The California Dream (Farewell, California)
The movers come tomorrow to pack up our California life, and so I will post my final California missive tonight. It feels exceedingly strange to have so little time left but have our house remain more or less intact—as though leaving is something far off, abstract, instead of imminent. My next post will be dispatched from New York City. I’m sure there will be much to report. *** Before moving to California in 2007, I’d never been here. And so I had in my mind only a fabricated highlight reel of what California was: L.A., the Pacific coast, hilly San Francisco, vineyards. Movie stars, tech prodigies, surfers. I imagined people said things like “Dude, I’m pumped” and ate a lot of bean sprouts. Without any facts to go on, I relied on the myth, imagining California to be a place where I’d feel a particular kind of freedom, or privilege, a place that promised something, though it wasn’t exactly clear what. I also imagined myself not quite fitting in—a dark-haired, bookish, sun-fearing East ...