I rarely take the F-Market because it is so slow and the double-seats have no butt dividers. The former is more important than the latter, of course, but the latter is really important if you have ever had a stranger smelling of grain alcohol be all gropey with the side of his leg. Not that that has ever happened to me before. (All the time, on the F-Market.)

F Market, by Jef Poskanzer

I took the F-Market yesterday because going underground on a day like that was a crime, the kind of crime that unicorns would ticket you for while crying tears of Nutella. It was an astoundingly beautiful San Francisco day. I should have walked. But I took the F-Market instead.

The redeeming quality about the F-Market is that it is usually populated with cheerful tourists. I like to eavesdrop and pretend that I speak their languages. I don’t. But I can fumble my way through German, so that is how I overheard the mother explaining to her little boy not to pull on the cord because that would ring the bell to signal that a stop was requested.

The little tow-headed boy of maybe five looked extremely disappointed in that Teutonic way, which is to say that his right shoulder may have slumped three millimeters. And my crabby old heart melted. Right before my stop, I touched his mother lightly on the elbow and asked her if he would like to ring the bell on my behalf. Lest you think I am some kind of awesome, I did this in English. (I am pretty sure I would still be on that train if I had to come up with “on my behalf” in German.)

She smiled and instructed her son to pull the cord, which he did gleefully, as indicated by one part of one tooth showing when he smiled. I gave him a bright “Dankeschön” as I left. And hell yeah, F-Market, I forgive you. I forgive you anything at all.

How disappointing. From the article: “The suddenly infamous Bernal Heights Coca-Cola billboard will apparently be covered up with siding in the hope that it can be preserved until a possible historic designation makes it legal to display once more.”

For those of you following the Bernal Heights Coca-Cola sign saga, here is the update from Bernalwood.

I had the pleasure of photographing this sign during a SFlickr photostroll a few years ago. Although I am no fan of the brand, I care about protecting the sign as a piece of San Francisco history.

If you care too, please help me in searching the San Francisco Historical Photograph Collection for evidence that the sign existed before 1965. I have already searched Flickr Commons, to no avail, but could always use a triple-check. The sign is located at the corner of Tompkins and Banks.

(via James)

Update, 17 February 2011: I searched Flickr Commons, but found no results. I also searched the San Francisco Historical Photographs collection at SFPL, but didn’t find anything there either. I contacted SF City Guides and the Mechanics’ Institute Library. The latter pointed me to the California Historical Society’s photograph collection. Then I remembered that SFPL recently digitized their city directories. I found “Tipton’s Gro” at 601 Tompkins on page 828 of the 1964-65 directory. This does not prove that the Coca-Cola sign existed, but searches for Tipton’s Grocery/Grocers may uncover something. I hope this helps.

I found myself wandering-with-purpose in the Financial District tonight. It was a perfect 65 degrees and the buildings quietly churned with swing-shift tidying. On a street I have walked hundreds of times, I found myself staring at the new location of an old employer. There was no rush of feeling, bad or good, just a slow smile. Well, there you are again. And I kept going.

I wish I understood San Francisco. For a researcher like me, the city is frustrating. Parts of it I want to make sense, and they don’t, and they won’t. Parts of it are like the transit system I’m always going on about, and you wonder why I just don’t shut up already. When I hear myself even start to talk about it, I cringe. But this is my first and closest interface with San Francisco, and so I care. I keep caring. I don’t know what to do about all that misguided love, but it’s there.

Ninety-minute travel-time aside, dinner at La Mediterranee was tasty as always, and “L’illusionniste” was a delight.

The vistas of Edinburgh gave me chills.

I hope my friend and I make a habit out of this dinner and a movie thing. I hope I don’t forget how much I love going to the movies.

Sometimes I wonder if I will ever belong to a place, or if I will continue to have these tenuous, furtive connections, inside but not a part of. I don’t know if it matters anymore.

For the photo a day meme: a photo of your town.

My town. My town. This subject is fraught for me because I have struggled with the concept of “my” in regards to San Francisco. Although I have lived in the Bay Area for 11 years, I still feel fairly detached from it. As a result, I haven’t taken any astounding photographs of this place.

That said, this photo captures a little part of my SF experience.

If you don’t live in San Francisco or care about city infrastructure, skip this post. I am compelled by my own impotent rage to document the abject absurdity of commuting in this city. This is anecdotal and subjective in nature; for statistics, please see Joe Eskenazi and Greg Dewar’s excellent SF Weekly article, “The Muni Death Spiral”.

Today the N-Judah train I was riding during rush hour stopped at Church and Duboce due to “train control problems”. (For those of you who do not commute in San Francisco, that stop is the last above-ground stop for the N, meaning that all the commuters trying to get downtown and to the Caltrain station are out of luck.) Above-ground, all the F-Market trains and shuttle buses were packed. I did not even bother walking into the Church Street station to see what the K, L, and M were like. I walked the mile and change to Civic Center, which, in and of itself, did not bother me; I enjoy walking, and I rarely see that part of town on foot.

What bothered me is that I left my house early specifically to get to work early and instead I was a half-hour late.

To review: I am a city employee. I take the city’s public transit in order to get to work. My job, like many jobs, is dependent on me being on time. On days like today, public transit fails in such a way that I am late for work.

And because I am a city employee, I do not have a flexible schedule — regardless of what SFGate.com comments state — so either I end up taking a shorter lunch break or I stay late to make up the time. In the former case, I have less time to decompress during the day; in the latter, I have less time to decompress at the end of it.

This city is stealing my time, half-hour by half-hour.

Since August of 2006, I have paid a flat monthly fee for the idea of a train or bus taking me 5 miles one way in a reasonable amount of time. I say “the idea” because this unicorn of transit has only appeared with any regularity when I worked the evening shift for several months. On a Tuesday morning, I would leave the Outer Sunset at 10:15 to get to Civic Center by 10:45. The trains rarely filled up by the time they hit the underground, and I would have 15 minutes to make a cup of tea before my day began.

But that was not rush hour, and most commuting happens during rush hour, when Muni often fails. I have seen nearly-empty N-Judah trains ramble outbound through the Outer Sunset during rush hour with no inbound counterparts in sight. That means the trains are stacking up at Ocean Beach and squatting there during rush hour when people are trying to get to work. In my case, it means I am trying to get to work for the same city that thwarts my commute multiple times a week.

My only options are:

1. Commute by alternate means. I no longer own a car, so I would need to walk (a Google-estimated trip of 100 minutes) or bike to work. Before you tell me all about the health benefits of walking and bicycle-riding, let me tell you about my will to live. My trust in San Franciscan drivers was soundly smacked from me in 2005 when I was hit by a truck while crossing an intersection on foot. I had the right of way. The truck didn’t stop, and neither did any other commuting human after I stumbled across the rest of the road and collapsed on the sidewalk. Although my injuries were minor, I now live with chronic pain in my right forearm. The accident gave me some serious perspective, especially on what I am willing to do in regards to my personal safety.
2. Leave 90 minutes before I am scheduled to work, leaving a cushion three times the length of a normal commute. The only pro to this option is that I will theoretically create such a large cushion that no Muni failure could impact my start time. (Although I know better, because I have experienced one-way commutes of 2 hours.) The cons to this are significant: not only do I have to change my sleep schedule, but due to the aforementioned rigidity of my schedule, I still “start work” at the same time, even if I am sitting in my office, ready to go an hour earlier.

So #2 it is, as I join the ranks of people who are forced into long commutes, sacrificing quality of life on the altar of crumbling civic infrastructure.

What can we do to fix this? I would again direct you to the SF Weekly article. A city that claims to be so dedicated to environmental causes must see the value in a functional transit system, or it is not what it claims to be. But the blatant hypocrisy of this place is a topic for another day.

I had this idea during dinner that I would get out my laptop and write something about the Big News, but I don’t know exactly what to say. Forgive my befuddled rambling.

For those of you who haven’t yet heard, I was one of the 15,000 City and County of San Francisco employees to receive a pink slip on Friday. Only I was on vacation and, in an effort to unplug, had not checked work email or RSS feeds all week. We returned home late Friday night, and my pink slip arrived in the mail on Saturday.

To say that I was shocked in that moment … well, I was shocked, but I was also a mess of other emotions. I opened the envelope, expecting a direct deposit slip, and received something very different. (It wasn’t pink at all, if you’re curious.) Because I hadn’t read the news, I thought I was one of a small number of layoffs — you see, I still believed all the “no, there won’t be layoffs” so heartily bandied about before this whole thing. Silly, naïve me.

FunkyPlaid and I sat in my study for a while, awash in disbelief and anger and who knows what else. Then I thought to call the library, and I asked a colleague what was going on. She informed me that she, too, had been laid off, that we all had been, library-wide, and then she related the 15,000 number, which blew my mind. I thought it couldn’t possibly be legal, but of course there are loopholes for any behavior.

I know I am hardly unique in this experience, especially now while our country suffers such economic turmoil. Last year, the union had dealt with the budget shortfall by arranging furlough days in order to stave off layoffs, so I know what it means to make sacrifices so that everyone can keep their jobs. But here we are, and with such a vague promise of rehiring at a shorter work-week, combined with my lack of seniority in the system … well, it looks bleak for me, if not during this round of layoffs then during the inevitable next.

This is hardly personal, but its personal impact is massive. My job is a complex and troubling one, but one I have grown to love with a fierce heart. I had so hoped we — and here I use “we” despite feeling cast aside by this city — would find a way to work together to provide our services to the public without losing anyone. Sometimes that is impossible, I am now told.

I hate that word “impossible”.

My gratitude for your compassion and your patience cannot fully be expressed by a mere “thank you” but I will still say it. I fully realize how despised civil servants are — I regularly hear comments to this effect — and yet you have only shown me kindness. Thank you. No matter what the outcome, I am humbled by your friendship.

The dashboard widget said 8 minutes, so I power-walked. As I slid onto one of the last non-senior seats on the bus, I caught a whiff of rubber cement.

The last time I smelled rubber cement on the bus, I was sitting next to the same person.

The smell was not entirely unpleasant. It reminded me of when I used to decorate my Chandler’s assignment notebook in high school, cutting out strange pictures from magazines and pasting them on the pages.

And so I catalogued one more smell that will not make me give up my seat on the bus.

I stepped off the 19 Polk with a mad grin.  The driver had been brilliant, announcing all the stops and transfer points, and even complimenting riders as they stepped onto the bus. “I love those boots, girl!” “C’mon up, beautiful!” She told me she loved my hat and called me cute as I thanked her and hopped off.

Trader Joe’s was aflutter with pre-dinner preparations. The cashier tried to make small-talk with the women in front of me, but they were dour and busy. He gave me a look and a shrug as if to say, I tried. He, too, complimented my hat, so I thanked him, and we exchanged those small pleasantries that make the line go faster.

As I was waiting for the 27 Bryant in an unfamiliar part of town, a young man, scruffy but cogent, was roaming a nearby parking lot.  He picked up a downed piece of fence and tossed it at the side of the concrete building a few times, seemingly out of boredom. I looked away, gauged my other bus-waiting options, pondered the dangers of walking instead — those things you do when you live in a city.  After a while, he emerged from the parking lot and saw me. Slowly, he approached.

I felt no threat as he walked up, hands at his sides, head slightly lowered.  It wasn’t that I hadn’t thought about what would happen if he attacked; there were plenty of cars passing by, and I had quite a set of lungs and boots.  His demeanor was not that of an attacker.  He looked like a little kid caught doing something.

“Hello. Do you work there?” he turned slightly to the building with a small shuffle of his feet.

“No, I don’t. I am just waiting for the bus.” I made eye contact, smiled politely, then looked away as if to accentuate the fact that I had not noticed him near the building.

“There are cool things by the parking lot. Flowers and sculptures and things.”  I had noticed these, but barely, so I nodded but did not encourage.

He stepped to the side again.  The side of his face I could see was turning red.  “I went to the restroom in the parking lot. Did you see me?” His use of the word restroom instead of bathroom surprised me.

“I didn’t see you,” I reassured him.

“OK. I went to the restroom there.”

I shrugged, “I don’t think anyone could see.”

“All right.  Thank you.” With a flat gesture of his palm out to me, almost as if he meant to shake my hand, he bowed slightly.

I did not move.  “You’re welcome. Have a good night.”

He shoved his hands in his pockets and wandered up the street.