San Francisco

Apparently I am in SOMA, the heart of tech in the city.

I’ve found myself in Starbucks two days in a row, a place I could never abide in Cambridge, in the heart of my coffee snob heart.

Where do I come form, where am I, where am I going?

Everything here is reflective. In the morning, light bounces from the bay to the ubiquitous glass paneling of the high rises. I imagine it is the light of a million disco balls, embracing, energizing, and sort of … jarring.

The brightness is infectious, I think. I went to a small cafe yesterday. I expected disaffected employees, charming decor. Not quite. It was small, and lacked the polished efficiency of Starbucks, but nonetheless, the concrete and steel motif reverberates strongly. In Cambridge, sometimes bookstores contained cafes. Tri… Bookstore on Newberry Street is one example. This cafe contained a bookstore. San Francisco is the synecdochic reversal of Cambridge. Maybe. Three business dudes sat to the left of me, and one guy in gym shorts and a t-shirt. No skinny pale girls with cigarettes. No guys in skinny jeans. I overheard acronyms, not French Surnames.

I feel out of place. In Cambridge, I identified with California. I lived in San Jose. I skateboarded. Here, I feel distinctly Cantabrigian.

Life

Life moves in cycles. I seem to post in this blog at apexes and troughs, so over the years a pattern has emerged.

Every eight months or so I feel alternately that a) school has made me less human or b) I am lazy and have wasted a lot of time and should be working hard.

Now I think I must be hovering somewhere near b). It’s so strange how different I feel. I read my old posts(and old journal entries) and I can’t imagine how it was to feel that way…always.

Spoiled Idealism

It’s been a good year since I’ve really focused on work. In this time I’ve made all sorts of excuses, all along the lines of “I don’t really know what I want to do…so I am not doing anything”. This is not an uncommon sentiment post-beat generation and especially, post-economic downturn, so I’ve been getting away with it. But maybe I really shouldn’t.

It is, after all, a luxury that I am at Harvard, fed and clothed by my parents. If I didn’t have them as a sort of security, if I were to face the world alone in six months, I’d surely be panicking now that I have no job and no serious academic prospects.

Basically, I am afraid that my idealism and maybe my personality is resting on some delusion — that money doesn’t really matter — a delusion perpetuated by my parents willingness to put up with my sponger tendencies.

I want my identity to be independent, so I need to be financially independent.