Moving: From the Park to the 'Hood

I'll be moving next weekend from foggy, quiet, parkside Inner Sunset to newly-chic but still-a-bit-seedy Hayes Valley. After living in what some of my Mission-centric friends might consider the suburbs of SF for the last five years, it will be a new urban-dwelling experience for me to be right in the middle of it all. My new street, Fell, is one of the major westbound arteries through town, running along the edge of Golden Gate Park's panhandle, smack next to where I grew up as a child in The Haight. Since then, I've lived in the Outer Richmond (a former sand-dune where my father lived for 14 years and where I resettled during the dot-com boom) and Noe Valley (where lesbian couples go to buy homes, walk dogs and push adopted/artificial-insemination-produced babies in strollers). Damn. My friends may be right.

Spent most of the weekend packing, cleaning, organizing and getting rid of excessive crap I've been schlepping around for years. Some of it's difficult to face; boxes of negatives, slides and contact sheets from my father's 30-year career as a photographer, my mother's antique breakfast-in-bed set, and the giant box of clothes and camping gear Jai left when he went back to India. My new minimalistic approach to things belies my sentimental attachment to tangible memories.


The long weekend (alright, who am I kidding... all my weekends are long weekends) also afforded me enough fun and enjoyment to keep some balance and sanity in my life. Took a kick-ass yoga class at the Yoga Tree for some home-practice inspiration. Saturday I went to the Pancake Playhouse party where the blacklight made me glow in hues of yellow and white and I greeted the new day with good friends, blueberry pancakes and soft rock hits of the 80s. Afterwards, my friend Mattia and I drove to the Marin Headlands to watch the sunrise over the Golden Gate Bridge and city skyline.

I'd put a photo here, but I've yet to replace my lost camera due to the fact that I can't bear to do the research. Anyone have recommendations for a small, 5 megapixel digital camera with good manual settings?

I'm So Romantic

This Valentine's Day, I really outdid myself. I did yoga to Son Kite (a new discovery! yoga to psytrance!). I bought myself a bouquet of my favorite flowers (irises and daffodils), cooked myself one of my favorite meals (lasagna) and watched one of my favorite movies (Shakespeare in Love) cuddled up on the couch while hand-feeding myself chocolate truffles and massaging my legs. After concluding the evening by showing myself the orgiastic sex/rave scene from The Matrix: Reloaded (my favorite scene from a movie ever), I took myself to bed. I was so impressed with how romantic I was this year that I can only guess at what stops I'll pull out for my birthday in May.

Down and Dirty in the New York Subway

I've had a case of writer's block for the past week; a bit ironic considering I'm currently reading a book entitled "If You Want to Write." Yes! Yes I do! I also want to photograph, but last weekend I lost my camera (and my cell phone, but I got that back). For anyone who knows me well or followed the travel portion of my blog, this should come as no surprise at all, but I do find it somewhat of a let down that I managed to hold onto my camera for twelve months through five countries, countless guesthouses, trains, busses and rickshaws and then how do I end up losing it? In the back of a New York City taxi cab. To add insult to injury, I had my phone number stuck to the side of it in the event of such a careless maneuver, but I'm pretty certain a NYC cabbie's secondary source of income is in the sale of drunkenly overlooked cameras, phones, iPods and Blackberries. I do not expect a call.

The next night I found myself at the West 4th St. subway station in the sole company of a dozen orange-vested graveyard-shift subway workers busily tending to their "Track and Tile" cleaning detail. (Yes, it's true, someone actually does clean the New York Subway and its network of stations!) Between trains and jokes of questionable taste, half the workers would set wobbly wooden ladders down into the tracks, climb across to the other side and begin furiously scrubbing the 100-year-old, grease-streaked tiled walls with long-handled brushes. Workers on the platform directed high-pressure hoses at the wall to rinse down the dirt his teammate had just brushed loose. When a train approached, they'd quickly grab their buckets, climb out of the tracks and wait for it to pass before climbing back in.

"How often does each station gets cleaned?" I ask Tonya, a Harlem native who's been cleaning for the subway since 2002. "I have no idea, but I've never cleaned the same station twice," she replies with a laugh. "What's it like working underground?" I ask as a yellow flatbed garbage train, loaded with trash generated by the day's 7.8 million riders, rumbles to a stop on the other track. "Well, as you can see, there's a lot of dirt down here. Some of it's really old and I don't think it will ever come off. It's dark and smelly down here. I'll tell you, it's hard work." If I ever complain about my job again, somebody smack me.

It's up to you, New York, New York!

I head to New York City for five days tomorrow morning to visit with friends and get up to some silly fun. I'll save writing a substantial post until I get back - tonight I must catch some zzzzs before my 4:30 AM SuperShuttle pickup.

Erica wrote email from Thailand after unwittingly racking up a 6000 baht (about $150) phone bill from the airport hotel upon arriving. Here's an excerpt:

"We went to a meeting last night at a large hotel called "Thai Together" with all of the individual groups of volunteers representing different parts of the islands. We also had a wonderful lunch prepared by the families at Yanui with them under their temporary housing structure. They are so kind and so happy that we are here. At the end of lunch, I could not hold back the tears rolling down my cheeks. I was so touched by their hospitality when they themselves have nothing . This place is soooo freaking beautiful yet there is still a lot of pain and fear. Hardly anyone is on the beaches which I am told are normaly packed...

"They are cleaning up fast around here and the waters and beaches are as they were 30 years ago as if mother nature cleaned up the last thirty years of tourism. [editor's comment: I love this image of Mother Nature taking care of tourist development and the cultural, environmental and social impact it's had in some areas of Thailand in particular]. MTV is coming out on Saturday to do a story about our project on Yanui Beach, so we are excited about that. Oh yeah, a chicken was sitting in one of the guys helmets and when it got up there was an egg in it! We laughed our asses off!"

This past weekend, I spent with my first love Mario's girlfriend Sarah. She writes a mean blog and I honestly couldn't give a better summation of our time together than she did. I hereby challenge you to Transcend the Elephant in the Room.