shoesonwrong

Six months to twenty-five, then I can wreck all the rental cars I want, baby.

What with Theresa buying her tickets and Guille delivering his bad news, I thought I’d just put my news out there, too.

Medical bills this year have been completely insane. Insane enough that we just don’t have the money for a week-long trip (we were actually hoping for two weeks) to San Francisco in January. I know the tweetup is only one day, but San Francisco is where Ryan and I went on our honeymoon just over five years ago. We haven’t been back since, and we wanted to make a vacation out of it.

To boot, the dev team Ryan’s working with will be rolling out a major software release about a week after the San Francisco tweetup, which means lots and lots of overtime being put in and possibly having to work weekends prior to the release. Even if money wasn’t an issue, time probably will be.

I could fly out by myself for a few days, but that’s not happening for a couple reasons: first, San Francisco is a really special place to me and Ryan, and I want to go back with him. Second, the tweetup is the day before his birthday. I’m not going to go to San Francisco, without him, over his birthday.

I hope to meet a lot of you eventually, but it just won’t be this January.

Alex Payne — So You’re Moving to San Francisco

That’s the impression I always get. Even New York City, where instead of using garbage bins we pile bags of garbage on the sidewalk, feels cleaner than San Francisco. There are some gorgeous clean neighborhoods, but the Haight, the Mission, and especially the whole stretch of Market north of the Castro are filthy. So are most of the cafes and some of the restaurants. The Tenderloin is a disaster area.

I once stopped in a Tenderloin bar in the middle of the afternoon (I was excited to be a writer, I was walking straight from Market to North Beach, I was dumb) where an ancient man told me, “This place is dangerous. When you leave, you head straight north, you don’t look right, and don’t look left.” I felt like a hobbit on a quest being warned by the wise man in the forest’s lone safe inn.

Also, getting around San Francisco is impossible.

But everyone knows these things. I agree with Alex on pretty much his whole post, and I’m very glad I moved to New York, but of course none of this reflects on the wonderful friends I have in that city.

(via nickdouglas)

I have two words for you: Dee. Troit.

I always pray it will rain on Mondays and wash away the vomit that has accrued on the sidewalk over the weekend in front of the bar down the street. Because people are pigs and I live near Sweetwater Tavern (which apparently has the best chicken wings in the whole world), I regularly find chicken bones strewn across the street like someone was going to do voodoo but just gave up. Sometimes the pigeons fight over the chicken bones — when they’re not fighting over the sidewalk vomit.

Once, I stepped over human shit on the sidewalk that was covered with a napkin and my only thought was, “It’s nice they put a napkin over it.”

If you were making a pro and con list about Detroit, the pro side would be about a mile long, but at the top of the con side would be “HAD TO STEP AROUND HUMAN FECES WHILE PIGEONS FIGHT OVER CHICKEN BONES AND VOMIT.”

Also, our public transportation consists of a few murder buses that only the brave ride and a squeaky People Mover that moves people in a mile wide circle.