penitent, turbulent, multiplex!

It has been quite a couple of days.

I landed in San Francisco on Thursday afternoon. I had already arranged my housing via craigslist a couple of weeks earlier, and the lady that I had been dealing with was nice enough to come all the way to the airport to pick me up. She arrived, and we started down the highway towards my new home in Palo Alto.

As we pulled into the apartment lot, I noticed that the area was pretty shabby. That by itself wouldn’t have bothered me; however, my hostess made a few comments about not wanting the neighbours to see me moving in.

Undaunted, I dragged all my stuff up to our flat on the second story. The place was spacious, but pretty ugly (puke orange carpets, peeling paint, smelling of mould, etc). My room was fairly huge, and was furnished with a dresser, some industrial shelves, a bar fridge, and a lamp. As I unpacked my suitcase and my bags, I started to get irritated with the loud rap music that was blaring out of the apartment across the street, but didn’t think much of it.

By the time I finished unpacking, it was dark. My hostess had gone to ‘take a nap’ in her room, from which she didn’t emerge for the rest of the night. At some point our other housemate arrived home from work, and he was extremely friendly; his first order of business was to make sure that I could connect to the wireless network he’d set up. I then decided that I should get to a pay phone and call home, to let my parents know that I was alive and well. So, I slipped out of the apartment and headed for the 7-11 at the corner, which was about 100m or so away.

If you want some idea of what our neighbourhood looked like after dark (at around 6:30pm), imagine any Dangerous Minds-esque movie you’ve ever seen, and change the black-to-Mexican ratio to about 50/50. The few gentle-looking people that I had seen upon my arrival walking with their children had disappeared, and instead the street was literally crawling with large men smoking, shouting into cellphone headsets, or shouting at each other.

I tried to make myself look even shabbier than I already was, tossed my hood up, and started walking towards the 7-11. About 10 steps out of my building, some dude named ‘Stan’ came up to me and said something incomprehensible; he was obviously under the influence of something fairly potent. He asked me for 50 cents, and I gave it to him; and then he asked me to buy him a “Black and Mayarrd” from the store, which I agreed to even though I had no idea what the hell he was talking about. After I walked into the store and managed to tune out the woman standing by the snacks shelf that was shrieking at a bag of Cheetos, I was able to deduce from a box on the counter that Stan wanted a “Black and Mild”, which is a little cigar. It was only a buck, so what the hell.

I walked out, gave Stan his cigar, and was told by him that if I ever needed any of the ‘buzzie stuff, you know’, that Stan was the man to talk to. Useful information, that. Stan said goodbye, and I picked up a pay phone and called home. Just then, three cars pulled in and conveniently began to blast astonishingly loud music in my general direction, so that when my mom picked up, she was exposed to about 6 or 7 obscenities for every word that I was able to emit.

After lying through my teeth about the condition of my neighbourhood to my parents (at this point I realized that I had made a grave error in moving here, but letting mom know that would only worry two people instead of just one), I again tried to make myself look inconspicuous and made my way home. I had only gone a few steps before I was approached, this time by a small group of three guys. In a remarkable demonstration of perception, they each observed that I was a ‘white boy’, and then proceeded to ask for money. I told them that I didn’t have any more, and one of them questioned why I had money to give to Stan but not to them.

Have you ever seen one of those movies where bullies surround a kid and push him around from bully to bully for a few minutes? Well, that was my fate for the next 30 seconds or so. I didn’t fight back or even say anything, I just waited for enough space to open up and then I walked away. Quickly. They swore at me for a while and then presumably found some other amusement. Some other people said things to me on the way home, but I wasn’t really paying attention. Oddly enough, the one thing that kept running through my mind was that I wasn’t going to be able to bike to work if I lived here, since rolling in after dark would be an iffy business.

I made it home without much further trouble. At this point I was feeling a bit frazzled, so I started to do some silly things, I guess. I hadn’t taken my bike out of its box yet, so I pushed that up against my door. Then, using only my iBook and the internet connection that had so miraculously been offered to me, I started looking for a way out.

The first thing I did was open a SkypeOut account so that I could make phone calls. Then, I started doing some comparative analysis of crime rates in the Bay Area. Turns out that the area I was living in had a murder rate three times that of the national average, and had once earned the dubious honour of having the highest murder rate of any city in the United States — despite its small population of roughly 30 000 people. Whee. In comparison, I found Mountain View to be essentially crimeless, and so I started spamming emails to craigslist housing ads from there. Once I was done that, I talked to my sister and my girlfriend for a while, and that managed to calm me down quite a bit. In the midst of talking to Suz, I received an email from one of the advertisers that I had contacted. I called her over SkypeOut, and arranged to see the place at 9am the next morning. Feeling somewhat reassured, I decided to go to bed. It was 10pm, and without blankets it was pretty cold on that futon. I ended up wearing my jacket, track pants, and shoes to sleep, and my towel and gym clothes were put into service as a pillow. I didn’t really fall asleep until 4am or so, I guess, and so I amused myself by watching slideshows of pictures of good times I’d had with friends and family in the past.

At 5:30am Friday morning, I decided that I wasn’t really going to get any more sleep, and so I got up and started organizing my stuff. I called a cab to pick me up, and I was profoundly irritated that the dispatcher couldn’t seem to figure out where I was located. He told me the cab was on its way, but he didn’t sound very sure about it. By 7am, I was waiting at the corner outside.

As I waited, I watched mothers from the area walking their kids to the corner that I was standing at so that they could pick up the bus. This experience made me feel like an overprivileged wretch: Here I was fleeing the area after a single night, and these little tikes were smiling and playing without any apparent trepidation. The assembled mothers looked somewhat tense, but the tension was somehow residual, a sort of basal level of suspicion of their surroundings. Apparently, all of the ‘bad people’ had hidden themselves away at dawn.

After about 10 minutes of waiting, the cab still hadn’t shown up. However, a free shuttle stopped at the corner I was waiting at, and the doors opened expectantly. I had no idea where this shuttle was going, and the driver didn’t speak much english at all. A helpful and friendly fellow on the shuttle told me that if I wanted to go to Mountain View, I should take the shuttle to the Caltrain station. I reasoned that the shuttle would at least bring me out to a major intersection from which catching a cab would be a bit easier, and so I jumped on.

Before I knew it, we were at the train station. I bought a ticket, and my helpful friend told me that the next train to Mountain View would arrive at 7:26am. It was now 7:18am.

At roughly 7:24am, a southbound train pulled up, and we got on it. Unfortunately, this train was actually the express run that was supposed to have arrived at 7:20am, and so it passed Mountain View and about 5 other stations before finally stopping at Santa Clara station, which was singularly desolate. There were about 3 other people waiting on the platform when I got off. It was 7:45am or so now, and the next train that would take me back to Mountain View wasn’t scheduled to arrive until 8:02am. I walked around a bit, but there wasn’t much around except a highway, a few bus stops, and a Starbucks. Finding the train platform comparatively more tolerable than the Starbucks, I paced nervously there until 8:03am, when the train showed up.

I got to Mountain View at 8:25am, and I was thoroughly disoriented. (Recall that I had expected to take a cab directly to the place, and thus I only knew how to get to the house by car.) Luckily, there was a cab waiting at the station, and I ran for it even though there didn’t seem to be any other takers. I told the cabby where I wanted to go, and he looked at me a bit funny and started driving. Turns out that the Caltrain station is only about 500m away from where I was going, so it probably would have been faster to walk.

I was about a half-hour early, so I walked around the neighbourhood a bit to get a feeling for it. Mountain View is about as suburby as you can get, but the houses all have character — they’re not just cookie-cutter copies of one another. The main strip on Castro Street looked interesting, as well. In terms of safety, there were two strong indicators that this was not a threatening area. First indicator: People left bikes out on their lawns, unlocked. Second: Several folks were out walking their tiny toy-dogs. My feelings at this point were mixed: I was happy to know that I was going to be living in a place that I could feel comfortable in, but at the same time I felt like a coward, and a traitor to some of my ideals. After all, I often argue against urban sprawl and advocate higher-density housing, and here I was relishing the idea of my future residency in suburbia.

It was still quite early after I got back from my walk — 8:40am — but such was my urgency that I rang the doorbell anyways. I was thoroughly charmed with the house. It’s a single-story villa, and it’s surrounded by gardens that are maintained by the landlady. I met one of the tenants and the landlady, both of whom are obviously very kind, intelligent, and respectful people. By 9:15am, I had signed a tenancy agreement. My next task was to somehow get back to my apartment in Palo Alto, pack up my stuff, and somehow get it over to my new place in Mountain View.

The first part of that problem was solved for me by the tenant of the house that I had met. She was on her way to Menlo Park at 10:15am, and offered to drop me off on the way. Upon leaving me at the corner in that dingy neighbourhood, she said “You are very smart to be getting out of here.” I agreed fervently, but again that feeling of guilt started to manifest itself.

I scurried into the apartment and repacked all of my things in less than 20 minutes. As I was packing, I couldn’t help but peek nervously out of the window at intervals. Across the street, highschool kids in poofy jackets were hanging out, playing rap on a stereo and calling people on flashy cell phones. A van had pulled up to the curb on my side of the street, and two big dudes with headsets jumped out of it, followed by three women who looked to be in their late twenties. One of the guys was yelling into his headset, but I couldn’t make out what he was saying. One of the women started screaming about something, and the other guy hit her in the face. I was later ashamed to realized that it never even occurred to me to call the police.

I called a series of cab companies until I found one that was obviously using some sort of computer-aided navigation system, and that offered van pickups. I managed to find one, and I went outside to wait for the cab to arrive. (With all of my stuff locked in the apartment, of course.) The van and its occupants were gone, and the only people left on the street were the highschool kids. They didn’t pay any attention to me, or to much else besides their phones. While I was waiting, an middle-aged Mexican man walked by, pulling his young daughter along on a tricycle. I smiled and waved at them, and the little girl laughed at me. She was awfully cute. The exchange warmed my heart for a bit, until I realized that the statistics I had read earlier suggested that this man had time to walk his daughter around at noon because he was unemployed. As the cab pulled up in front of me, I inwardly wished them luck.

I piled my stuff into the van without incident, except for a brief terrifying moment when I almost dropped my apartment key into a sewer grate. I made it to my Mountain View place by noon, and relaxed for the next couple of hours.

I would like to halt the narrative at this juncture to observe that in less than 24 hours, I had landed in California, moved into an apartment, found a new apartment, met the tenants and the landlady, secured a tenancy agreement, and moved into the new place. All of this was done only with an internet connection and my laptop. (Well, except for the actual transportation, but you know what I mean.) In addition to enabling this rapid transition, that same technology also allowed me to get in touch with loved ones when I wanted their support, and provided a welcome distraction when I was struck with nervous insomnia. I am pointing this out because I have the tendency to disdain most technologies as useless toys. Obviously if I had found myself in this same situation even a few years ago, things would probably not have worked out as well as they did. (And yes, I do recognize the irony that it was the same technology that landed me in this mess in the first place — but that was largely my fault. I should have used it to research the reputation of the neighbourhood before blindly making housing arrangements.)

That’s about as far as I want to go with that digression. As it stands, there’s not much left to the story. After relaxing for a bit, I unpacked my clothes and stuff. I then walked to the San Antonio Shopping Center, which is a huge outlet mall about 2.5 miles away from here. I bought some necessities at Target — bedding, small furniture items, etc. — because it was the first store I came across. I was home by 4:30 or so, and by 5pm I was starting to get a little dizzy because I hadn’t eaten since noon the day before. I was too tired at this point to put much effort into finding a grocery store, so I just punched ‘Safeway Mountain View’ into Google and found that there was one about a mile south of here. On the way there I came across a small sushi bar, and I stopped there and ate something quickly at the bar before continuing on. At Safeway I bought some things that would tide me over for a day or so, and then headed home. On the way I noticed a sign outside of a church that read “DEBATE ON EXISTENCE OF GOD: SATURDAY, 7PM-9PM.” Don’t ask me why, but I decided that I was going to check that out.

On Saturday, I put my bike back together and headed back to the San Antonio center to pick up a few more things, this time at Wal-Mart (blech). I pimped out my bike with some flashy lights and things so that if I’m ever caught in the dark, I won’t have to fear too much for my life (the residential streets here are quite poorly lit). I did end up going to that debate at 7, and I guess it was worth it, even though both sides were poorly and amateurishly argued. It was nice enough just to be around happy people in a social context, and I met a couple of interesting characters who were concerned with the state of my soul.

Today was similarly low-key. I visited the local farmer’s market, and then walked the entire length of the main street here. The main street is interesting because it’s like they’ve assembled one of every class of establishment that you would expect to find in a big city. Almost every type of restaurant has a single representative along this street — Chinese, Japanese, Italian, Mexican, Hawaiian, Korean, African variants, etc. I found a Chinese grocery store that I instantly fell in love with. It’s funny, but more than anything else, small Asian stores bring on this terrific homey feeling when I’m inside them. This one is spectacular; it’s very clean (although I’m almost never concerned about that sort of thing), prices are about 1/3rd that of other area stores across the board, and it’s a 2 minute walk away! I also biked out to work this afternoon just to get familiar with the area. I then biked out to a hardware store to grab a few fasteners that I needed to do some minor repairs to my bike.

I guess that’s it. In retrospect, nothing that happened to me over the last few days was all that exciting or newsworthy, but in comparison to how I originally envisioned my arrival here, they certainly were more interesting than I expected.

And now for a somewhat cheesy moment. Thanks to all of my friends and family for helping me out over the past few days. Even if I haven’t talked to you in weeks, memories and pictures of old times with you helped me through the few rough spots I hit.

I’ll be in touch.