So many other places are, but I feel really lucky right now to be living somewhere that I currently find really interesting. I’ll need years here to do everything. Years and a buddy or two or three. Years and maybe a local or two or three to show the hidden treasures. Nearly daily someone tells me about some new place or thing. Yesterday I learned that a person can hike Mount Tam[alpais] 100 times and still find new trails and experiences. I just had no clue. Some of the winners, I can’t stop visiting repeatedly. Honestly. They’re so good, I find myself crossing The Bridge over and over again.

I’ve heard it said that SF isn’t a party town, and so far I can attest to that. I’m pretty sure there are some great places to hear music and to otherwise go out, but they must all be in neighborhoods that I haven’t yet spent time in. Especially SoMa; perhaps that’s where someone could find some really good djs and perhaps some thick, sticky beats sometime (honestly though; where are all the djs? my housemate thinks this just isn’t the town for it. i disagree. i think we’re uneducated).

What SF is is a food town. And somewhat of a beer town. And a place with really interesting venues and really good goddamn vistas. Views views views…unless there’s fog or, during the fire season, smoke.

Having sold my car, I am, daily, a bonafide pedestrian, in nearly every form. I pack and carry tons of sometimes-useless stuff around, just in case. (Mainly it’s just extra weight, lugged and borne for no eventual outcome). I must learn to refine my “unforseen-event” planning. I often miss having a car…(but who can afford paying CA’s nearly $5 gas?)

I’m learning to think ahead and to plan for contingencies – a book for all the waiting, an umbrella, comfortable [ugly] shoes, extra bag in case I need to grab something from the store. One would think that with all the walking and with hills to boot, that I’d be losing weight or toning legs, but I can’t say that such is the case. In fact, the whole experience has taught me that I have to work a WHOLE LOT harder to see any physical benefit. I have to run a whole lot longer and push myself much, much harder to see toned abs and arms. Perhaps my cardio system is benefiting from the walking….but the pedestrian life is thus far not enough to change my body. There’s just too much good food in this town.

What hasn’t been entirely easy – and I’ve probably been too impatient, or events in my time here are currently building to make me impatient – is the meeting people and making friends thing. Perhaps I should have, but I didn’t realize how much such would affect me. I fully thought I needed anonymity for awhile, isolation. Turns out… I need to get out a whole lot more. Join things. Do things. Move off Twin Peaks and out of the Castro. Distill my little embarrassing anguishes from loneliness-for-the-first-time-in-a-long-time-so-screwing-with-your-head stuff.

To whom can I expose the urgency of my own passion? I don’t know yet.

The people here are absolutely textured and interesting. What I’d hoped for in variation and creative-ness, new perspectives, offering something new. Before I moved here, I was warned that everyone here is really good at things and I’m finding that to be true. It’s an underestimated Big Leagues for artists and creatives, for one. You like cycling? Chances are the person you’re telling that to competes on the weekends. Pretty good at skiing? The person casually listening has a house in Tahoe and grew up there and shreds mountains in their sleep. Really. It’s that easy to find talent and world travel experience and scientific pedigreed prowess. Another thing I’m finding…are a lot of people with something to explain, which is interesting. It means I can keep my mouth shut because someone is explaining to me why they’re not making a living with their ivy league degree or why they had to leave Vegas or their brilliant better-than-this-one job. Which sounds snotty, but I don’t mean it that way. A ton of people here are uber smarties. It’s made for some really interesting conversation. I’m realizing I have Casey to thank for one of my favorite things to have read this year, which I may not have fully appreciated had I not been interacting with Brilliants to the level that I have in the last few years and currently do now: http://www.theamericanscholar.org/su08/elite-deresiewicz.html