hey now- heh, here's a good one. well first off i am from outside NYC, LI, i know lame lame lame. but at least i went to NYC a LOT, and now here, same thing, cant quite pull off SF, live in Berkeley.

anyway think Sopranos. my line of work, i couldn't do it there, id be getting my legs broken by Tony, i haul garbage.

on the lighter side of things- winter just wasnt worth it.

Came to a friend's wedding, and knew right away that I would eventually end up here. 3 yrs later, I started spending a week each month out here on biz. That only lasted a year because I caught the bug and decided to make my way out here. Between the weather, the access to the mountains and ocean and the more liberal attitudes on most social issues, it just felt like what home ought to be.

Grew up on LI, spent my whole adult life living in manhattan. Just got tired of it, of how hard living in town is sometimes. Everytime I visited friends in SF, I had a great time, really enjoyed being here, enjoyed the weather, really enjoyed the access to the mountains and wine country, etc etc etc. When the time was right, decided to give it a shot.

as it turns out, i've found myself missing hot summers and cold winters, and the local sport of making everything political (i was called a republican beause i walk my dog on a leash), overarching uptightness about most things (comedians apologizing for jokes they were about to tell out of fear of insulting someone), and a near complete lack of reliable city services, mass transit (bart and muni are good in places, but there are whole swaths of the city with no bus access on Sundays), or police has, ironically, made SF an even harder place to live in at times.

I grew up in Elmhurst, Queens, and went to Stuyvesant for high school. When I was visiting Berkeley the summer after my junior year, I just fell in love with the entire Bay Area. I can't imagine going back.. But I do miss the pizza and calzones....

after college i was job hunting (at the very begining of the dot-com upswing). this company flew me to SF and back in one day (bad idea), so all i saw was beautiful weather and a ton of cool, smart, hip people my age. i was hooked, cause i was sick and tired of freezing every winter!

one of the first things i did when i got here was to buy a jacket! my concept of california sunshine was radically changed when the SF wind kicked in :)

took about a year for me to realize that this is where i'm "from", despite being born and raised in NY.

the winters...and ten days straight in late January of 2004, commuting to work with it never getting above 10 degrees...with a wind chill ranging from 0 to -15...our pipes froze twice.

that was the last one I could handle.

It was partly Jack Kerouac's fault, even though he was dead when I left NYC. I fell in love with SF while visiting for a weekend. Two weeks later I was living here.

I have slight bicoastal disorder, so I've been back and forth a few times. The last time I left NYC was in 2003, after sticking it out in my Financial District (Manhattan) apartment through a couple years of pre/post 9/11 wreckage. That probably made me miss San Francisco life the most, being two blocks away.

I'll always love my hometown NYC, but, at least for now, I prefer living on the West Coast.