hometown IS better than the south. if i could go back to oakland, i absolutely would, as i'm sure some other transplants would. but circumstance brought us here. circumstance also keeps us here. i was brought to nashville when i was a minor and had no choice in the matter. i went back to the bay area but was at a large disadvatange economically and came back to nashville.

i'm not knocking nashville. there is a lot of things i would have never been exposed to and a lot of people i would be sad that i never met if we never came here. in fact, living here for so long has opened my eyes and i'm no longer in a rush to get back to oakland, per se. the flip side of that is that living here has opened my eyes and i REALLY don't want to be in the south. there are things that a city affords you that living in nashville does not: sidewalks, adequate street lighting, adequate primary and secondary education, efficient public transportation, and open-minded people in places other than college campuses.

my favorite things that are in the bay area but are nowhere to be found in nashville:

• in and out burger
• noah's bagels
• the moma
• the oakland zoo
• lake merritt
• shattuck
• telegraph
• the onion
• fenton's
• barneys
• lanmark theatres
• naan n curry
• twin peaks
• oakland's chinatown
• san francisco's union square
• mocha
• jack london square

i'm missing a whole lot of things, but you get the picture. there's nothing about the "clean air" and friendly people in the south that would ever make me say that "i'm over oakland." i can't say "oaklanders are rude" because I'M an oaklander; i'd be talking about myself. too much of oakland is me. and though marcel doesn't have this b-boy new york accent, i'm sure a lot of new york is him, too. he admits,

The one thing that I do miss is the food. [...] [I]n the NYC I could get bagels,
knishes, Chinese food from Chinatown, Italian food from Little Italy, great
Mexican food, soul food from Harlem, Jamaican food in Brooklyn and so many other
examples. I was even down with some Kosher food in my neighborhood which had a
majority of Jewish people. I just can’t find a place to get some of these
things.

my love of oakland runs so much deeper than food, but i think it's a this point in his post he's starting to realize that he wrote this whole piece for nothing. i'm in the south and i can deal with it, but there's nowhere i'd call home, nowhere better to be than oakland, california. i'm sure locals feel the same about nashville. and they SHOULD. marcel says northeastern transplants are in a cult. that's extreme. those people are proud of where they come from. he should be too... MARCEL! WHAT'S WRONG WITH YOU??? =]

i still fucks with the home team, too! GO RAIDERS!! =]