Hints on how A.E. Graves spends her imaginary spare time
I love living here so very much, and appreciate my luck at having grown up here nearly every day.
The City, the Bay, the Pacific Ocean, the community, the weather, the coffee, the cultures, the economy, the hills, the parks, the food, even the fog…
It’s so good to be here.
We had an actual THUNDERSTORM this morning! The sound woke me up at about 4:18 am, which was NOT welcome, though it was novel. I could also see lightning flash through the curtains now and then, and after a while, even heard rain (ACTUAL RAIN!) patting against my home.
The novelty of thunder and lightning used to be delightful – it happens so rarely! – but during a fire weather watch, the fear of new wildfires sparked by lightning is too real. Lovely local lightning photos on Twitter were met with a sentiment that combined “ooooh!” with “OH, NO!”
We are still more than 20 days from the autumn equinox, but rain is rare in September, and the smell of rain and the heaviness of the storm mean that it FEELS like autumn right now.
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I’ve been busy. A little too busy.
There is a quote from Dorothea Lange, which the Internet recounts as, “One should really use the camera as though tomorrow you’d be stricken blind…” and sometimes I take her suggestion too much to heart. I’ve been WORKING on my projects with intense, goal-oriented dedication, and it feels like work – creative, but still work.
Photography isn’t all being out and taking photos: beyond the planning and reconnaissance about when the light will be right and in what weather and season, there are: downloads and uploads; indexing and organizing; labeling and backing up; and just as much work for film, plus physical labeling and storage. It is a bit tedious to manage my voluminous output across multiple formats, tedious enough that I suspect my notes for possible NaNoWriMo novels may just be a procrastination plan. I’ll admit it: I suspect it would be easier to write another novella (my fifth!) than it would be to organize my photos and scan my film (and recent monotype prints, while I’m at it). It is funny, but also true. Also: to the extent I pretend to care what people think, it would be much more glamorous to say I’ve written another novella than to describe my indexing process for images. Just typing that almost knocked me unconscious with boredozzzzzzzzzz…
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My dining room table is becoming a staging area for cameras and film with too little room left over to eat, and I need to get that under control soonish.
The IDEA of having time is stimulating all by itself. The potential project list in my head is getting ambitious, rather than just consisting of things that can be done after work or between errands. More and more modest-but-time-consuming projects are piling up in my mind. I really will be designing inappropriately complex templates for photo albums – it will be fun and mostly harmless! 😀 I really will locate more negatives that I’ve mislaid, to see if I can pull together a book from a camera my father found in HIS father’s attic! These projects will all be satisfying in their own way.
It’s lovely to have the time to execute plans, and hopefully I’ll squeeze in rest between organization sessions!
I… have… time… of my own! Right now!!!
After ten months of maintaining business continuity and transferring of all of my team’s and my own work to colleagues at a new corporate parent, I have a sense of accomplishment and relief. I left ‘things’ in good hands and departed on good terms, and now I can relax for a while!
Medical, dental, and administrative appointments took up my first days off, and more of those appointments are coming. I caught up on chores, those things I felt I must do, and did some cleaning. I took some photos, but it always felt like I had to go back to work when I completed a roll!
And then, on Wednesday of this past week, it felt REAL.
This time is really mine. Which feels rare and precious and wonderful and amazing.
I wake up early to take film out of the refrigerator to use for the days when the weather and smoke forecasts are favorable. I go out on long walks, looking at the lighting in various locations at different times of day, and choosing how I want to photograph certain buildings. I make excessively complex plans for setting up photo albums page templates for my Instax Mini prints. I fell into a rabbit hole about graffiti art by researching the Montana acrylic markers I use, which are inexplicably made in Heidelberg (!?!?!) but named after a very western state to celebrate the urban graffiti of New York City(!?!). I am now aware of the few SF Historic Districts we have; I looked up architects of buildings I like to photograph; I am reading books; I caught up on my correspondence in both English and German (!); I’ve even seen my friends!
It’s so exciting to have a life beyond my job.
I am lucky to do amazing work at amazing companies. My work offers exciting challenges and a chance to collaborate on programs that can improve human health, and is stimulating in many ways. Sometimes, they even let me listen to scientists! (Sometimes, I even understand what the scientists say! 😀 )
Yet, THIS intense self-study and self-guided time is also really NICE. Restorative. Stimulating. I can make bigger plans. I can follow my curiosity to wherever it leads me.
I’ve been having symbolic dreams at night about this. Dreams of trying to go somewhere new but being held back by other people’s issues have given way to dreams of arriving at my destination(s), and enjoying great views from a clean, pleasant location. (The cities in my dreams are GORGEOUS at night, and reflect spectacularly on nearby water!)
And then I wake up and fanatically research ink or film or glass paint or authors or book publishers or fonts while drinking French press coffee or homemade chai. (Hahahaha!)
I remain concerned about humans, and the consistently poor decision-making I’ve been witnessing. I’m going to try to vent some of this in harsh fiction, when I’m not fanatically doing something else… Otherwise, I’m hoping all this exploration will result in some good posts here, even as I wonder if this is really the best place to share what I’ve learned about spray paint nozzles. (There are SO MANY, and… oh, pardon me. Ahem.)
So books, coffee, AND MORE. 😉
Yesterday was my first weekday with no appointments or work in AGES.
It was AMAZING.
I completed some chores in the morning, which gave me a sense of accomplishment, and then fled the fog belt to test some film in sunlight. I wandered! I had lunch at a restaurant! I had a beer! (How long has it been?) I enjoyed an iced matcha drink while sitting in the shade! I RODE A CABLE CAR! (Yes, they are back now, after a very long hiatus.) I took more than 17,000 steps!
Unstructured time without appointments or commitments can be so beautiful.
I have countless obligations, chores, and tasks to complete, but taking a day to enjoy myself was a great thing to do. I’m lucky to have chosen to do this, lucky to live here in the Bay Area (and SF in particular), and so very lucky to be in good enough health to freely wander on foot around San Francisco in my purposeful “spare” time.
During the pandemic, I decided to change a few things about how I was living, and one of them was my hair color. I had previously spent late 2019 and early 2020 trying to go a respectable shade of gunmetal gray, a color that looks very modern in architectural settings, and which would match nearly all of my black and gray clothes. But, for whatever reason, the gray never really stuck. The dyes were permanent and were being professionally applied by a real colorist, yet it always faded back to an ambiguous, ashy near-blonde that didn’t quite have its own name.
In March 2020, the pandemic ended professional salon hair color visits, and I was left to my own, not-fully-respectable devices. I noodled around a bit with gray, purple, and rose tints, some of which lasted a day, some of which stuck but didn’t stay true. I watched my roots grow out (and out, and out). I had to see my roots often, because I spent five hours daily on video calls for work, and I did not like what I saw. So, I decided to change direction. In August of 2020, I went pink, a color I had never seriously considered in the past. Pink hair. On ME, a middle-aged woman who showed visible signs of being cooped up indoors for too long. It seemed… unlikely to succeed.
And yet.
Pink hair inspired people to respond differently to me on video calls. They smiled more. They were more outgoing to me than they had been previously. When my employer was acquired, I met many people at the new parent company by video meeting, and it was fun to watch their faces change when my camera turned on. Yes, I was still a legal department representative, yes, we were going to discuss serious business, but their faces visibly brightened. The mood softened. They were professional, always, but also warmer than people usually are with legal department folks.
During the long, dark dread of the 2020 pandemic, that felt REALLY NICE.
2021 arrived, and as my hometown’s vaccination campaign succeeded and infection levels dropped, I left the house and learned that this cheerfulness toward me also happens in real life. Women say nice things to me every day I go out now. We don’t even need to be talking: I was smiling at a woman walking past with her dog, and she just said, “Yaaay, pink hair!” unexpectedly. I am awash in cheer and compliments, and it surprises me every time. It’s like I’m carrying a kitten on my head, or am dressed as a huggable mascot.
I’d already picked out my next color, but it won’t be as…soft, so perhaps I will stick with my friendly pastel pink (PINK! A color I didn’t own any clothes in until recently, and would not have been caught dead in during my youth!) for a while longer, so it can continue to soften my way as I readjust to the world.
For reasons that are visible from space. 🙁
Gut-wrenching imagery of California tonight.
— Dakota Smith (@weatherdak) August 5, 2021
Multiple, destructive wildfires exhibiting extreme behavior. pic.twitter.com/fGaoeznRHB
Yes, I do have particulate filters that fit inside masks I have been using for the pandemic. No, that does not make me feel better.
Not good. Not good at all.
Life in San Francisco: July was a very foggy month in my San Francisco neighborhood’s microclimate, and I’ve had to make field trips to other parts of town to see beyond the edges of our gray blanket. It still amazes me that a blue sky can be just a streetcar ride away!
Last weekend, I spent 6+ hours walking in the sun with another fog refugee on the east side of town. It was a delightful, relaxing, restorative day. I watched a bike rally and its DJ on the back of a flatbed truck; I had an excellent (yet overpriced) espresso drink; I advised my friend not to interact with a gathering of furries; we squirmed through a cheerful crowd of baseball fans; we enjoyed a delicious vegan Indonesian lunch at a picnic table; we explored a neighborhood she’d never visited; we had delicious frozen vegan desserts… [Drifting into a saffron-flavored reverie…]
I kept saying aloud: we are so LUCKY to live here. After sunset, we walked back to catch streetcars to return to our still-foggy homes. *sigh*
It was restorative not only because we enjoyed bright, mild weather, but also because it felt like the Before Times. The many traumas of the past year weren’t on the surface, and it was barely noteworthy to wear masks on transit or while ordering food.
We are so very lucky.
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Life in a Global Pandemic: It has been discouraging to read the news on the dominance of the Delta COVID variant, and to see the local cases rise from low double digits up into the hundreds.
It is especially discouraging knowing that this scenario was preventable. That future similar (or worse) outcomes are preventable. But too many people are choosing not to contribute to prevention.
I now have my first, close/personal, vaccinated friend with a ‘breakthrough’ case. She is an organized person with natural curiosity, so she formally polled her social circles, and has come up with 14 breakthrough cases within her network. (Yes, she is in the greater Los Angeles area, which has been an infection hotspot this entire time, likely due to right wing anti-prevention sentiment.) This alarming information helps me reset some of my own planning about indoor activities as a vaccinated person, which I am less likely to expand now.
I’ve ordered some more fabric face masks in nice patterns, and in black. Including more that have a pocket for an anti-particulate-smoke filter.
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Life in a Climate Crisis: Speaking of smoke masks, the climate crisis is in the news daily, for all the wrong reasons. Rather than great news about countries meeting their climate goals, there have been a long series of disasters relating to increasing, localized extremes. There were so many flood stories last month (Japan, China, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, the US (New York City)) and so many fire stories (we have more area burned here in California than even last year gave us; Siberia is on fire; tourists are being evacuated from fast moving fires in the Mediterranean by boat!) that any disaster image that appeared on my phone’s screen from the news could be from ANYWHERE.
Because: the climate disaster is striking everywhere.
There were some unflattering quotes from survivors of the German floods saying that they had not believed this sort of thing could happen TO THEM, in THEIR country. (One of them named places where they WOULD expect this to happen, as if such events reflect a personal flaw of the citizens of those regions.)(*facepalm*) It suggested that they hadn’t had sympathy with flood-hit regions they had seen on the news. They hadn’t found it relevant when people in low-lying Pacific islands went to the UN, or when Greenlnd’s high northern communities were suffering, but NOW it is real to them.
Perhaps this is what it takes. Wealthy, developed countries watching flood waters destroy their own cities and towns. Perhaps that is what makes it real enough for urgent action.
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The news is filled with stories of Americans who are hospitalized with COVID complications, who want the vaccine too late to save their lives. I desperately want us to be smarter than that – not just about COVID, but about our environment. Perhaps we are already in the climate-crisis-hospital stage, and I’m just not accepting it.
There was a brief time period today when objects in my neighborhood had shadows. It was gradual: the fog became very bright, and suddenly, everything had a defined edge!
It didn’t last, and that’s okay.
Yesterday, I escaped the fog bank by heading across town northeast, and managed to shoot film for one of my projects in bright sunlight. I was nice to experience that direct warmth, to see how colors pop and objects shine. (*fond sigh*) (You can see phone images from these field trips at the July 2021 section of mobilelene.blogspot.com.) It was also delightful to sit near the waterfront, hear seagulls, listen to water moving, and watch hundreds of people wearing Pikachu visors wander around, staring at their phones while playing some game.
I love this town.
I love so much about San Francisco, even while I’m able to see its flaws.
When my pen pals ask what it is ‘like’ to live in a famous tourist city, I tell them about the diverse local restaurant culture, farmers markets with farmers from around the region (including produce varieties you can’t find in stores), large parks and widely accessible outdoors, local coffee roasters, bookstores, museums, universities, hospitals, mild climate year-round, a robust economy, a strong sense of community and volunteerism, and a welcoming, come-as-you-are cultural history.
The City’s flaws are also present, though the pandemic has confused when/where they are most visible, with life disrupted for so many people in so many ways. These are the sorts of flaws that come to mind when you have sheltered visitors from out of town visit, where you try to figure out how to warn them away from dodgy areas and give them tips on how to cope with visibly unhinged people. Not all these flaws are of local origin: we have housing shortages in urban areas throughout the west coast, and a lack of mental health services throughout the country. We do try to manage them locally, and the pandemic has disrupted our solutions for those things, too!
I’m making time to get reacquainted and see what has changed.
The City’s structure is visually stimulating, and the combination of old and new buildings, spaces, and parks gives me a lot to see and think about. Buildings I photographed in the past have been wholly replaced; shipyards have been turned into parks; brick industrial buildings have been gutted and turned into luxury housing… there is always something new, something old has a new neighbor that provides an interesting new contrast to, or old things age in interesting ways.
ASIDE: This sort of renewal is healthy, though it often feels like it risks pushing key activities out of the county – it should be possible for light industrial to operate without being priced out, to have foods and tools and clothes and messenger bags made here, to roast coffee and sell used books, to NOT require every shop to sell something with an luxury brand logo on it.
We should have some economic diversity – you shouldn’t need to be a brain surgeon to live here! If you think of wealthy communities down the Peninsula that are filled with brain surgeons, you realize that they have nothing to recommend them to visitors.
I missed having daily experiences of the City while I was a frequent business traveler at a prior job (especially from late 2013 through late 2018); I hoped to refresh my relationship with my hometown, yet missed it while working long hours in the first year of my current job (2019); I then couldn’t access anything beyond my neighborhood during our stringent local COVID ‘stay home’ year (all of 2020 until May of this year), which was somewhat beside the point, because many of the indoor things I’d want to access were closed for our safety. So, as I go out now, seeing some favorite places still boarded up while others are back and lively, I feel that I need to refresh ALL of my local knowledge. Which is a good excuse to wander!
It was a good day to wear a jacket here in San Francisco, but just two and a half hours east where my parents live, it was over 100 degrees Fahrenheit. It was 107 there yesterday. The fact that there could be a fifty degree difference over such a short distance is amazing. I am grateful that the difference is in my favor. Hooray for the cooling waters of the Pacific! Hooray for the insulation of San Francisco Bay!
While my photographic plans today were foiled (they required direct sunlight from the east prior to 11am), I did travel to the eastern edge of town after lunch, and so enjoyed having a shadow for a few minutes.
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The City still feels… off. Sleeping Beauty isn’t awake yet, and the sounds and sights remain muted. It is lively in spots – Japan Center’s Kinokuniya Building was HOPPING at 11am! – but then I can walk blocks without encountering another human.
Some favorite places are still boarded up. Paper covers too many windows. There are still holes in our urban fabric, and a sad sense that even more people are suffering than usual.
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A friend has admitted that she dreads full re-opening and what passed for normal, because “normal” was too frantic for her, involved too many obligations and interactions that didn’t really suit her. It was an unexpected insight from someone who had previously just avoided the news.
It is worth thinking about: what the smaller impacts to daily life are that manifest along the edges of this still-unfolding tragedy which we might learn from.
(Aristotle described tragedies as being caused not by intentional villainy, but by a flaw in the character of the hero-protagonists. (See the explanation of Hamartia in Brittanica.) There certainly are a lot of human flaws on display during this pandemic!)
We could all benefit from living more thoughtful lives!