My Separate Life

It is 6pm Saturday afternoon, San Francisco standard time, seventy-five degrees, sun just beginning to set behind the hills, city trading day life for night.

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My brother begins college in Atlanta next week, and my sister will study abroad in Spain this spring. My father’s parents will drive cross-country again this summer for another set of graduations, even though my grandfather broke his collarbone driving on Minnesota ice last winter. My mother’s father has been gone almost ten years, and I don’t think we spoke on the phone even once, the year he died.

We live very separate lives.

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My father once told me that while he envies me the San Francisco sun, he doesn’t think he and my mother will ever move out west. Once you put roots down, he said, it’s hard to move. Your community becomes more important than anything else. It takes care of you, it gives you context, it makes you happier than anything else.

This seems obvious, but at 25, I still can’t see myself staying in one place for long. I get itchy feet. I get tired of speaking only English. Once I know a place, I start wanting to meet another. For me, the novel has always trumped the known.

But the more people I meet, and the more places I know, the more unhealthy this nomadic lifestyle seems, as a cultural theme – even if it is a central tenet of US culture. We go away to college, and meet and make new friends – then start a job and do it all again. We change cities and friends when we change jobs, when we change careers, when it suits us, when we have to. We keep up with perhaps one in ten or fifty of the people we know well from each phase of our lives.

It seems we only find community through our children; family life forces us to ’settle down,’ to participate in the PTA, become soccer and scouting parents, grow away from distant friends with time. Children pull us together as a community in the US (“it takes a village”) and childhood is the time when individuals are most plugged into a community – until we have our own children, and unless our parents continued moving when we were young.

No surprise, then, that childhood and youth are idealized in the US; like it or not, that kind of closeness matters to us, as human beings. More than money, more than achievement, more than anything else – we need intimate, subtle, long-lasting relationships in our lives, and not (only) romantic relationships; we need the give-and-take of long-term friendships, the annoyances that come with keeping up with the Joneses (or being the Joneses), the comfort of knowing our place in a community, advice and sympathy from people who’ve seen our lives evolve. We’re tribal by nature (just think about the way your office is organized…), and we need desperately to belong to some group, somewhere.

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So we need community, but in order to have it, we must give up advancement – or experiences – that we might otherwise obtain. So we promise ourselves we’ll get back to community, or we create it as we go along.

I think TV fills in, for some; if you watch Colbert often enough, he’ll start to seem real, a friend. The internet lets you can connect across time zones, country boundaries, whatever. But it’s still not enough. Working from home doesn’t replace a physical office, phone sex does no justice to the real thing, and virtual relationships are just that.

Although they can help.

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San Francisco is a city of nomads, digital and otherwise. Most of the people I know now will be gone in a few years, if I don’t leave first, myself. Nearly everyone I know acts within fluid groups of friends. We shift in and out of each others’ lives with barely a ripple. We stand in for the friends we’ve had in highschool and in college, we stand in for family, we create context, even if that context has no depth, no background.

We seek meaning in activities, in our careers, in our romantic relationships.

And perhaps there’s nothing wrong with that. All I know is that I’m coming to believe roots matter, even if we don’t like it much – coming to believe healthy people are part of healthy communities, and that those communities are almost impossible to maintain if we keep changing location. And that the opportunities and experiences we want most are almost impossible to attain if we don’t.

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I don’t know what the answer is; I don’t know if there is one. Use your technology to maintain your community! sounds great, but I can only call my sisters so many times a week; it’s not the same as cooking dinner together on a Friday night. And phone time takes away from the real, the now.

My siblings and I want to live in the same city some day; it’s a plan, the best we’ve come up with so far. Now all we have to do is pick a city to grow roots in. I hope it will be somewhere with long, slow sunsets…

Chess with the masters

Woke this morning and tried to tame my hair into some semblance of normalcy before heading out. As the Mop is getting longer, it tends to stay down a little better, but i think i’ve yet to go more than about 3 days without some kindly stranger (usually with lip rings, tattoos, and a neon-shaded shag) complementing me on my “70’s haircut.” I have, on occasion, been tempted to ask one of these eclectic, electric strangers out, but have thus far restrained myself.

In any case, the Mop subdued for the time being, I headed out. Russian Hill, the neighborhood I’m staying in, is about as high as you can get in San Francisco and still be “in the city.” Pastel row houses, mini-terraces, every street leading up and over into the sky. The trolley cars’ chains clink and rustle against each other underground through the night, as though somewhere deep below, it’s raining, metal teardrops on the underside of the pavement. My dreams are full of this fluid, metallic sound, and then I wake in the mornings, half-disoriented, gray-white light seeping through the windows …

Russian Hill is something like Shadyside (in Pittsburgh), but on top of a hill, with more beautiful people, more variety. I’m finding San Francisco is really an understated city; every corner contains something beautiful, but very few of the people here seem predisposed to make a huge deal of it – as though living here says enough about you, without them needing (gauche, East Coast-fashion) to make a show of it.

I walked around a bit, talking on the phone (a good friend of mine is getting married. My cousin just turned 18. My sister’s grocery shopping in Chicago, where it’s some inhuman temperature far below freezing . . . ). Then took the #19 bus to see where it went, and wound up down near the civic center. Bought some dried cherries and a stalk of sugarcane at an outdoor market – remembering eating sugarcane in India at a village where they specialized in sugarcane, the sweet taste of sugar and the acrid smell of boiled dust . . .

Walked by a set of chess boards set out on tables in the sun, near the Powell station (BART). Old men, sitting around playing chess, as I’ve seen all over the world – Argentina, Istanbul, Brazil – a group of old men, wrinkles and a sharp sense of humor. I suspect many of the great geniuses of the world are sitting on street corners, eyes wrinkled against the glare, contemplating their next move; it’s always seemed a good endpoint for me – at the end of a life, to spend time exercising the mind, talking with friends, drinking mate or coffee or tea, chewing gum, watching the world change around you.

And so i stood and watched for a while, and then I put my fifty cents in, and we played chess.

I’m not bad – and I can say that honestly, knowing that at the same time, i’m not terribly good. I’ve achieved the first level or two, see past the pieces to the moves, and past the moves to the forces, and even, sometimes, past the force to the game – but there are levels and levels up; questions of intent, not just possibility, strategy, forking moves. The hardest thing, I think, with chess, is to see the game as a fluid thing, as a war building in intensity as we talk about language and immigration, jobs and pronunciations, one guy’s three “or four” jealous girlfriends. “I play slowly,” said my opponent, smiling, “like lava flowing.” A friend of his sat down, and helped me a bit; he played like a desperate swordsman, feinting and parrying, accepting losses i’d've found too risky, and ultimately, making a win.

“You know the difference between the top and the bottom of these tables?” said my opponent.

I: “No. Tell me.”

He: “The top is for chess, and the bottom, for gum.” He stuck his, freshly chewed, on the underside, and pulled a fresh piece. I offered him a dried cherry, made another move.

The sun moved in its accustomed course. A group of young black men break danced, robot-like, on the sidewalk. A tourist couple passed, lost.

Union Square. A woman, sleek and self-satisfied as a greyhound, sat in boots, long dark jeans, blue shirt, blue hat, long dark shiny hair, reading a book. I pass a gay couple – men, black and white, like opposing sides of a coin – arguing about the best angle for a photo they wanted to take. Tourists from Europe are everywhere, especially in department stores. The city feels quiet to me, often deserted (compared to Buenos Aires). People obey traffic laws. The light is different. Perhaps it’s the Bay that muffles so much of the city sound, or perhaps there are simply less cars in this city. Maybe it’s the hills.

Whatever it is, I keep feeling I’m in some other USA, apart from the East coast, something different and unique. Another vision of what and who we could be. The rest of the world keeps saying we don’t have any culture – but I dare them to come here and say it again. I can think of far worse national fates than the US of A becoming more like San Francisco, California . . .

Connection

Today, I drove to work in the rain and parked near a low curb, up against the hill. Schenley hill rising slick and green against the gray sky. Trees like sodden torches, leaves carpeting the grass. Stone steps. Marble hallway. Offices quiet and overheated. Pittsburgh has terrible weather, but I can’t help loving it, all the same…

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So my boss is in Rwanda today for a Connectivity Conference.

I can’t find a link for that conference, but here’s one for a similar conference in March 2007… http://www.ustda.gov/news/pressreleases/2007/SubSaharanAfrica/SSAICTConfOpening_031907.pdf

It’s a conference about the internet in Sub-Saharan Africa, about how to bring developing African states into the 21st century as far as internet access is concerned. CMU was the most wired university in the U.S. before such things were popular, and it’s working hard to maintain that reputation, which is why (I’m sure) we’re there.

But it got me thinking: Today I was on the phone to the following places: Ohio, Chicago, Boston, China. Yesterday, Argentina and California. A couple weeks ago, a friend in Quatar. New York, Atlanta, Minnesota … And let’s not even talk about my IM destinations!

(Incidentally, for a really useful VOIP program, go here: http://www.jajah.com — good quality sound, extraordinarily low prices (.031 cents/minute to China this evening, 150 free minutes per month between Jajah members – and membership is free…)

I remember a fall morning, perhaps six months ago. I’m at the office at my internship in Argentina (their fall, spring here in Pennsylvania…). It’s early in the morning, white light coming through the windows. The office ceiling must’ve been 15 feet up, wooden floors, low desks, rolley chairs. I was in the office making coffee with Gustavo, and we were chatting in Spanish, shooting the breeze. He makes amazing coffee – something magical. I swear, if I could import people, he’d be the first. Knows his way around a coffee machine better than anyone I’ve ever met … Anyway, he was telling me that Argentines are much more family oriented than US citizens – that they live in one city, that they stay close to their families, that they don’t feel the same need to travel, that they don’t tend to go away.

I remember that when I first went to Buenos Aires, I somehow thought the city was all there was – as though you could have 11 million people living in a Manhattan environment – but then I started getting to know Argentines, started going into the neighborhoods. Went for a walk with Martín the one day, and it was like walking through a small town – wide, empty streets, low houses … and then driving out of the city, a thousand houses, a hundred neighborhoods. You can leave home and never be more than half an hour from your parents’.

I took umbrage at Gustavo’s generalization, at the time- but then I realized; we (in the US) are mostly descended from wanderers, nomads, people who leave for a new place and never return. Connectivity, culturally and perhaps even genetically (can i say this and stay politically correct? probably not. Is it late, and is it my blog, so will i? yes ;) – so perhaps even genetically, we’re predisposed to have more interest in travel.

Also, we have more large cities. Over 1/4 of Argentina’s population lives in what might as well be their only city.

So I’ve got these phone calls going. I’m texting all over the world right this minute. I was in California over the weekend. … How do we keep connectivity in a world like this?

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I suppose I’m still trying to get a handle on why so much technology in the U.S., specifically, and why we seem to depend on it so much more than anyone else. Here’s a thought; we have the same need for connection, but we all have itchy feet. …