Why I Love & Hate Southern California

I should begin with a little background and me and Southern California, just to be fair. In my teen years, SoCal was the shit. It was the hair-raising, heavy metal '80s. Motley Crue was the most hardcore band around, my bangs made me three inches taller, and the coolest place in the known universe was the Sunset Strip in Los Angeles. I would spend hours with my friends watching Headbanger's Ball on Saturday night (back in the day when MTV didn't suck and played videos) dreaming of the day when we would rent an apartment in L.A. and spend our nights cruising the Strip.

As I approached age 18, I cooled on SoCal and turned my love to a new place, my own Pacific Northwest neighbor, Seattle. I entered college, found indie rock, began my career penning entertainment articles for some of the most alternative zines during the height of grunge, and any thoughts (or love) I had for relocating to Southern California went straight into the crapper.

I spent a year flying back and forth to L.A. while working for PolyGram, and hated being there. People were fake, I heard tale after tale of friends stabbing each other in the back to climb the corporate music business ladder, and my home in Seattle was much more inviting. Grunge was dead, but the community was still alive, well, and filled with pretentious music snobs who knew far more than the corporate hacks down in sunny California.

Even as I left the music industry and settled into a normal life, the thought of leaving my beloved Seattle for Southern California seemed like move I never wanted to make. Then I had my daughter. I knew, the moment we all came back from Rachael's first big family Hanukkah that I shouldn't rule out Southern California.

I'm here now, and I can't say I hate it. It has been an adjustment, but I really don't miss Seattle as much as I thought I would. I have figured out a list of loves and hates about my new residence.

Loves:
*The weather - Sunny almost all the time, which is damn cool. I know it's not this beautiful all the time, but the fact that I can come out of the house every morning and not see rain and gloom is the best.
*Friendly people - Californians are friendlier, straight up. Most Seattle natives are socially retarded, and I'm not the only one who will verify that, most of the major newspapers in Seattle have written articles about how people there are stand-offish and introverted. They call it the "Microsoft personality." People here are friendly.
*Traffic - No, I'm not smoking crack, traffic is actually better in Southern California. I have double the miles in my morning commute than I had in Seattle, and I do it in half the time. Here there are large volumes of people in cars going the same way. In Seattle, there are fewer cars, but the dumbasses planning the roads don't make enough lanes to move traffic through. The major I-5 has to merge with another major interstate, the 405, and they filter traffic down to one lane. Dumbasses!

Hates:
*Housing Prices - Holy crap! I'm going to pay an arm and a leg for a box with no yard on the sketchy side of town. The same money you pay for a large, new home, with a fantastic, huge yard in Seattle, you can get a 1,500 sq. ft. townhouse with a little courtyard area that you could spit across in an area of town that you'd better think twice about springing for an alarm system. This reality check has forced us to lower our standards a bit.
*Barbie People - Everyone here spends way too much time, energy, and money focusing on being perfect. From pole dancing exercise classes to advertisements for deals on plastic surgery, looks are what's important. If you aren't wearing the latest and hottest shoes, you might as well put a bullet in your head, and if you have wrinkles, don't plan on keeping them if you don't want to continue hearing pithy whispers behind your back.
*Displacement of the Moral Compass - I'm a fairly liberal, open-minded lady. Whatever sick, twisted thing you're into for shits and giggles is okay with me, but in California they take it to an extreme. Case in point, the woman who got all of these Hollywood celebrities into pole dancing for exercise was featured in an article along with her seven year old daughter. She was smiling and sitting against the pole, as her little girl was hanging upside-down on the pole with her legs wrapped around it. What the fuck!

I'm sure I'll come up with more loves and hates, but this will do for now. Until then, I'll enjoy the sun, and try to find a radio station that is better than mediocre.