Where I have been and how the affects my going forward.

This is somewhat of an obligatory post, somewhat akin to a mile marker on the side of life's freeway, I guess. The sole purpose: So I can look back at this in now + time and muse about how short-sighted my views were. Or, wait, is that not the whole point of this?

I'm on the shuttle bus bringing me from San Francisco to Mountain View for work. It's a bit bumpy, and this annoys me. The funny thing is that I really have no right to complain about this: There's wireless internet, the seats are soft, and the bus runs on biodiesel. Modern bourgeois corporate slave?

OK. Enough meta-information.

Actually my situation has little that can be complained about. Ever since I moved to the Bay Area, life has been great. Almost every day is different from the previous.

No longer must I contend with the -30° winters in Minneapolis. That's inhumanly cold and reckolous. Never again. The cold was not the worst part: I detested much about the attitudes of the people there. It's amusing, because the natives prided themselves on their open-mindedness. Bullshit! Many are just a bunch of passive-aggressive ninnies whose most open expression of opinion is "That's interesting." On top of that, the young people are incredibly insular. After most of my friends moved away for jobs, it was practically impossible to break into a new social group there. Funny, because I seem to make a new friend or two every week here. If it helps nail the point home, about 70 percent of my close friends were foreigners who were there for one reason or another.

Life wasn't entirely bad. At least the Midwest had beautiful weather features. I had lived in Tulsa before Minneapolis, so severe weather was always a treat in both places. The sheer wimpiness of the Bay's weather is driving me to take a week off from work and storm chase in Tornado Alley. Sound crazy? I think of it as any other calculated risk. Well, I'd probably not do exactly what the guy in that video did.

Tulsa isn't a bad city; it has rad art deco stylings on the buildings. I guess that's what it got for being the oil capitol of the U.S. for a few short decades in the early 20th century. I couldn't live there again, however. People often find it funny when I remark about liking the people there a little more than those in Minnesota. Why? They were at least up front with their views, be they prejudiced or not. I think their biggest flaw was lack of exposure to the world outside of their context.

It's crazy how relative deprivation and exposure affect our preferences. Compulsory programs by the government get little pity from me, but maybe we should institute a program of mandatory intra- and international travel for our citizens. I'd be willing to bet more could identify Iraq on a map after that.

As a side note, It always amuses me when Bay Area natives comment on the Midwest and the fly-over states, especially when many of them have never visited. I wouldn't necessarily suggest spending much time in them, but you will quickly see that no place in this country is a panacea.