Most people that I know in California — where I have lived since 2001 — think that I am from Florida. It is understandable. I moved to Oakland from Tampa, where I had gone to college and then begun my professional writing career. I have been known to go to bat for that much-maligned foreleg of a territory: I chose it, after all, and though I did so haphazardly at first (it's warm, my sister was there, and my grades were shitty so I went to a university …