a new page

oh, hello blog. i haven't seen you in a while.

i am a californian now. the next time i vote, it will be in a blue state (not a swing state). i barely ever drive, but my new license lists my permanent residence in the tenderloin of san francisco, my photo is a picture of me with long hair, not short, and a nose ring. everything is new and strangely permanent.

i buy my fruits and vegetables at a farmers' market that sets up shop a block away from my building twice a week. on sunday mornings i go early - past a grassy area where a gang of the neighborhood's homeless gather for their nightly slumber party, past a smelly old truck full of live chickens squawking foolishly from inside over-packed cages. i watch the old chinese man break their necks one by one and distribute them to a long line of customers who chat unintelligibly (to me, at least), comparing prices as they juggle their bags full of beans and potatoes and flowers. the market breathes - the air somehow seems fresher when i walk between the stands, squeezing tomatoes and sniffing melons and wishing in vain that i will find avocados (they never seem to have them at this market. i thought avocados were a california thing?). my favorite vendor is an overweight chinese woman who wears a blue bandanna and her long hair in two braids that are always messy and falling out by the time i find her. she offers me what she claims to be the biggest, freshest head of lettuce - though mysteriously, she just gave the biggest, freshest one to the man in line in front of me - and when i protest that i live alone and have no use for an oversized head of romaine, she suggests that i have a party and share it. i laugh and buy the lettuce; that's easier than telling her that i don't have enough friends for a party yet.

my apartment is on the twelfth floor of a building exclusively for law students. some days it feels like a dorm. the boys who live on my hall go out to clubs on weekends and invite me, come home late making lots of noise and playing drinking games, roar at the television together on saturday afternoons. when i arrived one month ago my space was empty - the sad brown carpet made the off-white walls look even sadder, the venetian blinds hung unevenly over shaky old window frames, and the tiny kitchen stood alone in the corner, the two stove burners and minifridge seeming to laugh at my misfortune. who knew such a small space could be so monotonous? a single towel rack, installed by a previous tenant, broke the impossible dullness of the space, if only because it represented a past life, something real and concrete that once hung its wet towels in the bathroom but has now disappeared, leaving only the towel rack as a memorial. i slept my first few nights on a camping pad on the floor in the corner where my bed now sits. staring up at the rough, stucco ceiling, i listened to the shouts and sirens blaring twelve stories below and wondered with what memories i'd fill the room, if i could find a way to call it my home, what i'd leave behind.

when i arrived in my bedroom in palestine, i cried. cried at the touch of the cold tiled floor, cried at the terrible orange doors and bedspread, cried at the strange smell of the air freshener in the bathroom, the sounds of shouting children in an unfamiliar language coming from outside. i cried at the total unfamiliarity of the entire thing, at my feeling that, for the first time in my life, i might not have been prepared to handle what i'd set myself up for. i didn't cry this time. i opened my windows, stuck my head outside, and smiled, for all the same reasons that i'd cried ten months earlier. it doesn't scare me anymore - i'm getting good at re-rooting.

from my window i look south across market street onto the mission and potrero hill - two neighborhoods in san francisco. past potrero hill there is a single piece of land that strangely remains totally undeveloped - in the late summer months it is brown, with only a few trees spotting it, and it sticks out from the multi-colored homes below. i found out a week after staring at this beautiful hill that it's actually a dog park, but i try not to think about that. i prefer to imagine that it somehow erupted from underground after everything else had been built - it doesn't seem to fit, and yet i couldn't imagine the view from my window without it. the hill reminds me a little bit of palestine. i think about looking out onto the bethlehem countryside from my veranda onto the layers of stone wall and dry grass rolling like waves toward the horizon, the white stone houses seeming to balance on the steep inclines of the mountains, the huge plateau of herodion (which i never did get to visit) in the far distance. the voices of children screaming, diesel cars puttering by, goats baaing, have all been replaced by the pulsing beat of a modern city, but my hill is still there, like it showed up to keep me company in this strange place.

there are pieces of me everywhere, and everywhere i've been has given me a little it more of myself that i'm now holding in front of me, colors and shapes pulsing in my hands. some days i look at the pieces and see if i can make sense of them, put them together into something intelligible. mostly, though, i like the way they look now, all muddled and disorganized, like someone's taken a handful of paintballs and thrown them against a white sheet so that the colors have started to melt and swirl together.