Bicoastalist

The Lack of Posts

When I started this blog in the fall, I had a great time setting it up, thinking of topics to discuss, researching related sites, etcetera, etcetera. All of which seemed to get the bug out of my system without my actually doing much blogging. Or maybe I was just crushed by school. Either way, I don't need to tell you all that I haven't kept this up.

So I was surprised to discover today that this blog is the second link for me on Google. That means Bicoastalist is eclipsing most of the O'Reilly links, which makes me rethink how much I know about Google. (That was the fifth link, btw.)

At any rate, I'm not ready to declare this blog dead. But it may remain in limbo for a while longer.

The Deal with the Photos

I've gotten a lot of email about the photos on the Bicoastalist site. "Great to see Robie!" "Why is it all pics of Eggs?" "Why no dogs?" "Where's Tony?" "That's a lot of Tony." "Five pictures of The Gates. Weird."

What gives?

Here's the deal. I set up the right column with five placeholders for pictures from my Flickr photostream. The photos fill in randomly, and they all change every time you hit the site.

There's nothing particularly bicoastal about this feature. In fact, no matter where you are, pull up a chair, crack open a beer and refresh the site over and over. It's oddly mesmerizing.

The Comparisons

Although my recent search for a treasure trove of bicoastal resources yielded shockingly little, I did unearth a handful of entertaining stories comparing NYC and SF. Written after the last Internet boom created a corps of tech workers who shuttled between the two cities, these pieces are unevenly reported, snarky and not without merit.

My favorite, a thoughtful article written by Rachel Lehmann-Haupt in 2000, suggests that back in the day, The Well had exactly the kind of bicoastally focused forum I've been looking for. The Well is now a paid service, and I don't want to spring for a month's subscription just to find out if the forum still exists. Still, when Lehmann-Haupt points out that perhaps the place bicoastal dwellers truly live is online, I can't decide whether that's a pre-bust artifact or a deep truth.

This 2005 East-v.-West smack down is obnoxious, but it makes the good point that, in New York, "The subway takes you just about anywhere you need to go." While in San Francisco, "The subway takes you just about anywhere you need to go, as long as it’s along Market Street."

Written just back in February, this blog post includes a map in which Manhattan has become Treasure Island, or San Francisco has become northern New Jersey, depending how you look at it. Either way, the reconfiguration looks so natural, it's a jolt to realize it's fantasy. Also included is a list correlating SF and NY neighborhoods. Among the ridiculous suggestions (Sunset/Brooklyn) are some surprisingly apt pairings (Marina/Murray Hill).

Finally, I don't agree with everything written in this 2004 blog post. But I've been thinking for days about his point that people in SF have many more acquaintances than people in NY. That does reflect my experience, the subject of a future bicoastalist post or three.

The Absence of Information

When I hit on the idea of creating this blog--which, come to think of it, occurred on a JetBlue flight between JFK and SFO--I assumed the sidebar would include a rich list of resources for bicoastal living. That is, I'd link to all of the websites, blogs and Google Groups covering the topic. And I have. Which took no effort whatsoever, because there wasn't anything to link to.

I'm pretty good at finding things online, and I expected to turn up groups and web pages of many kinds. Maybe a sleek site with American Express ads. And maybe something cheesy, with a purple background and white writing in an overly ambitious font. But last Wednesday night, with surprise giving way to near-panic, I found nothing on the web devoted to bicoastalists.

When we first got Eggs, it was immediately clear (from the shoes of mine he ate) that we couldn't let him hang out home alone and free-range. So we crated him when we'd leave for a few hours. By week two, however, he'd figured out how to break free. (He'd also figured out how to snag a pound cake, a banana nut loaf and a half dozen tortillas in one jail-break episode alone, but that's not the point of this story.)

To solve the crate problem, I jumped online to see what other people were doing about it. Two frustrating hours later, I concluded that Eggs was perhaps just the second dog in the history of canine containment systems to escape.

And so it went with the search for bicoastal information. The best resource I found was a 2001 Zagat Bicoastal Pack, which bundled that year's books for LA, SF and NYC. OTOH, I was impressed to see that the marketing efforts for Bicoastal Babe, a chick-y looking novel from a publisher I'd never heard of, included buying the keyword "bicoastal," ensuring that ads for the book showed up everywhere I searched.

Other than that stellar example, I'd say that the sites on bicoastal living need to work on their SEO. I did find a few articles comparing NYC and SF, which I'll run through in another post soon. Meantime, if you know of any resources I missed, give a shout.

The Two Places

On New Year's Eve 2005, I moved to California accidentally.

I'd been living in New York for twelve years, and I needed a break. Nothing major--I'd just bought and renovated a Williamsburg apartment I loved, in a building with friends. But I'd also collected a large number of bad-date stories and a career made up entirely of tangents. I wanted a small adventure, a few months somewhere to rejuice.

At the time, I was working for O'Reilly Media, which is headquartered in Sebastopol, CA. In the wine country an hour north of San Francisco, the town is compact and pretty and utterly without cheap short-term rentals. So when a director at O'Reilly offered me his guest house, I put my stuff in storage, bought my dog an FAA-approved crate and flew us across the country.

I intended to move back to New York in June.

But then things, as they are wont to do in an earthquake zone, shifted. In the late spring, O'Reilly offered me a significant promotion to stay in California. At the same time, a fling I'd been having out here started turning serious (which is to say, my boyfriend got a cleaning lady).

And these two developments occurred at exactly the moment I became otherwise ready to return to my regularly scheduled life in New York.

There's no mystery here: you already know what I decided to do. But more than two and a half years later, I'm still profoundly surprised that I live in California. And even as I've developed great ties in the Bay Area, I haven't become any less connected to NYC. Which adds up to life in two places. And a blog to figure out what that means.