It’s one year ago today that I landed as an alien on your shores, and though I’ve learned to disguise the silver with makeup, so as to stop the pointing and laughing, I still feel about as welcome here as a polecat, if you’ll forgive the mixing of metaphors.

I don’t mean to give you the impression that I hate everything about you. The novelty of the palm trees has yet to wane, and yes, I know they’re not native and yes, I know they’re grown in greenhouses in Nevada and shipped here on trucks, but hey, they can grow here. It almost never goes below freezing, except in August.

And the flowers! Don’t get me started! There’s always something blooming, even in the dead of winter (which is not really a phrase that applies to you), and the unearthly beauty of the jacarandas takes my breath away. No photograph can do justice to the colour of them seen live. It’s surreal; as though someone spray painted the blossoms.

So you’re pretty, I’ll grant you that, like a Hollywood stick actress. But you have no soul. The faux historical buildings, with their plaster arches and plastic marble. They’re too shiny and new to fool anyone but a fourth generation Californian - a phrase I’ve heard dozens of times since I’ve been here, always spoken with pride, and usually accompanied by the declaration that “I’ve never been out of the state.” You Americans’ steadfast belief that your country, or your state, is the best place in the world to be, when you have no experience whatsoever on which to make such a comparative statement, is one of the great cultural differences that baffles me as a Canadian.

You think you’re so liberal, California, and in comparison to, say, Mississippi, you are, but you’re 20 years behind Canada socially; 30 years behind every western European country. The joke is on you, though, because only the rest of the world knows this.

Your love of big, gas guzzling cars. Your omnipresent drug advertising. Your constant weaseling out of giving a direct answer to any question, lest someone sue you. Your incessant metaphorical and literal flag waving. It bores me to tears. I’m sick of the unemployed Mexicans who hang out on the streets during the day, and who ride their bicycles on the sidewalks, and leer at me as I pass. I’m fed up with dodging skateboarders. No one walks here.

I’m offended that there’s a beautiful park a block from my apartment in which I’ve never once seen children playing on the monkey bars, or teenagers tossing a Frisbee, or parents pushing their babies in buggies. Just homeless people napping under the benches, and elderly unshaven drunks sitting on them, drinking out of paper bags. Because, my god this is America, and those people have just as much right to be in that park as anyone else.

I’m tired of taking my shoes off at your airports, and having you confiscate my tiny bottles of hand lotion. You’re intolerant, paranoid, gluttonous, wasteful, gullible, provincial, ultra conservative, and racist.

I just wanted you to know how I felt.

Postmodern Sass is a pseudonym for an expat Torontonian living in the capital of Silicon Valley. http://www.postmodernsass.com/