Mar 29 2013
12 Comments
How to do what you love, Modern Life, San Francisco

Places to Think about Life in Downtown San Francisco

Bay Bridge from the Embarcadero in San FranciscoYou are responsible for managing your career/life. No one will do this for you, and it certainly doesn’t just happen. If you don’t wake up excited about your job or what you’re about to do all day, feeling like a lovely flower blooming in the sunlight of opportunity, it’s your job to fix something. Read this Onion article for a little more clarity on why doing anything else is pretty dumb.

At the same time, it’s not easy to switch careers or even understand where to begin, and time goes by so fast, all the sudden the weekened’s here but then it’s gone and all those things you wanted to think about are pushed to next week, again. So, where do you get the time to think about life? How do you find the correct patch of time-space fabric in which to plot your career, or any other kinds of goals you may have.

First off, make this a priority. Take your lunch break, and get out of the office, the hospital, the restaurant, or the mine. Removal is key, otherwise someone will probably ask you to do something. If your mine shaft, office building, or restaurant happens to be close to or in downtown San Francisco, I have some ideas for places you can escape to.

1. The Embarcadero

This is the street/boardwalk that borders the bay. Take some time to walk here and look out over the water and watch the sailboats doing their thing or look at the bridge, which is pretty cool. Stare at the people that stroll, business walk, or jog by you, some of them tourists trying to suck the marrow out of the city, others of them citizens getting their heart rates up or eating. The transience in the midst of such a broad landscape will help you as you try to decipher, “Where am I going in this wide world, and what do I need to do to get there?”

2. The Marriott on 2nd and Folsom

This Marriott has a huge lobby with ample seating and is a popular place for biz types to gather and discuss things they care about business-wise. Your first reaction might be, “How the heck am I supposed to think when I’m surrounded by people who are talking about business and holding meetings.” You’re right, there are people doing those things here, but look closer, and you’ll find people just checking in to their rooms and passing through the city. Think about them and their experience compared to yours. Boom. Your world just got bigger. Imagine the web of their relationships and watch it stretch over the entire globe. Boom. Your world just got bigger again. Then think about the person you want to be in 5 years and how to get there. It’s as simple as that.

3. The picnic area on 2nd and Folsom, south side

Come, sit in the sun, watch other people eat, and maybe enjoy something yourself. Look at the water in the fountain, the substance most critical to our very existence. Look at the trees, doing their all-important and only work of transforming sunlight into food, then think about what you’re doing that’s critical for well-being, either for others or for yourself. Are you contributing to the essential activities of the earth or adding to them in a positive way?

4. Find a tree and look at it for a long time

If you’re not in downtown San Francisco and have no idea what the places I just named are, go back and reconnect with nature, then extrapolate out and see the bigger picture. How can you be like that tree, fulfiling your purpose every day, during the day, and not relegating it to the nights and weekeneds. When you figure that out, please please please let me know how you’re doing it.

For more on finding your purpose and doing what you love, see “How to Find Your Purpose and Do What You Love” from brainpickings.org, Steve Jobs’ commencement speech at Stanford in 2005, and Stop Everything and Think about This by yours truly. 

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Mar 27 2013
11 Comments
Food, Outer Sunset, Posts about Breakfast, San Francisco, San Francisco bakeries

A True Story of Pastry Paralysis

beachside cafe pastry display san francisco

Photo courtesy of yelp.com

On a Saturday in mid-March, I walked 2.6 miles and 42 blocks down Irving Street to Beachside Cafe, and I was hungry.

My hunger grew the longer I walked, and along with it, hungry indecision. In my mind, I could see a pastry, the perfect, tender, sweet, and comforting pastry that would solve my craving, but I couldn’t quite make out what it was. Was it a cookie, a scone, a cinnamon bun or twist? It was impossible to tell.

There was almost no line as I walked into Beachside, and a full display of pastries glowed in the light of hunger and baked good glory. This was the first level of disaster. When faced with a display of pastries in which everything looked good, my mind froze up solid. I was left staring open-mouthed at the pastry display like the first Adam trying to name a billion different orange-colored things. I began to ask the server a series of questions, becoming more dissatisfied with every answer.

“What is your favorite?” “I really like banana nut muffin and the peanut butter cookie.” (boo)

“What’s your most popular pastry?” “The chocolate chip cookie.”(duh)

“What your second most popular pastry?” “Blueberry muffin?” (boring)

“Is the blueberry scone good?” “Yes.” (obvs)

“What’s that thing” “Scallion-bacon scone.” (weird)

“And that?” “Cinnamon apple muffin.” (reminds me too much of oatmeal)

These were the questions of a woman who clearly had no idea how to satisfy her need for a pastry or even what that particular need was. The crux of the issue is that I knew there was a right answer – there was a pastry on the shelf that would satisfy my deepest desires and yearnings, but I didn’t know how to find it, and I was terrified of missing the chance to sample the perfect pastry.

At last I chose the peanut butter cookie, and it was tasty – probably one of the better PB cookies I’ve had, but it didn’t hit the spot, the spot that cannot be named. It’s not the chocolate, pie, or berry spot. It is the pastry spot, and it is left un-hit, a hole in my soul that still seeks to be satisfied.

The quest continues. Who will win? The spot, or the human?

If you liked this, you might also like Experimentation in Pastries at Craftsmen and Wolves, Purchasing and Eating a Sandwich, and Deconstructed Peanut Butter and Jelly Sandwich.

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Mar 25 2013
8 Comments
Humorous, Modern Life, Success, Writing

A Short History of the List

To-do lists on post it notesOne day I woke up and found lists all around me.

They were telling me what I needed to do, what I wanted to do, restaurants I had to try, the must-read books of the year, bills I hadn’t paid, people who owed me money, action items from meetings I’d forgotten, and other things I absolutely could not forget. The lists covered the walls and lay heaped on the ground, were pouring out of the closet and bursting from drawers.

I was completely surrounded by them and immediately began to panic, the weight of all this crucial information bearing down on me with the force of an anvil, paralyzing me from acting at all or crossing even one item off one list.

So instead of beginning my work, I waded through the lists to my computer and began to procrastinate. I looked up the history of the list.

At the dawn of time, when all the earth’s matter and energy had been vomited up from the great unknown, the sole purpose of each individual bit of matter and anti-matter was this: to become more complex. Billions of years later, after a couple supernovas and other heavy-element producing astrological events, humans evolved and shortly thereafter started wearing trousers. Roughly around that time, the clock was invented. Prior to trouser-wearing and time-minding, the human’s to-do list looked something like this:

1. Survive

Or maybe like this:

1. Obtain food

2. Eat

3. Talk to Mom

At any rate, it was incredibly short because the basic tasks that went into a productive day were obvious and didn’t need to be remembered because if they weren’t, death would result shortly after. But in the time of trouser-wearing, the basic tools for survival became a bit murkier. It was no longer necessary to worry about obtaining food. It was readily available. Survival, too, turned out to be slightly easier than before, due to advances in leeching and humour-reading. All of the sudden, the question of “what do I do now” became much more profound.  It was no longer “what do I need to do today so I don’t die” but “what do I need to do today so I can do what I need to do tomorrow” and so on and so forth in a never ending cycle of perpetual productivity.

That’s when the humans invented lists, an all-powerful demigod that would tell them what they needed to do today in order to prosper tomorrow, or be happy, or avoid debtor’s prison, or remember the things they already knew.

Soon, lists became too complicated to understand, so it was necessary to develop a system where the lists could be listed, organized and distilled into something intelligible. Soon even that was too complicated to understand, so further reduction processes were undertaken and so on and so forth in an eternal battle between existing knowledge, and the desire to remember and act upon it.

There is a legend among the hill people of San Francisco that soon there will be one List that descends from the heavens, restoring order to the world and a sense of purpose, the List to end them all, to forever guide and inform, to comfort and encourage.

Until that day, the list demons proliferate, accusing their victims of sloth, of indirection, of forgetfulness. And the victims accept gladly, and create even more lists. Occasionally, on the most unusual of days, a list gets crossed off completely and disappears. Most often, however, the lists torment the list-maker to a point of madness or indifference, which could be the same thing. It depends on your perspective.

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Mar 21 2013
10 Comments
Humorous, Modern Life, San Francisco

What Improv Taught Me About Life

Life lessons from improvSo I started taking improv classes. I just did it for fun, and to meet other people and find out if my humor could translate to the stage. Three months later, I’ve accomplished almost all of my improvising goals, including being told by the teacher to try “less yelling.”

Unexpectedly, I also learned things that are useful for life, lessons I believe are helping me become better at sucking out the marrow of life’s ribs.

Other people have also found improv valuable. Heck, this guy even wrote a blog with the same title as mine.  It’s valuable for writers who want to write better, for actors who want to act better, and for humans who want to human better. The really incredible thing is that I have different points to make than these other chucklenuts. Let’s get going.

1. Live in the moment

It’s impossible to improv effectively if you’re inside your head, thinking about how the act is going, what you should do next, or what you could have done better. Every moment spent inside your skull monologue-ing to yourself, is  moment your body is occupying space onstage and going nowhere. Be present. Don’t over-think it. Silence the inner critic.

The same thing applies to living. How can you live effectively if you’re always thinking of what you could do better, judging yourself, or comparing yourself to other people. Life is going on outside your skull, and it’s meant to be lived, not tiptoed around.

2. You have a body

All day long, we use this body of ours to do things like type on computers, sit in chairs, stare at powerpoint presentations, make coffee, see patients, put on clothing, digest food, pick other people’s noses, etc. But how often are we conscious of it, of the weight we support on our frame, of the way our ankle feels when the other one is resting on it, the rhythm of our own heartbeat, the blood in our veins and the juices in our stomach.

Taking a moment to consider the universe of our own being is somehow relaxing. It helps define a space for me, reaffirms my existence, and helps me connect to the essence of what I am, namely, a being made of animated atoms. Wild, isn’t it?

3. There’s no right answer

Improv is not about being funny. It doesn’t matter if you say “thumb-flavored jello snacks” instead of “a pink ruler,” so long as you say something. The reality is that everything is right and good. My partner throws out something about being in a kitchen. Awesome. Yes. Or maybe she throws out something about me as her daughter that’s recently been having trouble wetting the bed. Awesome. Yes.

In life, I get so caught up with trying to find the ‘right’ idea or the ‘best’ idea that I don’t end up trying anything at all. I’m paralyzed by indecision, and the end result is much worse than if I’d run with something and improved it along the way.

4. Nothing’s funnier than the truth

Yes, space aliens that sprout wings anytime someone says the word “kerfuffle” are interesting, but so are work crushes, parents, grandparents, sisters and brothers, churches, bars, hair salons, the whole mix and everything. Our everyday life and relationships are incredibly rich, laden with beauty, pain, and humor.

What makes improv really great, and all humor really great, is its ability to relate to the truth in a unique way or portray it in a new light. That’s the gotcha moment, when all of the sudden you’re on the floor crying from laughter because of a scene about someone eating a donut. That’s where the real magic is, it’s in the everyday, the mundane, and the banal. That’s also the title of my next improv show. I hope you come.

P.S. I’ve been taking improv with Leela and am really enjoying the classes. If you’re in the Bay Area, you should definitely check them out.

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Mar 15 2013
15 Comments
San Francisco

BREAKING NEWS: Fox News Found Playing at San Francisco Cafe

Fox News at a Cafe in San FranciscoSAN FRANCISCO, CA — It was just another sunny Sunday morning in the Inner Sunset district of San Francisco. Parents were out walking their children and their dogs on the way to wait in line at breakfast places while the merchants of the local farmer’s market were displaying their produce and engaging with potential customers.

In the cafes, baristas prepared morning brews for a hungover or elderly clientele and the world rested and rejoiced in the last day of the weekend. Everything seemed right in the world. Birds flew, leaves rustled in the wind, and internet flowed endlessly to mobile devices.

But unbeknownst to the outside world, a cataclysmic clash of paradigms was occurring inside one humble San Francisco cafe, Cafe la Flore. Someone in this daring establishment had chosen to eschew cultural norms, and instead of CNN or MSNBC on the flatscreen,  this cultural deviant put on Fox news.

Yes indeed, Fox news was the choice of this humble cafe, the channel that has been called by locals a conservative propaganda machine, the opiate of barbaric and uneducated rubes, and in one case, the mouth of Sauron himself.

The very name evokes scoffing or even disdain from the average San Franciscan, who has never watched the channel except when there happened to be clips from it on The Colbert Report or The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. The gluten-free, vegetarian, and meat-loving liberal hordes dursn’t set eyes on the accursed channel lest their rational minds be perverted by the conservative backwash spewing from the two tongued mouths of Fox News robber barons.

Yet, in the face of this considerable cultural discrimination, some brave and likely isolated soul has hissed into the face of the liberal majority, defying them with a quiet yet potent act of subversion.

The world outside this cafe continues on, oblivious to the astonishing and all-together unforgettable political tension here in Cafe La Flore, but I and the man next to me both know the significance of this day. Though we shall never speak of it, we will always remember Sunday, March 10th, 2013: the day the world stood still inside the cafe and thought about political biases.

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