Adventures in San Francisco Week 1
Can your life change in a course of a week? Or is my imagination in overdrive due to the sheer amount of alone time I’ve had in that week?
I made it to San Francisco, absolutely no worse for the wear. In fact the flight was quite fantastic, relaxing even. I cashed in some miles and upgraded myself to business class which gave me all the leg room I could ask for, plenty of space for my fat ass to move around in comfortably, a personal DVD player where I watched two movies, meal served with real china, dessert, after dessert chocolates, a real blanket and pillow. It was nice being waited on hand and foot somewhere lost above the clouds.
SFO is a relatively quiet airport, the taxi to the hotel was uneventful. That was my first impression of San Francisco, that it was very much like I’d never left home, just quieter. My original room was fine until I realized that my “city view” meant staring straight into an office building right across a little alley. I’m sorry a little street, they have streets here that aren’t bigger than about three people laying foot to head across. If I looked sideways I could see parts of the city but it felt very much like being stuck in whatever room was leftover. Three weeks without being able to open up my shades was about 2 weeks and 6 days too long.
The first few days were traumatic, partly because of feeling locked in this tiny little box, letting the reality of being utterly alone for three weeks sink in and being unable to adjust to the time zone change and getting lost anytime I roamed outside of the direct blocks across the street from my hotel and office (thankfully, they are literally right across the street from one another). I was already thinking of how childish I would seem if I called my boss and told her I wanted to come home immediately. I was thinking how much I despised being away from my creature comforts. I was thinking I really don’t know how I’ll be able to leave this city as certifiably sane after three weeks. I admit it, I missed my mother and when I talked to her she sounded thousands of miles away, not only literally but something in her voice sounded so dejected and upset and I realized I did that, I made her feel that way.
It was quite loathsome. I couldn’t figure out where to eat because I’m so picky and since I was confined to about 4 square blocks that was I was capable of navigating, my choices were severely limited.
Work is and was the least of my issues, the people in the SF office are incredibly nice and helpful and friendly. By the third day, the woman next to me was ready to physically walk me to the public Muni transportation system and show me how to get around but I had to go back to my hotel and change my room. I couldn’t stand the thought of suffocating in that little box for three weeks.
Now I have a suite with two couches and a room with a real city view, with doors that slide open for fresh air and no one staring back at me from an office window.
That night I figured out how to use the Muni and I found civilization. I hopped on a cable car, didn’t care where it was going, I just wanted the experience of riding one and I rode it until the end of it’s line at Fisherman’s Wharf and all the way back to its place of origin. I snapped photo after photo, none of which I can share with you right now because I left my USB cord at home and my laptop insists it needs to erase and format my SD card which would cause me to lose all my pictures.
In the subsequent days I became something of a quick learner on the Muni and I got myself to Pier 39 and to the Castro and North Beach and Chinatown and the Mission and Portero Hill and on Saturday I walked up and down the streets of Haight-Ashbury and I let all of its history sink in with me. I would have loved to have lived through those peace, free love and LSD days. I even created a whole backstory for myself when I was much younger. I would be the backup singer for Joe Cocker on “With a Little Help From My Friends” (you know the girl who just sounds high as a kite when she’s singing “would you believe in a love at first sight”) and maybe I’d sleep with some random band members and have a kid but wind up marrying some experimental photographer who was eccentric and died early and left me his estate and I’d take up his interest after his death and my kid would grow up to be some well known musician and I’d be the cool chick mother with all these amazing stories and I’d write a book about it. Oh yes, my friends, I had some wacky alternate realities in my head. One of my favorite movies is a movie called Dogfight. I would so have been Lili Taylor’s character in that movie, in that time and that space. To look around it now it’s like part of time stood still and yet marched all over it in some ways. It’s still the neighborhood of the disenfranchised but also the neighborhood of those who are disenfranchised out of boredom and hipper than thou-ness.
That’s something you don’t realize about SF until you’re there, an undercurrent of snobbishness seems to pulse through this city. Maybe it’s the fighting off the West Coast Manhattan label or the clinging to its storied past with a tiny grip and wanting to still be that place, in that time, but there seems to always be a bit of a challenge that says let us prove how much better we are. I don’t get a real sense of the salt of the earth mentality here and maybe that’s because my main context is comparing it to NYC but there’s a certain false sincerity that I don’t feel when I’m in NYC.
Which isn’t necessarily to say that it turns me off, part of it actually appeals to my inner snot.
The other thing that you don’t know until you’re here is just how huge the homeless problem is and how many of them are so clearly addicts and/or mentally ill that need help. My co-worker explained to me that people used to come here because they knew they would get $600 a month but now that’s been taken away and it’s actually better now than it was back then because people started leaving or moving into the public housing and facilities that were built. To think this is the cleaned up version is scary. I feel like there is someone every 10 feet asking for money. The thing I noticed is that so many of them have a dog or a cat, seemingly just so they have someone to love and that breaks my heart.
It’s also far colder than I thought it would be. Which required me to find a place to buy more sweaters and some jackets.
Which sent me on a downward spiral of spending money like it was my last three weeks on earth. Boredom does that to me. I need to occupy my time and I find myself wandering in and out of stores in the neighborhoods I visit and I leave with stuff. Stuff I don’t need in the slightest but that I feel obligated to buy because when will I ever return?
Which is no excuse for the Coach, Easy Spirit or Bloomingdale’s (amongst others) merchandise I’ve wound up buying (Amber will be very proud). I’m just compulsive and guilting myself and feeling awful about it.
Then I meet this fascinating 78 year old man on the Muni, while I’m just riding one of the lines from one end to the other who tells me about his life story and about some kid he used to work with who was saving up his money to live well when he retired and he says to me “and I tell him, look kid, you find me when you’re 65 and you tell me if you’re even able to do half the things you wanted to do at 25, what’s the point you have to live the life you’re living, not the one you’re betting you’re going to have.” And suddenly I don’t feel as guilty. Still overwhelmed by how I’m going to pay this all off but not guilty.
Besides, I’m turning 30, I’m allowed one mini-mid life crisis.
I realized as I filled my time up and I let my new surroundings sink in that I wasn’t deeply depressed like I had been the first few days, that my routines from home are catching up to me here, I pace every night like I do at home. I think about the world as a bigger place than my smallness here, like I do at home. I’ve found a supermarket I’ve frequented a few times. I know the route to the Muni without having to think about it. I talk to my mother and she misses me and asks me if I miss her and I tell her I’m doing okay and I am.
I don’t know that I’d have the easiest time making new friends in a strange city but then I’m not that great at it at home either. But I’ve realized I really am capable of doing and being by myself. It’s not easy and it’s not a great way to judge considering I’m not having to clean up after myself or cook or anything but emotionally speaking, I’m an adjuster, I adjust and I can do that no matter what I decide to do.
Could I live in SF? I don’t know, to be honest. It hasn’t hit me in my gut that I’d like to, the way I felt excited about moving to L.A. did but it did prove to me that I could exist somewhere that isn’t NYC.
Maybe it’s time to be the author of the next half of my life.
I made it to San Francisco, absolutely no worse for the wear. In fact the flight was quite fantastic, relaxing even. I cashed in some miles and upgraded myself to business class which gave me all the leg room I could ask for, plenty of space for my fat ass to move around in comfortably, a personal DVD player where I watched two movies, meal served with real china, dessert, after dessert chocolates, a real blanket and pillow. It was nice being waited on hand and foot somewhere lost above the clouds.
SFO is a relatively quiet airport, the taxi to the hotel was uneventful. That was my first impression of San Francisco, that it was very much like I’d never left home, just quieter. My original room was fine until I realized that my “city view” meant staring straight into an office building right across a little alley. I’m sorry a little street, they have streets here that aren’t bigger than about three people laying foot to head across. If I looked sideways I could see parts of the city but it felt very much like being stuck in whatever room was leftover. Three weeks without being able to open up my shades was about 2 weeks and 6 days too long.
The first few days were traumatic, partly because of feeling locked in this tiny little box, letting the reality of being utterly alone for three weeks sink in and being unable to adjust to the time zone change and getting lost anytime I roamed outside of the direct blocks across the street from my hotel and office (thankfully, they are literally right across the street from one another). I was already thinking of how childish I would seem if I called my boss and told her I wanted to come home immediately. I was thinking how much I despised being away from my creature comforts. I was thinking I really don’t know how I’ll be able to leave this city as certifiably sane after three weeks. I admit it, I missed my mother and when I talked to her she sounded thousands of miles away, not only literally but something in her voice sounded so dejected and upset and I realized I did that, I made her feel that way.
It was quite loathsome. I couldn’t figure out where to eat because I’m so picky and since I was confined to about 4 square blocks that was I was capable of navigating, my choices were severely limited.
Work is and was the least of my issues, the people in the SF office are incredibly nice and helpful and friendly. By the third day, the woman next to me was ready to physically walk me to the public Muni transportation system and show me how to get around but I had to go back to my hotel and change my room. I couldn’t stand the thought of suffocating in that little box for three weeks.
Now I have a suite with two couches and a room with a real city view, with doors that slide open for fresh air and no one staring back at me from an office window.
That night I figured out how to use the Muni and I found civilization. I hopped on a cable car, didn’t care where it was going, I just wanted the experience of riding one and I rode it until the end of it’s line at Fisherman’s Wharf and all the way back to its place of origin. I snapped photo after photo, none of which I can share with you right now because I left my USB cord at home and my laptop insists it needs to erase and format my SD card which would cause me to lose all my pictures.
In the subsequent days I became something of a quick learner on the Muni and I got myself to Pier 39 and to the Castro and North Beach and Chinatown and the Mission and Portero Hill and on Saturday I walked up and down the streets of Haight-Ashbury and I let all of its history sink in with me. I would have loved to have lived through those peace, free love and LSD days. I even created a whole backstory for myself when I was much younger. I would be the backup singer for Joe Cocker on “With a Little Help From My Friends” (you know the girl who just sounds high as a kite when she’s singing “would you believe in a love at first sight”) and maybe I’d sleep with some random band members and have a kid but wind up marrying some experimental photographer who was eccentric and died early and left me his estate and I’d take up his interest after his death and my kid would grow up to be some well known musician and I’d be the cool chick mother with all these amazing stories and I’d write a book about it. Oh yes, my friends, I had some wacky alternate realities in my head. One of my favorite movies is a movie called Dogfight. I would so have been Lili Taylor’s character in that movie, in that time and that space. To look around it now it’s like part of time stood still and yet marched all over it in some ways. It’s still the neighborhood of the disenfranchised but also the neighborhood of those who are disenfranchised out of boredom and hipper than thou-ness.
That’s something you don’t realize about SF until you’re there, an undercurrent of snobbishness seems to pulse through this city. Maybe it’s the fighting off the West Coast Manhattan label or the clinging to its storied past with a tiny grip and wanting to still be that place, in that time, but there seems to always be a bit of a challenge that says let us prove how much better we are. I don’t get a real sense of the salt of the earth mentality here and maybe that’s because my main context is comparing it to NYC but there’s a certain false sincerity that I don’t feel when I’m in NYC.
Which isn’t necessarily to say that it turns me off, part of it actually appeals to my inner snot.
The other thing that you don’t know until you’re here is just how huge the homeless problem is and how many of them are so clearly addicts and/or mentally ill that need help. My co-worker explained to me that people used to come here because they knew they would get $600 a month but now that’s been taken away and it’s actually better now than it was back then because people started leaving or moving into the public housing and facilities that were built. To think this is the cleaned up version is scary. I feel like there is someone every 10 feet asking for money. The thing I noticed is that so many of them have a dog or a cat, seemingly just so they have someone to love and that breaks my heart.
It’s also far colder than I thought it would be. Which required me to find a place to buy more sweaters and some jackets.
Which sent me on a downward spiral of spending money like it was my last three weeks on earth. Boredom does that to me. I need to occupy my time and I find myself wandering in and out of stores in the neighborhoods I visit and I leave with stuff. Stuff I don’t need in the slightest but that I feel obligated to buy because when will I ever return?
Which is no excuse for the Coach, Easy Spirit or Bloomingdale’s (amongst others) merchandise I’ve wound up buying (Amber will be very proud). I’m just compulsive and guilting myself and feeling awful about it.
Then I meet this fascinating 78 year old man on the Muni, while I’m just riding one of the lines from one end to the other who tells me about his life story and about some kid he used to work with who was saving up his money to live well when he retired and he says to me “and I tell him, look kid, you find me when you’re 65 and you tell me if you’re even able to do half the things you wanted to do at 25, what’s the point you have to live the life you’re living, not the one you’re betting you’re going to have.” And suddenly I don’t feel as guilty. Still overwhelmed by how I’m going to pay this all off but not guilty.
Besides, I’m turning 30, I’m allowed one mini-mid life crisis.
I realized as I filled my time up and I let my new surroundings sink in that I wasn’t deeply depressed like I had been the first few days, that my routines from home are catching up to me here, I pace every night like I do at home. I think about the world as a bigger place than my smallness here, like I do at home. I’ve found a supermarket I’ve frequented a few times. I know the route to the Muni without having to think about it. I talk to my mother and she misses me and asks me if I miss her and I tell her I’m doing okay and I am.
I don’t know that I’d have the easiest time making new friends in a strange city but then I’m not that great at it at home either. But I’ve realized I really am capable of doing and being by myself. It’s not easy and it’s not a great way to judge considering I’m not having to clean up after myself or cook or anything but emotionally speaking, I’m an adjuster, I adjust and I can do that no matter what I decide to do.
Could I live in SF? I don’t know, to be honest. It hasn’t hit me in my gut that I’d like to, the way I felt excited about moving to L.A. did but it did prove to me that I could exist somewhere that isn’t NYC.
Maybe it’s time to be the author of the next half of my life.