Being San Franciscan

I hate being a tourist.  It's like admitting defeat.

Maybe it's teenage residue, wanting to always look perfectly bored and cool.  Or leftover small town anxiety.  I never want to be that person dressed inappropriately, peering at a map, gawping at the buildings or the bus schedule.  Having someone ask me for directions in a place I'm just visiting feels like a victory.

But I think it's more than that.  Wherever I go, Bismarck or Belgium, I have to imagine that I'm living there.  Here in San Francisco, writing at a coffee shop near my friend's place in Noe Valley, I'm pretending to live in a city where the weather varies by neighborhood.  Where one block parallel, you find yourself climbing a hill that isn't there the next street over. 

And then there's the fantasy life I come up with to match.  The new friends, the perfect apartment with Robin's egg walls.  How much more together my life would be in California, writing six hours a day, eating avocados and fish tacos...conveniently forgetting how you bring yourself along to every place you go.

I love to travel, but it really brings out the feeling of being the ghost in the machine.  Like, how can I still be this same person when I'm looking at these hills and palm trees and an ocean full of Great White sharks?  And the idea of choosing a place, of saying "this is where I live," feels like a million doors slamming. 

I guess I'm hoping that it brings me perspective.  This morning, I felt like someone slapped me with a fire poker when one of my hometown Facebook "friends" seriously and unflinchingly used the n------ word in his status update.  This is someone who's never left our little town and I'm 99% sure has never met a black person.  How can one stupid line make a place 3,000 miles from where I grew up feel more like "home" than the community that raised me?  

Reconciling who I am, where I came from, and where I'm going is proving to be much more difficult than pushing the "Remove Connection" button on Facebook.