I don't listen to the radio much except for when I'm at home. In addition to the perfect temperature of the sun, and the easy wide roads, and the hills, the radio is why I love driving in the Bay Area. Besides the current pop (it was unexpectedly satisfying to crank up "California Gurls" in California), the stations here take me back to junior high dances and even further back to playing in the aisles of my dad's store with nineties soft rock in the background, and to being driven around by my brothers in their eighties cars to the tunes of eighties new wave. I blast a lot of bad, catchy music. It's stuff I never hear elsewhere, stuff that I haven't heard in years, like old school Mase (words I still know) or that one beautiful Donna Lewis song (I Love You Always Forever) that made me buy the entire album but only listen to that one song. Now that I've sold that CD away years before iTunes import was invented, the only time I might ever come across the song again is by chance on the kind of radio station they use at the dentist, the kind of station programmed in the car along with pop, hip hop and oldies.
It was in this house and in this place that I listened to my first radio, sometime in elementary school. The beer and cigarette companies my dad would purchase his store's goods from would send him little gifts with their brands all over them, like bags and cups and one time, a radio. It was from Camel cigarettes. It was a blue and yellow handheld radio, in a rectangular shape, with a camel on it, and an antenna. I sat on the carpet of my parents' bedroom, turned it on, and became mesmerized for the next four hours. I heard the same top forty songs cycled through the afternoon, and it's my first memory of discovering music. I became familiar with the concept of a radio station, and especially when I've been away for a long time, the pureness of that discovery comes back when I drive here to the radio. There's something about all this that makes nostalgia fresh, and the layers of everything around so light without losing substance. And it's just fun to dance and sing loudly, badly, and honestly in the car.
Showing posts with label california. Show all posts
Showing posts with label california. Show all posts
Wednesday, August 4, 2010
Tuesday, July 27, 2010
so soon
On the eve of my board exams, a super hasty post about how I cannot wait to go home, for some calm and perspective. I'm as excited to go to Fremont, California as I was for Greece or Vietnam; in some ways, the feelings are even deeper. As usual I've let many things accumulate, things to save for home, the little and the closer to heart. There are errands: passport renewal, car registration, shoe returns, health insurance, travel and work for the next year. There are things I want to do everyday--run, write, sit on the couch with my parents. In my head I have a pile of unstarted entries about science, goodbyes, people--the thought of bumming around in the city and on the beach to plow through them is driving me crazy, it's so close. There are a good number of people from past and present I will be so happy to talk to, do things with, see things with, just be with--my oldest friend, my best friends from high school, college roommates, friends here who are currently there, and people met in between. As hard as it at these times to be away from my family, feeling so strongly their pull makes me glad for that capacity and venue for feeling. My mom is making all my favorite foods and my brother is making reservations at all his favorite sushi restaurants. There will be ocean, hikes, hills, woods, climbs, and lots and lots of sleeping. Before I get there, I have two 9-hour exams, two flights and three days to get through. It is so good to know how heavily the after outweighs the before.
Friday, April 4, 2008
backwards
Yesterday I met a baby two days old, and realized that's the closest I've ever come to the concrete very beginning of life. Then we saw another newborn born without a small intestine who, the nurse told us, wasn't going to make it. And that was the closest I've ever come to the concrete very end of life.
Last weekend, I left the rain in New Haven for rain in Fremont. The hills had turned green since I last saw them. There is nothing I love more in my hometown than the green hills on gray days. The greenery is so fresh against the rain. We drove through Niles, a part of Fremont I rarely see; the last time might've been the summer before high school, with the same friends. We drove for two and a half hours to get to Sutter Creek, and drove through numerous new-to-me and lush highways and narrow roads along the way. We passed hills sprinkled with churning windmills, hills strewn with cows, flattened hills that stretched to remote ranch houses. I saw a whole new part of California, with two of my oldest friends as passengers, going to the wedding of a friend whose closeness I still miss. The tears at the ceremony were for him growing together with his one, but selfishly, the feeling that lingered afterwards was our growing apart.
I missed home and family something awful while I was at home, most when they were right there for me. I sometimes get the impression people here don't think I'm attached to them or value these values as much as they do because I don't miss California and my family when I'm away. It's hard to explain that these things are so sewn in me that I rarely feel disconnected from them. Yet for whatever reason this past weekend, the physicality of my parents made me feel there are some things I can't carry as well as they can give me in their presence. When I was leaving, my mom exclaimed, I miss you so much! She often forgets to insert the right tense in her English phrases but her mistake made my nonsensical ache for home while I was there right. I miss missing home.
Last month, Henry visited me at Yale and I talked to him in person for the first time since June 2006 when we graduated, and we had similar conversations as we did then. Or at least similar topics of conversation. He mentioned the people we respectively let go. He called them the birds we let fly...willingly, purposefully. He talked about how hard it was, how he hasn't loved anyone that intensely since then, but focused on how much he's grown since then, and how he didn't think he could've grown in the same way if he hadn't. I agreed but will never make up my mind about a concrete rationale for any of that, no longer want to make sense of my senses. I miss the bird I let go, the one who nodded yes you are a difficult person but I don't find it difficult and want to be there as you figure it out because I love all of you. All of you. I grew with him and I've grown a lot without. I've been incredibly happy in both. Like Henry, I know that I've lived distinctly differently because of that willful, purposeful choice.
But that's a given for anything you choose or anything that happens to you, that it has shaped your life in a certain way that's never quite the same as if you had chosen something else or if something else had happened to you, but you can't judge which is more worthy, and in the end you can only be grateful for having had something and later, something else.
Last weekend, I left the rain in New Haven for rain in Fremont. The hills had turned green since I last saw them. There is nothing I love more in my hometown than the green hills on gray days. The greenery is so fresh against the rain. We drove through Niles, a part of Fremont I rarely see; the last time might've been the summer before high school, with the same friends. We drove for two and a half hours to get to Sutter Creek, and drove through numerous new-to-me and lush highways and narrow roads along the way. We passed hills sprinkled with churning windmills, hills strewn with cows, flattened hills that stretched to remote ranch houses. I saw a whole new part of California, with two of my oldest friends as passengers, going to the wedding of a friend whose closeness I still miss. The tears at the ceremony were for him growing together with his one, but selfishly, the feeling that lingered afterwards was our growing apart.
I missed home and family something awful while I was at home, most when they were right there for me. I sometimes get the impression people here don't think I'm attached to them or value these values as much as they do because I don't miss California and my family when I'm away. It's hard to explain that these things are so sewn in me that I rarely feel disconnected from them. Yet for whatever reason this past weekend, the physicality of my parents made me feel there are some things I can't carry as well as they can give me in their presence. When I was leaving, my mom exclaimed, I miss you so much! She often forgets to insert the right tense in her English phrases but her mistake made my nonsensical ache for home while I was there right. I miss missing home.
Last month, Henry visited me at Yale and I talked to him in person for the first time since June 2006 when we graduated, and we had similar conversations as we did then. Or at least similar topics of conversation. He mentioned the people we respectively let go. He called them the birds we let fly...willingly, purposefully. He talked about how hard it was, how he hasn't loved anyone that intensely since then, but focused on how much he's grown since then, and how he didn't think he could've grown in the same way if he hadn't. I agreed but will never make up my mind about a concrete rationale for any of that, no longer want to make sense of my senses. I miss the bird I let go, the one who nodded yes you are a difficult person but I don't find it difficult and want to be there as you figure it out because I love all of you. All of you. I grew with him and I've grown a lot without. I've been incredibly happy in both. Like Henry, I know that I've lived distinctly differently because of that willful, purposeful choice.
But that's a given for anything you choose or anything that happens to you, that it has shaped your life in a certain way that's never quite the same as if you had chosen something else or if something else had happened to you, but you can't judge which is more worthy, and in the end you can only be grateful for having had something and later, something else.
Wednesday, January 2, 2008
home
Since we started college, no visit to home has been unaccompanied by conversations about how it feels to be back home and what it means. As more time goes by, the visits become fewer and more far between, and the conversations about them longer. I don't see Fremont being a place that I will be again, outside of the holidays. It won't likely ever again be my home again in the sense of living here for any extended period of time, not even summers. I may end up in the Bay Area again, but that could be anywhere--not this street, not this place.
They say home is where your heart is, but I'm not sure my heart is here either. Not because I don't love Fremont. It always surprises me when I come home, how beautiful Fremont is. This small town with few claims to fame, with little to do, with little to see. One of the first things I did here was run around my neighborhood in the morning. The love I felt for this home was so immediately palpable; it breathed as I breathed. So much of it came from familiarity, because if you know me you know it takes forever for my surroundings to become familiar to me. Even now, I'm little aware of the street names and how they relate to each other. But I recognize things and it doesn't take much to re-feel them. The route to my piano teacher's house and the church where we played our recitals, the steps where my first boyfriend and I used to kiss, my old junior high. It has been gorgeously bright and warm enough to run comfortably in a T-shirt. December is a nice month here, where the hills are just transitioning from brown to green, so you see them in all their shades. Seeing Christmas lights on houses and decorations in the yard, during the day instead of night as intended, gives this small cove of the town an endearing charm. Instead of magic, it's real, and sweet. Fremont's not hip or urban or quirky or worldly or especially quaint, and it doesn't keep anything hidden that makes you want to seek out its corners. It just is what it is, a place where people live.
Maybe for that reason, home has become a place where I fix things. I've written earlier about how I hang onto broken things as long as possible, but when I come home I'm more amenable to changing them. I finally switched from rain-worn phone to my old phone so that it won't die on me after a few hours anymore. My family gave me a new laptop for Christmas to replace my only somewhat functional computer of the past few years. Home is where my mom sews buttons back onto my coat, where I finally get clothes dry-cleaned, where I cut my hair and go to the dentist, where I finally get a pair of dress pants so I can stop wearing the ones from high school. Home is where I began running, and where I returned to it during difficult times. It's clear that much of this is about convenience and familiarity, but convenience is not easy to come by and familiarity inherently doesn't happen instantly. Some things aren't so easily mended, but what comes first is the desire to mend, to maintain or move forward. I might carry my heart wherever I go, but this will always be a place to move around the pieces, to put them back in place or make them anew.
They say home is where your heart is, but I'm not sure my heart is here either. Not because I don't love Fremont. It always surprises me when I come home, how beautiful Fremont is. This small town with few claims to fame, with little to do, with little to see. One of the first things I did here was run around my neighborhood in the morning. The love I felt for this home was so immediately palpable; it breathed as I breathed. So much of it came from familiarity, because if you know me you know it takes forever for my surroundings to become familiar to me. Even now, I'm little aware of the street names and how they relate to each other. But I recognize things and it doesn't take much to re-feel them. The route to my piano teacher's house and the church where we played our recitals, the steps where my first boyfriend and I used to kiss, my old junior high. It has been gorgeously bright and warm enough to run comfortably in a T-shirt. December is a nice month here, where the hills are just transitioning from brown to green, so you see them in all their shades. Seeing Christmas lights on houses and decorations in the yard, during the day instead of night as intended, gives this small cove of the town an endearing charm. Instead of magic, it's real, and sweet. Fremont's not hip or urban or quirky or worldly or especially quaint, and it doesn't keep anything hidden that makes you want to seek out its corners. It just is what it is, a place where people live.
Maybe for that reason, home has become a place where I fix things. I've written earlier about how I hang onto broken things as long as possible, but when I come home I'm more amenable to changing them. I finally switched from rain-worn phone to my old phone so that it won't die on me after a few hours anymore. My family gave me a new laptop for Christmas to replace my only somewhat functional computer of the past few years. Home is where my mom sews buttons back onto my coat, where I finally get clothes dry-cleaned, where I cut my hair and go to the dentist, where I finally get a pair of dress pants so I can stop wearing the ones from high school. Home is where I began running, and where I returned to it during difficult times. It's clear that much of this is about convenience and familiarity, but convenience is not easy to come by and familiarity inherently doesn't happen instantly. Some things aren't so easily mended, but what comes first is the desire to mend, to maintain or move forward. I might carry my heart wherever I go, but this will always be a place to move around the pieces, to put them back in place or make them anew.
Sunday, July 30, 2006
san francisco
Amidst the ache of the past month, San Francisco has helped me. Not by cloaking my feelings with other strong sensations, but by letting me bare them and accentuate them without feeling like it was too much. The places and people comfortably crammed into this compact city (seven by seven miles, right Steph?) remind me that all these things I carry in me can fit inside of me, that I can grow to make room for them. At the same time that I’m glad that my emotional self won’t burst from the expansion of my own thoughts and feelings, I’ve always found it difficult and lacking in value to keep these things for myself. Even writing publicly this way seems insufficient. But the most I can aspire to, now and until I find something more useful, is remembering and sharing.
Living in the Sunset District means living in the thick of fog, which means that you can see the air physically and swiftly moving across the hills like it’s racing to get somewhere, and it’s especially nice watching it roll over the bridge near sunset. Running through misty mornings is not unpleasant. The slight cold makes me conscious of my body gradually warming, and my breaths register more clearly. My mind keeps going even as I try to concentrate on these physicalities, but it still helps to move, literally. It is nice to explore the streets of my new home, see the rows of shops and houses and bookstores, and discovering oddities like the pink Catholic church that reminds me of New Mexico and an alternative elementary school where I saw little Asian kids milling about in black T-shirts.
Our place is a ten-minute walk from Golden Gate Park, where it is perfect to run because there is no way you can take the same path each time. There are so many small and large treasures sitting in that park--lots of quiet trails, gardens of varying sizes and types, a baseball field (baseball fields are so pretty). It is quiet on weekday mornings, and the sprinklers make the sidewalks wet. I got a little lost the first time through (because I’m that way, and because it’s larger than New York’s Central Park) and ended up in Haight-Ashbury, a funky neighborhood lined with pot shops and music stores and old Victorian houses.
Haight is also where Raph lives (crazy to see him, five years after our first meeting!), and I’ve been lucky to dine at his place twice. The after-work (even though I haven’t started working yet) get-together-at-an-actual-place-that’s-not-a-dorm felt very I’m-in-my-twenties. Sitting around in an apartment with home-cooked food and wine, with conversation as entertainment, with jobs but not yet careers, with people from different places now with a common city of residence, makes for a good combination of settled and not-settled. Both dinners were very satisfying meals.
So much good food here, it’s the one thing I feel like I can literally endlessly explore. In Haight we had Cuban tapas at a cheery place called Cha Cha Cha. Steph took me and Leo to The Stinking Rose, on Columbus Ave near TransAmerica and City Lights, which is a garlic restaurant serving boiled garlic as appetizers and garlic-laced entrees. We sat in private booths that each had a different mirror and chandelier, and velvety red curtains.
Sarah and I had a fabulous seafood lunch at Pier 1 on the Embarcadero, overlooking the Bay Bridge. Another time she brought John to the city to eat at Tadich Grill, the oldest restaurant in California; it dates back to the Gold Rush. The restaurant was one big room with large engulfing booths tucked on the sides and a big bar in the middle, and we had cheesy-rich casseroles. It’s in the Financial District, and gets quickly crowded with after-work businesspeople, so it felt very grown-up to be there.
Last week I saw Andy for the first time since he graduated last year, with Steph, and went to the famous Burma Super Star and had my first taste of Burmese cuisine. I love how there are super popular hole-in-the-wall places here. Speaking of which, Tanvi and I had lunch at a warehouse-turned-streetfood-Indian-joint in Berkeley. I forget the name of what I had, but it was huge puff of crispy bread that took up half our table. Yum. I went there a second time with Sandeep and friends, where I again ordered a dish I couldn’t finish. Another time Aud and I searched for a Thai place and found one right when we got off the bus. I always knew the city was full of food, but living right here and seeing food on every block still amazes me. I love meals.
And having good people to eat with. It’s been calming and good for me, to have the leisure to see people I’ve seen fairly regularly during college as well as those I haven’t seen in a long time. There are few people I can talk to for long periods of time like I do with Audrey. After not having kept in touch for a couple of years, Tanvi and I had a three and a half hour conversation without pause. True, some of it was catch-up what-are-you-doing but mostly it was thoughts on the here and now, and the recent past, and connection was easy. We talked about how much we feel we’ve changed, but also questioned how much of that is self-awareness. After all, she seemed like the same person I knew in high school—then again, we’ve both changed so maybe we just changed similarly. College, being a communal experience, perhaps brings about similar transitions and feelings for most people. Some things like, how home’s not home, anxieties about growing up, the need to do things before life takes over, misremembered memories, loneliness. I wonder, will there be a time when people diverge so much that they not only move at different paces but in different directions? There are big chunks of time and experience that most everyone goes through: post-college life, marriage, settling, children, middle age, and so on. I suppose people will eventually be at different stages in their lives (some are, even now) but it seems like—it is natural and comforting to think that—there is usually a common base from which we all begin.
The last two weeks, as the rest of the Bay was drenched in heat, San Francisco warmed to gorgeous degrees, and there was plenty of sun here. During this time I saw some of the touristy and not-as-touristy sites that I never sought out before, which makes me feel closer to here. We went to Alcatraz, which was interesting mostly for getting the view of the city that prisoners had there. There was this one tiny window where the gorgeous white skyline appeared like a diorama. The simultaneous feeling of closeness and distance was sad.
After taking the ferry back to the city and looking back to Alcatraz, the island looked a bit different, less formidable, more melancholy.
Sarah and I wandered downtown and decided for no real reason to see the Grace Cathedral. Apparently it’s the largest Gothic structure in the West, which brought back memories of seeing Yale this past spring and made me miss the East Coast. The cathedral has these golden doors that were cast from the same mold as the Gates of Paradise from the Baptistry in Florence (Sarah recognized them as something from Italy, and we learned this detail looking it up afterwards).
There seem to be several Italian architectural imitations in the city. I randomly came across City Hall, which I don’t think I’ve ever seen before and is beautiful, whose dome is modeled after St. Peter’s Basicila in Rome. Anyhow, I liked the building’s golden accents and its sense of length; it spans across a vast space, and a long row of trees and stretch of grass lead up to it.
I ran into it on my way to the Asian Art Museum, which is a wonderful museum. It’s divided into Asian countries and the physical space of the museum is handled really well and delicately. It was easy to sense the change as you transitioned from India to China to to Korea to Japan. The hall of the entrance and some of the rooms inside are beautiful, too, with the kind of tall fat pillars, high ceilings and smooth stone that make you feel like you could be as elegant as the surroundings. I spent the afternoon there by myself, and it was the first time since I came back to California that I appreciated the solitude. Not that I was without thoughts of being not-alone, because I thought about that a lot, as with anything that moves me enough to want to share it, especially with people who would value it.
I also saw the city’s Museum of Modern Art, which has a lovely collection of Matisse. I liked especially a portrait he did of his wife, wearing a hideously beautiful dress, a patchwork of vivid and odd colors—the one where he told people that she had been wearing black when posing for him. Besides loving the colors, I’ve always loved the value modernism places on individual perception, and how emotion gets expressed in the concrete. I still don’t really understand contemporary art, which was a big part of the museum. One of their biggest exhibits also featured Shomei Tomatsu, a Japanese photographer. It was called “Skin of the Nation” and was an enormous collection of war-time and post-war Japan and its people. Tomatsu’s eye is amazingly comprehensive; he captured the rural and urban, Americans and Japanese, prostitutes and socialites. The concept of skin was most poignant in the series of Nagasaki victims. It overwhelms you, thinking about all the elements that comprise a culture and a person.
Overall, though, the SF MoMA doesn’t quite compare to New York’s, which might be my favorite museum of all because I’ve been there three times and had such a different and satisfying experience each time. I still remember the thrill of seeing the huge canvas of Chagall’s I and the Village the last time I went there, the cold winter of junior year.
One of the most special places I’ve been to while on my break before work is Baker Beach, very close to our place (we live a few miles from the ocean), a beautiful beach at the head of Golden Gate. Warm white thick sand, cold water, and an unbelievable view of the entire bridge. We walked across the entire expanse of the beach, to make it to the cove of rocks, whose rugged, slippery qualities felt great on our bare feet as we climbed them. This is also the nude area of the beach, and it’s funny, it was mostly men who went without clothing. (In Greece we’d noticed it was mostly women, never any men). I felt happy standing on those rocks facing a sun that was on the edge of setting but still draping the water with its warmth and shine.
Then there are the places outside of San Francisco that have been great too. A few of us from high school and a couple new friends took a trip to the Takara Sake Museum in Berkeley. We watched a short video on how sake is made, and the different types; glimpsed part of the sake factory; viewed sake-making tools. There is something satisfying about knowing something about what you’re consuming. We sampled six different kinds of sake. First we had classic sho chiku bai, their most popular sake. It was hot (temperature wise), and dry and faintly sweet. Next was Ginjo, which was one of our favorites. It’s made from really well-polished rice (apparently, 50% instead of the normal 30% polished), so it has a delicate texture and flavor. Served cold, it felt nice travelling down your throat and into your stomach, and very crisp. Then we had flavored sake! Out of a choice of plum, lychee, green apple and raspberry, I had lychee (smelled just like the fruit) and apple (tasted like candy). We also had nama sake, which isn’t made by pasteurization like the others but by filterization. It had a very distinct taste (the details of which I can’t remember) and strong smell. Next was nigori creme de sake. Nigori is unfiltered sake, so it was a murky white color instead of the usual clear. It was textury and richer than the others. Finally we had plum koshu which was very very sweet, but had more alcohol than the flavored sake.
Today I went to the Gilroy Garlic Festival with Steph and her mom. I can see where Steph inherits her silliness. It was so funny watching her mom impulsively gravitate to the foods and goodies that caught her fancy, and she was as excited about garlic ice cream as I was. We had garlic pasta, sausages, shrimp, mushrooms, and escargot. We had four different flavors of garlic ice cream: vanilla, pistachio, almond and chocolate. Gilroy is a funny town with lots of farmland, and we enjoyed the dry yellow landscape. We joked about how the dirt roads we had to go through to get parking had just been freshly dug out of the land for the festival, but I think underneath the humor was a wistful appreciation for the simple life of tilling land and producing crops.
I feel welcome here, and not because the Bay Area is my home--that concept of home as a place has been growing increasingly fuzzy for everyone. But because strangers (including the man walking through residential SF with a parakeet on his shoulder) smile back at me, because cars stop for pedestrians (even though they are perceptibly slower here), because a lady offered me money for bus fare (and in Haight, people offered us wine and crack). And mostly because the sun and hills and roads seem to love me back.
Will me and this city be enough to heal and grow over the next year? It’s too soon to actually feel the truth of it yet, but I build and rebuild faith that it will be.
Living in the Sunset District means living in the thick of fog, which means that you can see the air physically and swiftly moving across the hills like it’s racing to get somewhere, and it’s especially nice watching it roll over the bridge near sunset. Running through misty mornings is not unpleasant. The slight cold makes me conscious of my body gradually warming, and my breaths register more clearly. My mind keeps going even as I try to concentrate on these physicalities, but it still helps to move, literally. It is nice to explore the streets of my new home, see the rows of shops and houses and bookstores, and discovering oddities like the pink Catholic church that reminds me of New Mexico and an alternative elementary school where I saw little Asian kids milling about in black T-shirts.
Our place is a ten-minute walk from Golden Gate Park, where it is perfect to run because there is no way you can take the same path each time. There are so many small and large treasures sitting in that park--lots of quiet trails, gardens of varying sizes and types, a baseball field (baseball fields are so pretty). It is quiet on weekday mornings, and the sprinklers make the sidewalks wet. I got a little lost the first time through (because I’m that way, and because it’s larger than New York’s Central Park) and ended up in Haight-Ashbury, a funky neighborhood lined with pot shops and music stores and old Victorian houses.
Haight is also where Raph lives (crazy to see him, five years after our first meeting!), and I’ve been lucky to dine at his place twice. The after-work (even though I haven’t started working yet) get-together-at-an-actual-place-that’s-not-a-dorm felt very I’m-in-my-twenties. Sitting around in an apartment with home-cooked food and wine, with conversation as entertainment, with jobs but not yet careers, with people from different places now with a common city of residence, makes for a good combination of settled and not-settled. Both dinners were very satisfying meals.
So much good food here, it’s the one thing I feel like I can literally endlessly explore. In Haight we had Cuban tapas at a cheery place called Cha Cha Cha. Steph took me and Leo to The Stinking Rose, on Columbus Ave near TransAmerica and City Lights, which is a garlic restaurant serving boiled garlic as appetizers and garlic-laced entrees. We sat in private booths that each had a different mirror and chandelier, and velvety red curtains.
Sarah and I had a fabulous seafood lunch at Pier 1 on the Embarcadero, overlooking the Bay Bridge. Another time she brought John to the city to eat at Tadich Grill, the oldest restaurant in California; it dates back to the Gold Rush. The restaurant was one big room with large engulfing booths tucked on the sides and a big bar in the middle, and we had cheesy-rich casseroles. It’s in the Financial District, and gets quickly crowded with after-work businesspeople, so it felt very grown-up to be there.
Last week I saw Andy for the first time since he graduated last year, with Steph, and went to the famous Burma Super Star and had my first taste of Burmese cuisine. I love how there are super popular hole-in-the-wall places here. Speaking of which, Tanvi and I had lunch at a warehouse-turned-streetfood-Indian-joint in Berkeley. I forget the name of what I had, but it was huge puff of crispy bread that took up half our table. Yum. I went there a second time with Sandeep and friends, where I again ordered a dish I couldn’t finish. Another time Aud and I searched for a Thai place and found one right when we got off the bus. I always knew the city was full of food, but living right here and seeing food on every block still amazes me. I love meals.
And having good people to eat with. It’s been calming and good for me, to have the leisure to see people I’ve seen fairly regularly during college as well as those I haven’t seen in a long time. There are few people I can talk to for long periods of time like I do with Audrey. After not having kept in touch for a couple of years, Tanvi and I had a three and a half hour conversation without pause. True, some of it was catch-up what-are-you-doing but mostly it was thoughts on the here and now, and the recent past, and connection was easy. We talked about how much we feel we’ve changed, but also questioned how much of that is self-awareness. After all, she seemed like the same person I knew in high school—then again, we’ve both changed so maybe we just changed similarly. College, being a communal experience, perhaps brings about similar transitions and feelings for most people. Some things like, how home’s not home, anxieties about growing up, the need to do things before life takes over, misremembered memories, loneliness. I wonder, will there be a time when people diverge so much that they not only move at different paces but in different directions? There are big chunks of time and experience that most everyone goes through: post-college life, marriage, settling, children, middle age, and so on. I suppose people will eventually be at different stages in their lives (some are, even now) but it seems like—it is natural and comforting to think that—there is usually a common base from which we all begin.
The last two weeks, as the rest of the Bay was drenched in heat, San Francisco warmed to gorgeous degrees, and there was plenty of sun here. During this time I saw some of the touristy and not-as-touristy sites that I never sought out before, which makes me feel closer to here. We went to Alcatraz, which was interesting mostly for getting the view of the city that prisoners had there. There was this one tiny window where the gorgeous white skyline appeared like a diorama. The simultaneous feeling of closeness and distance was sad.
After taking the ferry back to the city and looking back to Alcatraz, the island looked a bit different, less formidable, more melancholy.
Sarah and I wandered downtown and decided for no real reason to see the Grace Cathedral. Apparently it’s the largest Gothic structure in the West, which brought back memories of seeing Yale this past spring and made me miss the East Coast. The cathedral has these golden doors that were cast from the same mold as the Gates of Paradise from the Baptistry in Florence (Sarah recognized them as something from Italy, and we learned this detail looking it up afterwards).
There seem to be several Italian architectural imitations in the city. I randomly came across City Hall, which I don’t think I’ve ever seen before and is beautiful, whose dome is modeled after St. Peter’s Basicila in Rome. Anyhow, I liked the building’s golden accents and its sense of length; it spans across a vast space, and a long row of trees and stretch of grass lead up to it.
I ran into it on my way to the Asian Art Museum, which is a wonderful museum. It’s divided into Asian countries and the physical space of the museum is handled really well and delicately. It was easy to sense the change as you transitioned from India to China to to Korea to Japan. The hall of the entrance and some of the rooms inside are beautiful, too, with the kind of tall fat pillars, high ceilings and smooth stone that make you feel like you could be as elegant as the surroundings. I spent the afternoon there by myself, and it was the first time since I came back to California that I appreciated the solitude. Not that I was without thoughts of being not-alone, because I thought about that a lot, as with anything that moves me enough to want to share it, especially with people who would value it.
I also saw the city’s Museum of Modern Art, which has a lovely collection of Matisse. I liked especially a portrait he did of his wife, wearing a hideously beautiful dress, a patchwork of vivid and odd colors—the one where he told people that she had been wearing black when posing for him. Besides loving the colors, I’ve always loved the value modernism places on individual perception, and how emotion gets expressed in the concrete. I still don’t really understand contemporary art, which was a big part of the museum. One of their biggest exhibits also featured Shomei Tomatsu, a Japanese photographer. It was called “Skin of the Nation” and was an enormous collection of war-time and post-war Japan and its people. Tomatsu’s eye is amazingly comprehensive; he captured the rural and urban, Americans and Japanese, prostitutes and socialites. The concept of skin was most poignant in the series of Nagasaki victims. It overwhelms you, thinking about all the elements that comprise a culture and a person.
Overall, though, the SF MoMA doesn’t quite compare to New York’s, which might be my favorite museum of all because I’ve been there three times and had such a different and satisfying experience each time. I still remember the thrill of seeing the huge canvas of Chagall’s I and the Village the last time I went there, the cold winter of junior year.
One of the most special places I’ve been to while on my break before work is Baker Beach, very close to our place (we live a few miles from the ocean), a beautiful beach at the head of Golden Gate. Warm white thick sand, cold water, and an unbelievable view of the entire bridge. We walked across the entire expanse of the beach, to make it to the cove of rocks, whose rugged, slippery qualities felt great on our bare feet as we climbed them. This is also the nude area of the beach, and it’s funny, it was mostly men who went without clothing. (In Greece we’d noticed it was mostly women, never any men). I felt happy standing on those rocks facing a sun that was on the edge of setting but still draping the water with its warmth and shine.
Then there are the places outside of San Francisco that have been great too. A few of us from high school and a couple new friends took a trip to the Takara Sake Museum in Berkeley. We watched a short video on how sake is made, and the different types; glimpsed part of the sake factory; viewed sake-making tools. There is something satisfying about knowing something about what you’re consuming. We sampled six different kinds of sake. First we had classic sho chiku bai, their most popular sake. It was hot (temperature wise), and dry and faintly sweet. Next was Ginjo, which was one of our favorites. It’s made from really well-polished rice (apparently, 50% instead of the normal 30% polished), so it has a delicate texture and flavor. Served cold, it felt nice travelling down your throat and into your stomach, and very crisp. Then we had flavored sake! Out of a choice of plum, lychee, green apple and raspberry, I had lychee (smelled just like the fruit) and apple (tasted like candy). We also had nama sake, which isn’t made by pasteurization like the others but by filterization. It had a very distinct taste (the details of which I can’t remember) and strong smell. Next was nigori creme de sake. Nigori is unfiltered sake, so it was a murky white color instead of the usual clear. It was textury and richer than the others. Finally we had plum koshu which was very very sweet, but had more alcohol than the flavored sake.
Today I went to the Gilroy Garlic Festival with Steph and her mom. I can see where Steph inherits her silliness. It was so funny watching her mom impulsively gravitate to the foods and goodies that caught her fancy, and she was as excited about garlic ice cream as I was. We had garlic pasta, sausages, shrimp, mushrooms, and escargot. We had four different flavors of garlic ice cream: vanilla, pistachio, almond and chocolate. Gilroy is a funny town with lots of farmland, and we enjoyed the dry yellow landscape. We joked about how the dirt roads we had to go through to get parking had just been freshly dug out of the land for the festival, but I think underneath the humor was a wistful appreciation for the simple life of tilling land and producing crops.
I feel welcome here, and not because the Bay Area is my home--that concept of home as a place has been growing increasingly fuzzy for everyone. But because strangers (including the man walking through residential SF with a parakeet on his shoulder) smile back at me, because cars stop for pedestrians (even though they are perceptibly slower here), because a lady offered me money for bus fare (and in Haight, people offered us wine and crack). And mostly because the sun and hills and roads seem to love me back.
Will me and this city be enough to heal and grow over the next year? It’s too soon to actually feel the truth of it yet, but I build and rebuild faith that it will be.
Wednesday, September 21, 2005
place
I'm finding it harder and harder to post because at home I have fleeting thoughts, I'm perpetually sleepy because I know I can sleep, there's little structure to my life and I feel little need to impose one. Though that last feeling is waning. I have California for two more days, and I so want to get back to school, and see everyone, and get settled into our room, and start our last year of classes. I can't wait for A-entry, special-meat Wednesdays, Professor Parker, sweaters, Bernard, frozen yogurt in cake cones.
Not to say that home wasn't wonderful. Basically, I saw a lot of movies and a few people. I watched Broken Flowers, 2046, March of the Penguins, Transporter 2, 40-Year-Old Virgin and The Constant Gardener. *Broken Flowers was a little slow and Sarah thought it was pointless, but I liked the concept of revisiting the different people that run through your life, and thinking about what each one says about your own character. It was after she saw *2046 that Sarah texted me, telling me to come home. After seeing the movie I understood that impulse. It was a lot about reaching out, and trying to grasp people who are more like air, smoke even...visible, with presence and movement, but without outline. I don't have the means to describe what it was really about; it would take more expression than I have. Images and lines and phrases come to mind. The line that I referenced once and that both Stephen and Sarah referenced, separately and at different times, was: "Love is about timing." The right time is just as important as the right person, and with that comes the right place because sometimes that's dependent on time. I liked how the main character's experiences flowed into the stories that he wrote, so that you couldn't tell which was informing the other, because it worked both ways. *March of the Penguins was so simple, it was amazing. It didn't need any artifice to convince you of its beauty. This is just the way it works, creation and the affection and sacrifice that come with it are just natural. That's the most optimistic thing I think I've ever seen in a movie. *Transporter 2 was pure entertainment, and fun to see on the big screen since I saw the first one on DVD. *The 40-Year-Old Virgin wasn't as good as I thought it would be, based on its cheesy poster and word of mouth. I didn't think it was that funny, but I can see why people thought it was unique as far as raunchy movies go. It was ultimately really sweet-natured, and about a growing up process, and it managed to support both theories of sex-isn't-everything and sex-is-really-important at the same time. *The Constant Gardener was on par with movies like Schindler's List and Hotel Rwanda, the kind that induce a mixture of inspiration and frustration. You want to prevent and stop such things, you want to help, but the reason you do is the same one that makes it hard to--these are big problems, fueled by the very human tendency to ignore what isn't in front of you. And then afterwards, when you're aware, what do you do? What causes do you choose to pursue and which do you have to leave behind, and will you really help? Africa is so beautiful, and so full of mysteries. That must make it all the harder for those with good intentions to go there.
The people were better than the movies. I saw Richard, ate ice cream with him (Ben & Jerry's, minus the life advice) and drank with him (and got a drunk dial from him a few hours later). I had lunch with Kristina today, and we had our usual updated discussion of the Real World and the actual real world. We talked about her moving houses, and I still can't believe that there will never be another birthday party on Prairie View, no more loitering in her driveway. I visited Steph's new place in Los Altos, and it was so nice to see her again, and strange to see my SoCal rival enjoying and living in NorCal. We hung out with no obligations to study later, and that was also different. I ate sandw(h)iches with Aud before she went back to Portland. Besides the company I like getting together with her because we can stay in Fremont. I know that Fremont residents don't share any particular qualities but there is that natural connection of coming from the same place, especially when we went to a high school comprised mostly of San Josians. It was during our conversation that I started consciously thinking about the role of places. She talked about how home wasn't exactly home anymore, and I told her about my feelings of displacement and the illusion of permanence that I attach to home, and a few days later in her journal she likened herself to water, dispersing to various areas but eventually flowing back to one place. That made me think about how I'm not built to change shape with place in exactly the way I thought. I think adjusting to the East Coast made me downplay the importance of my surroundings. I thought home was a feeling I could assume anywhere that interested me, and I didn't give much thought to how I create that feeling, or how it's created.
When Andrew came to California, and we made our way through San Francisco, I could feel how linked place and not just experience but character are. We both knew we were sharing something different with his visit to my home, and I remembered why I relish opportunities to show people places, college to my friends from home, and home to my college friends. We saw so much of the city, from so many different viewpoints--on the ground, from the car, from the middle of the bay, atop towers and hills, along bridges.
Adventuring with Sarah, in Pacifica and downtown San Jose, made me think about it more too. Driving along the coast to Pacifica, we followed a curve and suddenly, we were driving into the sky. It was just blue, the ocean melted seamlessly into the sky ("where's the horizon?"), and we kept moving and it moved too. Then the completely opposite atmosphere of downtown, a place I should totally feel distant from now--seeing it at the peak of nighttime revelry, seeing the dressed-up and made-up girls, the top-down cars playing loud music--that's not my downtown. My downtown was lines of uniformed high schoolers walking from Notre Dame to the cathedral; it was traipsing around the water fountains and Starbucks and the Tech in summery tank tops and jeans; it was musicals and science fairs and pre-winter-ball dinners. But still, it felt the way the new ND building feels--not mine, but still mine.
The truth is, certain places do move me by nature of more than pretty scenery or tall buildings, or even remaining the same as when I'd known and loved them first. I can't pinpoint all the actual reasons, there are so many and the majority are subtle. I don't have any real questions or definite statements, only that the idea of place is more complicated than I thought, the feeling of it simpler, and my love of it stronger.
Not to say that home wasn't wonderful. Basically, I saw a lot of movies and a few people. I watched Broken Flowers, 2046, March of the Penguins, Transporter 2, 40-Year-Old Virgin and The Constant Gardener. *Broken Flowers was a little slow and Sarah thought it was pointless, but I liked the concept of revisiting the different people that run through your life, and thinking about what each one says about your own character. It was after she saw *2046 that Sarah texted me, telling me to come home. After seeing the movie I understood that impulse. It was a lot about reaching out, and trying to grasp people who are more like air, smoke even...visible, with presence and movement, but without outline. I don't have the means to describe what it was really about; it would take more expression than I have. Images and lines and phrases come to mind. The line that I referenced once and that both Stephen and Sarah referenced, separately and at different times, was: "Love is about timing." The right time is just as important as the right person, and with that comes the right place because sometimes that's dependent on time. I liked how the main character's experiences flowed into the stories that he wrote, so that you couldn't tell which was informing the other, because it worked both ways. *March of the Penguins was so simple, it was amazing. It didn't need any artifice to convince you of its beauty. This is just the way it works, creation and the affection and sacrifice that come with it are just natural. That's the most optimistic thing I think I've ever seen in a movie. *Transporter 2 was pure entertainment, and fun to see on the big screen since I saw the first one on DVD. *The 40-Year-Old Virgin wasn't as good as I thought it would be, based on its cheesy poster and word of mouth. I didn't think it was that funny, but I can see why people thought it was unique as far as raunchy movies go. It was ultimately really sweet-natured, and about a growing up process, and it managed to support both theories of sex-isn't-everything and sex-is-really-important at the same time. *The Constant Gardener was on par with movies like Schindler's List and Hotel Rwanda, the kind that induce a mixture of inspiration and frustration. You want to prevent and stop such things, you want to help, but the reason you do is the same one that makes it hard to--these are big problems, fueled by the very human tendency to ignore what isn't in front of you. And then afterwards, when you're aware, what do you do? What causes do you choose to pursue and which do you have to leave behind, and will you really help? Africa is so beautiful, and so full of mysteries. That must make it all the harder for those with good intentions to go there.
The people were better than the movies. I saw Richard, ate ice cream with him (Ben & Jerry's, minus the life advice) and drank with him (and got a drunk dial from him a few hours later). I had lunch with Kristina today, and we had our usual updated discussion of the Real World and the actual real world. We talked about her moving houses, and I still can't believe that there will never be another birthday party on Prairie View, no more loitering in her driveway. I visited Steph's new place in Los Altos, and it was so nice to see her again, and strange to see my SoCal rival enjoying and living in NorCal. We hung out with no obligations to study later, and that was also different. I ate sandw(h)iches with Aud before she went back to Portland. Besides the company I like getting together with her because we can stay in Fremont. I know that Fremont residents don't share any particular qualities but there is that natural connection of coming from the same place, especially when we went to a high school comprised mostly of San Josians. It was during our conversation that I started consciously thinking about the role of places. She talked about how home wasn't exactly home anymore, and I told her about my feelings of displacement and the illusion of permanence that I attach to home, and a few days later in her journal she likened herself to water, dispersing to various areas but eventually flowing back to one place. That made me think about how I'm not built to change shape with place in exactly the way I thought. I think adjusting to the East Coast made me downplay the importance of my surroundings. I thought home was a feeling I could assume anywhere that interested me, and I didn't give much thought to how I create that feeling, or how it's created.
When Andrew came to California, and we made our way through San Francisco, I could feel how linked place and not just experience but character are. We both knew we were sharing something different with his visit to my home, and I remembered why I relish opportunities to show people places, college to my friends from home, and home to my college friends. We saw so much of the city, from so many different viewpoints--on the ground, from the car, from the middle of the bay, atop towers and hills, along bridges.
Adventuring with Sarah, in Pacifica and downtown San Jose, made me think about it more too. Driving along the coast to Pacifica, we followed a curve and suddenly, we were driving into the sky. It was just blue, the ocean melted seamlessly into the sky ("where's the horizon?"), and we kept moving and it moved too. Then the completely opposite atmosphere of downtown, a place I should totally feel distant from now--seeing it at the peak of nighttime revelry, seeing the dressed-up and made-up girls, the top-down cars playing loud music--that's not my downtown. My downtown was lines of uniformed high schoolers walking from Notre Dame to the cathedral; it was traipsing around the water fountains and Starbucks and the Tech in summery tank tops and jeans; it was musicals and science fairs and pre-winter-ball dinners. But still, it felt the way the new ND building feels--not mine, but still mine.
The truth is, certain places do move me by nature of more than pretty scenery or tall buildings, or even remaining the same as when I'd known and loved them first. I can't pinpoint all the actual reasons, there are so many and the majority are subtle. I don't have any real questions or definite statements, only that the idea of place is more complicated than I thought, the feeling of it simpler, and my love of it stronger.
Monday, September 19, 2005
san francisco in two days
At Coit Tower, on the ledges that extend beyond the windows, there are a bunch of coins, mostly pennies but also some nickels and dimes, a few quarters and a handful of foreign pieces. We weren't sure whether we were supposed to add a coin to the collection, or to take a coin as a souvenir. Both were difficult to do, and our first instinct was to add a penny. In our attempt we actually retrieved a quarter someone else left in the pile, and were quick to put it back, not wanting to disturb someone else's interaction with the place. After several tries (none of mine were successful) he managed to get a penny on the very edge, just safe enough to remain there, for who knows how long. As we circled around to see the city through these odd openings, we noticed a lot of other people working very hard to get coins from outside the ledge to the inside, the opposite of what we'd been doing. The idea seems to be an exchange, both ways, instead of one or the other, and I thought that was the simplest and sweetest notion for a place like that. I feel the same about the entire experience, and it's one of the few ineffable experiences I've had that I'm content with leaving that way, unexpressed. Some images instead.
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