Extremely depressing hometown news. I’ve been going to this store since I was a kid, and it was ancient even then. The place lasted for 104 years but couldn’t quite survive the “revitalization” of South Elm Street. So where am I supposed to go for a hand-mixed Cherry Coke now?
Speaking of soda (or pop, or fizzies, or dranks), check this out…
I’d spent the preceding night in Winnemucca, Nevada; it was the final overnight stop in my first cross-country automobile journey. I caught up on sleep, had dinner at Subway, and watched TV stations from Idaho and Reno.
Upon waking up on Monday morning, I set out for my new home. After stops in Reno and Vallejo where I attempted to contact the friends with whom I’d be staying, I found myself crossing the Bay Bridge at rush hour. I drove immediately to the Safeway on Market Street where I knew I’d find a parking space and a phone. Within half an hour, I was moving my stuff into a very small apartment a block from City Hall and I had a new home.
My God, has it really been ten years? Have I really spent more than a quarter of my life in this insulated little burgh where reality and common sense rarely intrude? I was so excited to have arrived in a place full of sex and food and interesting streets I’d never walked down and stores selling bizarre merchandise you couldn’t find in North Carolina.
A decade later, I’ve walked down most of those streets and many of the things which initially attracted me to San Francisco now repel me and make me want to leave. I’m no longer a long-haired idealistic twenty-something and I realize that San Francisco is no better or worse than most other big cities, although a part of me will always think of it as home.
Strangely enough, it was in 1996, when I started a website about the city, that I started to analyze it and realize that it wasn’t everything it claimed to be. The more I wrote about it, the more I realized it wasn’t nevessarily Mecca, and that it might not even be the place I wanted to spend the rest of my life.
The city has changed, although not as much as I might like to believe. Some things I miss:
Some things I’ll always remember about my ten years in San Francisco:
I’ve changed a lot too. I’m no longer scared of computers and I got to watch the “Internet Revolution” firsthand, where it happened. I’ve become a weather wimp who complains when the temperatures goes above 70 or below 40.
Politically and morally, I’ve become less of a leftist reactionary after realizing that unchecked (and unquestioned) dogma is just as damaging when it’s spouted by the left as by the right. I’ve become more of an independent thinker, and I’m less likely to scream “discrimination” where none really exists. And I never use the term “homophobia” unless I’m making fun of it.
I don’t drink until 3AM (or later) anymore, and I don’t roam sex clubs until the wee hours. My other activities are no longer dictated by my nightlife needs; I’m more functional and productive (and at more normal hours) and I actually get the dishes washed on a semi-regular basis. I spend more of my disposable income on books and DVDs than on clothes and booze.
I’m in love and living with the boy of my dreams, which is something I couldn’t have envisioned ten (or even two or three) years ago. And he seems to understand my need to flee the city every weekend.
Living in San Francisco for ten years has been a good thing for me, no matter how much my arguments seem to suggest otherwise. I don’t regret coming here; it’s provided a lot of entertainment and memories and it’s sharpened my critical thinking skills. And I’ve made some friends I intend to keep around forever.
My life would be much different if I’d stayed in North Carolina. I might never have seen Winnemucca.
I state for the record that I am not one of those fanatical “English-only” nuts. I do believe that immigrants who come to the US need to learn and begin using English as quickly as possible, for the sake of their own advancement. I also believe that we Americans tend to be rather a sloppy bunch when it comes to learning other languages, to our continuing detriment…
That said, something about this editorial just annoys the shit out of me. The idea that state governments in what is — by custom, if not by law — an English-speaking nation should be required to accommodate the alphabets of other languages in government-issued documents bothers me. Just as I would not expect a speeding ticket issued in Barcelona to be worded in English, I wouldn’t expect a driver’s license issued in the US to use a non-English alphabet…
“Those little marks aren’t decorations. They’re part of the Spanish language,” he states. I agree. But we speak English here. Like it or not, that’s the way it is. If we start adding accent and stress marks, should we then start producing driver’s licenses which use Cyrillic or Hebrew characters? Maybe Japanese too? Software compatibility issues aside, it’s just plain ludicrous…
“But it’s her name,” he whines, as if one accent mark were the only measure of the poor child’s identity. Reminds me of kids in school who whine that a certain standard of dress “stifles their individuality”, to whom I respond that, if that’s all the individuality you can muster, you don’t have enough of it to be concerned with anyway…
People have been misspelling my Welsh surname all my life. PG&E misspells it every month on my power bill. And the government persists in calling me “James” even though I prefer to use my middle name. It’s been surprisingly easy learning to cope…
More problems with outgoing mail tonight, which are (I think) finally fixed once and for all. Yes, I’ve been sending email so infrequently of late that it sometimes takes me a day or two to realize there’s a problem. And no, I don’t promise it will get better soon…
Today’s baffling bit of email from a Planet SOMA visitor:
i am looking for a motel that has accomodations for a couple. i am requesting that the hotel room be furnished with a large round waterbed(preferably w/satin sheets)and mirored walls and everything that it entalis.
About the only response I could come up with was “How nice for you. Hope you have a lovely time”. Really, how am I supposed to answer something like this?
Hint du jour: if you ever need to go to the emergency room in San Francisco, try St. Francis Hospital on Hyde Street. I took my boss there today and, to my amazement, found that I was the ONLY person in the waiting room. I’ve never seen such an eerily calm hospital in my life…
Chafe du jour: why were there no coasters or stickers in the new Mac we got at work yesterday like their were in the one that showed up at Mark’s office?
The fog is back, all is well with the world, and there’s a distinct possibility I’ll be at the Big Fresno Fair this weekend. If I could just manage dinner at the K&W tonight, I’d be quite content right now, thanks…
I finally got around to downloading and installing Mozilla 1.1, and I have to admit that it really doesn’t suck. After the nightmare which ensued when I tried installing Netscape 6 a long while back, I was a little scared of anything vaguely related, but Mozilla actually has some nice features, best of which is the pop-up blocker (which has apparently been disabled in the Netscape 7 version), and it (unlike Netscape 6) didn’t completely destroy all my preferences upon installation. I’m not sure if I’d ever use it as an everyday browser, but it’ll be nice to have around…
My suggestion to those 27 or 28 of you who are still (for whatever masochistic reasons) using Netscape 4.x, is that you finally let it die. I find it baffling that a browser so bad has lasted so long on so many people’s hard drives…
Enough of this. It’s off to the Tonga Room for Jamie’s birthday tonight and to Fresno for the fair tomorrow…
Great time this weekend in Fresno at the fair, but don’t expect to hear about it for a few more days. It’s suddenly become a very busy week at work. Visualize me playing with REALLY large Excel spreadsheets and pretending I know how to do budgeting and forecasting. It’s kind of amuzing, actually, and it does sort of stimulate my inner geek…
One of the things I hate about cohabitation: seeing a tantalizing package from Amazon at the front door and realizing it’s not for me and I really shouldn’t open it…
I may have to buy myself something tonight. It’s been that kind of week…
Happy birthday to Mom…
Thirteen years ago tonight, I’d just been to dinner with my parents and we came home and watched San Francisco shake and bake on the news from the safety of Greensboro. I’d prefer not to have a more intimate earthquake view this evening, thanks…
I shudder to think what might happen if another major quake were to hit SF today. The live/work lofts in my neighborhood would all be reduced to little piles of corrugated cardboard and glue (which might not be such a bad thing), but we’d never be able to rebuild any lost freeways because there’d be too many arguments over which method we’d use to make them more appealing to homeless people (who might want to wander across them at random or live under them) than to evil, disgusting motorists (who’d just be driving on them, after all)…
While the Bay Bridge — sill unrepaired after the 1989 quake — would be history, the Transamerica Pyramid would, alas, still be standing…
Ah San Francisco, where the newspaper has taken to predicting “areas of morning fog, then mostly sunny” on Thursday and Saturday, and “mostly sunny, after areas of morning fog” on Friday and Sunday. For the sake of variety, I assume…