I was reading this month’s issue of The Atlantic and in amongst an unrelated but interesting psychology article about the science of self were these quotes which relate to a debate I’ve been in increasingly over the past few months.

First, from the introduction:

[I]f you ask people about their greatest happiness in life, more than a third mention their children or grandchildren, but when they use a diary to record their happiness, it turns out that taking care of the kids is a downer—parenting ranks just a bit higher than housework, and falls below sex, socializing with friends, watching TV, praying, eating, and cooking.

And, more in depth:

[W]e are often mistaken about what makes us happy. Consider again what happens when we have children. Pretty much no matter how you test it, children make us less happy. The evidence isn’t just from diary studies; surveys of marital satisfaction show that couples tend to start off happy, get less happy when they have kids, and become happy again only once the kids leave the house. As the psychologist Daniel Gilbert puts it, “Despite what we read in the popular press, the only known symptom of ‘empty-nest syndrome’ is increased smiling.” So why do people believe that children give them so much pleasure? Gilbert sees it as an illusion, a failure of affective forecasting. Society’s needs are served when people believe that having children is a good thing, so we are deluged with images and stories about how wonderful kids are. We think they make us happy, though they actually don’t.

I am fairly certain this means I win the debate.

One of the amazing things about San Francisco is how almost every part of the city is iconic of the whole. New York, to pick an example, has a billion well-known buildings and monuments, but if you saw a picture of an average street, you’d be hard pressed to specifically identify from which large east coast city it came. But a shot of a random street in San Francisco, with the omnipresent hills and bay windows, can only be from San Francisco. This is especially true in video, and whenever I see footage shot here, I fall in love a little.

Once I’d definitively decided to move here, about a year and a half ago, I started watching the well-known Sony Bravia commercial featuring José Gonzalez and dreamed of living here. (Seriously, I downloaded a high-res copy and I watched it before I went to sleep an embarrassing number of times.) Even now that I call this city my home, I still get sentimental watching that video, thinking about the time I just wished I could call it my home. A few months ago that I found this hilarious video clip of Star Wars invading San Francisco. As silly as it is, it once again made me feel great to live in a place so beautiful and so unmistakable.

And then yesterday I was fortunate enough to stumble across some amazing vignettes of San Francisco directed by Francis Ford Coppola, who apparently lives here. Actually, having just skimmed his Wikipedia entry, I now realize that I’ve eaten at the restaurant he owns, Cafe Zoetrope. Who knew? Anyway! He has short youtube-but-way-better movies for eight neighborhoods in San Francisco. Each area includes three videos: a short interview with Coppola, a more abstract video of the neighborhood, and and interview with someone who lives nearby.

The website involves all kinds of Flash weirdness, so I can’t link directly to it. If you want to watch, go to the Louis Vitton Journeys site, hover over FFC’s picture on the far left, and then select “San Francisco with Francis F. Coppola”. After watching a 20-second introductory clip, you can watch the segments about my neighborhood by clicking right smack-dab in the middle. Mission, represent!

While I was in Israel, I plowed through an astounding amount of reading material. I’m not sure I’ve had a more productive reading month since I left high school. In addition reading the paper every day, I also plowed through four New Yorkers (that had piled up from my previous trips to Minneapolis and Portland) and several books. Here are some capsule reviews. I’ll sort them in order of how much I liked them.

If you want any of these books, let me know (except for The Corrections and The New Kings of Non-Fiction, which aren’t mine). First come, first serve, mmhmm.

On the Lower Frequences: A Secret History of the City by Erick Lyle

This is a history of San Francisco in a particularly weird decade: the mid-90s through the mid-00s. Which, in San Francisco more than anywhere, was shaped entirely by the dotcom boom and subsequent dotcom bust. The story, however, is told by someone who, in the “About the Author” describes himself as “proudly unemployed”. This is the story of the city’s most bizarre decade as seen through the eyes squatters and homeless, punks and anarchists.

About half the book is journalism. He published a DIY newspaper and much of the text of the book comes out of that. At one point, his paper gets an interview with Mayor Willie Brown in which the mayor suggests that poor people should all pack up and move somewhere cheaper. The quote becomes political fodder and is repeated over and over in flyers opposing his reelection. He interviews people setting up needle exchange clinics, free-food distributors, and the the guys who threw a pie in the face of Willie Brown. He also spends a lot of time documenting the changes that occur to the city with the influx of money and people, and specifically how all that gentrification directly affected him. This part of the book is particularly interesting if you’ve lived here since he talks a lot about the Mission, the Tenderloin, and SOMA.

But intermingled with the reporting is a memoir. Since the book is almost entirely reprinted writings of his past, you can, even when he doesn’t explicitly talk about his emotions, get a real sense for how he’s feeling at any given time. He spends a lot of time documenting his many enterprising punk-rock acts. His adventures vary mostly from the potentially illegal to the definitely illegal. They’re entertaining enough to make you want to throw everything away and join the squatters just so can have the fun they’re apparently having. For example, to distribute his newspaper, he would steal newspaper boxes, carry them home, repaint them, and then put them on the street. The cops would reclaim them and he would repeat the process, enough times that the cops eventually just gave up.

Many of his capers involve doing massive things in plain sight. His (apparently correct) assumption is everyone will think “no one could possibly be brazen enough to do that without permission.” For example, many of his friends painted gigantic anti-capitalist murals on the sides of buildings in the middle of the day. And, most notably, a large group of them broke in to a gigantic abandoned movie theater on Market Street (right smack dab in the middle of downtown, about a block from the famous cable car turnaround), cleaned it all out, and ran a free-food café, squat house, and music venue out of it for months.

All told, it’s a fascinating book, especially if you’re familiar with the city. It’s full of history and full of happenings and full of humanity. It made me in love with this city even more, despite the fact that the book is filled with pages and pages of angry rants against gentrifiers like myself. Sorry about that, Erick!

Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut

Can you believe I’d never read anything by Vonnegut? Nothing. I probably still wouldn’t have if Carissa hadn’t loaned me this book last time I was in Portland. I mostly find scifi annoying, so I guess I had just steered clear. This book made me feel like an idiot for avoiding him all this time. (The feeling was compounded by an amazing list of “Best Kurt Vonnegut Quotes” from the 2008 Best American Non-Required Reading that I just read yesterday.) I’m sure there’s been enough said about this book that I don’t need to write any more. But anyway, you should probably read it.

Also, next time you’re in a bookstore, grab the Non-Required Reading book, and read the excerpts that start on page 26. So many wonderful things.

The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen

Again, this book has been so hyped that I scarcely think I need to add more. Just read it, yeah? It’s great.

The New Kings of Non-Fiction

I stole this book from Carissa who, in turn, had borrowed it from Abe. This casual misuse of property rights works both ways, though: she borrowed The Corrections from me, even though I was borrowing it from Emily. Anyway, this is a collection of (duh) non-fiction articles ripped by none other than Ira Glass from the usual list of publications (New Yorker, Harper’s, The Atlantic, The New York Times, etc.). Ira, in the introduction, describes this as “an age of great nonfiction writing, in the same way that the 1920s and ’30s were a golden age for American popular song.” I have no way of evaluating this claim, but sure. He specifically talks a lot about his love for stories where the journalist isn’t afraid to insert herself into the story (e.g. Erick Lyle’s book I talked about above). Unsurprisingly, these are all stories that wouldn’t seem out of place on This American Life. Which is a good thing. There are several names you’d expect to see (specifically: DFW, Chuck Klosterman, Malcom Gladwell, Michael Pollan, and Susan Orlean) and at least one that I didn’t: Dan Savage, even though I’d read his article previously. Actually, I’d already read several of these articles before, but they were all good enough that I didn’t mind reading them again.

The Constant Rider Omnibus: Stories from the Public Transportation Front by Kate Lopresti

This book collects all the issues of The Constant Rider, a zine published (in seven issues) from 2000 to 2005 about the author’s experience on public transit, mostly in Portland. My friends in SF bought it for me because I’d fed them several great stories from my many bus trips in Portland. Have you heard about the woman who insisted I call the police on my own cell phone because she claimed I’d broken her foot? Or the man sitting next to me on an overcrowded bus who asked if he could buy my half-full Big Gulp and then proceeded to whip his dick out and pee in it? (Actually, that’s pretty much the whole story.) Aside from six months in which I bought a brand new Honda Civic and then totaled it, I haven’t had a car in 12 years, so I have some great stories. So, it seems, does Kate Lopresti. Her stories are funny and easy to read, especially after she learns to stop typesetting them in a sans-serif font. It was a quick read, but enjoyable.

The Discomfort Zone by Jonathan Franzen

I loved The Corrections, so when I saw another of Franzen’s books in the (very small) English-language section of an Israeli bookstore, I grabbed it immediately. It’s a memoir that he wrote, mostly about his tween to teenage years. It’s gotten great reviews, but it came off to me like a David Sedaris wannabe. Parts of it were great, but parts of it seemed incredibly tedious. I dunno. That’s about all I feel like writing. It’s still not a bad book, but all that sticks out in my mind at the moment are the boring parts. It’s definitely better than I’m making it out to be, but…

Crumbs 3

I don’t know much about this. I got it at Little Otsu. It’s just some small-press book of six or seven short stories. There’s no table of contents, and I’m too lazy to count. It’s put together in Toronto, but there’s no “about the author” paragraphs, so I have no idea who these people are. There’s an address for submissions, so probably the stories arrived like that. Some of them are pretty good, but the whole thing is dragged down by a story that takes up half(!!!) of the book which isn’t very good. I liked the first two Crumbs, but you’ll probably never find them anyway, so this is kinda a pointless “review”.

The Zen of Fish: The Story of Sushi, from Samurai to Supermarket by Trevor Corson

I think I first heard about this book on The Splendid Table. From the cover, it sounds like my favorite kind of book: the highly-specific single-subject non-fiction book. (One of my favorites, and a perfect example of the genre I have trouble naming, is John McPhee’s Oranges.) And about half the book was like that! It was filled with interesting details about the history and story of sushi, many of which were surprising and educational. But then he mixes it with my least favorite kind of writing: the faux-novel non-fiction, where somehow the author knows what every character is thinking at all times, even though that’s an impossibility in a non-fiction book. The book is intermingled with the story of several students attending a California sushi academy. I think he followed the Ira Glass school of journalism and felt compelled to insert some “human element”. Which is fine, but it just doesn’t seem to fit in this book. It’s almost two books in one. I wanted to skip over the sushi academy parts and just read about the history of the food.

I admit that I have a very specific grudge against what I call the “In Cold Blood-style of writing”: where an author writes non-fiction as though he were omnipotent. I don’t care how many interviews you’ve done; if you’re putting thoughts into someone else’s head without attributing a source in the same sentence, it just feels like lies to me. (”Laura said she was scared” vs. “Laura was scared”.) You can’t possibly know what they were actually thinking, only what they told you they were thinking. Um, maybe I’m being pedantic. If that sort of thing doesn’t bother you as much, maybe you’ll like this book.

Somehow I got selected for terrorist-level screening in Israel. Before I could get on the plane, I had to go through a 30 minute interview and then 1.25 hours of luggage screening. They took every single item out of my bags, swiped it all with their weird little chemical detectors, and then made me pack it all back up. One of the last swipes they did set off the beepy-beepy alarm, so then I also got a full 10 minute pat-down in a private room. In the end they told me that the bike lock I brought could not go into my messenger bag, it had to go in my suitcase. Admittedly it’s a beast of a lock that could easily be a weapon, but both those bags were being checked anyway, so I don’t get it. I got to the airport 2.5 hours before my flight but still almost missed it. Fortunately after all that they walked me right through the normal security checkpoint so I made it.

I’m in Atlanta, almost home free! So, what did I miss? Did Obama get elected yet, or what?

I went to the Embassy to pick up my passport. When I got there, they told me that they couldn’t make a new passport because my old passport had been found and was now sitting at the Consulate in Jerusalem. They gave me my $100 back, at least. So, I suppose tomorrow I get to learn about the bus system in Israel. Supposedly it’s only about $5 to get to Jersualem.

Wikipedia says: “The [Tel Aviv] Central Bus Station is the largest central bus station in the world… The terminal is known for its problematic structure. Some of the floors cannot be reached easily… The entire building has become a synonym for bad design.” Adventure!

The day after I left for Tel Aviv, a new food cart opened in the Mission. Started by a cook at Bar Tartine, he was going to serve cheap(ish) sandwiches every Thursday from 21st & Mission. His intent was for it to grow slowly and organically, but before it even opened, a few blogs had picked up the story. This was gentrification taken to its extreme. Instead of just displacing people from neighborhoods, now cultures were being co-opted in the form of taco carts, then stuffed with yippie food and drenched in a thick sauce of hipster irony. This was the crack cocaine of gentrification: some new, advanced, more pure form. The first Pork Belly & Jicama (PB&J, ha ha?) sandwich wasn’t free, but you get the point. I wanted to see it so badly.

Instead I flew off to hang out in foreign bars, dance clubs, and other dark places (and to repeat the phrase “I’m sorry; I only speak English” all day). There were dozens of events in SF in October that I was going to be sad to miss, but unlike most of them (shows, for the most part), this one would be around when I got back.

Or so I thought. Yesterday, I got the news that, in fact, Mission Street Food has already gotten too popular, with lines of people down the block before the cart even opens. So now, instead, he’s going to temporarily rent an as-yet-unknown restaurant for the night and serve food out of there instead. What? Then it’s just, you know, a restaurant! I demand kitsch and irony and the appeal of something new and different (and possibly offensive, if you’re one of those people who thinks a lot). Instead I get a restaurant that’s closed 6 nights a week? I suppose I’ll take what I can get. King Trumpet, wait for me, I’ll be home soon!

I was actually somewhat excited to go to the US Embassy and see what it was all about. I’m not sure why. Perhaps it is a symptom of the last vestiges of patriotism that haven’t been beaten out of me yet? In any event, I had two expectations, both of which were easily met:

1. The processes and procedures for getting a new passport would be simple and straightforward
2. …assuming I didn’t drown in a pit of boredom and bureaucracy first.

I assume I am not the first, or thousandth, or hundred-thousandth citizen to lose a passport in a foreign country. And certainly the US doesn’t want to leave its people stranded. So I assumed it wouldn’t be too much trouble to get a new one. But even still, overhearing the business of others relayed over loudspeakers from microphones behind bulletproof glass, I was impressed at how easy they were making it. At one point, to verify a man’s residency in the US, she asked him a series of questions that included his college’s school colors.  One man even got a $1200 plane ticket to Nashville and $500 in traveling cash because he didn’t have any way to get home. (He has to pay all the money back, of course.)

Upon hearing the transactions of the twenty people before me, my single concern was that I, in fact, have no idea what my college’s colors are. I just looked it up: Portland State’s colors are forest green and white. Had I been asked, I was prepared to proffer my math major as proof that I was too nerdy (i.e. too cool) to attend sporting events and, thus, couldn’t possibly know the school’s colors.

When it came to be my turn, I was expecting a pretty painless procedure. Generally you have to make an appointment, but if you get there between 8am and 11am, you can get an “emergency visit”. I arrived around 10:30 and my name was dutifully written on the roster underneath the appointments. Then I waited. I read old Times, Newsweeks, Wireds, and other things. I had brought a book and a newspaper, but they make you check your bag (a store 50 feet away provides this convenient “service” for only about US$3) and I had forgotten to take any reading materials with me. At 1pm and with the waiting room essentially cleared, I finally knocked on a window and asked if they had forgotten about me. The woman, who had earlier been exceedingly friendly to everyone, seemed annoyed that I had torn her from her lunch (something so unappetizing, it could only be eaten in a government building). She told me to come back Monday, but earlier next time. I tried to explain that I had arrived earlier, at 10:30am in fact, some 2.5 hours ago. She told me to come back Monday, but earlier next time. Feeling defeated, I left without further argument.

Important things I have lost while visiting Israel:

• My cellular telephone
• My passport

I guess we won’t be going to see Jordan after all! I still have a week and a half left, so stay tuned to see what else ends up on this list!

Update: I posted this from a posh hotel in Eilat, a resort town on the very southern tip of Israel. We went in to ask about a room, but it was crazy expensive, so we’re just poaching their wireless Internet while sitting by the pool. Not ten minutes after I wrote the list, we were debating whether or not to jump in their pool and poach that too. It was then that Carissa realized we both left our swimming suits at our hostel on the Dead Sea, 2.5 hours away from here. Oops!

Carissa and I planned to work through the week and take off to tour the country on Saturday. But we’ve both grown pretty bored of Tel Aviv by now, so we said “fuck it” and rented a car on Friday morning instead.

Carissa makes all the travel plans. She tries to read the Lonely Planet book to me, but my head just fuzzes out whenever I have to listen to boring travel literature. Over the course of our trip so far, I have spent at least two hours completely ignoring Carissa while she rambles on about hotels and visas and who knows what else (oh yeah, and her obsession with riding a camel). So it’s a good thing she’s here or I’d probably still be in Tel Aviv.

We got to Jerusalem Friday afternoon, a few hours before sundown. We parked just outside the wall of the old city, on a street with dozens of “no parking” and “tow away” signs and also dozens of cars. We were a little scared, but figured they’d have to tow the 50 cars in front of us before they got to ours, so we assumed we’d have a few hours to move it. Once inside the old city, we wandered around, trying various hostels to see who had a room. Eventually we found a spot in the Christ Church Guest House.

After getting some food, we went back to the hostel because we couldn’t really find anything to do after 8pm. We saw Reuel, the man who a few hours earlier had helped us park in their parking lot and also warned me of the terrible dangers of the Hayward Fault and how certain death would befall me if I stayed in SF. He repeated this warning at least two more times through out the night. We asked Reuel if there was anywhere he could recommend to get a drink. He took us to this amazing new place that had just opened. It was a bar in a converted alleyway. They had put a door on the entrance to the alley, put chairs and tables on the street, turned one shop into the kitchen and the other shop into a bar. It was absolutely adorable.

We asked if Reuel wanted to get a drink with us and he said he’d love to. In short order, the conversation turned to how Reuel, from Atlanta, came to be living in Jerusalem for the past 2.5 years. It was the most obvious question to ask this stranger. But without realizing what we’d done, we’d walked right into a trap of our own making.

We spent at least two hours talking about God. Reuel was a perfect politician. He launched into his well-rehearsed stump speech about finding God after years of bad parents, sex, drugs, and rock & roll. (Actually, he never mentioned the rock & roll, but I’m assuming it was involved somehow.) When we asked questions, he’d first compliment us on a brilliant question, throw off a sound bite or two, and then launch into another speech that was at best tangentially related to the question.

We both listened for probably an hour before really challenging him at all. He seemed to like Carissa’s softer, more open-minded athiesm than my more militant, logic-based atheism. I heard nothing even remotely convincing, but I’m sure he’d say the same about my arguments. He was constantly using anecdotes to show how much he could relate to us. (Joe Biden grew up in Scranton, PA? Joe Biden must understand me!) At one point, as we were getting ready to leave, he seemed to take a wild stab in the dark and told me that I probably have issues with my father, just like him. I was kinda offended and told him my parents were great and I had no issues with either of them. He countered that his parents were great too, but he still resented them. Or something. It was confusing and seemed to be the one stumbling point in his otherwise perfect delivery. I suppose he was grasping for anything to attack my atheism with, since I had stopped even pretending to understand where he was coming from.

He was charismatic and his stories were interesting, so listening to them was still fun. And to be sure, he was a very nice guy with good intentions. Still, I couldn’t help but feel a little cornered. I just wanted a drink and instead I got a sermon.

I met my friend Gal on my third night in Tel Aviv, I believe. She was at a dance club with someone else I knew and when the club closed at 5am, four of us went out to breakfast. Still, I didn’t really recognize her when she shouted my name from a café two blocks from my house (excuse me, “my” house). I figured it out after a minute, as I usually do. She was smoking and talking on the phone to someone else I knew, and she passed the phone to me to say hello. After that brief encounter, I saw her pretty much constantly. Apparently she was actually working at the café and, in fact, works there six days a week, in addition to working three night shifts (midnight-8am) at the local convenience store which is literally next door. Between these two jobs, she works an astonishing 72 hours a week.

The little café is on Sheinken Street, a boutique- and coffee-filled avenue just a block from where I’m staying. I walk down it several times a day because it’s generally the quickest way to the beach and several other parts of town. So when she’s not busy, she waves me down and we sit and drink tea. Afterwards, she angrily refuses payment and tips. (I learned my lesson after I tried twice.)

The owners, two brothers in their sixties who seemingly spend all day there, know me now too. As does the manager and their similarly omnipresent friends. I’m not clear on who all these people are, but there are about 5 people who are always there. If I pass by around 8pm, when the place is starting to empty out, I go in and sit at the table with them while Gal works and and we all drink tea and eat sweets and wait for everyone else to leave. No one there speaks English very well. They chatter on in Hebrew most of the time while I sit around and alternately read and watch the mysterious conversation. If someone says something that elicits a round of laughter, they’ll try their best to translate. Every once in a while when it quiets down, someone tries politely to include me. I get the same ultra-basic questions on repeat. “So you are from San Francisco? I love San Francisco.” “Is this your first time in Israel? How do you like it?” “What do you do in San Francisco?” Once it gets more complicated than that, we’re generally unable to understand each other. They passed around the back cover of the book I was reading and, after asking me for definitions of about six words, Gal declared “this isn’t English, this is Chinese!”

Still, despite the language barrier, it’s great to have a little place where I’m more than a regular; I get to sit at the owners’ table.