On Sunday at She Said, a friend of mine introduced me This is the most beautiful woman in the club.

Yeah, said the punk rock bouncer she was talking to. I know about a dozen guys who are in love with her.

Funny, I don't feel beautiful. I have short legs and a funny-looking nose and a tummy I can't get rid of no matter how many crunches I do. I save up every compliment, every hopeless love letter, every whispered "I have such a crush on you." I save up the catcalls on the street, the boys who ask my friends if I'm single, the leers and the come-ons from people I don't even like, just so long as they're sincere, so long as they looked at me and felt something. Maybe I'm awful for admitting this, but that's why I go out so much. Every night I must be bathed in praise, because I'm not really pretty, not truly desirable unless people see me and want me.

Blame insecurity. Blame a lousy childhood. Blame a culture that values women as sex objects. It feels good to be admired, even if most of the time I don't understand it, even if it really should be a little bit creepy. That's hardly news. I'd almost forgotten what it was like to be pretty, you know. This is the year I lost all of the weight I put on after college. I practically melted away. I knew I was getting thinner. First my old clothes started to fit, then they were a little bit loose, then they were so big that my skirts were hanging low on my hips. One day I looked in the mirror and I could see my ribs.

That's what all those men are hitting on, this new skinny girl with good cheekbones. I'm still not sure where she came from. I'm still not entirely comfortable in my skin. But I'm glad she's here. Maybe someday I'll even see the most beautiful girl in the club.

I've been sick all week with some awful coughing thing. I don't know what the hell has happend to my immune system. It held up well enough through the rigors of December and January, but this month it just gave up hope and practically opened the door for any cold or flu that wanted to come my way. Not a day has gone by that I haven't had a sore throat, a fever, or a cough. I've taken a couple of sick days, but all I can do while sitting at home is think about how much work isn't getting done. I can cough just as well at the office as I can in my bedroom. I just pop DayQuil all day long and spend the hours in a warm fuzzy fog.

I stay home and watch marathons of Iron Chef or Sabrina with Audrey Hepburn or the Heavy Weight Finals of BattleBots. Who says there's nothing good on television anymore? There's an odd sort of pleasure in just being able to turn your brain off for a while. Sometimes I get there through dancing, sometimes through television, sometimes it's drugs. Sometimes when I go out and some normal grabs my arm and tells me I look hot, I pretend to be too far gone on E or G or K (though I'm stone cold sober) to know what he's saying. Sometimes I tell the normal I'm from out of town. Sometimes, when he asks me what I do for a living, I tell him I'm a dancer/I'm a seamtress/I work retail, anything but a high stress computer job that is sure to give me an ulcer before I'm thirty. I let him try to impress me for a while and when I'm tired of him (it never takes me long to be tired of him), I tell him that I'm married (five years in June) and walk away.

Sometimes it feels good to just move instead of thinking, to be passive instead of analyzing everything, to play dumb even though you know better. Sometimes it feels better to cocoon myself at home, to have movies brought to me, to have food brought to me, to spend the entire day talking to no one, to doze off at 3 o'clock still wearing the pajamas I woke up in. Sometimes it's best to go out into the crowd, a simple thing living next to downtown, become anonymous, nameless, faceless.

If I bump into her, I will tell her I'm a tourist from London.

If he asks me for a cigarette I will tell him I go to art school.

And why not? In a place where people collide and bounce off of each other like so many molecules, you can take a vacation from yourself in the time that it takes to strike up a conversation. You can do it without even opening your mouth. You're here on a business trip. You caught that cold on a plane. What an easy, painless thing it is, to make up a whole new personality, even easier when you're loopy on decongestants or your third Cosmopolitan and whole world seems to be just a few seconds out of synch. It's just a movie and you're the femme fatale. You're the comic relief. You're a Girl Friday. You're some extra. When the lights go out and the credits roll, no one will remember you.

I came home soaking wet last night because some idiot stole my umbrella this weekend.

I went to a party and when the time came to go home, my umbrella was nowhere to be found.

"Oh," said my gracious hostess. "I know who must have taken it. Here's her number."

After four days of calling, my umbrella still has not been returned. It seems the culprit lives in Marin. It's not convenient for her to drive all the way to downtown San Francisco to return my only protection against the rain. Well, it's not convenient for me to be drenched on the way to and from work every day either, you thoughtless Marin-dwelling, redwood tree-hugging harridan. I don't even remember you at the party, but I'll bet that you're blonde. I'll bet you wear a baseball cap with your little blonde ponytail threaded through the back.

I wouldn't be nearly so venomous if it wasn't a beautiful umbrella. Some people just buy the same little black folding umbrella over and over again, but not me. I have an umbrella printed with the rose window from Notre Dame. It glows like stained glass when the light hits it. The umbrella is so beautiful and distinctive that I've owned it for years, the lifetime of a dozen black folding things bought on the street corner, because I can't forget it in a bar or a club or a taxi cab. The whole idea behind owning an umbrella like that was that no one would think to steal it because it would be instantly recognisable as mine.

Seriously, if you're exiting a party, somewhat tipsy and dreading the rain, wouldn't it make sense to pick up some drab anonymous umbrella so that you can at least smile sheepishly and pretend that it was some innocent mixup and not outright theft? What do you say when the owner of the umbrella calls you the next day? Gee, I'm sorry. I thought I could get away with stealing that. I figured I could just walk off with it and no one would ever notice. Then when you called my house, I thought maybe you'd forget about your umbrella if I just didn't call you back. Now that I accidentally picked up the phone while you were calling, I'm hoping that I can just blow you off by telling you what a pain in the ass it is for me to give your umbrella back to you.

I have no sympathy for the inconvenience I am causing you. I don't care how bad traffic is on the Golden Gate Bridge as you're trying to leave your affluent suburb in your leather-interior SUV. When you are caught stealing, the only appropriate Miss Manners response is "Words cannot describe how sorry I am. Please, allow me to return the stolen item to you post haste. Now I will hang my head in shame and dye my hair black as a sign of my sincere repentance."

Have you got that, you vacuous tart? There will be a test later. I'm catching a cold and I know where you live.

This is what happens when my friends and I stay up all night, drinking red wine.

Ladies and gentlemen, The Burning Man Tarot.

The Suits: Dust, Bottles, Rebar, and Torches

Card 0 -- The Newbie. A clean, wide-eyed innocent stands on the empty playa. The newbie is at the beginning of his journey, grinning widly, half-blinded by the sun. He has no idea what he is getting into. He is almost certainly carrying an inadequate supply of water and sunblock, but he strides forward anyway. Everybody's got to start somewhere.

Card 6 -- Ecstacy. Pierced, tattooed, bodypainted lovers embrace in the desert. Behind them, a giant white pill perches on the horizon, like a sun rising or setting. The Ecstacy card represents the force of attraction that brings people together in spite of dehydration, sleep-deprivation, and dust-covered smelliness. There is no greater power on Earth.

Card 7 -- The Art Car. The undeniable feeling of triumph when you drive your motorized project down the esplanade only to have fellow citizens of Black Rock City point and say "Wow! What's that?" The Art Car, straight out of Mad Max, is completely unlike anything you have ever seen before, unless you've seen the cover of Hack by Information Society.

Card 12 -- The Port-a-potty. Row apon row of the giant green monsters crowd the horizon. There are twice as many of them as there were last year, but there are never quite enough. The line extends off the edge of the card. It goes on forever. Waves of noxious scent threaten to choke the needy. The Port-a-potty is possibly the most misunderstood card in the Burning Man Tarot. The card often triggers apprehension, but it is only by making the sacrifice of waiting in line that we attain release.

Card 13 -- The Man. There He is, carved out of neon, arms raised against a pitch-black sky. We build him, we worship him, we burn him, and then we go out into the desert to do it all again. He is death and rebirth, the end and the beginning.

Where's my copy of PhotoShop?

I wasn't going to celebrate Valentine's Day at all. I'm not much of a romantic. I already have enough dead roses in my bedroom. I don't need a box of chocolate-covered marzipan, even if it is from Godiva. The only indication I had that some sort of lover's holiday was taking place was one co-worker who had skipped out of work for the afternoon so that he could decorate his girlfriend's apartment with flowers. I thought that it was sweet, sweet but not for me. If someone filled my place with flowers, all I'd be able to think of is the terrible mess.

You can't force romance. You can't synthesize it with with jewelery in velvet boxes, long-stemmed red roses purchased at extortionist prices, or ill-fitting lingerie. You certainly can't create a mood with ugly red hearts printed on just about everything.

I met up with J on Market Street so that we could walk home together. We weren't going to go out. Even as we were turning onto 5th Street, we were trying to remember if there were still swordfish steaks in the fridge. We'd have to thaw them out. We'd have to decide on vegetables. We'd have to starve for another hour. We ducked into a restaurant before we hit Mission.

9:30 is a little bit late for dinner, so we missed the rush of couples. The restaurant had one of those confused menus that are the result of trying to please everyone at once. There was a full sushi bar along with all of the California staple dishes: ahi tuna, filet mignon, and grilled mahi mahi. You would order clam chowder or miso. We were so ravenous that we ordered a little bit of everything and washed it down with a bottle of unfiltered sake. Tuna tartare? No problem. Asparagus rolls? Sure. Something or other with truffle oil? Bring it on. Edible flowers (peppery), daikon radish, strips of guyere cheese, some kind of crepe, more unfiltered sake, warm gooey chocolate cake, and three different kinds of sorbet. By the time we were ready to pay the bill, I was sure the waitstaff would have to roll us out the door.

We were too stuffed to go anything but vegetate in front of the television, watching Casablanca on American Movie Classics. I'd forgotten how incredibly sad that movie is. I nearly cried when Rick demanded "As Time Goes By." Nothing is as sad as Rick letting Ilsa get on the plane to Lisbon with Victor Lazlo because the problems of three little people don't amount to a hill of beans in this world. We are all so small and the world is so big and it's awful to think that sometimes love isn't enough of a comfort. Love doesn't guarrantee a happy ending, but it's so nice while it lasts. It's nice to have someone to fall asleep with on the couch, somebody who will smile when I wake up in the morning humming "As Time Goes By."

When the going gets tough, the tough go to the hair salon. The tough let themselves be waited on hand and foot. They gossip and drink red wine until they're tipsy, or at least until they're not so tough anymore.

I think it was November when I realized that my hair was starting to get a little bit ratty. I'd had my hair extentions in for almost six months, which is already quite a bit longer than they're supposed to last. I ran frantic through the Lower Haight looking for a hair salon that could help me. My hair dresser had moved to Los Angeles, where the rent is so cheap that even artists can afford to live in lofts. It seemed that she'd been catering to the fake hair needs of the entire neighborhood, because every time I went into a salon and asked if they had somebody who did hair extentions, they would look apon my black and blue dredlocks with horror. All of the extentions would have to be taken out, then my dreds would have to be combed out, mousy brown roots dyed black, and only then could we actually start putting in my new hair. No one was prepared to take on this project.

I'd completely given up on the idea of getting in touch with my former hairdresser. I was sure she was leading a fabulous low-rent lifestyle, working on her oil paintings five days a week while sipping a nice Merlot. The only other salon in the Lower Haight that does extentions is Spaghetti and Ravioli, the kind of hair salon that's also a spa. Hair extentions required an in-person consultation with the owner of the salon, who would look you over (only on a weekday before 6 pm) and judge your worthiness to pay him hundreds of dollars to braid synthetic hair into your own in frosty silence. I fought back my distaste and arranged a consultation, only to have the door slammed in my face because it was 6:05.

If I was a truly dedicated supervillain, I would have sent my minions to destroy that puny little salon. I would have turned the full force of my Death Ray on the effeminate salon owner, a Death Ray that would afflict him with a beer belly, a hockey jersey, and male pattern baldness before killing him. But did I extend a perfectly-manicured finger to push the Big Red Button? No. I let the state of my hair continue to deteriorate. I pulled the mass of itchy dredlocks back from my face in the morning and tried to pretend they weren't there.

At the end of January, just as things were beginning to look dire, J ran into my hairdresser while getting his hair dyed purple at Edo. A few weeks later, she called me to let me know that she had an entire Sunday free in which to do my hair. At last! I went in first thing in the morning (read: noon) and spent nine hours at the salon. The old dreds came out easily. The dredlocks in my real hair combed out with no problems. The last time I'd seen my real hair, it was shaved high in the back and cut to my cheekbones in the front. Now I had a perfectly round shoulder-length bob. I almost left it at that, so fasciated was I by the idea of being able to run my fingers through my hair again, but I'd become accustomed to looking in the mirror and seeing, well, color. In the time it took me to walk to The Grind for a soy chai latte, I'd decided that I just couldn't live without glamazon hair.

It was an all day job. While sitting in my little salon chair, I saw people getting elaborate dye jobs, dredlocks, spiral curls, and highlights, but no one had project hair quite as elaborate as mine. Hair stylists came and went. Customers came and went. The pink-haired receptionist went home. Some guy came by and gave all of the stylists deep tissue massages in the basement. We drank smoothies and chai and cup after cup of green tea. My hairdresser talked about work. I talked about work. We talked about our various boyfriends and her extended breakup with the keyboardist from Faith and the Muse. We talked about painting and corset training and why you can't rehabilitate an alcoholic. The girls in the salon went through most of a bottle of red wine.

I treated myself to a taxi cab home instead of taking the bus. The first words out of the cab driver's mouth were "Wow! Nice hair."

Life is good.

Everybody's got to relax somehow. Some people vegetate in front of the TV. Some people go for an invigorating run. Some of us get drunk and dance all night. Some of us curl up with a good book. I've tried all of these things. I'm not the only one who is cracking under job stress. Our QA manager has insomnia. He gets home at two in the morning and he can't sleep. No matter what he does or where he goes, he can't stop thinking about what needs to be done at the office, some bug that isn't fixed, or some developer's screw-up. Maybe that makes me an awful person, finding comfort in the misery of others, but it's nice to know that it's not just me. I see other people in the office who have been up all night, people with dark circles under their eyes and short tempers, but Emilian is the only other person I've talked to that is taking this project so personally that he simply cannot let go of it no matter how hard he tries.

I worked all of Saturday. I went to bed at six in the morning and my first work-related phone call came in at eight-thirty. The phone wouldn't stop ringing. It got so bad that J grabbed a blanket and went to sleep on the couch. Somewhere around noon, I gave up all hope of sleeping, put on the first clothes I saw, and took a cab to the office.

It was raining, soak-through-everything rain. My umbrella felt pointless. Our configuration problems were endless. Somebody accidentally cut power to the development web server in the middle of the afternoon. Our testers were still finding unreproducable bugs a few hours before we were supposed to push to production. The Thai food we ordered wasn't very good. In a lot of ways, software development is like war: long stretches of tedium punctuated by moments of sheer terror. By the time I got home, it wasn't Saturday anymore, and J had gone off to Shrine of Lillith.

It's a sad day when you have to go to a club because it's the only place you ever see your boyfriend when you're both awake. For a while, we just sat in a corner and talked, looking for all the world like a couple that had just met that night and couldn't wait to take each other home. Other people would start to walk up to us and then turn away because they were obviously interrupting something. We made every last person by the bar feel like a third wheel. The only person who was too obliviously drunk to notice was Kalico, who arrived shortly after two in the morning. I couldn't stop her. She was too sweet and too drunk and much too sincere.

We're the little people she slurs, three-quarters my size, five years my senior, China doll girls with big, big eyes. People stare at us people stare at you and we're the same. She leans on my shoulder because she can't sit up straight. We're the people who don't ever give up hope. No matter what the world does to us, we still believe in happy endings.

You know what? Very late at night, so late it's almost morning, in a place where the floors are sticky with beer, I do believe in happy endings. I do.

Forgive me, father, for I have sinned. I have gone out among the Urban Outfitters-wearing masses, the 20-something hipsters in their faux thriftstore clothes. I have partaken of a club that was not strictly Industrial. I dabbled in --how shall I put this delicately? 80's hits. I knowingly stepped into a dance club where whole throngs of girls in pastel babydoll tee-shirts boogied down to Billy Idol's "White Wedding." It gets worse, father. I went there directly from work, in my work clothes. I went clubbing in a floppy black sweater and sensible shoes. I went clubbing without makeup.

No boys in baseball caps stared at my cleavage, because it was nowhere to be found. No squealing girls grabbed at my arms and asked "Where did you get that?" because I wasn't sporting any that. There were no porcupine quills or mink vertebrae in my hair, no leather corset, no shredded silk ribbon or bits of lace, not even an interesting pair of boots. I was normal, out among the normal people.

Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of Cheap Trick, I shall fear no Budweiser.

It was the strangest thing. I had a good time. Molly spun Book of Love in the back room. Some DJ played Dominion/Mother Russia and I danced to Sisters of Mercy for the first time in years. J and I bounced around the dance floor to something, I don't remember what, but it seemed terribly nostalgic at the time, the kind of music you don't really want to admit to liking anymore, but it's so tied up with the most important things you've ever done that you can't ever stop being moved by it.

There is some music you will never get over. This is the result of the same mysterious forces that guarrantee you will never get over your first love. So I'm not so original. Here I am, reluctantly admitting that I still like to hear Siouxie Sioux singing "Peek-a-boo" and Peter Murphy crooning on about just about anything. It's okay not to be primped and pretty all the time, to go out among the normals and dance because it just feels good to move.

In fact, it's kind of fun.

WARNING: FICTION AHEAD

If you're here to read my journal, scroll down about halfway down the screen. My life starts there. In the meantime, I'm playing at being little miss novelist. Indulge me.

We didn't even want to think about what the bastards could get for the place now.

3BR/1B Victorian. Hardwood floors. Eat-in kitchen. Decorative fireplace. Access to garden. 1 car parking. Quiet and sunny. Close to Lower Haight transportation, bars, and shops. Pets considered with extra deposit.

An ad written by the tenants would be somewhat less forgiving.

Three bedroom, one bathroom death trap/health hazard. Sloping East-West floors. All doors and windows out of square. Most living room window panes held together with tape. Unexplained chunk of porcelain missing from toilet. Built-in cabinetry does not close properly. Electrical systems never updated. Do not expect to be able to run hair dryer and toaster at the same time. Occasional access to hot water, infrequent access to decent water pressure in shower. Garden consists of carnivorous blackberry bramble that feeds on pets and small children.

Plenty of old San Francisco charm.

Charm has a lot of power here. People would rent a cardboard box in this city if it had crown moldings and was close to a creperie.

We did think about it. In fact, we thought about it constantly. The air was thick with speculation.

Twenty-five hundred? Three thousand? Thirty-three hundred? Maybe more. There's parking, after all. They could charge extra for the garage.

Thirty-six hundred, Micky says. I think it's highway robbery.

"Divide by three, dumbass. That's twelve hundred dollars per bedroom. That's not even the average cost of a studio now. A studio!"

Micky keeps an eye on the rental market the same way most people keep an eye on a car wreck. He checks the List twice a day. He looks through rental ads in the newspapers. He's got the number of every major property management company in the city. If a For Rent sign goes up in a window somewhere, he's on the phone asking how much.

"The average cost of a studio, from a room in a transient hotel in the Tenderloin to a rich-bitch penthouse in the Marina, is one thousand, twelve-hundred, and seventy-eight dollars a month," he says, tapping a dry erase marker against his teeth. He's plotting points on his Housing Chart. "Before a landlord will even look at your application, he requires proof that your monthly income is at least three times the cost of rent. That's three thousand, eight hundred, and thirty-four dollars a month. Forty-six grand a year. Twenty-two dollars and twenty cents an hour. No waitress makes twenty-two twenty an hour. You don't get that kind of money driving taxis. What the hell are any of us qualified to do that makes that kind of money?"

"There's always the Campus Theater, Mick. I hear the Varsity Squad is looking for a tight end." Once, in a fog of tequila and nitrous oxide, Micky confided to me that he had this fantasy about being a male stripper. I consider it my solemn duty to give him a hard time about it.

"Sure, and you can turn tricks on Capp Street," he shot back.

"Between the cut for my pimp and my crack habit, there's no way I'll be seeing twenty-two bucks an hour. I'm afraid crack whores have been priced right out of the rental market."

The only one of us who will never wake up in a cold sweat from eviction-related nightmares is Her Blonde Eminence, Portia, keeper of the lease. Portia's relationship to the landlords is murky at best. Micky and I are pretty sure she must have seen them at least once. We've never seen the lease. We have no idea if it gives her the right to sublet our rooms. We don't even know if the landlords know who's living here. In a perfect world, we would straighten this situation out immediately. We would assert our rights, face our faceless landlords, demand mended windowpanes and electrical outlets that don't arc when you try to plug something into them. But Micky might as well have branded $1278 across my retinas and Portia knows it. We're all too scared of paying real city rents.

If Portia worked, though God only knows what she would do for a living, she wouldn't need us. This house is a hive. She is the queen. We are her drones, and we all buzz to the sound of her addiction.

I blame her parents. Granola-munching, yoga-at-dawn, Berkeley lawyers. They thought it was important for a girl to find herself, preferably by backpacking around some godforsaken corner of the world until her chakras opened. A girl shouldn't be hampered by mundane worries, like getting a job and paying her PG&E bill. She should be able to take off at a moment's notice to study meditative underwater basket weaving in Goa.

To my knowledge, Portia has never been out of the country. She has no interest in saving the whales, building homes for third-world earthquake victims, teaching English in Peru, or even bumming around Europe. But just in case she should have that desire, Portia's trust fund vomits up money month after month, money that fuels Portia's own sugar-coated bliss.

Aside from rent, groceries, and the DSL bill, Portia spends every penny of it on Ebay.

I didn't take Ev's advice. I wrote pages and pages last night and I never once saved. When I finally tried to publish, I discovered I had been hit by the rolling blog-outs. Sometimes I can't help thinking that ftp really is the better way. Sure, I don't get a clever little web-based user interface, but I spend twelve hours of my day mucking around with user-antagonistic software. Why should my journal be any different?

Still, I'm sad that stuff is gone. I haven't even tried to write fiction in a very long time. A lot of young writers start off in fantasy or science fiction. They try to build whole worlds on the page right off the bat. I'll reserve that kind of thing for people who are much more talented than I am. It's a rare writer who can suck you into a world created wholly from their imagination. I'd like to try, solely as an experiment, just to write what I know. The world I live in is strange enough. All I have to do is describe what I see.

Wish me luck.

Damn. I miss everything.

I didn't get to see the shell of the Volkswagon Beetle that a group of Canadian engineering students suspended from the Golden Gate Bridge yesterday. That's better than the police car on top of the MIT dome. In fact, it rivals the telephone booth on top of the MIT dome with the working telephone. We've been hopelessly outpranked by Canadians. This is just another example of Americans falling behind in a vital field. Soon we will have to import our pranksters to the States on H1B Visas.

Well, they might outprank us, but we still lead the world in potato distribution. Leave it to the Americans to concern themselves with Potato Awareness. If there's anything we lack in our diet, it's starch and carbohydrates. It enough to make me reach for a celery stick.

Who am I kidding? I don't even like celery and I have a terrible weakness for home fries. I'm just bitter because I missed the potato that was rightfully mine. Now I will have to go grocery shopping.

I'm still decompressing from the horror that was Release 1.0. I spent most of the weekend asleep. No joke, I slept from 8:00 on Saturday evening until noon on Sunday. I had nightmares, including the Teeth Falling Out Nightmare. I must have had that one three times. When my teeth start falling out, they're little white enameled things, but as the dream progresses, my teeth go rotten, covered in dark green and black plaque. I can't resist the urge to scrape at the plaque with a fingernail, and when I do, there's hardly any tooth at all under all that rotten stuff.

Maybe it wouldn't be so bad if I wasn't absolutely certain I was awake.

There's always somewhere I have to be (my high school classroom, moving the car I haven't owned in more than a year so that the DPT doesn't tow it away) or someone I need to talk to, but I can't. All I can do is tongue the spaces where my molars used to be.

As much I try to relax and leave work back at the office, to eat something that isn't ramen and coffee, to go out and talk about whatever it is normal people talk about these days, I still can't rest.

I swear that in my novel I will write what I know. I'm tired of making things up. I've turned my back on fiction, remember? I'm determined to write about things as they are, or least as they should be.

I remember wanting to be a waitress when I grew up. I was ten. My best friend's parents had a Cambodian restaurant on Geary Street and we spent a whole summer in the back room behind the kitchen. Soriya's grandmother cooked for us on a wok that was three feet wide. Everything was noise and steam while we listened to Live 105 and crimped each other's hair. Being a waitress seemed like a solemn responsibility then. They were an order, like nuns with a vow of service. They wore pastel-colored dresses with high collars and they brought silver pots of rice with ninja silence.

I never go to the Richmond district anymore. It's a tremendously unhip part of town. Down the Avenues, for 40-something blocks all the way to frigid Ocean Beach, there are little stucco houses built in the 20's and 30's, ugly houses with painted concrete lawns (nothing else will grow in the permafog) where Russian and Chinese grandmas live. Without a car, trekking west beyond Arguello Avenue is more trouble than it's worth. Sometimes I crave it, not enough to catch a 38 Geary, but almost. Somewhere in the middle of the Richmond are the most familiar streets I've ever known. I can still find the places where I used to get ice cream, the bakeries where I spent my pocket money on dim sum, Green Apple books, where used paperbacks are three dollars, and shops filled with cheap plastic Japanese toys.

So lacking in glamour is the Richmond that it never changes. There will never be loft developments on the streets where Filipino boys revv their Honda Civics. No one will suddenly declare it's hip to live among the Russian delis. At night the streets are empty and abandoned. I miss it sometimes.

I miss wanting to be a waitress.