I carry a torch...

It is Sunday morning in San Francisco. Despite the few beers I had last night and the late sleeping time, I forced myself out of bed early to come to a cafe and get a few things done--for school, for miscellaneous freelance projects. So I'm sitting in a cafe tapping away at my laptop and the guy next to me has a hospital bracelet on his wrist and I'm wondering if that's a fashion because last week when my cousin's baby was born, even after he'd left the hospital with his wife and new daughter, he kept his bracelet on and when I asked him about it he said he liked it. Which makes sense. So I wonder why this guy sitting next to me was in the hospital. Doesn't seem like a new dad since he's pretty skinny and young, wearing very fashionable jeans and a shirt that shows his flat belly. Okay, so the cafe I am at is just a few blocks from Castro Street and certainly not the place to go to meet straight available men. According to a fifty-something school teacher I substituted for last week, San Francisco is not the place to meet straight available men anyway, since the ratio of them to the women who are seeking them is so out of balance. Moreover, because of this discrepancy, the ones one does meet feel free to act like fools. Aren't we mostly all just beautiful fools, our foolishness fluxuating from one moment to the next? The teacher told me she had to move back east to meet a husband, suggested I do the same. That's why I'm moving to Richmond, didn't you hear? Find myself a husband. Make some babies. Get on with things. But first I need to get this work done. On this sunny Sunday. The weather here is so warm, last night all I needed to wear was a t-shirt. San Francisco is not supposed to be like that. No matter how warm day is, night should bring up scarves and goosebumps. It was nice. Hence the beers, I guess. On my way to the cafe just now I saw a man out jogging. He was wearing a shirt that said "Beijing 2008." And I was all, "What is he thinking?" But really, I'm confused about this whole Olympic hubbub. Can't we just acknowledge that the Olympics are a huge, corrupt, commercial institution, however international and historical? And, true, some athletes work their whole lives to be a part and that's a fine and beautiful thing, a crowning achievement, etc. But, just as the professional level of so many pursuits that start out as dreams, it is a complex thing in regards to where the money comes from and what the business points are. And yes China's human rights abuses are deplorable and disgusting, but don't we have our own abuses? Why are these torch protests more media-worthy than the anti-war and anti-torture protests of some weeks ago? And I'm sure you all know this by now, but the whole torch thing didn't start in ancient Greece but with the Berlin Olympics when Hitler was in charge, when he was not yet a villainous war criminal, though that was the year he banned Jewish athletes from the German team and also the year that some teams didn't send Jewish athletes for fear of offending his sensibilities. This was a bit of information being spouted off on NPR the other morning and woke me up and has stuck with me. And the other night there was a woman sitting at my kitchen table, idly looking at the headlines of the papers spread across it and she exclaimed, "Oh, gosh!" at a story about how the Olympic torch burned hundreds of Tibetan protesters who impeded its path. Then she realized she was reading The Onion.

Like I said, Sunday morning at a cafe in San Francisco, and I've got work to do.

A Perfect Day

Yesterday was a great day. You know the kind...? When everything goes right and the rhythm of it flows so it just feels good. In the middle of it, I went for a walk with A and B to Buena Vista Park. A didn't know where we were going, and he insisted it didn't matter, but as we walked up Haight Street and things started going uphill, he began to complain. And...as we reached the park and began to climb upwards on paths and steps, he insisted we take breaks. But we made it to the top and it was gorgeous. I mean, of course, seeing most cities from above is nice, particularly a city like San Francisco. But it was also...nice to be there so high up and listen to the crows.

Here's a picture of A and B from behind as we were walking down, light shooting at us through the trees.

Before the park, I made lunch at home and we listened to Egyptian music. (Egypt's where I know A from. We worked at the same gallery in downtown Cairo when I was in Egypt for nine months between 2004 and 2005. He was born in a town outside Cairo and just moved here two months ago now, his first time outside Egypt.) I listen to Arabic music alone pretty often but rarely with other Arabs, so it was nice to sit and talk about the lyrics--what they mean, whether they are poetry or dialect. This is the sort of conversation you have when you listen to Om Kalthoum. Most of her recorded music is in very long operatic songs, beautiful, moving, painful, even if you don't know Arabic. You can listen to some of them here. The two that I know well are Al-Atlal (The Ruins) and El Hobb Keda (Love is Like This (or That?)). Both highly recommended. We also got in some Fairouz. She goes very well with sweet, dark tea.

A also reminded me about this crazy video:

A very tongue-in-cheek production out of his home country and my temporarily adopted home country. Awesome.

And then after the park it got cold and I biked west alone and then east again with T to a lovely gathering in honor of dessert. Creme brulee, ginger snaps, fruit salad, whipped cream, strawberry-crowned cupcakes, macaroons, mojitos. I'm not a sugar person, but damn was that a nice sugar high.