AllCal

Adjective to counteract NorCal vs. SoCal hate and Norcal Rage.

An Example of AllCalness from Nor and So Cal Unite Facebook Group: Goal: To Unite California. To eliminate the prejudice and hostility between nor and so cal. To create a place that is safe for our children and their children.

Usage:

As a frustrated UCD student from the Southern California area comments: "i just joined this group to say that. Why does it have to be NorCal? My friend once asked why can't it be all cal?"

To Out of State Students, this controversy and spiteful Californian mudslinging may seem strange, even petty, but to Southern Californian students, who have moved 400+ miles up to Davis and miss home, this hostility to their home area can often be mentally and emotionally damaging, and... sadly, can develop into hatred to NorCal residents and Davis... leading to a refusal to adapt to life here, and a refusal to call Davis their 2nd home. They start to say things like "Just 4 years and I'll be done", or "I hate Davis" and... other sacrilegious comments... and they never really experience the great things about NorCal culture.

Which is why AllCalness is so important.

Reasons For This Wiki

1) I love BOTH NorCal and SoCal. And yes, it *is* possible to love both.

2) I had a friend from NorCal who moved to SoCal for college and... he felt a little SoCal Rage, there, too...

• I was just fed up with all of this NorCal > SoCal or SoCal > NorCal nonsense.
• I was tired of the things students who just moved within the same state had to put up with.

3) Message Board on SoCal Connection Facebook Group.

• A guy who didn't really know how damaging NorCal Rage was for many of the SoCal students wrote a scathing message which is very painful for me to read (don't read if you love SoCal): "First of all welcome to our neck of the woods, I hope you guys aren't HELLA freezing. Maybe if ALL of you didn't wear uggs with a short skirt that barely covers, well anything, you'd be warmer. Secondly, don't come up north and complain, go back if you the prefer shallow wretched sheep-like existence you had goin' on there. Thirdly, stop making bad rock music". Hehe.....
• I wrote a long message to him, explaining calmly why a SoCal person who was far away from home would act in ways that NorCal natives maybe wouldn't understand and vice versa... and why I, a SoCaler, actually loved NorCal culture and its winters. Also, I explained why a SoCal person would act a certain way (or "overreact" =P, hehe, a "SoCal" humor thing?) to things. Hehe, I don't remember if I apologized about the bad rock music, though, hehe, =P. But, mostly I talked about... how it feels to feel that kind of hate toward... one's community... one's home, when so far away and asked him... how it would feel to move 400 miles from home and then, experience all of this hate toward the place you came from.
• I'm not sure if was received, however. I think the Facebook server went down... and the message was probably lost forever...
• Many members then wrote angry messages in reply to his comment and... I was too tired to write another reply to clear the misunderstanding.

4) I overhead a conversation on a Unitrans bus, while going home.

• Two guys said hi to one another because they were in the same class.
• It was a long weekend and... (To Be Continued... Umm... This is getting long.)

5) Message on NorCal Facebook Group

• A very bitter SoCaler left a horrible message. This is also very painful for me to read (avert your eyes if you love NorCal...): "i fucking hate this part of NorCal....and the people are soo annoying sometimes too....i just joined this group to say that. Why does it have to be NorCaL? My friend once asked why can't it be all cal?"
• A NorCaler left a horrible message back =(... Maybe it's funny for some of you... but it wasn't for me...: "It can't be AllCal because then there would be nothing to distinguish the best part of California from that SoCal trash. XD" .... yeah... ='(
• My response...
• Sometimes... I wish this would all stop... I am so tired of this mudslinging. I was so tired of it that... I made this DavisWiki page. Here's the address if you didn't get that: http://daviswiki.org/index.cgi/AllCal. =P
• I am a SoCaler. And I love NorCal culture. I love that you guys say "hella" even though I still feel weird to. I love the winters here. I love the faux-stereotyping double-take-inducing straight-faced witty humor that you guys do up here. (Though sometimes it gets rather confusing.... hehe. Yeah... Sometimes, I don't know when you guys are jokingggg.... Reallyyy! I know I know... how naiiive =( *sigh*)
• So little things like that... sometimes, made it... pretty hard to adapt my first year here. Especially because I missed home.... Even within the same state. And it was even harder with all of the NorCal vs. SoCal anger... I'm just tired of the hate.
• Yes, there can be pride... but why does it so easily turn into supremacy? Why does it so easily turn into hatred?
• After writing this comment, I was accused of being a traitor from my fellow SoCaler... *sigh*... I wrote back a couple of messages... (And thus, the saga continues... >_<)

Common (Mis)Perceptions

1) People often say the SoCalers hate Davis winters. How true is this?

Example of a SoCaler who has "adapted" to an extent: From my Xanga: - =), loving NorCalness, including its coldest winter days.

I love the NorCal cold sometimes because it makes it so much more awake to feel the chilliness of the morning against my face. Clean to the freshness in the day. Like, this is real Winteriness! And well, yeah, it forces me to actually wear more than two layers of clothes! =0 ("SoCal" girl wearing more than two layers?? *Gasp* =P) Well, it's refreshing, sometimes. I mean, when I dress warm enough, that is, otherwise, it's just not pleasant (like feeling like you can't ever sleep or sit down comfortably.)

And after the California downpour this winter... this one tree. A huge one. One that's established and greatly gnarled. It had a huge puddle/lake around it, the shape of a perfect circle. Simple. Clean. (*sigh* I forgot my camera. ) Reflections of the empty branches. I think the absence of leaves makes you see the beauty of the outlines of the branches so clearly. Because it's so barren. It makes you see the richness in the years it took for those branches to sprout as soft green twigs and extend and reach out into the enormous. ~ January 19, 2005

2) People also say that all SoCalers hate the word hella. (In-depth definition here.) How valid is this generalization?

I actually have heard a few of my SoCal friends (who have moved to Davis) using hella, now. At first, I was a little sad because I could see they were using something that was kind of strange to my ears, at the time. But, then, it started to grow on me. It still feels a little weird, so I don't actually use it, but I don't hate the word "hella" either. I think it's part of what cool and exciting about coming up north. - =)

• I'm beginning to think that "Hella" is the new "like" and "totally". It's an age thing. I think it caught on with high school kids earlier here, but it's going around SoCal now too. I've never heard anyone beyond their mid-twenties use this term at all. It sounds funny to an ear that has never heard it before. But if you go to Minnesota, there's a weird scandanavian word-play where a lot of things get "uh!" on the end. (Snow-yuh.) (Band-uh?) (Hell-uh?). I wonder if there's any relationship?
• Haha! Yep, those Minnesotans. I mean who could've known they were the cause of this Hella Dispute? =0 (j/k) =P. Actually, the SoCal friends I was talking about are living in Davis (where SoCalers are the minority), so, people have adapted. That's what I was trying to say. Whoa. Interesting, only 20 years and younger... Hmm when did the word start to appear in high schools? ... The origin from http://www.urbandictionary.com/: "Originated from the streets of San Francisco in the Hunters Point neighborhood." Hmm... Interesting. I wonder if someone has more in-depth research on this word. *ponders* - =/

2005-02-27 08:58:09   I've never heard of anyone in SoCal "hating on" someone from "NorCal." The funny thing is when people identify themselves as being from "NorCal" they exclusively mean the Bay, which is funny because there's a lot of California left to the North. People from, say, Redding identify themselves in this way. The closest thing I've heard resembling hate towards "NorCal" is anti-gay anti-SF remarks, but it's not really just from SoCal people. That's just a certain caste of people (Rush Limbaugh listeners? or was it Jerry Fallwell?) with this attitute which you'll even find in Sacramento, Woodland, and even among some folks in Davis. —JaimeRaba

Is this page serious?? It's, like, hella weird, dude. :) Hey, I've only ever seen NorCalis being anti-SoCali when some SoCali is being/was being an ass (frequently by making fun of a NorCali and/or NorCal.). — SummerSong

2005-02-28 00:10:34   Haha! (Yeah, it's like... *goes into "SoCal" mode* soooooo serious! Like yaaah! =P Hehe, ;) Yes, I can make fun of my own Socalness.) Well, when you think about it... This isn't really about who's to blame... This isn't about who started the hating, like a playground fight. It's about finding out what kind of misunderstanding happens between SoCalers and NorCalers that starts it. Why does it so easily turn into supremacy (for both sides. I'm really just sick of SoCalers hating NorCal and NorCalers hating SoCal. I love both. That's why I made this page...) —JenKao

2005-02-28 00:11:14   I've never witnessed really Anti-NorCalistic behavior with my own eyes until I saw this guy's comment on facebook. (I wonder what happened to him.) I didn't know that SoCal/NorCal hate was going on at all until I came to Davis... What kind of misunderstanding happens? Lol, there can be jerks wherever there are people, wherever there are human beings, you know? ... —JenKao

2005-02-28 00:11:46   ... Sometimes, I think it's just maybe a slightly different affinity for different kinds of humor, with SoCalers not getting that NorCalers are joking. And NorCalers not getting that SoCalers are joking. Something as simple as that because I mean... Sometimes, in one area, in one culture, people's behavior could be seen as jerk-like, but in another culture it would be seen as really hilarious (*thinks of faux-racist NorCal-ish jokes that play upon stereotypes*) because there's an unspoken understanding between the people that they don't even realize is unspoken... Kind of interesting. =) —JenKao

I didn't know there were SoCal/NorCal issues until just a couple years ago—I wonder if they've been around a long time or if they're the invention of recent generations... I think that labeling someone as either SoCal or NorCal and using that as a way to explain differences between them is just an easy, convienant way of putting people into understandable categories. We can say that NorCal and SoCal people have different types of humor, but, really, NorCal people have different humor than other NorCal people, and the same goes for SoCal people. I know that when I visit my friends in San Diego, their humor is completely different than the humor of my family in Riverside and it's all different than my cousin's ex-boyfriend's humor in Irvine. And they're all SoCal. In much the same way, my friends in Davis think my Santa Rosa friends are wierd, and everybody thinks my Nevada City friends are nuts. But they're all NorCal. Ultimately, though (here comes the "Summer was raised a in a smiling, music-playing, garden-growing, song-singing, wild-dancing, recycling, solar-paneled hippy family" speel) any steps that anyone makes to eliminate tension and misunderstanding between any two people or any two groups of people is ok by me. — SummerSong

I agree Summer. NorCal verus SoCal is ridiculous. Applying labels on people only accentuates our differences and these ones in particular have such extreme generalizations it only causes more tension that is completely trivial and ignorant. -MiriamKaufman

2005-02-28 17:50:40   I feel quite bad at this point for having fueled this flame at all on the wiki. I think that more than anything we all need to recognize the fact that north south east or west California is by far the best state in the union. I mean we have so much abundance here. Not only that but california contains the lowest point on earth and it's only 100 miles south of the tallest mountain in the lower 48 states. How cool is that. I think the new focus of this north south debate should be on the relative merits of Mt. Whitney vs. Death Valley. —DanMasiel

2005-06-06 19:23:51   I thought this was priceless: I referred to a girl as a 'valley girl' to my friend from Stockton. She absolutely refused to believe that 'valley girl' meant a girl from the San Fernando Valley and not from the Central Valley. Wow...she must've never seen Clueless. —DanielMedinaCleghorn

2005-07-31 20:22:10   I come from San Luis Obispo county in an area known as "The Central Coast." When I go to LA they call me NorCal, in Davis they call me SoCal. What do you think? —MarkWetter

2005-08-16 19:13:00   I'm recently here from PA, with a few months spent in Irvine, Orange County. I lived in OC for years back in the 80's, occasionally in LA for visits and stuff. And you know? I really hated living there, both times. I've moved here, and I feel "home" like I never felt down south. I don't know what it is, but there's a feel to Southern Cal that starts soon as I hit Bakersfield on the drive south. Different drivers, different people, different behaviors. I'm generalizing, yes. And this "hella" thing, I haven't noticed it. I suppose I will when my kids get older and start using it 'cause I don't have any plans to leave for a while. —BlancheNonken

2005-12-16 05:34:49   I wager that people who fatuously "region"-label others and argue about where they are from are idiots, but that's just me. I have met some really intelligent people from all over this state, along with each region's fair share of vapid jackasses.

2006-07-21 05:06:15   There is a tendency for people from Redding to call the Davis area Central California and thus not NorCal. Redding residents believe themselves to be true Northern Californians. —SteveOstrowski

2006-11-20 13:01:18   The North/South California rivalry (Northern California-Southern California rivalry) goes back a long way and won't be erased here. But, a rivalry is one thing, insults and abuse are another and not called for. And BTW, as a native NorCal, but from the mountains, I hate the fog. —RalphFinch

2007-11-06 02:13:52   Did the use of the word "chill" as an adjective (as in, "I'm chill. This is a chill situation. How chill.") originate from SoCal? —RichardYeh