I can't believe it. I've assimilated (San Diego: to buy, to live, prices)

[kettlepot]

Originally Posted by JerZ

Oh, I loved this!!

JerZ, I read the title of your thread and I thought...

"My God! Some CRAZY Angeleno has gone and put a Borg attachment onto his arm, and inserted some awful implant into his EYE!"

[jen5276]

I love this post. I hope I can move out to So Cal soon. I am so over NYC and the rude, nasty people, crappy weather, etc.

[yamota]

People really shouldn't compare their own cities to New York anyway. New York is New York, most cities like to compare itself to New York but really, it's an unreachable plateau. They can build as many skyscrapers as they want, as tall as they want, but they'll never capture the grandeur, mystique and majesty of it.

[JerZ]

Originally Posted by kettlepot

JerZ, I read the title of your thread and I thought...

"My God! Some CRAZY Angeleno has gone and put a Borg attachment onto his arm, and inserted some awful implant into his EYE!"

LOL, yes, this is EXACTLY what happened...I'm now plugged into The Matrix...come on over...itttttttttttttt's blissssssssssss.

[chacho_keva]

Originally Posted by 12buttons

I should check out your towns. I moved from the East coast back in 1998 . I had a house in Venice off the water -after making it into the house I left in Connecticut, I sold it. Couldn't handle the neighborhood in transition thingy. Guess I am more conservative than I thought. Now we are moving back for a job and the hubster tells me he won't drive an hour on the freeway to get to work on Wilshire Blvd.
Any suggestions? Unfortunately it has to be under 400k but I need a regular full size house around 2100 sq ft to take all my treasured accumulations!
Any suggestions? I am in my late forties - schools not an issue but safety and lack of drama is. I am a writer and work around mostly the westside of Los Angeles.
By the way,the day I started to appreciate Los Angeles was the day I stopped hating it for not being New York.

Congratulations to you and finding home.

Boy! That statement deserves to be put on T-Shirts! Just love it for being sooo true!

I'm a NYC transplant myself; Bronx area. Please don't run. I promise not to mug you!

As far as housing goes, you may consider Arcadia which is slightly east of Pasadena. Nice town it is. I've also heard great things about Glendale which is west of Pasadena.

All the best!

[yamota]

I guess the moral of the story is, people should love the city theyr'e in, no matter where it is, LA, Detroit or Leclaire, Iowa, and not try to compare it to New York or Paris or Hong Kong or any other city, all that does is raise insecurity and cement the old saying "the grass is greener on the other side", but is it really?

[readymade]

I compare LA to Boston all the time. And Boston never wins.

[yamota]

Is there anyone left in LA that's actually born and raised in LA?

[JerZ]

Originally Posted by yamota

Is there anyone left in LA that's actually born and raised in LA?

Ha ha, yes. My husband.

ETA: But also keep in mind that you're going to hear from a lot of transplants here simply because this is a relocation type of forum.

[JerZ]

Originally Posted by yamota

I guess the moral of the story is, people should love the city theyr'e in, no matter where it is, LA, Detroit or Leclaire, Iowa, and not try to compare it to New York or Paris or Hong Kong or any other city, all that does is raise insecurity and cement the old saying "the grass is greener on the other side", but is it really?

I came to realize (probably earlier than I...assimilated...now I can't say that without feeling like a girl borg, LOL) that I didn't initially dislike L.A. because there were things wrong with it.

In other words, I thought in the beginning, "This is wrong, that's wrong, and that's why I don't like the place," but that was never actually the reason.

I figured it out the time I went back to New Jersey and somebody made me cry not one hour inside the state, LOL. I'll make this as brief as I can but it's sort of funny...

I flew back to NJ for the second time; the first time had been for my BIL's funeral so I wasn't thinking of myself really. But the second time had an impact on how I actually felt being there. I picked up my car at the rental and started driving north on the Garden State Parkway. It's a toll road. It was 1:00AM so most of the booths weren't manned.

When a booth isn't manned, it either has a red light meaning you can't go through it, or it's "exact change only" and they mean that. So heaven help you if you don't have exactly $.35. (It may be more than that now, actually. This was in 2007, for reference.)

So my very FIRST toll booth it's two red, one exact change, and one big, scary dude. I drive up, 1:00 in the morning, fresh off a changeover plane following 8 hours of travel and I smile. "Hi! Can I buy tokens? I only have this $.35 for you and I won't have change for the next place. And it's late at night so none of the booths may be manned."

The dude gave me...a look. A "WTF?" look. An "Is she crazy?" look. A standard-issue northeastern "Why are you wasting my time when I could be, well, continuing to just stand here?" look.

And he answers me with:

"No."

Just no. Nothing else.

I sat there for a second. Why couldn't I buy tokens? I hadn't been on the GSP in some time (even back in NJ I'd avoid it 99% of the time and I surely never went on it often enough to need to buy tokens, like people did in the old days) so...what was I doing wrong?

After a pause of silence while the toll booth man stared at me, I said, "Oh. Okay. Will I be able to buy them at the next booth then?"

"Lady, I SAID NO."

Okay. Um...I said half-heartedly, in a reeeeeeeeeeally meek voice because I really needed to get this issue resolved somehow and I didn't want to get a ticket for going through a booth and not paying, "Can you...can you tell me if there's a person at the next booth then who can give me change for a dollar?"

And he SCREAMED, I am talking screamed, "NO, lady! What the f*ck is wrong with you? I TOLD YOU NO! Are you f*cking deaf?"

I drove off quietly. And cried all the way up the Parkway. Yes, cried. LOL. (For the record, there was in fact a person at the next toll booth up. I didn't say a word. I shoved my dollar at him and he threw change back at me. Just like old times. I later found out that they no longer sell tokens at booths. But the guy couldn't just say that. "Lady, the Parkway doesn't sell tokens any more.")

It wasn't my only such experience during that particular trip, though it was the only one where a big frightening man told a woman to go f*ck herself, basically. I bought coffee at the airport on my way off...the woman glared at me, refused to speak to me, THEN when I gave her a tip she smiled...and I remembered...Oh yeah, out here, you tip them because you want them to smile, they make you tip them that way. And all of a sudden that seemed so bizarre whereas when I lived there it didn't. And other similar things...

I had NEVER realized until that very moment that there was a lot wrong with NJ. Or, well, yes I had, but I'd always tempered everything with "...but the houses are so pretty and colonial and the seasons are so pretty."

All of a sudden I remembered all the things I *hadn't* liked about northern NJ. And one was that people were mean. They just were. I hate to say that. It's so true. Big frightening men did scream at small women from toll booths. They did swear at them. I used to think it was just par for the course. Now that I'd been away from it, I realized: no. It wasn't. Not everywhere.

I remembered other things, too, that I hadn't liked at all. But I've already made this way too long. The upshot is: you can love being in a place even if there are "things wrong with" it. I did. (I still have an enormous affection for NJ! Especially the autumn.) I believe when transplants, like me, say "I don't like L.A. because of the traffic, the smog, the prices of homes," blah blah, we're really just trying to justify that it's not the northeast.

It took me a lot of years after that experience to really like being here. For it to feel like home. Now I can joke about what's wrong with it in sort of the same loving way we joke about relatives and the like. It doesn't mean I don't want to be here and it's no longer an excuse.