It occurred to me, after the recall election, that very few people have probably experienced the Buffoon Governor Trifecta(TM) that I have. 1986-1999: Tommy Thompson, Wisconsin. 1999-2002: Jesse Ventura, Minnesota. 2003-?: Arnold Schwarzenegger, California. The mind reels.
Category: California
I’m doing well, thanks.
I’m getting over a cold, actually, but after the slight downturn in April I’m feeling well otherwise.
In fact, right now my life is abundant with opportunities to have fun—more so than on average throughout my life so far. I have very little to complain about. Recently I have played baseball, and gone to a baseball game, and played some fantasy baseball (okay, perhaps I’m a bit baseball obsessed right now); I have also done my fair share of consuming food and libations while socializing, which is definitely enjoyable. Time management is something I may start focusing on fairly soon, with more demands on my time certain to arise. It’s been easier to establish a social life here than it ever was in Minneapolis; I have some theories as to why, but I’m not entirely sure.
Let me just interrupt this monologue to say that these crudely produced Peanuts parodies are quite exquisite.
I’m getting more and more work at CLCV. This development is good. This means more pay, which means a more sustainable lifestyle. I am seriously, seriously considering selling my car (I know, I haven’t followed through on this threat yet, despite it being a constant refrain for the last 2 years or so), which would stretch out my ability to live without a permanent full-time job quite considerably. If (or when?) necessity becomes a factor, that car is as good as gone. Even now, the expense of insurance is almost entirely unnecessary, being that I use my car about once a week (if that).
It is ridiculously easy to get along without a car in the Bay Area, since the weather is amazing and public transportation is practically omnipresent. Not to mention that my roommate Nick owns two cars and likes to drive them.
I have basically stopped applying for outside jobs at this point, what with the supply of workers with my qualifications in my field far outpacing demand. It seems pointless to expend a lot of time sending out resumes that result in emails saying, “Thanks for being one of 400 highly qualified applicants for this position two months ago; it has been filled.”
As always, I didn’t want a whole month to go by without at least updating at least once. It’s been a surprisingly difficult and stimulating month. Birth. Death. Closure. Anticipation. Nights that have been entirely too late, unsurprisingly.
I can’t really explain why I’m feeling dark at this point. I have been cruising at a satisfying altitude the last couple months; it’s only natural I should hit a more contemplative spell. I really should spend more time contemplating, though.
The joyous news of the recent past is that my brother and his wife had their baby: I’m an uncle! Nora Ruth was born Tuesday, April 8th in North Carolina. I wonder when I’ll get a chance to meet my new niece.
The next day, unfortunately, brought a loss to our family. My mom’s cat—Macintosh Xavier Gohlke Ream—died last Wednesday.
Macintosh had a really long and wonderful life. He was the most intelligent and affectionate cat I’ve ever met. I was 10, still living in Milwaukee, when the neighbor kids offered him door to door on our block. He was just a little kitten, and they put him in Mom’s arms, and that was pretty much it — he was our cat from that point on. 1985-2003. Macky was always there when I came back home, and next time, he won’t be. I’m going to miss him.
I like California. I like working at CLCV. The people are really interesting. The weather is generally quite good. And there are many, many things to do. I just need to get out there and do them. Before I do them, though, I have some work hanging over my head. Things have been crazy around here, what with some upheaval at work, and some interesting developments (if, at times, slow to develop) in my personal life. I fear you must suffer this vagueness for the moment.
I will say that the trip to the Midwest was really fun and rewarding (despite the massively nasty cold virus I brought back home—sorry, Bay Area). That’s just the kind of month I’ve had.
“Welcome back,” you might say.
It has been a scant seven weeks since I moved out of Minneapolis, not enough time to judge if it was a good decision. Honestly, I’m just as torn as (if not more than) I was before I moved.
Of course, the four-day cross-country move was somewhat exhausting. Some of the scenery was spectacular, and some was not. [Spectacular: the Rockies, the Sierras, the Gateway Arch. Spectacularly depressing: Illinois, eastern Colorado, western Utah.]
My first few weeks in California were mostly spent floundering. Four days after arriving, I went on a quick, expensive, unplanned trip to San Diego that was not joyous at all times. Nick had left his car down there on a previous trip for repairs, and he asked if I’d like to go along to pick it up… after buying me a one-way plane ticket. (Under ideal circumstances, of course, I might have had the opportunity to say, “Perhaps we could go after I’ve recovered from the four-day cross-country move,” but I had no such option. I could have said no, but the fact he had already bought the ticket made that option awkward.)
I freely admit that I mostly wanted to go, since I hadn’t previously been to Southern California. I’m glad now that I’ve seen some of San Diego and L.A., if only to confirm I don’t have any desire to live there. I was blown away by the often ruggedly scenic Pacific Coast Highway on our trip north. Still, the combination of having nowhere quiet to sleep the first night (long story), sun-sickness the second day, and car sickness at a few points going up Highway 1 made the trip less than entirely pleasant. Oh, and my camera broke during the trip, so I don’t even have pictures.
When we got back to Oakland, I continued to live in the living room, which is obviously not as appropriate a situation as the English language might imply. My computer was on a very low table, making working on my portfolio site and finding a job difficult. And, of course, we were actively looking for a new place.
Making things worse, the freelance job that apparently fell in my lap while I was still in Minnesota fell out of my lap on the 10th. [Roughly a week earlier, Nick, Windy, and I signed the lease for the house in Berkeley.] The organization’s board postponed approval until their next meeting, October 15th. (Coincidentally, my next rent check is due the same day.)
I don’t mean to sound like I’m complaining, especially not about my roommates. It was gracious of Nick and Windy to share their space with me and to find a new place simply because I was moving out here. I’ve had a pretty good time going to baseball games and movies, playing Madden NFL 2003 for the PS2 (oh, evil time-sucking habit), going out for dinner, and playing nearly genuine Irish pub trivia.
Berkeley seems like a nice enough place to live, and I’ve loved the Bay Area since the first time I visited. Under the right circumstances, I know that I would love living out here.
Right now, though, I really miss the familiar. I miss being around Amber. (Since I am of course eminently missable, it’s unsurprising that she misses me as well.) I miss my friends in Minneapolis and Madison (still more numerous there than in Minneapolis), not to mention my friends in scattered regions of the country. Of course, it’s great seeing Kim & Dave, Tree, and Nick & Windy—I would never have been able to move out here without knowing a few people. And I miss my parents. Perhaps I underestimated how much I’d rather be nearer to them—at least close enough to drop by more than once a year.
I don’t think that I’m inordinately negative, in general; I usually fall somewhere between realistic and optimistic. However, maybe my feeling lost, stressed, and homesick is understandable, considering I turned my life upside down.
My decision to move might turn out for the best. At the very least, it certainly has helped me determine—or made me admit to myself—what I think is really important.
From Wednesday at 9 a.m. CDT to last night at 10 p.m. PDT, I drove from Minneapolis to Oakland (via Valley, Madison, Hartford, and Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and with the help of Nick, who drove roughly half the trip). The drive was enlightening—I feel like I know a little bit more about the country I live in—but exhausting. The highlights included Denver and the Rocky Mountain National Park; the lowlight was the entire state of Utah.
Today I’ll allow myself to take the day off, but tomorrow I have to get to work.
Today is my last day at the Minnesota DNR.
Tomorrow is my last day in Minneapolis.
The last couple weeks have been hard. The last couple days have been harder. Somehow it’s even harder to leave here than it was to leave Madison. Maybe that’s because I’m going so much farther away from pretty much all the people I love. Maybe it’s because there’s a lot more buildup. Maybe it’s harder because, unlike when I was in Madison, I’m pretty happy with where I am professionally. I really like the people I’ve been working with at the DNR, and I really like the projects I’ve been doing on the side.
I have faith, though, that there’s good work for me to do in California too. And, damn it, it’s an adventure.
Anger-inducing discovery of the day: Someone stole my rear bike wheel last night. Update: Actually, my bike wheel was not stolen. Again, a quick-release lever was stolen from my bike, this time for the rear wheel. As for the wheel itself, it took me about a day to realize that the wheel—which, at first, appeared too large for my bike—that I discovered on my front porch and tossed angrily on the (fenced-in) front lawn was, in fact, my wheel. I bought another $10 part and reattached the wheel, to my relief.
I have done squat on this site in the last month. Wow.
Perhaps that’s because I’ve been preparing for this fact: I’m moving. Rather, I’m about to move. (More precisely, I plan to relocate in the near future.) This will be the biggest move of my life, from Minneapolis to the San Francisco area—Oakland, to be exact, at least at first.
You may know that I’ve been talking about this for a long time. You may not realize when I’m going. Though this one is not quite as sudden as my last move (from decision to move in one week), it is coming up quickly. Let’s call it August 13th: roughly one month from now.
In reality, I’m moving out of this apartment in two weeks to make way for Holly, Amber’s new roommate (and a friend of hers since elementary school). The move will be pretty cheap; my parents are going to provide a vehicle and some storage space for my biggest stuff (that I can’t sell in the next two weeks). I’ll come back and work for two more weeks, staying on the very comfortable couch in my soon-to-be-former living room, after which I’ll pile my necessities into my ’99 Acura and go west. My new roommates, Nick and Windy (pictured elsewhere), who will conveniently be in Wisconsin at the time, will ride along, providing driving relief and moral support.
So that’s it—I’m quitting my secure, steady, relatively good job. I’m leaving my comfy apartment with a roommate I get along with really well. I’m driving myself headlong into destinations and experiences unknown.
On the one hand, I must be nuts. On the other hand, I actually have a much better plan than I did when I moved here. Of course, when I moved here, I followed no plan at all.
What is life without change and risk? I really don’t want to live my life passively. I admit that less drastic change would almost certainly be less stressful, but there’s something extremely attractive about the kind of stress known as “adventure.”
I admit that a tiny kernel of fear remains buried in my heart. And yet the reactions of some of my friends, family, and acquaintances—essentially, “If I were your age, and I had the opportunity to move out there, and I weren’t tied down to a bunch of responsibilities (read: children and a house), I’d go in a second,” or simply, “I admire your guts”—help me remain confident that this is a really good idea.
I could write a hundred—a thousand—more pages analyzing all the issues surrounding this move. Maybe I’ll try to do a little each day (but my gut feeling is that I probably won’t).
You know what’s really, really good? “Oh, Inverted World” by The Shins.
Cripes, another 2-week lapse! Time flies. Sorry.
I guess I’ve been busy doing outside writing, buying CDs, and seeing movies that can be described as original (Gosford Park was well worth seeing, and rent Manny & Lo and Oscar and Lucinda).
* * *
Just found another local weblog… Laurel Krahn‘s the real deal. She’s been weblogging in Minneapolis since 1998. I’m sort of curious who’s doing the same thing I’m doing in roughly the same location I’m doing it. I mean, I’ve hardly bothered to get to know anyone here…. perhaps I’ll run across someone I have something in common with (that’s less superficial than location and hobby).
* * *
Every year at about this time I come up with a list of goals for the upcoming year, and attempt to gauge how much I’ve accomplished in the previous year. I’m not going to burden you with the details, but I will mention that the first one is this:
- Move to California by September.
Yep, and I’m serious about it. I’ve been talking about moving to California, specifically the San Francisco Bay Area, since before I graduated from college. I held myself back in 1998, though, because of my lingering, slow-to-die tendency to take the path of least resistance. I already had a job pretty much lined up in Madison at the time, and I had lots of friends there, etc. So I never scraped together the guts to make a change so big. Of course, 2 years later, I acted quite impulsively when I found myself getting in a rut, and it’s too bad I didn’t move to a city with more to offer. Anyway, 2 more years later, I’m ready to try something new, and circumstances are favorable. Astrologically and otherwise.
I am somewhat uncertain about writing on this site about moving, since people at work are aware of its existence. But I don’t think they really look at it very often. I guess I’ll find out, won’t I? It is genuinely true that one of the bigger reasons to stay here is that I genuinely like my (stable, challenging, interesting) job (in which I have a lot of freedom and am compensated well). I also have to consider that I’ll be much farther from all but 4 people that I’ve met in this world.
Anyway, I’ve been looking for personal writing on the web about either moving to San Francisco or moving out of Minneapolis. Not a lot out there, but here are a few sites that are interesting:
- Planet Soma: this guy is somewhat jaded, having lived in SF for 10 years; he says San Francisco is “the most overrated city in America.” His objections about the place are either not that bad, irrelevant to me, or are trade-offs I already knew about. For example, no place could be as corporate as Minneapolis. SF may be more corporate than it once was (and, sure, stay out of the tourist traps), but it’s certainly better than here. And he says it’s hard to find a place to park. Fine, I’ll get rid of my car—I hate driving anyway! I would love to live in a city with good public transit. Anyway, it’s good reading.
- Alfredo Jacobo Perez Gomez loves San Francisco. This balances the last view. Check out his neighborhood photo tours. San Francisco and the surrounding area are really gorgeous.
- Apparently indispensable is craigslist.
Here’s my rationale: What’s the point of life if you don’t try new things and go where you want to go? I can always come back to the Midwest. It’s really worth it to me at this stage in my life. Plus nothing is set in stone right now. It’s just important to me to start really seriously considering it.
* * *
Oh, yeah, two more sites that fail the test/test test (“t3” from now on [heh]): the state “portals” of both California and North Carolina. I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this, but I’ve been one of many committee members peripherally involved with the design of the new State of Minnesota site (of course, I’ve skipped the last few meetings since I’ve been so busy with the DNR redesign), which is what made me think of checking those sites.
As this very strange year comes to an end, I believe it’s entirely appropriate for me to compose my year-end Top Ten List. I’ve decided to end the year focusing on the positive. Maybe I should break it out into categories, but I’m just too lazy.
- Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring twice in one weekend, with Nick and the gang on Sunday
- Surviving the year despite one or more incidents in which being in a car could have gotten me killed
- Hearing that my brother was hired as a police officer in North Carolina
- Seeing a baseball game in Milwaukee with my brother (and spending time with my mom, and my dad, and the rest of my family, the rest of the year)
- Enjoying the Land of Evermor in Baraboo, Wisconsin with Amber
- Discovering new (to me) music by Built to Spill, Quasi, Death Cab for Cutie, Guided by Voices (um, and, oh yeah, seeing the Minders and Of Montreal in separate shows)
- Visiting Seattle in the summer, and seeing Jonathan (and going to the web design conference, at which I got to meet Zeldman briefly)
- Launching gohlkusmaximus.com
- Trekking out to Ohio for the Sloan shows in Detroit and (especially) Cleveland, and road-tripping with Will
- Enjoying a sunny, lazy day at San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park in early April with Amber
Barely missed the top 10: my summer road trip to Chicago and Columbus; the end of the state employee strike; finishing the design, though not the production, of the new Minnesota DNR web site. Fairly far off the top 10: shaving off my six-month-experiment full beard (but that was a good thing—believe me).
Happy new year, everyone. See you in 2002.
Descriptors for my and Amber’s recently completed trip to San Francisco: enjoyable. fun. exhausting. heartbreaking. inspiring.
It was all that and more. We enjoyed each other’s company. But let’s talk about Amtrak first. Two and a half days on the train (a total of 116 hours or so round-trip—but who’s counting?) was hard to take—though it was almost entirely due to the lack of good scenery in northeastern and north-central Montana, the miniscule number of food choices for vegetarians on the Empire Builder, our inability to really, um, go anywhere on the train [other than in the direction it pointed, without any effort on our part], the disturbing lack of facilities for washing oneself in “coach”, and not in any way due to the company. I take that back. It was great fun being with Amber, but some of the other people were not so companionable.
Example: the woman who felt it necessary to discuss her legal problems [including an interstate custody battle for which she did not want to go to California] with a (conceited) country lawyer, right behind us, very loudly, at 11 pm, two days after we first got on the train, when we [and several others around us] desperately needed sleep. That was unpleasant.
On the trip back, the Coast Starlight was 2 hours late getting to Emeryville (near Berkeley), CA, and we were scheduled only 1 1/2 hours of layover time in Portland to catch the Empire Builder on the final leg of our journey. This wasn’t the worst part. We were stopped somewhere in rural Oregon, nowhere near a station, when the conductor announced that there was “a minor medical emergency” and that we would wait for the paramedics. Rumors quickly spread of a man who was suffering heart attack symptoms. We never saw an ambulance, however. Instead we saw a woman arrested outdoors by three law enforcement officers, after her luggage was seized from our car and searched. I personally saw the cuffs being put onto her wrists. The medical emergency seemed to have been a weak cover story.
The results of the lateness of that train: we had to take a bus from Eugene, OR to Portland; we basically had to run from the bus to the train, which was departing mere minutes after our arrival; we were therefore unable to replenish our supply of trail mix, fruits, and vegetables in the (very palatial and pleasant) Portland train depot; we were therefore forced to eat more pre-packaged “vegetable patties,” complete with bun and egg-white binding agent, than we ever would have wanted to.
116 hours.
SF was great though—Haight-Ashbury, Guided by Voices (such super-skilled rock musicians!) free at Amoeba Records (a surprisingly great show for free!), a sunny day in Golden Gate Park, an incredible wealth of great art at SFMOMA (including a brilliant site-specific installation by Sarah Sze called “Things Fall Apart” made of a chopped-up Jeep Cherokee, strings, wires, and a sculptural collage of organic and inorganic elements that I can’t do justice to here). The food was great and cheap—Nick knows where to go. Don’t miss Intermezzo on Telegraph in Berkeley, among others.
We got to get out of Minneapolis as well—a good thing, except that the Bay Area has a way of making Minneapolis look brown, boring, and uptight, and feel very, very cold. Sigh.