Ready to begin ready to begin ready to begin

but we're still here 'til June 7th, sitting in the fog

You all know I’ve got nothing but respect-tantamount-love for my personal trainer but he does this thing I see a lot of guys who grew up in hypermasculine environments do: he assumes anger is a bad thing that leads to potential violence, so if I say I’m angry he immediately assumes shit’s bad, but obviously it’s GOOD, as established, so I had to REALLY explain to him what I meant when I said, “I am so done with San Francisco.” He’s a genuinely adept listener, so it didn’t take long.

“I fit in well here,” he admitted, during the course of my explanations. “Even though I’m from LA, I fit in well here.” Of course he does. All gorgeous Angelinos love the fuck out of the Bay Area, because they don’t know any better. OOOPS SORRY SEE I TOLD YOU I WAS DONE. I’m not taking, of course, about nature or food or iconic architecture. What I MEAN is, people are so fucking socially isolated here by choice and they think it’s normal. It drove me crazy for 2 years, then made my life very dramatic in year 3, and now I’m done, and all I had to tell him was that I knew someone from LA who couldn’t get over the fact that I approached him deliberately and started a conversation, an act that, where I come from, is the world’s most natural thing to do.

“Oh wow,” he said when I related the (from my perspective) casual opening line that went on to spark an impactful relationship. “Yeah no one in LA would ever do that. We’re all about looking cool and looking important, you have to look too important for anyone to be able to just go up and talk to.”

“And you’ve all got the looking-cool thing down!” I said. “But that’s what I don’t get. You’re all gorgeous” (he half-smiled here, at which point I remembered that in my sometimes-difficult-effort to not be one of those clients I hadn’t told him that out loud) “but what’s the POINT of being so HOT if NOT to make a human connection?”

I’ve gotta use caps here because I was actually shouting this. I do not understand. He told me that I was making excellent points and that this is something he’s only thought through recently and that I — two-years-ago-a-gym-novice I — was helping him to understand that there are other ways to perceive human communication. This feels like the greatest contribution I have made to San Francisco — teaching Californians that ELSEWHERE MAKING FUCKING CONNECTIONS IS THE POINT.

And here I must stop to thank my parents, the visionaries who decided to open New Mexico’s very first coffeehouse in 1985, when I was two. An internet search unearthing old Albuquerque Tribune articles taught me that they were turned down for multiple business loans because the banks declared that no one would listen to live music without alcohol. My dad, a musician, wanted EJ’S to be a listening venue, and both my parents felt strongly about the community space also being a place where recovering addicts could go to make sober friends, since most everyone knows that the loneliest point of recovery is the initial period when you don’t know anyone who’s not using. I don’t know this from my own experience, but because for a long stretch of my life it was rare for me to get close to anyone who hadn’t struggled with addiction. I had the honor of being a lot of people’s first sober friend, without trying to be. I guess I can thank my parents for that too? But we’re getting off track.

The point is, little me with my long red hair and sunflower hats sat at customers’ tables all the time, listening and joining in the conversation and making jokes. Everyone loved me because (you won’t be surprised to learn) I was adorable, so the notion of a stranger being a friend you haven’t met formed me at my deepest core. Therefore nobody freaks my shit out like West Coast Isolationists, and nobody freaks their shit out like me.

This might sound like an exaggeration, but I lived in Seattle for almost three years, and the way those aggressively introverted anxiety-as-identity types would shake stutter and nearly yelp if I said hi to them at a red light made me wonder if I was transforming in to a monster. Lest anyone who’s sympathetic to those types wonder if this is because I was mean, quite a few witnesses can tell you that, in effort to NOT make anyone uncomfortable, I used to REALLY HIDE how ruthless I can be. BUT IT DIDN’T WORK THEY HATED ME ANYWAY. So, life as a biiiiiitch it is.

My age compels me to include this song, which I would burst into were we in each other’s company. Not because I still stand behind it, it’s surprisingly slow and a lot less rebellious than I remember, but I was in 7th grade when it came out and at the time I had never heard anything more liberating. That same year, I saw No Doubt (my first concert!) and Gwen Stefani swore a blue streak, also liberating but terrifying in its own way. My parents divorced when I was 6 (and separated when I was 4) because from the get-go they had deep disagreements about how to live life, but one thing they agreed on was that they DID NOT WANT ME TO SWEAR.

This is why I’ve got such a sailor-mouth now, I think. It’s really true, that thing they say about what your parents emphasize you should never ever ever ever ever ever do. You will grow up believing there’s nothing sweeter or more freeing. Whoops.