Wow, my first post in October and the month is almost halfway gone. Not good. I should stick myself to a schedule, as recommended in this article regarding weblog usability. And look at how many other tenets I've violated! Ah, so much to do, so little time.

I didn't leave the city limits of San Francisco for nearly a whole month, the time period between Labor Day and October 1. I made that observation to a few people, most of whom replied, "you must have been mighty bored." But I certainly wasn't! In that time I worked plenty, walked a lot, tried at least 5 new restaurants, helped paint a homeless shelter, pushed my way through crowds of leather-clad men, had street people mutter strange and unintelligible things to me, and generally lived life.

I recently read a quote by a politician from across the bay in Oakland. He was disgruntled at the slow progress of the new Bay Bridge section, and he blamed it on San Franciscans' lack of motivation to get it done, saying, "They don't need a new Bay Bridge. They think they're in Nirvana over there -- why would they ever want to leave?" Well, I wouldn't necessarily call San Francisco "Nirvana," but I can see his point. It's sort of a hassle to leave the city, especially when you don't have a car (and conversely, it's rather a hassle to enter the city when you do have a car).

Finally, though, on October 1, Karen and I BARTed our way to Berkeley to the La Pena Cultural Center, where one of Karen's friends was playing in the band José Roberto y Sus Amigos (who were mighty good, by the way). That began a flurry of city-leaving. I had to go to Daly City, 15 miles south of here, for work. Then, having prepared myself with these little Bay Area baby steps, I hopped on a plane to New York City for another work-related trip. New York City -- there's another city I could stay in for months and never get bored. And with such good pizza, too! I'd never get hungry, either.

But here I am, back in San Francisco, back within the city limits, and here I'll stay for a while. My birthday is coming up on Friday, and Karen and I have got reservations at Chez Nous, a restaurant we've been meaning to try for years. If I must get older, at least I'll do it in style.

I went to the Folsom Street Fair sans notebook and sans camera, partly because I didn't want to look like a tourist or journalist, and partly just because I didn't feel like carrying stuff around. Well, it was definitely pretty strange.

Upon first arriving, I found myself in front of a stage where an ambiguously-gendered band was capably covering 80's tunes. Thin, leather clad men gyrated on platforms at either end of the stage. The music was actually pretty good, so I stuck around for a bit, but eventually I turned around and headed east on Folsom St. Almost immediately the foot traffic ground to a halt; there was evidently a spectacle ahead. I worked my way towards the front, and lo and behold, it appeared to be a mostly-naked transsexual woman getting whipped (and enjoying it).

At this point, I was filled with a sudden sense of dread: what if I saw someone I knew there? Not in the sense that I would care if someone saw me, but rather more like, "what if I come across someone I know getting spanked?" San Francisco is not a particularly big city, and it's not unusual for me to have a chance meeting with someone I know. If I had happened upon a spanking booth where, say, one of my coworkers was getting the paddle, I'm not sure I'd be able to purge that image from of my head.

Thankfully, of the many red, battered butts I saw that day, none were attached to faces I recognized. And there were spanking booths, quite a number of them. And naked people hanging about, mostly old, bearded men. Leatherwear shops had set up booths, as had Elbow Grease and a number of magazine purveyors (and I don't mean Newsweek). All in all, it was very San Franciscan -- the kind of thing one could only see in this city (and maybe in Berlin).

By far the strangest thing I saw was something going on after I left the fair, as I was walking north on 8th Street. On 8th and Mission there is a massive, windowless PG&E building (PG&E being Pacific Gas and Electric), probably containing a power substation. In front of this concrete monolith was gathered a group of maybe 15 people, dressed perfectly normally (i.e. not in S&M gear) -- but they were doing something incredibly odd. They appeared to be worshipping the building. There were plenty of passersby who just ignored the scene, and really, stuff like this happens every day in this city. Just yesterday, in fact, I was chased around for a bit by two people dressed as a 9-foot-tall sun and moon. You just shrug it off after a while.

But back to the worshippers: I had to stop and watch. A few others stood around me, equally puzzled. As we watched, they started to run around each other in an apparently choreographed manner. Eventually one of the women pulled out a red-stained blanket and played dead for a bit, until three of the men picked her up and lifted her towards the sky. She started chanting, "My wings are gone, there are only stones."

So it wasn't a worship, it was in fact a sort of street theater. These were not street people, by the way; they had obviously planned all this out beforehand, to meet here and perform this weirdness. I wouldn't be surprised if it was a Gertrude Stein play. If you've ever seen one of those (and they're popular in this area), you'd know that she's like the Jackson Pollock of the theater. Her plays consist of utterly random lines, coupled with equally random movements. At least, they're random to me -- I've never been into the abstract art thing. But here it was, right in front of me, the most abstract play I'd ever seen at the strangest venue I could imagine. That's San Francisco for you.

On Sunday, I decided to take a little urban hike from my place in Duboce Triangle to Pancho Villa Taqueria, the best burrito place around IMHO, which is in the Mission District. It was about a one-mile walk. In that one mile, however, I saw so many strange things, I was very much tempted to stop off in a neighborhood convenience store and buy myself a notebook and a pen to write it down. And I should have written it down, too, because now I can only remember the highlights.

My trek first took me down Castro Street and through the Castro district, long known for being the "gay" part of town. This means that there are men holding hands and generally being affectionate, rainbow flags flying from every storefront, and bars with names like The Men's Room. But these things, at least in San Francisco, are perfectly normal. Sunday, however, there was apparently some sort of gathering for the runup to the upcoming Folsom Street Fair, rightly billed as "the granddaddy of all leather events." And so my path down Castro Street was blocked by hundreds of large, bearded men, many wearing little leather thongs or buttless leather pants. The only means from point A to point B was to push through the crowd, and so I did, slowly weaving my way through the cowhide-clad masses.

Finally reaching Castro and 18th St., I made a left and began traversing the edge of Duboce Park. Upon reaching the opposite end of the park, I couldn't take my eyes off the profoundly weird site of an elderly Asian man dancing in place on the sidewalk in front of the Duboce Park Cafe. And by elderly, I do mean elderly -- the guy was definitely pushing 80 years old. He didn't seem to be homeless or mentally ill (as many people are in this city); rather, he was just selling newspapers from a stack beside him, and the dancing was his way of attracting business. It worked to some degree -- although I didn't buy a newspaper, he did get my attention.

I continued along my merry way, and on the next block I happened upon a bald man smiling sheepishly at me, standing next to a colorfully-striped couch. For whatever reason, he had apparently decided that taking the couch into his apartment the old-fashioned way, using the stairs, was untenable, so he'd rigged a complex system of ropes and pulleys from the roof overhang. My couch-intuition was likely more refined due to my involvement in two recent mega-couch moves, so it was just beginning to dawn on him what I could already see: that the couch wouldn't fit through the window either. He was screwed.

Thankfully, it wasn't my problem. What was my problem was that I was mighty hungry, and I still didn't have a two-handed refried-black-bean-filled burrito in my hands. So I hightailed it to Pancho Villa and got a super burrito. Nothing beats a nice, satisfying burrito after a long, strange walk.

Perhaps this weekend I'll do a similar walk with notebook in hand. Last week was just the warmup for the Folsom Street Fair; this week is the real deal. I've never been to it, in all of my 6 years in the Bay Area, but I've heard it's completely nuts. Sounds like fun.

Given how long it's been since I put up a blog entry, you'd think I had put my website into deep freeze.

This is supposed to be summer in San Francisco -- the brief period between September and October when the sun pokes out of the fog and scantily-clad revelers cover the grass at Golden Gate Park. But not this year. No, this year, we've got bone-chilling cold. From my window here at work, I can see hundreds of sailboats all concentrated into a relatively small area of the bay, sailing around in circles. They're probably huddling together for warmth.

It's been a crazy, busy couple of weeks. This week was Salesforce's user conference, Dreamforce, and I devoted a significant portion of my time to setting things up there and making sure everything ran smoothly. Fortunately, everything did run smoothly, including the CEO's keynote address, in which some of my software played a part. It was time well spent, though; I met lots of people, customers, Salesforce employees, and people from partner companies. I find this all very interesting, especially compared to the mega-company I came from. I feel like I can see how the whole business is run, and what part everyone plays in it. Part of that is just the startup ethos, but Salesforce is fairly well beyond startup status now. But it's still small enough that I can be on a first-name basis with people up and down the hierarchy; back at Oracle, I could never see myself saying, "Yo, Larry!"

Ah, it's Friday on the eve of a three day weekend. The time could scarcely be better, too -- I've been working hard getting things ready for DreamForce, Salesforce's upcoming conference. I'm looking forward to it, it sounds like it'll be fun.

And what better way to celebrate the long weekend than with the good old American pastime? The Yankees are in town! They'll be playing the Oakland A's tonight, tomorrow and Sunday. I've got tickets for myself and Karen for tonight's game, and I'll probably catch one more game this weekend. Oakland A's games are fun in a way that the San Francisco Giants games just can't match. The fans are much more into it, particularly in the bleachers, which sport a full color guard, drummers, and the occasional out-of-tune horn player. Besides, Oakland, being as it is in the American League, tends to have more offensive fireworks at its games. Baseball has two leagues, the American and National leagues, with the primary difference between the two being that the National League requires the pitcher to go to bat, while the American League allows a "designated hitter" to take his place. In general, pitchers can't hit, which tends to dampen the offense of National League teams.

And then, of course, there are the Yankees, traditionally the best-funded of baseball teams, and frequently the front-runners (although at the moment they're a bit behind their nemesis, the Boston Red Sox, in their divison). I've been a Yankees fan since the days of Don Mattingly, partly as a result of growing up near their New York home, but also because they're just fun to watch. Lots of people have choice words for the Yankees and their $200-million-a-year baseball steamroller, but few can deny that Yankees games are always exciting and high-energy.

And those are my only plans for the weekend. The rest of the time, I intend to lounge around and sleep a lot. Hey, I've been employed for three whole weeks now -- I need the rest!

As the title of this entry indicates, it's certainly been a busy couple of weeks. Here at Salesforce.com, I attended some training on Monday and Tuesday, culminating in a Salesforce Foundation event where a bunch of us new hires went out to a park in a public housing area of San Francisco and cleaned it up (the Salesforce Foundation is a charitable foundation backed by Salesforce.com). An interesting fact about my class of new hires was that more than a few of them were Salesforce.com users at their previous company, and liked it so much that they got a job here. It's kind of like those old Hair Club For Men commercials where CEO Cy Sperling would announce unenthusiastically, "I'm not only the president -- I'm also a client." Except backwards. And most of the new hires here had hair to begin with.

Meanwhile, Karen has started law school, and she's been hitting the books pretty hard, spending hours upon hours every day briefing cases. Her experience thus far has eerily mirrored Scott Turow's account of his first year at law school, One-L, right down to the strict, no-nonsense Contracts professor. I'd have to say, though, that our new ventures (her school and my new job) are well in sync. She's been spending long hours with her nose in books, and I've been hanging out at work a lot learning the ins and outs of Salesforce's applications; it works out wonderfully in that we're both so busy, neither of us feels neglected. We still manage to see each other fairly often, and we're working out a schedule so that I know to stay out of her way during her worst days (which generally fall just before a class with the aforementioned Contracts professor).

I happened upon one of my roommates the other day, a rare occurrence indeed; although five of us live in the house, we're almost never home at the same time. The most I ever see of them is their occasional load of laundry in the dryer. It works well for me, though; when I am home (also a rare occurrence these days), it's like I have the whole house to myself.

That's that for now. I haven't been very good about keeping up the blog lately; I keep lamenting that fact, but rarely do anything about it. Well, hopefully I'll be a little better about it. If nothing else, I can start writing about what I had for lunch. With all the lunch choices in downtown SF, I'd have blog material for weeks!

I had to keep it quick for lunch today, so I headed down to the Taco Bell and tried one of their new Crunch Wrap Supremes. This is just a new packaging of the 6 standard Taco Bell ingredients (tortillas, cheese stuff, beans, salsa, lettuce, and sour cream), with the twist that it's wrapped up like a big wanton and then put in a toaster. Mmm, so good. But so dangerous. Too much Taco Bell and you'll be in dire straits for hours afterwards. So Rule 1 about ordering from Taco Bell: Never over-order from Taco Bell. When in doubt, leave it out.

My newly renovated life is coming together nicely now. After some haggling with the moving and storage company who wanted to charge me a truly exorbitant amount of cash to move my stuff from the storage warehouse to my new Beaver Street pad, I decided to go ahead and do it myself. I rented a UHaul truck and drove it out to the warehouse in Fairfield, 50 miles out of San Francisco. It was a pain in the butt, but it saved me lots of money, plus gave me the satisfaction of knowing that the shady A1 Red Ball Moving Company would not get another dime of my hard-earned cash. Upon reaching Fairfield, I discovered to my unbridled delight that the odometer on the truck was not functioning. This meant that I would save even more money, because UHaul charges $0.99 per mile driven, but they'd now have no way to track how far I'd gone. I had previously arranged through eMove to hire a couple of guys who billed themselves as Quality Movers. Fortunately for me, they quite lived up to their name. They showed up at the warehouse just after I did, and promptly loaded the stuff onto the truck. When we got back to San Francisco, the three of us hauled it all up the three flights of stairs to my room, and I became a fully furnished resident of Beaver Street.

After a while spent unpacking, I sat down on my bed to rest for a bit and looked out the window, and I noticed something I hadn't realized before -- I have a killer view of the city from my room! From my window, on the third story of a house perched on top of a steep hill, I can see all of downtown, Civic Center, the Bay Bridge, Treasure Island, and if it's not too foggy, I can even make out Oakland. How about that.

And yesterday I started my job at Salesforce.com. Their offices are at a wonderful location at Embarcadero and Market Streets, and from my large cube window I have a beautiful view of the bay, the Bay Bridge, and the ferries coming in and out of the historic Ferry Building. Not that I had much time for window gazing; I went right to work the very minute I arrived, getting to know the people, learning the products, and that sort of thing. I was happy to do it, too; my three weeks off was mostly nap-filled and pleasant, but I was itching to start doing something useful with myself.

It was just as I suspected: there are smart and motivated people everywhere at Salesforce, and everyone appears genuinely happy to be there. It's got the light, fun atmosphere of one of the old dotcom boom companies (I should know -- I worked at one myself), but with an edge of business acumen and rationality that was distinctly missing during those halcyon days. I think I'm going to like it there.

I'm writing this from the fine town of Lombard, IL, which lies about 45 minutes out of downtown Chicago by train. What am I doing here, you ask? Why, I'm just coming to the end of The Whirlwind Tour.

Karen and I had arranged this trip long before I knew that I'd be temporarily unemployed at this time -- that just turned out to be an unexpected bonus. The plan was that we'd go visit my family in New Jersey, stay in New York City for a while, then head to Chicago to see her family, all before she began law school on August 15. So far it's gone like clockwork (let's hope I don't jinx myself here). We stopped in New Jersey and did such typical New Jersey activities as wandering around Princeton, getting root beer at Stewart's, and playing mini golf. We also went to the balloon festival, where they launch hundreds of hot-air balloons from the huge fields and farms around the old town of Branchburg, NJ. I'll put up some pictures of it in the photo gallery when I get a chance.

Then we headed to New York City, where we had reserved an itty bitty room at the top floor of the Thirty Thirty Hotel -- a room so small, it reminded me of the coat closet we had in Bombay. No matter, though, we didn't need much space (plus, NYC is a heck of a lot cleaner than Bombay). In our 2 1/2 days in New York we really packed it in. We headed to the Empire State Building the night we got there. The next morning, we set out to walk the 60 blocks from our hotel through Central Park to the Guggenheim -- then we walked all the way back south again, across the Brooklyn Bridge, and to Grimaldi's Pizza (which, by the way, is not at all what it's cracked up to be -- "Best Pizza In New York" indeed).

The next day we headed to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and went to Ben's Kosher Deli. Then we got tickets to Glengarry Glen Ross on Broadway (written by David Mamet and starring Alan Alda and Liev Schrieber, who inadvertently blew smoke in my face as we passed him on our way out). Then we went down to Tribeca and managed to get seats at one of New York's best restaurants, Next Door Nobu. This restaurant doesn't take reservations -- fortunately for us, as the original Nobu is so trendy it's almost impossible to get a table there unless you're Brad Pitt -- but its head chef is the same guy, Nobu Matsuhisa, and the menu is almost identical. Nobu's fare is sushi, and we both agree that we've never seen or tasted any better -- it was truly sublime. We ordered a few items and also got the "Chef's Choice," where for an $80 prix fixe the chef chooses an array of dishes from the menu, and we were not disappointed. They piled on the food, plate after plate of unbelievably high-quality sushi, with deep-red ahi tuna, pink-orange salmon and iridescent blue Japanese sardines. Incredible. When the bill came, we found to our delight that they had even comped us on some items, so it wasn't nearly as steep as we were prepared for. We would gladly have paid the full bill anyway -- it was worth it. If you're going to be in NYC, I highly recommend Nobu -- just save me a seat.

And now we're in Chicago, where we hit the Field Museum (a cultural and natural history museum) and the Museum of Science And Industry, where they had a particularly striking exhibit showing the function of the human body through hundreds of excellently preserved cadavers and organs. It sounds gory, perhaps, but it was actually fascinating. The bones, the muscles, the nerves, the vascular system -- all were shown in great detail. Amazing.

Tomorrow morning I'll head back to nice, cool San Francisco, where I've got to move my stuff from its crates in storage to my place at (snicker snicker) Beaver Street. And next week I'll start my job at Salesforce, which I'm quite looking forward to. The whirlwind tour may be ending, but the whirlwind life continues.

Wow. So this is what I'd do if I didn't have a job.

For those of you just tuning in, I'm on a three-week hiatus between jobs, having left Oracle last week and not starting at Salesforce.com until August 15. In the meantime, I had intended to continue my search for a place to live, but then I went and found one on Sunday, rendering myself utterly useless for the remainder of the week.

I have been doing a lot of sleeping. Sleeping is something I'm good at, and even at Karen's place, which overlooks a busy street, I can get some solid shuteye. The irony is that the place I'm moving to will be utterly silent, being situated as it is on a steep hill far above Duboce Triangle (which will surely also be responsible for the Thighs Of Steel I will shortly develop). But for now, I've been sleeping until 8:30 (a luxury for me given my previous commute schedule) and taking nice long naps during the day.

Of course, I should be catching up on my sleep now -- in a few days we'll be in The City That Never Sleeps. After a stop in New Jersey to visit my family, we'll head to New York City. Although I don't think either of us has the energy to party all night, we'll surely be on our feet a lot during the day, enough that I'll probably see fit to make withdrawals from the sleep account I'm building up now.

When I get back, it'll be time to move into my new place. Unfortunately, the moving and storage company I used turned out to be somewhat shady, so I'll be making every effort to get a quote from them for the moving job and make them stick to that quote. They screwed me when they moved my stuff into storage, inexplicably charging me $320 more than they quoted, and there wasn't much I could do about it because I was in India. This time, however, I'm going to have as much documentation as I can on hand, so if they try it again, I'll immediately threaten to sue. You've got to keep these shady people in line.

Well then. This has been a truly interesting few days, and as a result, I now find myself housed but unemployed.

Temporarily unemployed, that is. On Thursday I accepted an offer from Salesforce.com, a company based in a great location in downtown San Francisco. I'd been interviewing for a while since I'd returned from India, and it took a surprisingly long time for it all to produce an offer. Ultimately, albeit after two months or so, I ended up with three offers from three very different companies. The Salesforce one was by far the strongest, but they also seemed the most organized and most aligned with what I wanted to do.

Salesforce.com is in the Customer Relationship Management space, generally abbreviated to CRM. Companies use Salesforce's software to track their customers -- who they are, what they've bought before, what they might buy in the future, and what products they need help with. Salesforce is so devoted to CRM that even their stock ticker symbol is "CRM" -- these guys mean business. I've been working in PeopleSoft (later Oracle) CRM for some time, so I was very familiar with what they did; but Salesforce's twist is that it's all hosted and web-based. That means that Salesforce's customers never install anything at all for themselves, they just log into Salesforce.com and start using it. Sort of like Yahoo Mail or GMail -- you never have to install any applications to read your mail, you just log into the web page and mail away.

Salesforce is a relatively young company, founded in 2000, and it's brimming with energetic, smart people. I already knew many of the people there from previous companies I've worked at, and those people were certainly among the best and the brightest around. Salesforce's offices are laid out in a manner that I think promotes collaboration, where people can discuss amongst themselves over small clusters of half-size cubes. From the moment I walked into those offices by the bay, I got a good vibe. I had a feeling I'd do well there.

But because Salesforce is a direct competitor of the CRM product I was working on at Oracle, the management at Oracle asked me to leave on Friday, just one day into my two weeks' notice. I was prepared for this step, and I fully understand it as well -- if you know your employee is going to a competitor, you probably don't want him to gather any more information about you than he already has. And to their credit, my managers at Oracle were really cool about it. There was no acrimony there, and they knew I wouldn't have done anything unethical anyway, but it's a company policy and they need to abide by it. And so be it then -- I'll just take a few weeks off to relax before I start at Salesforce.

In other news, I have finally found a place to live. This, I think, will be the true San Francisco experience, although that's not what I originally set out to find. Knowing that I'd be taking the job at Salesforce, which is in the Financial District, I decided to focus heavily on Duboce Triangle, which I mentioned in my previous posting. Duboce Triangle is an excellent spot because it's right on top of a central subway station from which I can catch any of three different lines that go directly downtown (and therefore directly to Salesforce).

I found a posting on Craigslist for an open house this afternoon on (chuckle chuckle) Beaver Street, so I went down to check it out. It's a six story house with four bedrooms, and each bedroom is on a different story and has its own bathroom attached. Attached private bathrooms are good. The room was great, nice and big, they have a housekeeper that comes in every two weeks, and they split all the utilities five ways, so that's all pretty cheap. I met two of the four roommates, and they struck me as pretty cool guys. They did make clear to me that it was a gay household (all four of them are gay), and asked me if I was comfortable with that. Honestly, I don't care if my roommates are gay, straight, black, white, or somewhere in between, as long as they're sane and pleasant to be around. It was a deal I couldn't pass up, so I took it. Just call me Marco of Beaver Street.

Last night I went and visited a place in Duboce Triangle, a small section of the city delimited by Duboce Park on the north side and Market St. angling along the south. Considering its proximity to major thoroughfares, the area of Duboce Triangle is a very quiet neighborhood. Standing on the tree-lined streets of Duboce Triangle, you'd never know that you were just a few blocks from the big Safeway, the subways, and the Castro. The place itself is quite large and up on the third floor; there would be two roommates, of whom I've met one and found to be very cool. The other roommate I will meet tonight. I hope it goes well!

I've been pretty lax for the last couple of weeks in writing this blog. Lax, but busy -- that's my lame excuse.

So I'm still searching for a place to live, two weeks on. It's slow going. I've responded to a number of ads on Craigslist. Lots of people just never wrote back to me, but of those that did, I'm finding a 75% weirdness rate. That is to say, three quarters of potential roommates are proving to be either subtlely or overtly strange. Last night, I visited a place on Fillmore & O'Farrell, right above the gym I go to. This guy was extra weird -- every question I asked him was met with a shrug and a terse response. When I got up to the apartment, three of his friends were sitting around. A quick glance at the TV showed that it was tuned to the front door camera -- they were just watching people come in and out. Evidently they'd also been watching me. Good thing I didn't do anything embarrassing while I was waiting at the front door.

The apartment hunting has filled my nights of late, and with no results so far, I'm running out of time to meet my self-imposed deadline. I had hoped to have a place and be moved in by July 28; the following week, Karen and I are going to New Jersey, New York and Chicago to see our respective families, and then it'll be just one more week before she starts law school.

Well, I'll try to write more often here. By the time I'm done with all this, I'll probably have enough potential-roommate anecdotes to fill a book.

I've been doing a bit of apartment hunting in San Francisco lately. I've stayed with Karen at her place since I returned from India, and the three of us (Karen, myself, and Karen's roommate) get along quite well. Still, though, the place isn't made for three, and as Karen starts to move in some law-school-centric furniture (bookshelves, filing cabinets, etc.), it's getting increasingly cramped. It was only intended to be a temporary arrangement anyway (the living situation, that is, not Karen!). So the search begins.

First, my goal is to live somewhere in the city. San Francisco, like many cities, is made up of a hodgepodge of different neighborhoods, each with its own character, advantages, and disadvantages. It's not a particularly large city, and any part of it is reachable from any other part with relative ease; but some areas are much better served by public transit than others. Since I don't have a car, and I'd prefer not to buy one if I can avoid it, public transit access is pretty important to me. Also, I like to walk. There are some areas of the city that are more conducive to walking, with nearby supermarkets, restaurants, parks, and other such things that I'd actually want to walk to. And, of course, I'd much prefer to live in a safer area, although in truth almost everything north of Monster Park (formerly Candlestick Park) is pretty safe.

These parameters limit my options with regard to neighborhoods. I consider this limit a good thing, or else I'd be mentally paralyzed by the diversity of choices. I've narrowed it down as follows, in rough order of preference (click on each neighborhood in the list for a map of it):

1. Pacific Heights: Trendy but not overly so, Pacific Heights near Fillmore St. is an excellent spot. Lots of restaurants, a Safeway and a Whole Foods both within 5 minutes' walk, and not too far from Pizza My Heart and Pizza Orgasmica. There are a fair number of buses that go through Pacific Heights, but the Muni and BART trains are fairly far. It's a bit pricey to live here, but not as bad as the nearby Marina, which is a little too trendy and full of young Kennedys and Rockefellers for my tastes.
2. SoMa (South of Market): SoMa is, for the most part, brand spanking new. Prior to the recent development boom, SoMa's only claim to fame was the 80 freeway overpass which ran through it and provided cover for its many impromptu homeless shelters. Now, though, it's fast becoming the hippest part of the city. Pac Bell Park, home of the Giants, is there; a huge new Whole Foods and an equally large Safeway recently opened there; and it's the site fo the much celebrated Goat Hill Pizza, which I have yet to try. Also, it's within walking distance to the Financial District, the locus of all trains, buses, and ferries that operate in San Francisco; CalTrain, which runs down the peninsula to San Jose, has a terminal in SoMa as well. SoMa, with its newly-built lofts and thumbprint-id-locked apartment buildings, is seeing rents skyrocket of late.
3. Russian Hill: Russian Hill, just on the other side of Van Ness from Pacific Heights, is somewhat more sedate. The buildings there tend to be a tad older. The "Hill" in Russian Hill is no joke; many of the houses are built on a steep incline, and local residents can often be found sporting oversize quadriceps. Polk St., which cuts across the western edge of Russian Hill, is home to numerous good restaurants and little hangout spots. Up the hill on Hyde & Green you'll find Za Gourmet Pizza, which is really good when you're in the mood for a massive slice with a crispy crust. Like Pacific Heights, Russian Hill is a bus-only transit zone. It's a little closer to BART and Muni trains, but not much.

So that's it, my top three choices right now. It has also entered my mind to consider (the infamous) Castro, Mission, and Noe Valley, but I think the three neighborhoods described above would best meet my needs.

Having roughly decided on neighborhoods, I now have the choice of renting a place myself or moving in with a roommate (or roommates). I am leaning towards the latter, not least because the price of renting a place myself is pretty steep, but also because I think it might be fun to have some roommates. So I've been looking at places on Craigslist and HousingMaps (and my eternal thanks go to Craig Newmark and "Mapper Paul" for their benevolence in running these sites). In reading these postings, I have to evaluate not only the place, but the person. Does he or she sound normal? Like a control freak? Is there a dog in the house (immediate grounds for exclusion in my book)? Are they searching for a mindfulness practitioner? It's not easy, rather like trying to glean someone's character from a college application. And actually going to see the places is a trip. It's voyeuristic, in a way, peeking into the life of a person I don't even know but might one day live with. Strange. Strange but necessary. And I, ever the optimist, continue to believe that this will all turn out well, and I'll soon have a killer place with a friendly roommate (or 2).

I'm back in San Francisco now after a whirlwind tour of New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and New York. I'm from there, you see; I grew up there. This means that I have an intuitive understanding of the value of great pizza.

Pizza outside those mid-Atlantic coastal states just isn't right. I say this with apologies to Chicagoans, who make an interesting (and Sicilian-influenced) super-thick slice -- but New York style pizza is still the best. A true New York style pizzeria, which despite the name can be found across the Atlantic seaboard, should be as follows: The guy behind the counter should be like a character from the Sopranos (apologies now go to the American Italian Defamation Association, but it's true). He should have a thick accent, a face that says "Whaddya lookin' at me for?", and thick black bushy eyebrows. He should be short with the customers -- his speech should be clipped, not in a mean way, but for the sake of speed and efficiency. He should never put a verb in a question: "Two slices?" "Here or to go?" "That your table?" And he should serve you up a nicely triangular slice (and by slice, I mean slice -- any pizzeria that doesn't serve by the slice should be lynched) (you hear that, Amici's "East Coast Pizzeria?"). Said slice should be folded once, down the middle, so that what little grease there is (and there shouldn't be much) will slide right off and pool on the plate. Upon folding the slice, there should be a pleasant crackling noise, that of the crispy outer crust breaking and revealing a bready, but still slightly crispy, interior.

Well, my brother Mikey understands good pizza, anyway. While I was over there I helped him cram all his and his roommate's stuff into a U-Haul and truck it to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The City Of Brotherly Love. Actually, that moniker is closer to the truth than I'd imagined. Philadelphia has a bit of a bad reputation; it tag-teams with Houston as America's fattest city, and there do exist some pretty bad parts of town. In truth, though, people there tend to be very nice; even the guy at the U-Haul depot was cracking jokes with us, despite the fact that we walked in at the very last minute of his shift. I've been to Philly before, and once even walked it from one end to the other, but I guess I hadn't been very social with the locals. Well, Mikey's got a pretty sweet place, right there on South Street, the city's biggest hangout. I think the city will treat him well.

"Nobody's from San Francisco." It's a commonly heard refrain around here, even featured in the San Francisco-based movie Tales Of The City (which, by the way, is quite bad, fraught with stupid stereotypes, and overall not worth adding to your NetFlix queue).

One could add a corollary to the above statement: "Everybody eventually leaves San Francisco." This is a boom-and-bust town, a city whose very foundation was the Gold Rush of 1849, and it has traditionally been a place of transients. When the boom is over, people leave; and so history is repeating itself now.

It seems like since I returned to San Francisco, half the people I know have either left or planning to leave soon. Most are planning to add initials to their names: MBAs, Ph.Ds, M.D.s and J.D.s; and many, having become quite attached to the city, aren't going far. Fortunately for them, there are a wealth of good universities in the area, including Stanford, Berkeley, UC Davis, and Santa Clara (and there are some in the city itself, including USF, where Karen will soon be attending law school). But even those not-so-distant suburbs are segregated from the city; by traffic, mostly, but also by mindset. Once someone leaves for a town outside of BART range (which is pretty much anywhere other than Berkeley), they surely won't be back much, because getting to San Francisco will become an instant hassle for them. Driving and parking in the city (or taking the other, less useful public transportation options) always present a needlessly stressful challenge which tend to keep visitors from nearby towns away. I know this firsthand, having lived in San Jose for a while, 46 miles and a world away from San Francisco.

But then, that transience is perhaps just part of the character of this city. It's a city of the young and the young-at-heart, full of ambitious, driven people brimming with ideas, but it's a tough place for starving students and people who are trying to start families. It's a blessing and a curse. The constant turnover ensures that the city's collective mind stays fresh and new -- still, all those going-away parties can get depressing.