Musings from San Francisco

Hello, blog. I'm in California, about to go to sleep in my friends' attic. I am really glad I'm on this trip. I lived out here in San Francisco last summer, for three months right after graduation. I hadn't realized how much I'd forgotten, but it's been delightful to have memories come flooding back. While getting fabulous drinks at Berretta earlier tonight, I wondered out loud if I'd adore SF less if I wasn't always on here on vacation. To me, SF is a magical place where I get enough sleep, wander around, and see my friends. Because I'm always here for a limited period of time, my friends tend to prioritize spending time with me while I'm here, and can be more easily convinced to go out to nice or interesting places. And the weather's not so bad.

I've never been on a trip this long without having an SO or a group of a friends who were also traveling. It's a bit weird. I've had a cold most of the time here, and getting sick while traveling alone really sucks. I was only truly miserable for a few hours, and thankfully that was one of the nights when I had a room to myself that I could be in as long as I wanted without being in anyone's way.

I hate that so many of my friends live so very far away, but it's nice to have a city I can go to and have a solid friend base in. Vacations here are very non-threatening, and rather cheap without any hotel costs. It's almost like... a refuge I can retreat to? An oasis? I last came here right after graduating from MIT. I came here my last two Spring Breaks at MIT, which always needs to be some concentrated relaxation and rejuvenation in the middle of the hell of MIT. I also came here right before I began my final year at MIT, right after leaving a job that I'd wished had ended differently. Now I'm here because I got laid off. I didn't realize until I started writing this that I'd never come here except to get a respite from MIT stress. Someday I'll come here entirely randomly, I hope. The night before I got laid off, a friend emailed me and told me to come visit SF soon. I told her I'd be here as soon as my job ended, one way or another, thinking this would likely be a (somewhat longer) trip in August after my contract ended. Instead, I got laid off, and pretty quickly started looking at travel options. Because I was coming out to Seattle anyway, it seemed quite obvious to attach a SF trip as well.

I did not explicitly set out for this trip to be a time of reflection, but I was always open to it. I definitely have started some trains of thought that I think will be good for me. One of the few things that upset me about getting laid off was having to bump up the timeline on deciding what to do next in my career. I'm feeling much more secure in that regard now. I still don't know what I want to do next, but I'm much more confident in my own abilities and in the existence of interesting jobs. I went to a series of talks last night under the general theme of Art, AI, and Algorithms ("Do Androids Paint Electric Sheep?") and two of the talks left me feeling excited about things in my field for the first time in awhile. I took notes of things to read and investigate. I've been having really excellent small group or one on one conversations with old friends about life. I feel like my intellectual curiosity is starting to return to me, having been stifled by that job that left me with so little time or energy to think about anything. I realize that I need to give myself more time to recover from MIT. It was the most significant experience of my life, and it affected me in ways I don't even know yet. It's been less than a year, I don't need to know what I'm doing with the rest of my life yet.

It'll be more than a week before I get back to MIT. Ha! I wrote MIT! Boston, I mean. Boston. See how it dominated me still? ;-) I hope the thoughts rumbling in my head continue during the rest of my west coast travels. We'll see.

Oh, and by the way, Iron Bloggers, I talked about IB today and I think a west coast league wants to form up. :-)

Nobody reads this blog, and that's okay.

Perhaps someone has been reading, but I really have no idea. I haven't gotten any comments and no one has mentioned reading it to me. I'm in this whole Iron Blogger thing, and maybe that causes people to read the other posts in it, but there are, what, 40 of us? And most of the rest of the blogs are about version control and other things that make me feel like they probably are not super interested in my blog.

I don't have an audience I'm writing for, and that's fascinating. I haven't kept a personal diary in years, and all other writing has been for some audience, whether it's a personal email, a paper for a professor, a zephyr(*) for unknown numbers of MIT people, tweets for potentially the entire world... and that always strongly shapes what I say. With this blog, my only real goal is to write a bit more seriously and formally than I do in other fora, and to be accessible to a wider audience. I suppose that means I do have an audience I am writing for, but it is defined by what it is not, instead of what it is. My audience did not go to MIT, and does not have a degree in Comparative Media Studies. My audience is not a fangirl, but is generally aware that American media exists. My audience does not play LARPs or go to Burning Man. My audience is not sexually or socially deviant. My audience does not live in Boston. My audience basically has nothing in common with me, I suppose. I want to be able to write for people who little to nothing in common with. I would like to able to take all the things that are important to me and explain them clearly and compelling to people who are unaware and uninterested. I'd really love to have a book published someday, and this blog aspires to be practice for that, though I haven't really lived up to that potential yet. "Maybe Next Week". Is that a motto of Iron Blogger? It should be.

* MIT's internal IM/IRC-like chat system. It has the strange evolved property that people constantly have group conversations where they have no idea who might be listening it, and any one of thousands of people affiliated with MIT could be.