bay area stuff

i live around a mile inland from the piers and the bay but can still hear ship horns blare every morning as boats leave their docks. sound waves float across the hills and cut through the traffic and eventually make their way into my ear, and i’m always reminded: “ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board”. what is on board for me then, if i haven’t had wishes in a long time? i have been too caught up in everyday work to think much about dreams; these days i do not manufacture my desires as much as they are presented for me to consider. i didn’t invent, say, the idea of going to a group house in truchas; it stumbled into my inbox and i chose to adopt it. people not knowing what they want until they see it extends far beyond apple products

i’m not really sure what to write about now. the previous post was a sort of synthesis of a lot of introspection i’d been doing for a while and i am fairly confident about everything i wrote there, so i don’t anticipate needing to think about anything of a similar nature in the immediate future. i guess we’re back to normalcy for now

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soma (south of market area) is probably the weirdest neighborhood i’ve visited in a while. i don’t particularly like it, but it’s only a 15 minute walk from home and is on the way to the caltrain stop and contains my favorite sf spot (yerba buena gardens, which has a nice mlk memorial and cute birds and a convenient mall and etc) so i end up there frequently

i am somewhat annoyed that despite the vast majority of sf being close to compass-aligned, some surveyor decided to build the entire soma district at a 45 degree angle just because market street runs northeast-southwest? sf developmental history is fascinating. anyway, this makes navigating the area more confusing than it needs to be, especially because i try to avoid using google maps when taking walks and therefore am at a greater risk of becoming disoriented. but aside from throwing off pedestrians occasionally there are a lot of crooked intersections at the soma boundary which creates a genuine bottleneck for traffic (and also this design choice makes it SEoma instead of Soma but whatever ):< )

if you walk down the entirety of sixth street there are a lot of homeless people and oftentimes concerning activity eg. live arrests being made and it’s pretty sad, but then if you walk one block over to fifth street it’s just… empty and clean? i don’t really understand yet but sf spatial and wealth disparities interact in mind-boggling ways. i read an overview of SROs which was helpful for getting a better understanding of housing problems, though i wouldn’t expect you to find it interesting if you haven’t lived in sf before as it namedrops a bunch of sf districts

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i’m fully vaccinated now, which is cool but hasn’t changed my day-to-day behavior much. a few weekends ago i visited berkeley, which was nice and probably my favorite college campus so far? in my opinion it has the most organic mixture of greenery and school buildings and urban areas. a week later i visited stanford and they had all the right campus elements but it seemed extremely artificial, in the sense that it was extremely green everywhere and felt like a giant park. then i walked from stanford to menlo park, which only took ~40 minutes and caught me by surprise because i imagined them as fairly distinct locations. maybe i didn’t realize the extent to which facebook cares about being near stanford

anyway, visiting friends at both schools was fun. i had a goal of meeting at least one new person every weekend, where new person refers to someone i’d never met or hadn’t seen in a long time, and it’s been a genuinely helpful objective that i think i want to continue. it was going fairly successfully up until this past weekend, when none of the people i asked to hang out with were free. instead i went to some parks (bernal heights which had a nice view, dolores which is literally yerba buena but larger and more boring) and they seemed very family-friendly but sort of miserable to visit alone; it’s similar to how eating at a sit-down restaurant by yourself is considered weird. in general i think we do a terrible job of accommodating single people and mostly just make them more acutely aware of their solitude (single in the literal sense, not as a relationship status). exploring cities by yourself is freeing but sometimes overwhelmingly lonely, and i’m not sure what to do about it other than to just breathe and let go. i guess that is how i resolve most of my turbulence these days