June 4, 2006

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Days 3 Through 12

Cross-country trips, new cities, and new jobs present quite a problem for a blogger. They give him tons and tons of material about which to write, hijinks and shenanigans occur, crazy people are met, and pictures are taken, but there is never any time left to write about them. And blog material has a way of piling up that discourages one to blog at all if one can't make a significant dent in the backlog. So this is my attempt to do that. Two weeks of living in one post of blogging. I'd love to be more detailed; there is so much more to tell. But then again, it would be quite silly to lament one's life being so full that there isn't time in which to comment on it. If living were to become a lower priority than meta-living, one's real-life adventures would probably not be the sort worth reading about.

Day 3 of the trip saw me traversing Wyoming. The scenery finally got interesting after the long and boring Nebraska void.

I took a few scenic loops on the recommendation of a shaggy old cowboy at the Wyoming welcome center. He didn't let me down. The first was through Medicine Bow National Forest. It was supposed to add an hour to my travel time, but it ended up adding about two and a half because I stopped so often to take pictures, get a closer look at rivers and trees and snow, and admire the views.

A few more hours and I arrived at the Flaming Gorge National Recreation Area loop. The sun was going to go down soon, and I thought strongly about skipping it, but I'm glad I didn't. Some of the views were spectacular, and were made all the more so by the stark golden glow of the sunset.

Then I decided to take some long exposure pictures on the road while there was still some light, and just see what happened. Pretty cool, I think.

I drove and drove and drove and finally made it to Salt Lake City. Thinking I could find some place on the Southwestern side of Salt Lake City, I pressed on. But no lodgings were to be had. I ended up having to go another hour and a half or so, across the Great Salt Flats. This pissed me off a bit because it meant I couldn't see them (it was pitch black in the middle of nowhere, Utah. I spent the night in Wendover, Utah, right across from the Nevada border.

The next morning, I left my pillow in the hotel room, and didn't realize it until the next night. But I decided to backtrack for a bit to see a little of the salt flats. They were very flat, white, shimmering, and eerie. I didn't go too far back, so I guess I didn't even get the full salt flats experience.

Nevada was weird. Everyone I saw there at all stops was either a trucker or a biker. I ate lunch at a pizza hut and literally everyone there (maybe fifteen or twenty people in unrelated parties) were wearing some item of Harley Davidson couture. And there I saw the man with the largest head I've ever seen. He was native American, maybe 6'2" and about 300 massive, powerful pounds. And atop his humongous frame was a head like a ponytailed, lumpy basketball, and only slightly less orange. I could not stop staring at him, and I could not shake the thought that he was the inspiration for the goblins in the animated version of The Hobbit. He even had the same humpback.

I resisted stopping for the all-you-can-eat lobster buffet in Boomtown, Nevada, and finally made it into California.

A few more hours, and I reached Berkeley. With bitter longing, I walked a bit around UC-Berkeley's gorgeous campus. I had no idea it was so beautiful and lush. It stirred up some regrets about not ever studying in undergrad and therefore having to "settle" for not-Berkeley-but-still-wonderful-Georgetown. And then that reminded me of how I'm doing the same thing in law school. Will I finally be forced to settle for a not-high-paying-but-still-exhausting firm job? It was a sobering reminder not to waste my summer, and to really put all I can into the EFF job. Oh, and for the record, I love Georgetown. But Berkeley was my first choice.

I drove across the Bay Bridge into the city, and was pretty shocked. San Francisco is a big city. Much of it is not quaint or charming. There is no parking to be had, and any hotels I was likely to find would have been much more than I'd like to pay. So, having been thoroughly intimidated by my dusk entrance into San Francisco, I promptly drove back across the Bay Bridge, and got a motel room in Berkeley for cheap.

The next morning I went to look at an apartment. The guy answered the door shirtless, wearing sweatpants. His name was Avi, and he was a short and skinny Jew who obviously worked out a lot to make up for the fact that he was a short and skinny Jew. After criticizing me for being Jewish and mispronouncing his name, he took me inside the apartment and started frying up some bacon for himself.

After spending a good fifteen minutes telling me about all the other people that wanted to move into the place, and how this was really an interview and I needed to impress him, he finally explained that in truth, he didn't really care who lived there. Why?

"Because I'm hardly ever here, anyway." At this point the bacon was completely burned and smoking like crazy. He continued. "I'm almost always gone. I get a big-bootied bitch, we hop on that sport bike you see out the window, and we just ride somewhere."

And yes, that's an accurate quote.

In my desperately homeless state, I almost decided to take the place. Thank God I had the sense not to put myself in such a ridiculous home, no matter how much blog fodder it would have produced. Instead, I decided to go by my summer workplace and see if anyone would be there on a Saturday morning who might take mercy on me and give me a place to stay. EFF to the rescue! A staff attorney and one of the other interns were there. The staff attorney got Jason on the phone, who said I could stay at his home. The intern, Nick, and I went to lunch and I stored some of my more valuable stuff in his apartment temporarily until I found my own. And I emailed some more people from Craigslist.

Shortly thereafter, I got a call from one of them, who was familiar with EFF and wanted me to come see the place. Such a huge difference from that other shithole. This apartment was in the Mission, was huge, had a backyard, a loft with a really nice little roof area, and best of all, the people living there didn't discuss the big-bootied bitches they drove around on their sport bikes. We got along very well, and an hour or so later, with a little help from Cara, I was handing over my rent check.

That night, I stayed with Jason. That was somewhat surreal. I'd been reading his blog for several years, and was, shall we say, a big fan of his work. So I was geeking out over being around him, while he was barbecuing me steak and otherwise being a gracious host. His roommate, George, was awesome. She (George) is an Australian programmer who was one of the original people who worked on Flickr. She moved to San Francisco when it was bought by Yahoo. We all watched the last twenty minutes or so of Carrie, as she paused every few seconds to take photos of the screen. Then Jason started taking photos of her taking photos of the screen, and it all culminated in us watching a full episode of Star Trek Voyager. Law geeks indeed.

Every night since then, I've been in my apartment. More on that to come. In the between time, I've started my job at EFF. It turns out that a lot of what I do there is confidential, and I can't really talk about it--kind of ironic for an organization so into free speech. But attorney-client privilege is no joke. Ah, well.

Now you're all caught up, and I can get back to real blogging. Also note that I added pictures to the Day 2 post as well. I'll post about San Francisco, work, my apartment, etc. later. For now, suffice to say, I'm in a great apartment with cool roommates, and I have an awesome job.

Posted at June 4, 2006 9:10 AM | Comments (3)

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