New York: There is one place that San Franciscans believe is better than San Francisco, and that place is New York City. San Franciscans love New York City, and almost all of them aspire to one day make enough money at their humorous bicycle zine to become bi-coastal.
Apparently, there’s just something about ridiculously expensive rent that makes San Franciscans scream for more. San Franciscans think that New York and San Francisco are like The Conservatory and The Lounge in the game of Clue: there’s a secret passage beneath them that allows a player to go all the way across the board in one move.
When their friends and business associates announce that they are moving to New York you will often see a slight tightening at the eyes of any San Franciscan within earshot. This is one way that San Franciscans pretend to have emotions, and the emotion they are affecting here is jealousy. Then they will ask the person where they are moving to, and the answer will almost certainly be either Williamsburg or the East Village.
Watching lowbrow television shows is what San Franciscans do when they feel like slumming but don’t want to get shot.But it’s not enough for the movee to specify a neighborhood. San Franciscans want cross-streets, because nine out of ten San Franciscans actually knows the geography of New York better than they know how to get around their own neighborhood after 12 Red Stripes.
And this brings us to one reason that San Franciscans are so surly in the early morning. They’re pulling all-nighters at least twice a week in preparation for the moment when they can casually mention that they know exactly what dive bar you’re talking about between 1st and A.
Lowbrow television: Watching lowbrow television shows is what San Franciscans do when they feel like slumming but don’t want to get shot. There is nothing a San Franciscan likes more than talking about last night’s episode of Rock of Love Bus, or dressing up as Jon & Kate Plus 8 for Bay to Breakers.
This is pretty much the same thing that Kate Winslet’s character was doing in Titanic, when she Irish step danced while smoking hand rolled cigarettes with the third-class passengers below decks. San Franciscans didn’t invent slumming, and neither did Kate Winslet, but both are happy to let James Cameron tell them what is fun.
It’s not that San Franciscans don’t like good TV, it just doesn’t fit their image as yuppies with a bohemian complex to talk about what Mike Wallace had to say on 60 Minutes last night. In San Francisco, people who define themselves by their shows are the equivalent to what Lauren Conrad is to the other characters on The Hills: important, vaguely fashionable, and really good at staring blankly into the middle distance.
