A few weeks ago, at a party thrown by a SF newspaper, some of the staffers incorrectly accused my friend and I of working at their rival publication, teasing that they’d “meet us at the flagpole.” (LOL) Bizarre schoolyard metaphors aside, my friend was frazzled. “Why did they say that?” she demanded. “What does that even mean?”
I giggled my way up the stairs, empowered by this smartass display of purposeless rivalry. “Wow! That reminded me of New York!” I exclaimed breathlessly, as I climbed into her car. Why was I so giddy that some local newspaper staffers had been coyly dickish towards me? I don’t know, but I totally was! Is this some form of professional masochism? I was genuinely excited to bear witness to the kind of petty journalism infighting I was trying to escape by leaving New York. You can take the girl out of the blog-o-sphere…
I don’t really want to leave the blog-o-sphere, though. I just want to leave the pettiness. I think that’s what I’m trying to accomplish by living here, but my Google Reader has stayed more or less the same for the past three years.
At lunch I tried explaining to my coworker the lovably snarky attitude of much of the company I keep. “A lot of my friends are…” I trailed off, eyes grazing the ceiling as I tried to conjure the appropriate term.
“Negative?” she offered.
“No… I’d say they’re skeptical of enthusiasm,” I responded.
I’m skeptical of enthusiasm, too, or at least deeply uncomfortable with it. I have always been more Daria than Quinn. I am not good at “team spirit.” Events involving large crowds of people simultaneously experiencing the same predetermined human emotion make me uncomfortable because I frequently get choked up. It’s embarrassing! When my sister lost her soccer game the other month, I cried–not because I give a damn about soccer!–but because other people were crying. I do this a lot: I call it “being permeable” but also sometimes “being a gigantic baby who can’t manage her emotions properly.” I guess my version of enthusiasm is being overwhelmed by other people’s display of it.
Being hardened and skeptical is not something I want for myself, which I think is one of the reasons I moved to Northern California. In New York I was a silly thin-skinned cherub. My feelings got hurt 10 times a day: by strangers who gruffly brushed past me on the subway, by nasty internet commenters, by my friends’ own nonchalance. Here, I fear my inability to engage with enthusiasm–a trait I wore like armor in New York–is frequently taken as bitchiness.
“I moved here so that I could be around people who didn’t automatically react to anything outside of their comfort zone with unnecessary vitriol,” I told my co-worker. “Sometimes I don’t know if I react with disgust to most things because I truly do have disdain for them, or because that is how I’ve been conditioned to react.” In other words: living in New York for four years made me a total asshole.
Part of becoming softer here is allowing myself to feel enthusiasm with greater depth, even if that enthusiasm is pegged to comforting West Coast versions of things I disliked in New York. Living here forces me to step outside my comfort zone so much every day that I’m not yet willing to give up my love for media infighting and Twitter spats. At least let me keep those things until I can leave my apartment without being clenched with the intense fear that I will end up lost in a city that is not built on an intuitive grid system (ugh).
Until then, I will keep unsuccessfully trying to explain to my co-workers what the fuck Hipster Runoff is.
(‘Satire.’)