this is bread breadth breath

*On this Sunday afternoon, I am standing in my kitchen, which is collecting heat like a greenhouse on this unusually hot day in San Francisco. September is the beginning of an Indian summer. There are piles of books on the kitchen table, a dusty bin full of ski goggles and headlamps and other outdoor contraptions that now seem more nostalgic than utilitarian, and trails of breadcrumbs everywhere, the memento minutiae of yesterday's kitchen craftwork.

*Like most things in life, the work of cooking ends up having little permanence, but food is glaringly ephemeral because we confront its disintegration and disappearance everyday, biding time as food rots in our refrigerator or as it is passes through our mouths in mere seconds. We fight its transience by preserving, canning, and freezing. I fight its transience by photographing. And hoarding. And collecting. And writing it all down. I struggle to accept ephemera. I'm an archivist.

*I sweep away the breadcrumbs, even though I'm tempted to eat them.

*The stove is unusually crowded today. There's the cast iron skillet that's been sitting around for a week, in cleaning limbo (mostly clean, but not completely due to my compulsion to google "cast iron cleaning" every time I use and clean the skillet, just in case I'm doing something wrong) and the kettle that I never seem to take off the stove. Half of the stove is occupied by my laziness. On the other half: a pot of boiling salted water and a pan on low heat, filled with glistening slices of onion. The oven is heated to 350 degrees Fahrenheit. I crack open the window so that I can breathe better.

*"Breathe" is on my to-do list.

*The year has passed by breathlessly. A friend once told me, quite literally, you only inhale; you never seem to exhale. He was commenting on the way I breathe, or the way I don't. I guess I shouldn't be surprised to discover, for the umpteenth time, that how I approach my need for air and food is just about how I approach everything. Inhale everything I possibly can; forget to exhale because there's no time.

*"Remember to exhale," I tell myself.

*Breathing doesn't work like that. It doesn't run on reminders.

this is the forty-niner spirit

Last night I attended a lecture called Sacred Roots in Secular Soil, given in conjunction by two pastors, Dave Lomas & John Tyson. What follows recounts some of the facts/connections/conjectures made in that lecture and also contains my own reactive thoughts and reflections.

***

*I never thought that being a Bay Area native would be a rarity in San Francisco. But it is. It’s not uncommon that I’ll receive an incredulous response when I tell someone that I grew up in the South Bay. “Wow, so you’re actually from around here!” they’ll say. “Yep, born and raised,” I respond. Once someone even said, “I think you’re the first person that I’ve met who’s ACTUALLY a Bay Area native.” I was shocked.

*Most cities, by nature of short-term apartment leases, constantly changing neighborhoods, and a large population of young inhabitants, foster a culture of transience, but San Francisco (and perhaps New York) does so more than other cities. San Francisco is notorious for its out-of-town transplants, people who’ve come here to strike it rich with the Silicon Valley boom. Sounds familiar right? And not without historical precedent either. The get-rich-quick phenomenon isn’t new—it dates back to the Gold Rush, in 1848, which led to the fastest growth in population that San Francisco had ever experienced. A city that began with 200 people in 1846 became a population of 36,000 by 1852.That’s a population that was getting 45 times bigger every year, or 180 times bigger over the course of four years.

*Though the earliest gold-seekers were mostly Californians, by 1849, news of the Gold Rush had spread, and that’s when thousands of what we now call “forty-niners”—East Coasters, Australians, New Zealanders, Latin Americans, Asians, and Europeans—made their way to California. In 1849, this group numbered about 90,000; by 1855, this group had grown to 300,000. One interesting demographic to note about these individuals is that they were mostly men—either single or men who had left their families.

*The mentality that gave birth to the riches that lay the groundwork for San Francisco is one of rootlessness. That the forty-niners came for the money meant that their attachment to this city was merely financial. There wasn’t much reason to stay if they didn’t find the gold they were looking for, and if they stayed, it was until they could strike it rich. Then they could send money back to their families, or find a way to live a good life here. “Eureka,” which literally means “I found it!” is our state motto. Like most urban migrants, we arrive in cities to find something. Sometimes we find it, and then we leave; some people never find what they’re looking for at all, and they leave, jaded and dissatisfied. It can be difficult to truly feel like you’re building a life with some semblance of permanence. San Francisco does a good job of fostering city pride through its sports teams and strange traditions, but we rarely lay down our roots in our neighborhoods (and by neighborhoods, I probably mean micro-neighborhoods). We’re never in one place too long. Our living situations are temporary, and so is our sense of being here.

*The Gold Rush-incited mass movement into California was the start of what we now call gentrification, a densensitized and somewhat euphemistic term we use to describe the process of kicking out old residents by increasing rent. I know this is a simplistic view of a much more complex system, one in which I am very much implicated, but this is essentially what happened at the time of the Gold Rush too. Native Americans were forcibly removed from their land, resulting in thousands of deaths. When we come into a neighborhood unaware of its history and unconcerned with its existing culture and population, we’re not only at a disadvantage, but we're doing harm through ignorance. To distance ourselves even more by not fully engaging with the immediate community means that we draw a line between “us”’ and “them,” “us” being the sojourners who will leave in awhile but take what we need in the mean time, and “them” being the people who have probably been here way longer than we have. Sometimes we make these people "them" because their lives are more harder to relate to because of cultural or linguistic or economic barriers, but none of these barriers preclude community engagement.

*I’ve been back in the Bay Area for nearly a year now. I live in a furnished apartment, which makes it all the more difficult to feel like this is my home. My one-year lease on this apartment is almost up, and I’ll have to decide soon if I want to move elsewhere. But I realized last night that planting roots and investing in community is not contingent on my living situation. Instead, it’s an attitude and a posture that requires that my time and energy and money be spent here. It requires getting to know the people on my street and opening my eyes to the day-to-day happenings of my neighborhood. This isn’t going to be easy, but I don’t want to be a forty-niner, trying to strike it rich: here today, gone tomorrow.

*In high school, I used to take the BART into the Mission. I knew even back then, when the Mission was a vastly different landscape, that I wanted to live in that neighborhood. I sensed a special vibrance in the place, one that felt communal, one that felt like it was building and renewing and creating. I was so smitten by the colorful murals and the Mexican bakeries with their sugary, colorful pastries. I even knew the cross streets of my desired residence, and somehow, that’s where I ended up.

*I work in the tech world, a world full of modern-day forty-niners, a world where the Internet makes it so much easier to excuse ourselves from our immediate community except at times when it serves our own selfish needs. I’m still struggling with how I can begin to invest in and give to my community, and in the process, cultivate the relationships that will root me in this very neighborhood. In twenty years, I hope I’m still here in the Mission, but first: I need to go meet my neighbors.

this is where i've settled

*I am currently living in a small apartment in the Mission District of San Francisco. It's not a main street, but it's not a quiet street either. There's a lesbian bar on the corner, and on occasion, I'll hear Mexican karaoke when I'm about to go to bed. The elderly Asian woman across the street rummages through our recycling bins on Monday nights after we put them out, taking all of our bottles and cans to sell back for the California Cash Refund credit.




*My room is small but cozy. The bed takes up approximately 85% of the room; I use half of it for book storage. Even though my room is about half the size of the other bedroom in the apartment, I chose it because I like the light that pours in through the windows in the mornings and through the afternoons. I don't mind the smallness because I don't need that much space. I'm still attached to some of my material things, but my intention is to live a more compact life.





*Material things, case in point. Necessary candles, post-its, eye mask, ear plugs, glasses, lollipops, pens, water bottle...



*This is most of my room. I can't get much more my room into a single photograph.



*My two houseplants and some empty vases. I try to take good care of these houseplants but find myself googling houseplant ailments every other day. This does not bode well for future pets or children.



*The hallway from my bedroom. The main door is at the bottom of those stairs. The bathroom (which houses a tub that has talons as feet!) is at the top of the stairs. To the right, the kitchen, the dining room, and the laundry room. The closed door is my roommate's bedroom.



*This is the living room. We have an electric fireplace, empty book shelves, and a television I do not know how to operate.



*I wash dishes about four times a day so I spend a lot of time in this little nook.



*The dining room. My mom gave me the cactus. My roommate received those orchids in the mail. There is a copy of The Economist on our table but it belongs to neither my roommate nor me. We receive all of Adam Flynn's mail, and that is his subscription. Who is Adam Flynn? I do not know, but we have a stack of Adam Flynn's magazines and other paraphernalia in case he is ever interested in reading them.



*On most weekday nights, I choose the quiet life that my apartments, a respite from the production and attention of work. But the world outside, in all its grit and color, is the perfect counterpoint, and I'm reminded every time I step outside that there is so much to see and so many places to explore. Everyday I navigate the dichotomy between the indoors and the outdoors; I struggle with sitting in a cubicle for so long, and sometimes I am scared to walk anywhere at night. Some days I want to sit at my dining table all day long and on others I find myself bolting down 18th street, sucking in all the fresh air I can get as I weave through the Mission and into the Castro. I'm still trying to figure out all sorts of balance in my life right now, but I love being out of an institution and just living in the world, which can be messy in a really beautiful way. Just living in the world right now, and trying to make the most of where I am, who I am, and all the things I have here with me...