The Foggy Notion

You never know what people will be into… and that goes for Bay Citizen reporters, Tumblr members, and Theo Olesen.  

Taken by my husband: Summer in the city #2. 

Since I’ve been living in San Francisco, I feel like I can’t keep up with the insane amount of social networking slash e-coupon services slash events feeds that I’m bombarded with daily. I’m a little overwhelmed by the sheer amount of information I receive in a 24-hour period and the impossibility of truly filtering it all for what I need or want. Even now, on vacation, I simply file away most of those emails in the delusional belief that I’ll look at them one day and maybe get something valuable out of it. (Unlikely.)

Here’s my list. Not all are San Francisco-based, but many are – or at least have SF branches. 

Groupon

LivingSocial

Bloomspot

Perkville

Savored

Travelzoo

Yelp

DailyCandy

UrbanDaddy

All but the last one offer some sort of coupon/deal/discount service now, while the bottom four feature (amongst other things) news on events and interesting things to do or try in your area. Add to that Twitter and Tumblr (and, for those of you still on that train, Facebook and *yawn* MySpace), with a little sprinkle of Last.fm and now Google+, and you’ve got a whole lot of torment. 

And for what, really? My life is no richer, no more interesting or intellectual, because of any of these… at most, I just know which restaurants I want to go to, what inane things strangers are commenting on, whose music I detest, what food stand is “in” now, or what free concerts I mean to attend but never will because I’m too lazy. 

Don’t even get me started on the e-shopping catalogues… those go straight to Trash — for my own sake. 

Summer in the city. Taken by yours truly.

My favorite listing (though not my favorite band) is “Human League: You have been spanked with a VHS copy of The Neverending Story.”

I think today I’m finally going to learn the Fahrenheit scale. After living in America for four years now (!), I believe it’s time I embrace this bizarre climactic measure where 0 degrees anywhere translates into 32 degrees here. I have a sneaking suspicion that this is a San Franciscan invention to make people in the Bay feel better about their shi**y weather. So when it should be at least 25 degrees C in late July but is, in fact, a meager 15, San Franciscans can lie to themselves by throwing around 60 degrees F instead. Higher number = higher mood. Sure, it’s a ridiculous system, but since I’m all about lying to yourself to feel better, I am more than willing to support it. 

Now I will memorize these more-elusive-than-morse-code formulas and I’ll be set.

Tcelsius = (5/9)*(Tf-32)  

Tfahr = (9/5)*Tc+32 

Piece of cake. (Baked at 350 degrees F, which is approximately 176.66 degrees C.)

Yesterday I ventured into daylight at approximately 5pm. These days, it’s hard to find an excuse to leave the house. Not that going to Crate & Barrel is an exciting prospect, but errands are a good way to avoid cabin fever. And having two pillows is important. Unfortunately, the streets of San Francisco also present a series of disadvantages, one of which are sidewalk etiquette violators – a subject I enjoy ranting about (and which my husband abhors). 

More specifically, my rigorous research has led me to believe that some of San Francisco’s worst sidewalk etiquette violators are in fact French tourists. Allow me to share a couple of examples from my latest afternoon stroll:

I’m making my way down Powell Street, arching my neck slightly to see what flag the Westin St. Francis on Union Square is flying (Cuban), when I bump into a considerable crowd of loud and nasal French tourists that are slowing down traffic when traffic is already at its worst. Between the otherwise endearing hand motions, the simultaneous “ehhh’s”, and the unbearably slow pace, they constituted a migraine of their own.

Proceed a couple more blocks and I am forced to come to a halting stop when this fanny-pack-wearing couple and their obnoxious kids, who are already zigzagging from side to side so that no one can walk past them, decide that they must stop and convene in the middle of the damn street. (They handed out sandwiches to each other. Not even baguettes. Just subs. It was so unnecessary.) And yes, they were most definitely French – and vociferous, at that.

I don’t really have issues with tourists or obtrusive pedestrians per se, only with the unapologetic ones, which the French ones always seem to be. Even when they’re not oblivious to their own intrusion, I’ve never detected an ounce of concern for how it might be impacting those around them. I’ve been to Paris and Lyon, where people respect pedestrian etiquette (at least as much as anywhere else), so why the airs when you’re abroad? Didn’t you know that San Francisco was once named the Paris of the West? (According to the world’s most credible source, Wikipedia.) That demands some courtesy. In other words, please stop taking over the streets of San Francisco. Some of us actually live here. 

Encouraging words of the day, brought to you by: http://tinyurl.com/3hj8o2g

I just received a message from tumblrbot asking “What is your earliest human memory?” to which, of course, I would have to reply… splitting my tongue on the edge of a chimney. I don’t have an actual memory of it, but I have a sense of it… a flashback of pain, if you will.

The chimney at our old summer house had several corners jutting out and, while I’m not one to necessarily encourage child-proofing an entire house (you learn most quickly by making mistakes!), this was certainly a disaster waiting to happen. I remember blood and bawling — both my own — and a general freak-out in the family. So basically not that different from many of my would-be future memories, since I wasn’t exactly a calm or well-behaved child. (I’m kidding. Sort of.) Good times.

I’m learning to play the saxophone and it is no easy feat.

Challenges include:

*Controlling your breathing. (Stop inhaling – that’s not what that means. It essentially refers to controlling the inner workings of your breathing, e.g. your diaphragm movement.)

*Strengthening your mouth muscles. [Insert clever sexual crack here.] This involves practicing your embouchure, which is the way in which your mouth comes into contact with the saxophone. In brief, you cover your lower teeth with your lower lip (think: elderly no-teeth mouth), place your top teeth on the mouthpiece (approximately 10 mm in), and wrap your entire mouth around it, so that no air can get out. Who’s laughing now? (Me, the first few times I tried this. But not you, if you’re doing the embouchure right.) 

*Blowing a steady flow of air into the instrument, so that you get a consistent sound. For an ex-smoker, this proves to be rather challenging.

*Learning the fingering chart. [Insert another, perhaps more clever but probably not, sexual crack here.] Some notes, like the B-flat, require several simultaneous finger placements.

*Reading music. If you’re musically ignorant like me, this is a necessary but brutal step to learning how to play actual songs. I have a musically gifted husband, however, which helps in the process. 

I would grace you all with a demonstration, but it’s sunny today and I wouldn’t want to provoke the rain. So you’ll have to trust that, somewhere in San Francisco, an amateur saxophonist is pissing off a whole lot of neighbors with endless repetitions of a poorly-executed “When All the Saints Go Marching In.” 

On a similar note (ha!), here’s a different kind of Jazz talent: http://t.co/fQjR5Uu

Sunday was a special day for this half-a**ed San Franciscan. For the first time in my 2+ years of living in the Fog City, I visited Golden Gate Park. In fact, I turned it into a fairly epic discovery journey. 

The route went something like this:

1. We took the N – Judah Muni to Cole and Carl (Carl always gets to go first, so here’s your 15 minutes/characters of fame, Cole).
2. We walked to Haight and Ashbury. Not a first, but certainly a much-needed second, since I’d begun to forget how this area looked – and smelled… Decidedly colorful.
3. My husband bought us coffee while I sold many beloved shoes at Buffalo Exchange for a grand total of $13. Yes, that’s - $2 for Muni, + $13 for Buffalo, - $5 for coffee = I effectively sold 3 pairs of shoes for $6. I’m a winner.
4. We dropped off the unwanted fare at Goodwill down the road. (My beige corduroy 80’s jacket was apparently too stylish for the likes of Buffalo Exchange folk… even though fake fur cropped puffy jackets aren’t? Ridiculous.) That’s $100 in tax refunds, folks. Charity can be so rewarding.
5. We stopped by the new Whole Foods in Cole Valley. Two sushi platters to go for a picnic in the park. Disgustingly healthy/yuppie/San Francisco/post-modern.
6. Enter Golden Gate Park!!!

The mission was simply to reach Museum Row and walk around enough to say that I’d been, but as with everything else in my life, I have to “go big or go home” (great American expression)… and this was no exception. So our trip took on new dimensions and our refined objective – to traverse the entire park that afternoon on foot – required us to cut some corners, i.e. we were too pressed for time (re: stingy) to tour the Japanese Tea Garden and, for consistency’s sake, we skipped the Botanical Gardens as well. 

But I did see a fair amount of inter-special communing at Mallard Lake (who knew pigeons, ducks, mallards, and turtles were so comfortable with each other… there’s a lesson to be learned) and poison ivy on several of the trails we climbed. Lots of barbecuing, frisbeeing, jogging, stretching, dog-walking, circle-dancing, and one particularly cool cat blowing his saxophone in the thick of the bushes (we tried to peek but couldn’t locate him amidst the greenery). My husband got disoriented towards the end and started taking us in the wrong direction – with all sorts of self-assured airs – but, fortunately for me, it became evident that he was mistaken and I saved the day by steering us back west-bound (I got an especially bittersweet through-the-teeth “you’re right”… no small feat in a marriage). 

At last, we reached the beach! Yes, the freezing-cold beach with the lovely summer Bay fog hovering on the horizon. You bet your bananas I dipped my poor toes in that Pacific Ocean — one cold step for (wo)man, but one hugely invigorating step for my blood circulation… and sense of accomplishment.