When I think of leaving the bay one of the things I wonder about is how technology actually works for people outside of this bubble. Everyone is in a bubble. But what color and flavor varies. I have traveled since tech became a thing… but I’ve not lived outside the valley in 20 years.
I wake up and reach for my God-box, my externalized brain, my friends. Most mornings I wake up to a message that a friend left after I went to sleep. My community lives in here. I don’t see my community in person much.
If I flew back to California for a week a year I could probably schedule as much in person time with most of my friends as I get living here.
I wonder how Noah and I will do at making friends together when we leave. Here we don’t really share friends. That’s complicated. I’ve tried and it didn’t go that well. My friends mostly like him fine. His friends mostly don’t care for me. I don’t know what we are going to do when we meet new people. I have this chip on my shoulder that is going to make everything hard. I assume that geeks are going to judge me and think they are better/smarter/more worthy and I’m a bitch to start with.
I can’t get over fucking K telling me that I should expect to have people think I’m stupid because I am a woman and I don’t work in tech. That was what, 15 years ago?
I still hate you and everyone in your profession for that comment. Woo.
Will I do better with geeks outside this bubble? Will I feel more like tribe for them because I know all the stupid references even if I don’t care about them? Or will I feel hostile?
I don’t know yet.
Its so, so different away from here.
Of course I worry that I have been here long enough that things away from here will have drastically changed by the time I can move.
Even after just 1 year away, many of my friendships here disintegrated. People expected me to spend my whole visit driving around to see them without sleeping and oh, I tried.
I found nerd/geek culture…unrecognizable. in my small pond I felt pretty respected and had competence assumed, at least before the brain stuff got bad.
My international friends (mostly in Spain and Columbia) used the internet very differently, social media and skype were much bigger than here. It was a communications tool. So much time has passed.
I also had a lot more difficulty making friends, unwritten social rules about how you do that were so different.
I am so curious to see where this journey takes you.
Maybe I will fail and slink home with my tail between my legs.
That’s such a hard path, too. Things changed. Or maybe things kept on their path and I didn’t. But your mileage may vary & you do you.
I expect people to think I’m an entitled bitch because I’ve worked in tech in SF. Not smart. There’s this… silence of choosing not to say anything.
If I slink back it will be to California as a whole but not the bay.
If you end up using WhatsApp let me know it would be fun to chat with you on it. 🙂 Good luck with the culling and moving
~Alison