Another lesson relearned: cities and Public Services don’t really mix so well.

And so it is that I missed the 8:15 bus to work this morning, and am sitting in Peet’s Coffee on Van Ness writing this and waiting for 9:15 to roll around. (more…)

The first time you strap a snowboard onto your feet and attempt to navigate your way down a hillside, it’s a deeply disconcerting experience. All of a sudden, the rules change, the way you balance and move is extended along completely different planes; and your feet and knees take on brand new roles.

But heading out to the slopes in late January gave me a weird insight which should have been pretty obvious by now, but somehow wasn’t. I wasn’t a confident teenager at all; shy and gawky, I often chose to let the world pass me by, rather than submit to the risks of engaging with it. But something’s changed over the last few years, and I’ve grown to absolutely love throwing myself headlong into anything which comes along - be it music festivals, snowboarding, shark-wrestling (okay, that one’s a theoretical “todo”) or upping sticks and moving to America.
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It’s easy to be dead in a suburb.

It’s easy to drift into the background, to disconnect yourself from the situations and people and places and words and momentary ecstacies which set your heart on fire.

And it’s funny how quickly you forget; how quickly the perfect, joyful pain of real life becomes unfamiliar.

But if you’re truly a child of the city; if you’ve ever tied the rhythms of your heart to it; bled with it and healed with it and trudged through it and skipped across it, it never leaves you.
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(…being the sound of my social life exploding.)

I really, really hoped that moving up to San Francisco would provide me with less nights in watching DVDs, and more nights out doing random things. And whadya know? The city answered my hopes and then some.
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