Living in San Francisco for Real

It's nice to now have a job (and an income). I've moved from Excelsior (the outer reaches of San Francisco) to a place in Lower Haight. We've got a smaller room in a tiny two-bedroom apartment in a more dangerous neighborhood with a dog, a girl, her newborn baby and her mom and for that I'm paying substantially more in rent. The room Sarah and I had in Excelsior was 1100/month and this one is 1400. My apartment building is on top of a light rail stop, which, because it's loud and draws crazies, keeps housing prices... within reach. Of course, my commute takes half the time and I live right in the middle of a lot of SF's most famous neighborhoods.

I live a block off of Market Street (the source of the neighborhood's seedyness) and on the edge of the Castro District, so there're HIV medication billboards in my metro station (actually, one that explained why Uncle Jacques and a handful of middle aged men I see walking on the street look so skinny), couples of every gender combination holding hands (m-f couples being only marginally more common than m-m), crazy homeless people out my window yelling at nobody in particular and/or panhandling. Also, smoking pot in broad daylight, while walking down the street, while eating on a cafe patio, whatever, is normal and completely unremarkable (public smoking is maybe 4:1 tobacco:pot and attended with equally mild scorn). I saw a guy leaning over to light up a bowl as he walked down the street, in fact, with nary the raised eyebrow among passerbys.

A block or two the other direction from my house, closer to Haight Street proper, the Victorian paint jobs get really nice and people wear NorthFace and drive Priuses, Audis and multi-thousand-dollar bicycles, which I find a little obnoxious, though it does provide a nice counterbalance to Market Street.

People here tend to be smart and interesting, as pointed out by my flatmate Mary (the mother, who's from Kansas-via-Vegas). Unfortunately there's also a distinctly Northern Californian niceness here that has a passive aggressive side to it. Ask for directions, and you will have no trouble getting help. In spite of that sometimes-extreme niceness, because of the Chinese cultural influence people are more likely to push their way past you without a "pardon me". That bothers Mary, but not me. This is generally true of all San Franciscans but old Chinese ladies, of course, are the worst and will bowl you over at the drop of a hat with about twice as much force as their tiny 80lb frames should seem to be capable of.

Sarah and I, with our five figure incomes, can now afford to try out local restaurants. Restaurants here, it turns out, aren't any more expensive than anywhere else. They aren't necessarily any better, either, but the incredible selection means that with some skill and research you can do pretty well for your typical restaurant price.

Classically "cheap food" is not actually cheap in San Francisco. Burritos, burgers etc, are always a couple bucks more here than elsewhere, both starting around $8 (though the burgers are worth it). Food trucks, known elsewhere in California for providing ridiculously cheap and delicious tacos, are their own bizarre art form here. Sarah and I went to an "Off the Grid", which is the weekly SF food truck festival, held in a remote parking lot. Japanese, American gourmet, Filipino, Indian, Malaysian, Yucatan, you-name-it cuisine has representation and all errs towards imaginative fusion. Good luck finding lunch for under $9, but it will be fascinating and delicious.

There *is* cheap food in San Francisco, just in unexpected or elsewhere-obscure genres and select neighborhoods. In Excelsior, which has a big Salvadorean population, there was an awesome Salvadorean bakery on the way to the bus stop that was super cheap (breakfast for $1.50!). Dim Sum and Chinese bakery are similarly super cheap and super delicious, where they can be found, which is pretty much anywhere in the city not riddled with nice Victorian paint jobs and multi-thousand-dollar bicycles. Oh, also, Vietnamese is perennially under-priced (also lunch diners in nontouristy China town). Don't look for a ton of meat, but an entree in a decent-looking Vietnamese restaurant may run you $7 and an excellent meal for two with tip $20.

The extreme niceness, the crazy people panhandling and the extreme affluence/environmental consciousnes may irritate me, but somewhere in living here is also the soul of what makes California great. A lot of it is people not caring what other people do or what other people think of them (even the niceness is not out of social obligation, but some bizzare internal compulsion).

It's kind of surreal to visit the suburbs now, with all their trimmed grass, cleanliness and trees. It comes across as shocking that there should ever be more than a hand's breadth between buildings.

The Red Fox

I received a ridiculously thoughtful gift this year for Valentine's day. Sarah had remembered me talking wistfully about Italian liqueurs and bought me a bottle of Campari. Add to that Sarah's new favorite soda called Sarsi (a Filipino sarsaparilla) and it was actually a pretty obvious highball:

1/2 shot Campari
1 shot Gin
Top with Sarsaparilla

This is a very dry, herbal drink considering that it's mostly soda. Other sarsaparillas should be just as good as Sarsi, but I'm not so sure root beer is going to work for this. The dryness that distinguishes sarsaparilla from root beer is essential to complement the bitter and oh-so-dry Campari. The name came pretty naturally. It's not totally clear whether Sarah or I invented this one since we both found the combination so obvious, but I'm going to credit her since using gin in a rich, sweet drink would definitely have not occurred to me before meeting her.

Sarah calls the gin-less version of this drink a "Camparsi".

Calamari Punch

Sarah and I checked out a Filipino food festival called Kulinarya where, among other things, we discovered a delicious limeade made from the Filipino calamansi lime, whose unique taste can be described as a cross between a lime and a kumquat. This is probably what goaded us into finally visiting Manila Oriental Market down the street. We loaded up on exotic ramens (they had an entire aisle devoted to ramen) and various beverages including a ton of calamansi-ade. The following highball is named after the combination of calamansi and Kraken rum upon which it is based. Kraken has been my go-to spiced black rum since Matt Wingert introduced it to me, and makes a great dark and stormy, though Sarah will insist that a true "Dark 'n' Stormy" is only made with Gosling's.

1 shot Kraken (or other black spiced rum)
 2 dashes Angostura bitters 
3+ parts Calamansi-ade

There's not a whole lot to be said about this drink. It's just good punch, with warm spices and featuring a neat Filipino beverage. Anyone who wants to try to recreate this without an insanely hard-to-find specialty ingredient should substitute limeade with a splash of orange juice (or, if you have it, kumquat juice). Like any good punch, this scales up. My thanks to the Excelsior House Tasting Team (aka Sarah).

The Cherry Excelsior

This is the first cocktail developed at the Excelsior House and invention credit goes overwhelmingly to Sarah. Around Christmas we bought a two-liter of Schweppes Black Cherry Flavored Ginger Ale to try out. The soda itself is overly sweet and kind of weird, but we came up with an excellent use for it that burned through an impressive amount of Tanqueray in the process. My apologies for how obscure the soda is. Find it, however, and you're in for a treat.

1 shot Gin
2 parts Black Cherry Ginger Ale
juice squeezed from half a lime
garnish with a maraschino cherry

Serve over ice. In the absence of said rather specific soda, you could improvise with regular black cherry soda and a small piece of fresh ginger muddled into the gin.

The punch of the alcohol and acidity of the lime balances out the soda's cloying sweetness. The combination of juniper, ginger and citrus play out a deft support role underneath the prominent black cherry flavor. The drink is balanced and complex without being overstated. Truth be told, it's kind of addictive.

Back to Work

After basically nine months of unemployment, I start a new job on Wednesday with a nonprofit, open-access scientific publishing company. My job as a "publishing assistant" will be to coordinate between different experts to get scientific papers ready for publishing on our online journals.

The company works on a different business model than traditional scientific publishers. Instead of recouping the costs of publishing by selling journals to universities, we charge a flat fee that the researcher pays for us to publish their work and make it available to absolutely everyone. For reasons that are explained here, this is a very exciting development in scientific publishing and I'm proud to be working for a successful company that is leading the open-access charge.

I'm also stoked to be making a paycheck and have insurance coverage again, as well as to be doing something constructive in terms of a career. This is an industry that I can see myself prospering in for a long time, because while it makes use of my scientific background, I will not be doing any tedious, intricate bench research that I've found I am particularly unsuited to.

I've bought new shoes and pants so that I'll look presentable for work. Now I've just got to make a list of all the health problems I've been holding off on fixing since I last had insurance, two years ago.

Blackout for SOPA and PIPA

Well, I can't figure out how to blackout this blog, but I will have you know that I stand in solidarity with Wikipedia, Google, Facebook, Reddit, Yahoo, Twitter, Ebay, AOL, LinkedIn, Mozilla, a whole host of other websites and a legion of regular citizens against SOPA and PIPA. If you don't know, these are bills in Congress that go up for a vote in the coming days. They are nothing less than an all-out assault against a free and open Internet. I encourage all of you to contact your representatives today about this bill. Wikipedia will help you.

Here is what Wikipedia looked like at the time this post was published.

For a thorough but readable analysis of these two bills, see Reddit's blog.

It wasn't until I tried to contact my Representative that I discovered who my Representative is. Can you guess? It's fucking Nancy Pelosi!UPDATE: SOPA was shelved after the overwhelming response elicited by the blackout protest. PIPA is undergoing revision. A new version of anti-piracy legislation is expected to return to the floor sometime in February. As Wikipedia states in its banner, "we're not done yet".

Maturity

It started maybe a year ago, after I'd just finished my first real relationship and gotten my first real job. People started commenting about how I much had matured. They talked about how I let stupid arguments go unargued or how my writing on this blog had become more sophisticated.

I am twenty-four years old. People rely on me. I do genuinely "uncle" things like teach my niece and nephews how to build a fire, paddle a canoe and drive a vehicle. When I went to Louisiana for the summer I picked up social obligations without comment or awkwardness. I care about how much money I make. I complain about aches and pains. I'm not afraid to touch any bodily fluid. I enjoy talking about relationship issues with my friends, including the increasingly prominent topic of marriage. I drink freely at family events without embarrassment. These, I've found, are hallmarks of maturity.

The realization that I am becoming mature contains, of course, an element of terror. Embarrassing health problems, declining energy levels, the nine-to-five workday and the alarming acceleration of time's passage all weigh heavily on my soul, not to mention the loss of the peculiar brand of frenetic magic I brandished in this blog's earliest prose. The person I was in high school, the radical, has given way to the moderate and that sense of ceaseless, inspired warfare has gone with it. Or rather, it sputters rather than roars. My cutting word and desire to change the world has not diminished, but it is wielded casually now, without pretense or fervor. These are sad things on their own, but make no mistake: I am proud of the person I've become and I am happy to have become it. It took time and concerted effort to arrive where I am now and that arrival is not without its rewards.

The most important rewards, of course, are trust and respect. I've realized that prestige in adulthood is far more dependent upon being a person of character than I'd imagined in childhood. For someone without particularly stellar career prospects, this is very good news.

More intangibly than trust and respect is an increasingly persistent sense of grace. There is an ease that comes from knowing the world and what I'm capable of. I still haven't found my occupational place in the world, but I have found my personal place. I am a good friend, an affectionate lover, a critic, a thinker and a dilettante.

I know that there are much more interesting and intelligent people in this world, but I am comfortable that my talents are worthy enough to merit raising my voice. I am not satisfied by boring people or interesting people holding themselves to low standards. I am an asshole, particularly in that regard. I try not to be a hypocrite.

I will have children. They will consume much of my life and drive me crazy. They will also be awesome. I will get old and feeble and, if possible, more curmudgeony. People will silently laugh at me for things I am not aware of and audibly laugh at me for things I cannot control. I will not grow taller. I will continue to grow more hairy.

I am at peace with all of these things. That may be the most telling part of all of this. What happened to going down kicking and screaming? When did I become so irritatingly pragmatic? Clearly, I am getting old.