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It’s been just over two years since I first moved to Silicon Valley.

Ever since I wrote Scenes from New York, I always intended to put together another collection of photos for the San Francisco Bay Area. But two years is a long time. For Scenes from New York, I had only been living there for nine months. The city was still new to me, and I could still comment on it as if I were an outsider.

But here, now, in California? I’ve gotten used to its quirks, its advantages, and its dysfunctions. That makes it harder to talk about this place objectively in a way that people from the outside would understand.

But still, I’m going to try anyway.

I’ve talked before about how negativity and criticism are crucial to growth and should be preserved. This time, I want to talk about conflict.

I’ve found that I have pretty differing reactions when I see or participate in conflict, depending on the situation.

If I see a couple bickering about whether or not they’re going to go out for dinner, I generally don’t have a good reaction. It tends to be a shallow argument, they’re probably hungry and in a bad emotional state, and ultimately one day eating in or out (usually) doesn’t matter.

There’s a more constructive version of this though.

For a brief moment, the wireframe fibres constructing the world were visible. But in the blink of an eye, they vanished, and the man found himself in a comfortably decorated, warmly-lit room with a short, dark-haired woman who looked to be in her early thirties.

She smiled at him. “Welcome back. It’s good to see you again. How have you been?”

If you know a bit about me, you’ll know that I grew up between multiple cultures: my mom’s side of the family lives entirely in Brazil, my dad’s side almost entirely in Portugal, and I myself grew up in Canada. Those three cultures have some pretty profound differences, from Brazil’s laissez-faire looseness, to Portugal’s focus on social rituals, to Canada’s more British-style aloofness and distance when compared to the other two.

I was exposed to all those cultures young enough that I internalized the different aspects of them. I grew up knowing that these different sides of my family and social groups acted and expected to be treated in different ways, and managed to find a way to center myself in the common ground between them while adjusting myself to fit them wherever necessary.

It’s led to a lifetime of feeling a bit like a misfit no matter where I go, but it’s also helped me have a broad perspective on a wide variety of different issues. I consider that outlook and perspective to be a very fundamental part of who I am today.

But even that kind of upbringing didn’t prepare me for the culture shock I would be exposed to when, as a kid, I moved from downtown Toronto to a semi-suburban neighbourhood in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

Let me tell you about my great-grandfather.

There’s actually a lot I could tell you about my great-grandfather. It’s one of the things that my dad’s side of the family did very well, helping maintain a sense of continuity throughout the generations. My great-grandfather made his home in a tiny village in the interior of Portugal, and I’ve visited that place many times in my life. We still have a great-aunt who lives there in the same house he used to live in, one of the dozen or so people that still call that village home.

Every time we visit there, my dad tells us stories. About how the land around the village, now overrun with pine trees and brush, used to be covered in well-tended fields. About how he used to play with the rabbits they raised, and then have them for dinner later that day. About the time the village finally got itself a phone. One phone, in the centre of the village, for everyone to use.

And he told us about my great-grandfather’s old nickname. “José Mau”. “Bad José”, to partially translate it.