“I was born there”
Weird thing for Sulu to say to his longtime friends and crewmates
Have they never seen San Francisco before with Starfleet headquartered across the bay?
It's a perfectly normal thing to say.
But it dies remind myself of something Douglas Adams once said - that one if the chief difficulties of time travel is not the technicalities, but the grammar! How exactly do you phrase a statement that is about your past and everyone else's future? Past tense, future tense, as yet to be created word forms?
The weird part is him saying it to these people, his friends and co-workers for decades.
[we know he’s really speaking directly to the audience, of course]
Starfleet HQ is right across the Bay, so it’s hard to imagine this is the first time they’ve all seen SF together.
Maybe Sulu says this every time they look at SF, and the others have learned to tune it out. That’d explain why no one responds with that time-travel cliché: “you mean, you WILL be born there!”