Holidays Lost

It may not be Milton, but I am channeling Voltaire these days. "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."

In my case, it is more a matter of "I don't subscribe to the beliefs you celebrate, but I will defend to the death my right to get paid days off on those holidays."

Okay, so maybe it doesn't have quite the same ring to it.

Still, coming up on the holiday season, when it was decided that yes, the call center will be open regular hours on Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year's Day, I couldn't help feeling a little weird about it. I've never actually worked on Thanksgiving or Christmas, which have always been family days. But based on the fact that I've not worked any of the other holidays so far this year, and that I don't have children, it is probably only fair that I work at least two of the days.

Curse this Puritanical work ethic of ours. We work much too hard as a nation. Now we even have to work on the big holidays.

But let's be fair. Is there an inherent reason why I should not work these days? Maybe I'm being a hypocrite. Let's consider my relationship to each of these days:

Thanksgiving: a celebration of Puritans surviving a cold winter. They then set forth to wipe out an entire native culture. Also they wore stupid hats. I'm not a huge fan. Turkey is good, but I can eat turkey any day.

Christmas: for one thing, historical evidence and biblical study has established that Jesus was probably born in March. Also, I don't believe the Bible is an unblemished depiction of a loving, forgiving religion (too much alteration by a paternalistic system bent on perpetuating itself). Also, I don't believe in the religion in the first place. And as far as the original pagan winter festival that Christmas supplanted, well, I'm kind of too boring to be a good pagan.

New Year's Day: let's face it. This is a rather arbitrary milestone that we created to mark one year as opposed to the next. It isn't even subsequent to an equinox. About the most it has going for it is college football and a hangover from the night before. I do like college football, but that's what DVR is for, right? (I'm kidding, Marina. Unless you are okay with it, in which case I'm not kidding.) As for hangovers, well, they invented coffee for a reason.

So I guess I don't REALLY have a good reason for being weirded out at having to work these holidays. But, I mean, if even Voltaire is on my side, that should count for something right?

By the way, if I come off sounding like a tactless jerk, ungrateful for actually having a job to want a paid holiday from in the first place, or if you feel like I kicked your sacred cow in the ribs, just tell yourself that I was only kidding all along. Thank you.

San Francisco Snapshots: Ninth And Irving; Clement Street

1) I went back to Ninth and Irving last night. Drew and I met after work for a few beers at Yancy's, and then went to Milano Pizzeria for a pitcher of Sierra Nevada and slices of True Greek--by slices, I am referring to the vast swaths of pizza that Milano defines as a slice, approximately 25% of an entire pizza. Milano is this local, cash-only pizzeria on Ninth between Irving and Judah, walls covered in classic pictures and movie posters. The owner, this old Italian guy, will often sit against the wall near the kitchen, watching people coming in and out with a benevolent smile.

The night was cold and foggy. This is just how it should be. Enough of this summer stuff, with clear skies and warm nights. San Francisco needs atmosphere. It needs fog and Bourbon and Branch--I'll be going there for the first time on Friday night. I will be wearing a fedora. It will be excellent.

The first night of a trip to San Francisco I took in the fall of 2006, I ate dinner at Ninth and Irving at Sliders Diner--now Jenny's Burgers--with Drew and Sam, on a glossy, rainy night, followed up by beers at the Blackthorn. In some ways, every other night in San Francisco since then has been an attempt to recreate that atmosphere. It's why I moved to the city.

My friends used to live at 45th and Irving, and we would ride the N-Judah to and from the Ninth and Irving intersection, for beers at Yancy's or the Blackthorn, burgers at Sliders, sushi at Kiki's or pizza at Milano, donuts at Donut World. And of course people-watching on the N, which is more than just a public transit route; it's a lifestyle.

And then, of course, there is the walk home through Golden Gate Park, deserted except for the fog.

2) Clement Street. Ah, the scent of donuts, seafood, and sweet and sour sauce, sometimes all at the same time. Crowded sidewalks, The Bitter End, Pizza Orgasmica, The Blue Danube coffeeshop, Bill's Place.

And of course, Green Apple Books. It's an awesomely chaotic used bookstore, kind of labyrinthine, sprawled over two different buildings. I occasionally wander in there after work, spending far more time and money than I originally planned.

But the worm turned a little bit today, as I found out they don't have a public bathroom. A used bookstore without a public bathroom? That seems ridiculous, but apparently it is not uncommon for SF bookstores.

Borders and Barnes and Noble provide bathrooms. Everyone knows about the bookstore/bathroom urge phenomenon. That's just stupid to not have a public bathroom in a used bookstore.

Not that I'm bitter or anything.

Recessionizing

The other morning, I was rattling along McAllister on the #5 line, heading to work. Yes, rattling along, as that early in the morning I am nothing more than a hyper-intelligent bag of potatoes, bouncing and jostling along the road, not talking to people on the bus (hyper-intelligent for a bag of potatoes, I mean). I usually wake up after visiting a market to get a bagel and an orange juice and ignore the young teenagers casually walking through the empty check stands on their way in, stuffing small objects in their pocket as they go--I'm not turning a blind eye to young people sticking it to a corporation, mind you; I just really dislike teenagers and would rather ignore them.

But my morning routine was shaken when I saw that Cafe Neon was gone. All of a sudden, the windows papered over in that brown butcher's paper decor that seems to mark storefronts more and more these days. One day here, the next day gone like a pot of coffee gone cold and stale and thrown out.

I used to go to Cafe Neon a lot; it was handy to Vaughn's apartment, so we would meet there after work before watching a ball game on TV. They did good french toast, I remember, from a year and a half ago.

I guess that is the nature of a recession. After seeing Cafe Neon was gone, I started noticing more and more empty store fronts along my usual walking/busriding routes.

The weird thing was, I couldn't even remember what some of the empty store fronts once contained--which probably explains why they are now empty, but still, it bothered me that I couldn't remember.

They say the recession is ending. The stock numbers are starting to trend upwards, for whatever that is worth. But I question that, because of my observation of these emptying stores.

I can think of three possible explanations for the discrepancy:

1) I'm not nearly as observant as I would like to think I am, and just haven't noticed all the failed stores until now that it has been brought home so thoroughly with the demise of Cafe Neon;

2) the recession is ending, but there are some lingering aftershocks that are catching up to some businesses that have been desperately holding on;

or 3) the recession continues, and any talk of it ending is premature, or at least not yet relevant on the ground.

I'm going to discard possibility 1 out of hand, because that would make me feel so much better. As for the latter options, I'm not qualified to answer. What do you all think?

Sharing The Shoreline With Birds Of A Feather

The Western Snowy Plover is a threatened species, with only a few thousand remaining on the west coast, and with an average of forty who over-winter on Ocean Beach and Crissy Field in San Francisco. It is, of course, quite possible that there are more, and that we just can't see them, because they blend in to the sand so well, like camouflaged golf balls (the link above takes you to an HTML version of a document regarding the Snowy Plover Protection Program through the National Park Service; important stuff, and also controversial in some circles).

This is not actually about the plover qua plover, but more about sharing. If it is true that the best way to learn is to teach, then maybe it is equally true that the best way to see something hard to see like a plover is to show one to someone else.

Last night, Marina went with me to the beach as I roved the protected area, trying to talk to people about why it isn't so awesome to let dogs run free among threatened shorebirds; measure just how much fun teenagers have these days in terms of the percentage of signs destroyed by reckless use of markers; and hopefully glimpse a couple of the little plovers around and about. I've never been 100% confident in my ability to distinguish a plover from a sanderling, say, which would put a bit of a crimp in my ability to protect them, one would think.

But hey, if your girlfriend wants to see a plover, you get motivated to see a plover. And so, after discounting thirty sanderlings as not being the genuine article, I looked carefully through the binoculars at a small creature barely visible in a small indentation in the sand that Marina pointed out, and I said with authority that there indeed was a plover. The difference from the sanderling was now crystal clear to me, which would have been reward enough, but it was even better to see Marina's excitement as she looked at the plover through the binoculars. From there, we quickly spotted another five plovers huddled nearby.

I've always thought protecting the plovers was a great idea; now I don't need to worry about actually seeing them in the first place.