Yes, I really am this bitter.

It was a Saturday morning in a strange city, and I was hung over. Portland was beautiful and quirky and, despite all the money I was spending on alcohol, it was just the sort of trip I needed. My brother, his friends, and I were waiting for a table to open up inside a small restaurant best known for appearing on a Food Network show (you know, the one where the fat guy eats an irresponsible amount of food).

There were a few metal chairs out front, which we had claimed several minutes before. There was a tap on my shoulder. I turned to see a man I had previously assumed was homeless (almost everyone looks homeless in that city).

“How about showing a little of that famous Portland hospitality and giving your chair up?” he asked, pointing out a few middle-aged women waiting in line behind us.

All I could think of saying in return was, “I’m not from Portland.”

Spokane, Washington, is not exactly a hive of courtesy. There is no unspoken code of ethics between people in front of diners. We don’t consider the feelings of others because we tend not to acknowledge them in the slightest. That weekend, I was a stranger in a strange land.

Despite coming from a reasonably small town, I had taken to Spokane’s lifestyle fairly quickly. It was easy to ignore neighbors and laugh at hipsters. I walked the grubby streets with my eyes on the ground and a “Sorry, I don’t have any change” loaded on my lips. It was easy to assume every city was like that.

Portland was very, very different. There were interesting things to look at. The streets were clean. People were friendly and the homeless were quiet and well behaved (unlike their Spokane counterparts, who carried themselves with the sort of boundless enthusiasm generally reserved for students of musical theater). But it was a two-way street. The price of living in a cool city is living its lifestyle. I could stay in Portland, but then I’d have to act like a Portlander.

For as long as I’ve been in Spokane I’ve assumed I was destined to live in a bigger, cleaner, cooler city. I don’t think that’s true anymore. I enjoy hating people too much.