I Have No Bay Area Pride

One of the things we did in Chicago was take some Chicago Architecture boat tour. It was actually really interesting and gave me a whole new appreciation for architecture. Neck gets sore by the end though, staring up at buildings the whole time.

Anyway, one thing that struck me about our (awesome) tour guide was how he had so much Chicago pride. That’s really cool to me. Having pride in your city.

As for me, I have no pride in any location whatsoever. And I was wondering why that is. Part of it was my parents moving, and that weird feeling of going somewhere else for holidays so there’s no strong feeling of “home”. But that’s just a minor part.

The bigger thing I think is that I grew up in San Jose, and it’s really hard to have strong pride in San Jose. Lots of reasons why. For one, there are no tourist attractions in San Jose. Think about it. Is there a single place you would take a visitor to in San Jose? Nothing nature wise, nothing manmade. The Winchester Mystery House? Happy Hallow? I dunno, there’s nothing. And it’s hard to have pride in a place like that.

The other thing is, I dunno, you can grow up in Chicagoland and still have Chicago pride. But like, San Jose isn’t that way with San Francisco. My feeling growing up was, SJ had this inferiority complex with SF, so we didn’t want to be associated with it, much less have pride in SF, but kept asserting ourselves. Like the fact that San Jose is bigger than (population and area) than SF. There was a huge uproar once when Nightline ran a trivia question saying the capital of Silicon Valley was San Francisco. Huge. Again, an inferiority thing, I think. So yeah, San Jose isn’t a suburb of San Francisco, so we can’t latch onto SF pride. Nor are other South Bay cities like Sunnyvale or Mountain View suburbs of SF.

So anyway, yeah, no pride in any area. Boring.