A lot of things on my mind right now. Things that will most likely affect my life for some time to come. Most of them have to do with the basic question of where I should live. Of course, this basic question brings up lots of other, more complex ones, including the ever-present “what should I be when I grow up?” I hate that one…

On the home front, it’s highly likely that my roomie of over six years will be leaving soon. This is a pretty strange thing to contemplate. When you live with someone for six years, it’s almost like a marriage, but without the added drama of sex or snoring issues.

I’m not about to break in a new roomie a this stage in the game. Which means, of course, that if I stay here, I’ll be paying all the rent by myself. I haven’t yet determined if I can really afford this, or if I really want to make the sacrifices (extra work, fewer toys and road trips, etc.) it may require.

But if I move, where should I go? Despite my growing distaste for San Francisco, I’m not sure I’m quite ready to leave the Bay Area. Do I stay here? Do I move across the bay to Oakland or Alameda? More and more I find that I like the East Bay better than San Francisco in many ways. If I’m going to stay here long term, that’s where I want to be.

Or should I just use this as an excuse to get the hell out of here completely? I know I’m going to do so eventually. It seems a little redundant to pack up and move across the bay if I’m just going to move someplace else in another year or two anyway.

And, of course, if I do move someplace else, just exactly what the hell am I going to do when get there? There’s also the reality that once I move out of this rent-controlled place, I’ll never be able to move back into San Francisco.

At the same time I’m excited about having this whole apartment to myself, I’m also scared of the implications. I’m unnerved by the questions forced by the issue.

AOL sucks, reason #591: I’ve been working for weeks now on a client site which features a searchable database. Everything works beautifully.

Except on America Online…

Apparently, AOL’s system of proxy servers makes lots of sites unusable. In addition, their system does all sorts of really strange things to sites which do work. All the same, lots of people still use AOL, although the reasons for this continue to elude me.

So I find myself coming up with a half-assed fix to accommodate the ineptitude of a large corporation with unlimited resources. It’s the same disgust I feel when I use Microsoft products…

Things I really love this week: NewsRadio, Minute Maid Lemonade in the gallon jug, this pre-Falwell Teletubbies site, Better Telnet, and this week’s SF Weekly feedback.

Things I really hate this week: AOL (see above), idiots who put me on “press release” email lists I never asked to be on, parking tickets, and Nash Bridges location shoots.

After living in the strange place known as San Francisco for a few years, we begin to take a lot of things for granted. I’m not just talking about the food, the weather, etc. I’m talking about some really strange shit. Things that people outside the city might find truly bizarre, but that we don’t even question.

For example, there are damned few American cities where an ad campaign featuring a giant pot leaf (the kind we used to draw on our notebooks in high school) would draw no incredulous looks when plastered on city buses all over town. The product is some hemp-enhanced shampoo, but the icon is unmistakeable. This ad (and probably this product) wouldn’t fly in, say, Charlotte or Oklahoma City.

Marijuana smokers aren’t outlaws here. Cigarette smokers are.

San Francisco is the sort of place where someone in full drag on Market Street draws no stares and where someone walking down the street in an army uniform is assumed to be en route to a gay bar. Here, the controversy is not over whether to have a gay parade, but over how may points in the Kinsey continuum should be included in the name of the parade.

We don’t argue about whether or not sex clubs should exist, but about how closely the city should monitor them. People here discuss their sex lives with an openness which might make even New Yorkers blush.

San Franciscans use terms like “liberating” and “negative energy” and “inner child” without even a trace of irony. San Franciscans think terms like “lesbian – gay – bisexual – transgendered – questioning” roll effortlessly off the tongue.

In San Francisco, people ask “do you drive?” or “do you have a car?” In most parts of the country, the question is skipped because the answer is just assumed. Transit trauma has replaced “my car wouldn’t start” as the primary exucse for being late to work. In many circles, people who DO have cars are viewed as the oddities.

People here take road trips to the suburbs to go to Target or Pak-n-Save. It’s a really big production, not a daily way of life.

No one here finds it the least bit strange that it’s easier to buy imported coffee than to buy a hammer, or that juice bars outnumber drugstores in many neighborhoods. We take it for granted that we’re never far from a nice Peruvian or Laotian resturant, but finding a meat and two vegetables for under ten bucks is all but impossible.

It’s not “liberal vs. conservative” here. It’s more “libertarian vs. socialist vs. communist”.

The strangest thing, though, is that people here have an annoying tendency to forget that things ARE different here. We forget that minority groups are more worried about keeping their jobs and homes than about which terms urban white liberals use to “empower” them. We are shocked and appalled when small-town diners don’t have our favorite brand of “imported from God knows where” coffee.

We can’t understand why most of the country couldn’t give a flying fuck about how our Board of Supervisors condemned the heinous injustice in Burkina Faso or Brunei last week. We can’t believe that the Des Moines city council didn’t pass the same resolution and thank us for the idea.

We can’t cope with the fact that most of the world does not share our eccentricities. It’s nice that we’re a little bit odd in San Francisco. It would be even nicer if we could remember that we’re a little bit odd in San Francisco.

Curiosities du jour:

The Castro has really come of age, it seems. The neighborhood which once reached out to queers worldwide is now up in arms about the possible placement of a temporary shelter for homeless gay youth. Despite all the empty babbling about “gay community”, the great social experiment of the 1970s has officially become nothing but an upscale shopping mall…

Protesters outside the Stud this week shouted “maricon” in reaction to “Wetback Night”, a Latino-hosted drag night. Hmm. Let’s see…Latinos accusing other Latinos of bigotry by calling them faggots. Makes sense to me…

The non-introspective life of yer humble host:

Thursday night dinner at Ye Olde Pizza Joynt in Hayward. Spent Friday afternoon helping a friend give birth to a brand new bouncing baby website. Friday evening has been given over to “Polyester”, although it’s not the same without the Odorama scratch-n-sniff card…

And I may go out and commit multiple misdemeanors by smoking cigarettes in my neighborhood bars later tonight…