Wow, that flew by
First off, why is it raining out? We've had 3/4s of an inch of rain today and it's still raining. The average monthly rainfall in June is 0.01 inch. It's rained only one other day at all in June since I've moved here.
But I digress....
I'm coming up on an anniversary. On August 6, four years ago, I packed up everything I owned into a big yellow truck and started heading across the country to San Francisco. I didn't have a job when I got there (although I had been interviewing and had several leads), and wasn't exactly sure where it would take me, and that was part of the adventure. Little did I know it would take me here.
So you ask, why are you bringing this up now? August 6 isn't for almost two months, and four years isn't exactly a major milestone, like 1, 2 or 5 or 10 years. Well, I'm getting to that point.
So I loaded all my stuff up, threw a lot of it in boxes. A few months later I started work, and a couple months after that I started school. After that, there wasn't much time for else.
So that stuff stayed in boxes for the most part until today. I finished school a couple weeks ago, and been finishing everything else that's been on hold since. I got my diploma in the mail today (man that's an expensive piece of paper), and I started going through stuff. I went through my desk, got that all cleaned up. In one of my projects for school, I needed some stuff from past projects. I looked in my filing cabinet and found literally two stacks of stuff from my desk in Minneapolis I threw in the filing cabinet when I moved. I could pretty much throw that away wholesale, since I hadn't seen it in 4 years. I promised to go through it after I finished.
So tonight I started to go through it. It was really weird, like an unintended time capsule. In two cabinets, I found one cabinet full of stuff from my desk in Minneapolis. In the second cabinet I found stuff from immediately after from when I first moved to San Francisco.
In the first cabinet, it was just bills, statements, the usual stuff. I pretty much just threw it all away.
In the second cabinet, it was full of ephemera, fliers from night clubs, notes to myself ("check out this craigslist.org"), my old Minnesota license plates, the receipt from the moving van, and countless phone numbers, many from guys I have no idea anymore who they are, many who have now become very good friends who I met in those first few months since I moved here. Man did I ever get phone numbers in those days. I remember one guy stopped me in the middle of the street to give me his phone number. Ah, to be fresh meat again. :-)
Perhaps the biggest gem I came across was a Christmas letter I started writing. Things got crazy, and I started school as soon as I got back from Minneapolis and never sent it. It all seems now so, innocent. It goes a little bit into 9/11 (of course), but it's mostly about that time when everything was fresh and new. I'd love to send it out now. :-)
-----------------------
December 17, 2001
Dear Fabulous Friends,
What a year this has been. It goes without saying that this has hands down been the most memorable year of our lives. We had great times, and we've had terribly tragic times. But we must remember that this year comes after an unprecedented time of peace and prosperity. But there are good things to come out of this. Times of peace and prosperity bring times of comfort in ourselves, but it's times like these that let us truly know who our friends are. In most years, I've sent out a self-mixed CD with a small footnote to thank my friends. So in that vein, this year I decided to include a letter as well, and if you're reading this, you truly are my friend.
I feel there's a certain irony to this year. I decided to start the year in San Francisco. I remember on the afternoon of the 2nd, I was having lunch outside in a t-shirt, basking in the sun in a nearly tropical 65 degrees compared to what I was used to back home. A few hours later, I caught a flight back to Minneapolis. When I got home, there was 3 feet of snow waiting for me to plow. When my snowblower wouldn't start and I had to shovel it by hand. My own mother once said in the winter of '97 (after a record 120 inches of snow), "They say this weather builds character. Well, I have enough [expletive] character!" After another near record snowfall and near record cold last winter, I decided to make the move.
So I started to plan. By my luck, my friend and sister-from-another-mother Kevin needed a place as his roommate was buying a house. He is now renting out my house in Minneapolis. Also my friend John by total coincidence just got a job in San Mateo and would be moving out at the same time, so we could leverage the moving costs and split the driving duties. So I decided August would be a good time. After all, summer is the best time to be in Minnesota. It would be after my sister would be getting married in July, and so much stuff to do and enjoy the lakes one last time as a full-time resident there. Well, spring turned out to be the wettest on record, 17" of rain in two months. In true Minnesota fashion, it was the tip of the weather iceberg. With all that water, add a touch of head and suddenly Miami seems cool and dry. On the day I picked up my truck, it was in the 90s with another record... a dew point of 88 degrees, the highest in Minnesota history. It was almost lucky that my moving truck was delayed several hours. Instead of loading the truck in the heat of the day, we were packing in the relentless humidity of the evening. It was so humid, you could literally shake the sweat off you like a wet dog coming out of a lake. That night with a full tank of character, my friend John and I headed off down I-35. Take a right at Iowa and drive until you see a pretty red bridge.
(In retreat from Minnesota weather bashing, my friends and weather.com tell me fall in MN turned out to be beautiful, and there isn't snow on the ground yet. Of course, now that I've moved. :-) )
My move was also inspired by my sister's relocation to Long Island five years earlier, almost to the day. I was also inspired by a just as intrepid move I made almost exactly ten years previous from northern Minnesota to Minneapolis. And like my sister's move, almost immediately following the move we both faced tragic events nearly in our backyard. Days after my sister moved to New York, TWA flight 802 crashed off the coast of Long Island. And a few weeks after I moved to San Francisco, of course those tragic events of 9/11. Never before in American history had we ever seen anything like this. And never before had any of us experience the "connectedness" of this event. My now brother-in-law was driving across the Brooklyn Bridge when the first plane hit the Tower. My friend Steve lives just a short distance from the Pentagon in Arlington, VA. And Mark Bingham, a fellow San Franciscan and very close friend of several friends of mine went down on Flight 93 in a field in Pennsylvania.
But we all know all too well someone close to us who was tragically affected by 9/11. But in the months that have followed, I would like to dwell on the incredible good that has come out of this. These States are United once again. It's brought us closer in ways we couldn't have imagined. These holidays are sure to be the realization of that. I myself decided to finally get my fist tattoo, and after much self-deliberation decided to use it as a permanent testament to Mark Bingham, a true hero on that day. On Labor Day weekend, just days before 9/11, Mark was in New Orleans partying with several friends of mine. In the spirit that truly was Mark, he decided to get a temporary tattoo on his shoulder of a bear claw, one of his favorite subjects, both the California Bears (the rugby team he played for and cheered on at UC Berkeley) and the human incarnation as well. (Mark would frequently haunt the Lone Star here in San Francisco, the same as my watering hole.) He was still wearing that tattoo when his plane went down. It was just temporary at the time, but it's permanent now in our hearts and on my shoulder. It's not a memorial to his death. It's a testament to his life. :-)
And so I'm slowly getting adjusted to living in the city by the Bay. I do live in the heart of the city, and it's definitely a city. Fabulous restaurants on every corner, side-by-side with panhandlers. Every once in awhile I still see things that leave me at a loss for words. Some things humorous (like that realization walking through Chinatown that those live chickens aren't sold for pets), some things disturbing (the crazy person on the sidewalk ahead of me who suddenly feels it necessary to give everyone around him the finger), most of them harmless (the panhandler who's sign next to his cup reads "homeless my ass, I just wanna get high!"), but just things I'm not used to. (As we speak, my laptop battery just kicked in as we had a momentary power outage, arguably the first in a long time, but much more frequent here than in MN.) But as I suspected, now that I have a job and thus a routine, I feel much less like a tourist. When I first moved, I kept having this feeling like I was supposed to be catching a flight back home at some point. You can imagine how odd it was to sleep in a strange city, but in my own familiar bed.
So coming from a land where skin-on mashed potatoes is considered exotic, even my diet has taken some getting used to. Case in point: When I was in MN, I tried looking for a Thai chili sauce that I loved. I looked everywhere and couldn't find it anywhere. Here they have it in every Safeway and most corner groceries. (But on the corollary, several attempts to find buffalo wing sauce here turned out fruitless, yet Cub Foods in MN has over a dozen varieties.) And do they have to put artichokes on everything? At Escape From New York, they put artichokes on pizza. A true New Yorker wouldn't be caught dead with artichokes on their pizza! The other day I ordered a chicken ad artichoke burrito. That is just perverted. :-) But in a town that caters to every taste, I did find Chow, a nice littler homey "meat and potatoes" place on Church Street in the heart of what my friend John refers to as "Little Minnesota", for all the Minnesotans who have moved into that neighborhood. They have a wonderful chicken fusilli that's just like I used to get in the now defunct Cafe Solo in the Warehouse District of Minneapolis. If they only had wild rice hotdish. :-)
So all in all, life isn't that much different from a year ago. I'm still in the inner city, just the Mission instead of Camden. I still work downtown, just SF instead of Minneapolis. I still have a short public transit ride to work, just BART instead of MTC. And my office looks out over Market Street and the Bay Bridge instead of Nicollet Mall and the Hennepin Avenue Bridge. And I still have good friends in both places.
So while I've replaced snow in winter and mosquitoes in the summer with rain in winter and fog in the summer, my heart is still in the same place. Just this time I left my heart in Minnesota. :-)
Oh yeah, the irony bit. This year after being away for almost five months, I decided to spend the holidays in Minnesota, Christmas well spent with my family and New Year's well spent with my Minnesota friends. The irony is that I started out the year living in Minneapolis and partying in San Francisco. I'm ending it living in San Francisco and partying in Minneapolis. And with a feeling instead of being home, that eventually I do have to catch that flight back to SF. Life does have a way of making you smile like that.
I love all of you, and you continue to be in my heart and thoughts. And for my non-CA friends, come visit dammit. Like I have to twist your arms. :-)
Your friend always,
Joe
But I digress....
I'm coming up on an anniversary. On August 6, four years ago, I packed up everything I owned into a big yellow truck and started heading across the country to San Francisco. I didn't have a job when I got there (although I had been interviewing and had several leads), and wasn't exactly sure where it would take me, and that was part of the adventure. Little did I know it would take me here.
So you ask, why are you bringing this up now? August 6 isn't for almost two months, and four years isn't exactly a major milestone, like 1, 2 or 5 or 10 years. Well, I'm getting to that point.
So I loaded all my stuff up, threw a lot of it in boxes. A few months later I started work, and a couple months after that I started school. After that, there wasn't much time for else.
So that stuff stayed in boxes for the most part until today. I finished school a couple weeks ago, and been finishing everything else that's been on hold since. I got my diploma in the mail today (man that's an expensive piece of paper), and I started going through stuff. I went through my desk, got that all cleaned up. In one of my projects for school, I needed some stuff from past projects. I looked in my filing cabinet and found literally two stacks of stuff from my desk in Minneapolis I threw in the filing cabinet when I moved. I could pretty much throw that away wholesale, since I hadn't seen it in 4 years. I promised to go through it after I finished.
So tonight I started to go through it. It was really weird, like an unintended time capsule. In two cabinets, I found one cabinet full of stuff from my desk in Minneapolis. In the second cabinet I found stuff from immediately after from when I first moved to San Francisco.
In the first cabinet, it was just bills, statements, the usual stuff. I pretty much just threw it all away.
In the second cabinet, it was full of ephemera, fliers from night clubs, notes to myself ("check out this craigslist.org"), my old Minnesota license plates, the receipt from the moving van, and countless phone numbers, many from guys I have no idea anymore who they are, many who have now become very good friends who I met in those first few months since I moved here. Man did I ever get phone numbers in those days. I remember one guy stopped me in the middle of the street to give me his phone number. Ah, to be fresh meat again. :-)
Perhaps the biggest gem I came across was a Christmas letter I started writing. Things got crazy, and I started school as soon as I got back from Minneapolis and never sent it. It all seems now so, innocent. It goes a little bit into 9/11 (of course), but it's mostly about that time when everything was fresh and new. I'd love to send it out now. :-)
-----------------------
December 17, 2001
Dear Fabulous Friends,
What a year this has been. It goes without saying that this has hands down been the most memorable year of our lives. We had great times, and we've had terribly tragic times. But we must remember that this year comes after an unprecedented time of peace and prosperity. But there are good things to come out of this. Times of peace and prosperity bring times of comfort in ourselves, but it's times like these that let us truly know who our friends are. In most years, I've sent out a self-mixed CD with a small footnote to thank my friends. So in that vein, this year I decided to include a letter as well, and if you're reading this, you truly are my friend.
I feel there's a certain irony to this year. I decided to start the year in San Francisco. I remember on the afternoon of the 2nd, I was having lunch outside in a t-shirt, basking in the sun in a nearly tropical 65 degrees compared to what I was used to back home. A few hours later, I caught a flight back to Minneapolis. When I got home, there was 3 feet of snow waiting for me to plow. When my snowblower wouldn't start and I had to shovel it by hand. My own mother once said in the winter of '97 (after a record 120 inches of snow), "They say this weather builds character. Well, I have enough [expletive] character!" After another near record snowfall and near record cold last winter, I decided to make the move.
So I started to plan. By my luck, my friend and sister-from-another-mother Kevin needed a place as his roommate was buying a house. He is now renting out my house in Minneapolis. Also my friend John by total coincidence just got a job in San Mateo and would be moving out at the same time, so we could leverage the moving costs and split the driving duties. So I decided August would be a good time. After all, summer is the best time to be in Minnesota. It would be after my sister would be getting married in July, and so much stuff to do and enjoy the lakes one last time as a full-time resident there. Well, spring turned out to be the wettest on record, 17" of rain in two months. In true Minnesota fashion, it was the tip of the weather iceberg. With all that water, add a touch of head and suddenly Miami seems cool and dry. On the day I picked up my truck, it was in the 90s with another record... a dew point of 88 degrees, the highest in Minnesota history. It was almost lucky that my moving truck was delayed several hours. Instead of loading the truck in the heat of the day, we were packing in the relentless humidity of the evening. It was so humid, you could literally shake the sweat off you like a wet dog coming out of a lake. That night with a full tank of character, my friend John and I headed off down I-35. Take a right at Iowa and drive until you see a pretty red bridge.
(In retreat from Minnesota weather bashing, my friends and weather.com tell me fall in MN turned out to be beautiful, and there isn't snow on the ground yet. Of course, now that I've moved. :-) )
My move was also inspired by my sister's relocation to Long Island five years earlier, almost to the day. I was also inspired by a just as intrepid move I made almost exactly ten years previous from northern Minnesota to Minneapolis. And like my sister's move, almost immediately following the move we both faced tragic events nearly in our backyard. Days after my sister moved to New York, TWA flight 802 crashed off the coast of Long Island. And a few weeks after I moved to San Francisco, of course those tragic events of 9/11. Never before in American history had we ever seen anything like this. And never before had any of us experience the "connectedness" of this event. My now brother-in-law was driving across the Brooklyn Bridge when the first plane hit the Tower. My friend Steve lives just a short distance from the Pentagon in Arlington, VA. And Mark Bingham, a fellow San Franciscan and very close friend of several friends of mine went down on Flight 93 in a field in Pennsylvania.
But we all know all too well someone close to us who was tragically affected by 9/11. But in the months that have followed, I would like to dwell on the incredible good that has come out of this. These States are United once again. It's brought us closer in ways we couldn't have imagined. These holidays are sure to be the realization of that. I myself decided to finally get my fist tattoo, and after much self-deliberation decided to use it as a permanent testament to Mark Bingham, a true hero on that day. On Labor Day weekend, just days before 9/11, Mark was in New Orleans partying with several friends of mine. In the spirit that truly was Mark, he decided to get a temporary tattoo on his shoulder of a bear claw, one of his favorite subjects, both the California Bears (the rugby team he played for and cheered on at UC Berkeley) and the human incarnation as well. (Mark would frequently haunt the Lone Star here in San Francisco, the same as my watering hole.) He was still wearing that tattoo when his plane went down. It was just temporary at the time, but it's permanent now in our hearts and on my shoulder. It's not a memorial to his death. It's a testament to his life. :-)
And so I'm slowly getting adjusted to living in the city by the Bay. I do live in the heart of the city, and it's definitely a city. Fabulous restaurants on every corner, side-by-side with panhandlers. Every once in awhile I still see things that leave me at a loss for words. Some things humorous (like that realization walking through Chinatown that those live chickens aren't sold for pets), some things disturbing (the crazy person on the sidewalk ahead of me who suddenly feels it necessary to give everyone around him the finger), most of them harmless (the panhandler who's sign next to his cup reads "homeless my ass, I just wanna get high!"), but just things I'm not used to. (As we speak, my laptop battery just kicked in as we had a momentary power outage, arguably the first in a long time, but much more frequent here than in MN.) But as I suspected, now that I have a job and thus a routine, I feel much less like a tourist. When I first moved, I kept having this feeling like I was supposed to be catching a flight back home at some point. You can imagine how odd it was to sleep in a strange city, but in my own familiar bed.
So coming from a land where skin-on mashed potatoes is considered exotic, even my diet has taken some getting used to. Case in point: When I was in MN, I tried looking for a Thai chili sauce that I loved. I looked everywhere and couldn't find it anywhere. Here they have it in every Safeway and most corner groceries. (But on the corollary, several attempts to find buffalo wing sauce here turned out fruitless, yet Cub Foods in MN has over a dozen varieties.) And do they have to put artichokes on everything? At Escape From New York, they put artichokes on pizza. A true New Yorker wouldn't be caught dead with artichokes on their pizza! The other day I ordered a chicken ad artichoke burrito. That is just perverted. :-) But in a town that caters to every taste, I did find Chow, a nice littler homey "meat and potatoes" place on Church Street in the heart of what my friend John refers to as "Little Minnesota", for all the Minnesotans who have moved into that neighborhood. They have a wonderful chicken fusilli that's just like I used to get in the now defunct Cafe Solo in the Warehouse District of Minneapolis. If they only had wild rice hotdish. :-)
So all in all, life isn't that much different from a year ago. I'm still in the inner city, just the Mission instead of Camden. I still work downtown, just SF instead of Minneapolis. I still have a short public transit ride to work, just BART instead of MTC. And my office looks out over Market Street and the Bay Bridge instead of Nicollet Mall and the Hennepin Avenue Bridge. And I still have good friends in both places.
So while I've replaced snow in winter and mosquitoes in the summer with rain in winter and fog in the summer, my heart is still in the same place. Just this time I left my heart in Minnesota. :-)
Oh yeah, the irony bit. This year after being away for almost five months, I decided to spend the holidays in Minnesota, Christmas well spent with my family and New Year's well spent with my Minnesota friends. The irony is that I started out the year living in Minneapolis and partying in San Francisco. I'm ending it living in San Francisco and partying in Minneapolis. And with a feeling instead of being home, that eventually I do have to catch that flight back to SF. Life does have a way of making you smile like that.
I love all of you, and you continue to be in my heart and thoughts. And for my non-CA friends, come visit dammit. Like I have to twist your arms. :-)
Your friend always,
Joe
posted by Joe Carlin at 7:45 AM
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