I like it here. I haven’t written much about my transition to the Bay Area, mostly because it’s been quite a year of ups and downs. But I do enjoy it and am happy with the decision, mostly because of the people.
I’ve had more interesting and fun conversations here with random strangers than I’ve had in any other city. People get jokes. They are ready to engage. They seem to be having fun. I like it.
I’ve also started to recognize people; not just the nice people who make me coffee and sandwiches, but people I see on the street. In the last year I have taken pictures of at least five people who I’ve seen again. I don’t mean people in my neighborhood or near my office, I mean random folks I saw on BART or on the street.
The impetus for this post came from a woman standing next to me on the train – right now – whose photo I took months ago. I took it because her green travel mug matched her green jacket and it looked kind of cool and commutery and my intention is to take photos and decide later what to do with them, rather than hem and haw and miss the picture.
I think I took two, and in the second she is giving me a definite “why are you creeping me?” hairy eyeball. I should post the picture here but that would require a lot of scrolling and it wasn’t in focus.
Is she reading this over my shoulder? I would if I were her. I totally look at people’s screens on BART. A few months ago I watched a guy post comment spam with embedded… scripts… or something.
Also you’d be amazed how many people on the train are reading porn novels on their devices.
San Francisco is one of the world’s great cities, but only 837,000 people live here, nowhere near the size of the mellifluously-named Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill Combined Statistical Area “CSA”, with its estimated population of two million plus.
I don’t know how to end this post and we’re almost at my stop so I’ll just say there’s a Japanese transsexual dressed like a schoolgirl standing near the train door, posing and checking herself out in the reflection of the window and a guy dressed in, you know, men’s clothes trying really hard to figure her out.
I should probably take a picture.