Leaving the Berkeley bubble

Yesterday I was a little fragile, a little peevish and petulant. I'm on vacation, so I should be enjoying myself - which made me even more upset. What was making me so irritated?

While driving around, 'spoza and I had a little conversation, trying to get at the source of my irritation, and I think she found it: leaving the Berkeley bubble is confronting me with the hard fact that millions of people choose to live differently than I'd like to live.

The good people of Utah, speaking generally and not specifically, like living large. Large houses, large cars, large portions of food. Acres and acres of anonymous McMansions, hermetically sealed by covenant-compliant white plastic fences. Wide roads packed with king cab pickup trucks on stilts. Restaurants which pride themselves on maximizing caloric value per dollar. Design and forethought seems to be much less important than quantity.

The frustrating thing for me is that when we moved to Berkeley, I vowed not to become a Berkeley snob, and now I find I've started to become one. Berkeley-ites, when they discovered I had just come from Utah, were very dismissive. They implied that I must be overjoyed to have escaped oppression and mediocrity when I left Utah. In Berkeley, it's almost axiomatic that all the people living in flyover country are insipid and narrow-minded, as opposed to the accomplished, internationally experienced Bay Area.

The truth was that I was very happy living in Utah. After having lived so many places growing up, I pride myself on my adaptability - I've enjoyed living in the Mojave Desert and Siberia, in the Pacific Northwest and the Great Basin, even in the ruthless, unrelenting sun of Los Angeles (ok, so maybe LA was my least favorite place to live. =) So I interpreted Berkeley snobbery as Bay Area parochialism. I still think that the Bay Area tends to make people rather parochial, despite its pretensions to internationalism. But the difficult truth is that I really like a lot of things about Berkeley, and I've started taking it for granted. I like living around people which value the environment, and understand that bigger is not always better. I like restaurants that serve me moderate portions of exquisitely crafted food. I like seeing ZENN neighborhood electric vehicles on the roads. I like walking to Trader Joe's.

It's hard to be confronted with so many square miles of sprawling evidence that other people don't value these things, and I think that's what made me so irritable yesterday. I'm reexamining my prized adaptability - could I really be happy living here?

Ironically, I was lifted out of my funk by large quantities of anonymous pizza - it was a great value, only $6 for a pizza and a prodigious order of breadsticks, accompanied by all the HFCS I could stand. And right now I'm relaxing on an enormous couch inside a gargantuan house with enough square footage to lose my glasses in thousands of different ways. There is a certain mindset from which I could enjoy all of this. Perhaps that's what really irked me. =)