From 2024: What Will I Miss About California When I Move To Spain?

The difference between "missing" and "nostalgia"

As the year winds down, I’m resurfacing a few pieces that mattered—some popular, some overlooked, some that quietly predicted what life abroad would actually feel like.

This definitely ranks in my top three most favorite. I talked a lot about why we wanted to move and how I thought Spain would fit those desires. It’s fun to compare what you thought would happen with what actually happened and chart the distance—or lack thereof—between the two. Plus, "Weird Al" Yankovic and Jennifer Love Hewitt also make an appearance.

A note before you read:

Most writing about life abroad does one of three things:

• sells escape
• aestheticizes the experience
• or invents problems so someone can position themselves as the expert who “solves” them

I’m not interested in any of that.

I write about what happens when you remove a functioning adult from the system that made life automatic—and choose to live without insulation, shortcuts, or spectacle.

This is about competence, identity, and staying engaged in the second half of life—not starting over.

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From November 2024

The point we’re at now in the process makes me think about where I’ve been and where I’m headed more than usual. About how to take the emotions you feel, put them in the proper perspective and consider them within the context of how you got to where you are today. You likely didn’t get there by playing it safe and letting your emotions get the best of you in an irrational way.

I have been thinking about this larger dynamic in relation to the difference between missing people and things and feeling nostalgia, not only for people and things, but places.

Based on how I define the word, the only thing I’ll truly miss about California is my daughter.

While she doesn’t define the place, she evokes the strongest emotion when I think about leaving. This emotion isn’t something I will merely wax nostalgic about when I consider California from 5,989 miles away.

I will feel it. Even if we video call near daily the way we do now and see one another the same number of cumulative days in a year — (maybe more, actually) — distance has a way of amplifying feelings. It can make the heart grow fonder, but it can also make you blow shit out of proportion.

Like many words in the English language, we throw around miss a little too casually.

But that’s okay. As I considered this, it helped me figure out myself — and life — a little more.

When you miss, you —

When you feel nostalgia, you —

So there’s a distinction that’s easy to lose sight of.

Do you miss things or people or are you (not so) simply nostalgic about or otherwise emotionally affected by what they represent? By the impact they had and continue to have on your life.

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I’ll turn 50 next summer in Spain.

It’s pretty crazy to see myself write those words. I grew up conservative in a small city that’s more like a town in Western New York.

Long story short, I fell in love with radio at a super young age, worked in the business starting at 13 and moved for a full-time job in Miami when I was 19.

At the time I thought California was “the land of fruits and nuts” and that that wasn’t a good thing!

I was on record as saying I would only move to the state to make it big in radio. As a means to a professional end. I laugh at my old self when I think back on such a naive proclamation.

Little did I know that —

I would move to San Francisco in 1999, and not because of radio. It was because I had fallen in love with cities.

After radio brought me to Boston for a week in 1999, I asked myself, why am I not living in the heart of a big city? I felt the energy and wanted to see how it would translate to day-to-day life.

So — not long after Bill Clinton signed the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which put radio’s death spiral into motion (it loosened ownership rules for large media companies), I decided to gradually leave the business. This change helped pave the way to move to San Francisco, the closest big city to where I was working at the time — freaking Las Vegas.

Freaking San Francisco, but in the best way!

That’s not only where my daughter was born and now lives as a 21-year old woman, but it’s where I — in many ways — slowly started to become the opposite of everything I thought I was or wanted to be as a kid growing up in Niagara Falls.

I feel like this transformation hit full stride in my forties around the time my daughter became an adult. There’s something about looking back on your time as a parent that shifts your perspective just enough to make you think you’re as close as you’ve ever been to having shit figured out.

So I’ll miss my daughter.

And I’ll always be nostalgic about California.

Nostalgic because this sometimes crazy and often inspirational place is largely responsible for the ongoing and always-evolving process of opening my mind. It — and the people I have observed here, befriended and ended up close to — helped me become more politically aware, socially and culturally critical and emotionally mature.

It has been a long process. And one that — I really think — can only happen, at the least the way it has for me, in great cities. Particularly great cities in big and messy states.

Small towns, dead cities and — most definitely — suburbia have a way of keeping your head in your sand. And you don’t even know it. You think you understand things — from immigration to “the normal gay guy” to seemingly mundane things such as the impacts of car culture — but it’s impossible to understand things you don’t experience or, at the very least, observe in a place where they actually exist. To the max.

So, here again, I won’t really miss anything, except my kid.

But I will certainly feel nostalgia — a true appreciation — about living in a state where you have experiences you simply can’t have in other places. Experiences that become so part of your daily life that you can take them for granted.

But you don’t. Because, in a part of the world where an earthquake can strike at any second and where the only constant is change (even if the more things change, the more they stay the same!), you learn to not take things for granted.

I don’t take for granted the fact that my preferred mode of ride sharing has quickly become Waymo’s driverless cars.

Yes, I know. They started in Arizona, but who associates such a big technological advance with Phoenix. It’s San Francisco and Los Angeles that receive and deserve the headlines.

Until they arrive in Spain — and they will — I won’t miss, but I will feel nostalgic about driverless cars.

Also, seeing famous people!

So, living in LA, do you ever see anyone who’s famous?

The number one question people ask.

I won’t miss this about LA, but I’ll certainly have stories to tell.

The other day, my wife and I were having our second moving sale in preparation for our January move.

During the sale, a local celebrity passed by and perused our offers. Nancy Silverton is a famous chef and restaurateur, who owns the one Michelin star Osteria Mozza in Los Angeles.

That restaurant is the real deal and so is Nancy. So it was cool to have a conversation with her, particularly because days before I captured this image after finally trying a pizza place she is connected to.

An experience you can only have in Los Angeles if you have really come to know Los Angeles.

Moments after that interaction, the one and only Wierd Al Yankovic parked his car on our block, walked by us without stopping, went and did something, then came back, got in his car and left.

I once walked so close to Jennifer Garner in a Santa Monica crosswalk I thought the paparazzi might mistake me for her new love interest.

Jennifer Love-Hewitt lived in the apartment next door to me for like three months. We shared a freaking wall.

And — of course — the taco trucks. You can’t replicate the Los Angeles taco truck experience.

But these three things — tech such as driverless cars, hobnobbing with celebrities (or something like that) and taco trucks —are not things I’ll miss.

All cool shit to not only wax nostalgic about, but to consider as little (not so!) tiny elements of a larger experience of living in a place that has the power to take who you are and make you reconsider and solidify it at the same time.

A big reason for making the move to Spain is to head full steam into the second act of my life in a place that can challenge me as much, if not more than California has.

My love of cities sparked several years of urban planning education, which focused on the physical and mental health and social components of urban living.

Those two factors have convinced me that I can take an already good life and make it better in an environment with a culture that revolves around public space and subsequent social interaction and is much, much less about the car. Car culture is one thing I won’t miss — or even feel nostalgia for — after I leave California.

I consider myself an expert in knowing the types of physical environments where I thrive.

So, at a point when I could bask in the glow of having made it in California for more than half of my life, I prefer to take what I learned here and use it to learn a new language, overcome fresh and foreign obstacles and make sense of another culture that has the potential to continue to shape who I am and want to be.