It’s all too rare that I write much about the rather unexciting, everyday facts of my life: the things that, ultimately, most people don’t really care about. But they are important for the sake of memories to me. They are something I should be documenting to remind myself that, even if it’s unexciting, stuff does happen to me.

Tomorrow I will be moving house in my temporary part-time home of San Francisco. I have spent most of the past two years, when here, in the Richmond District. It was on purpose: when I was staying in hotels, I consciously sought out a little-known hotel in this area because I had loved this neighborhood pretty much since I first spent any time in it six or seven years ago. It was an acceptable little hotel, and when I decided I needed something more semi-permanent and comfortable, I decided to find an apartment room in the same area. Now the time has come where I will be moving this home to a new part of the city: essentially my “third” neighborhood, after the Richmond, and the SOMA neighborhood in which I first lived when I moved in with David in 2002.

The Geary Parkway Motel was the place I got fat in. I spent a year living out of hotels after I began my transcontinental commuter job in October 2005. I actually started out in the Mid-Market Travelodge, but then moved on to the Geary Parkway Motel after the turn of the year. The owners were very happy to have such a reliable guest and they gave me a nice price. It was always one of two rooms: 205 or 211. Fairly clean, no wireless, but wired ethernet and a dorm fridge, microwave and king-sized bed. Oh, and full cable (not the crappy generic 10-channel Hotel Cable).

After half a year of this, I was invited by a colleague to house-sit for a couple weeks as she and her husband vacationed in Europe in summer 2006. Staying in a waterfront condo in Alameda romanced me a bit too much, as well as taking the ferry across the bay on my way to work every day. I ended up deciding to start staying in the Alameda Travelodge for a couple months.

Bad idea. I was bored out of my mind. Alameda waterfront condos are one thing (along with being able to borrow a car to get to the ferry terminal each day). Staying in a suburban hotel with no car and little more than fast food was hell. Did I mention this was the year I got very fat? Mostly because I could not cook for myself unless it was microwave food. I ate like crap. Fast food most meals quickly piled up.

By the end of Fall 2006 I was growing quite weary of both Alameda, my job, and hotels in general. I felt very inept and unproductive at work, I did nothing but work and watch TV. I ate like hell and it was showing in my blood sugar, blood lipids and energy level. Then one lonely weekend in the hotel in Alameda, as I pondered whether or not to get out of bed and get another McBreakfast, I had a mini-meltdown. It had to end: I was finding an apartment.

Strangely, the ad I put up in Craigslist specifically aimed at the Richmond. I wanted to know what it would be like to live in my favorite San Francisco neighborhood and actually be able to buy groceries, cook, and have a place to hang my hat.

I was quite lucky. Within a couple days of posting my ad, it was answered by a very New York Russian Jewish lady who shared my habit of commuting long distances for an irregular means of earning a living. She taught music lessons in Napa and also in her San Francisco apartment, as well as in a local church’s youth school. She needed to share expenses since she was trying to afford a mortgage in Napa County. It seemed like a perfect match. She was willing to take a generous lead time so that I could schedule a time to drive a van down to Cambria and pick up my childhood furniture from my parents’ to use as my new bedroom suite. By November I’d given a deposit and I moved in on 1 December 2006.

This was also right after I had returned from a wonderful, yet somehow horrifically tragic vacation with David. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. It was apparent that I could not make it through a vacation or holiday without having a complete nervous breakdown, and this one was accompanied by money problems (a hangover from spending 1200 bucks per month on hotels for a year, perhaps, not to mention that $400 dinner in Chicago) and severe sicko-ness on both my part and David’s. I decided during that vacation that I loved really cold places, and that I wanted to live in Toronto some day. I also decided that if I did not change what I was shoving down my throat every day I was going to die. Soon.

And so, moving into an apartment in San Francisco was also a big change on the health front. I weighed about 230 when I moved into that apartment. The night before I left it I weighed 185. It wasn’t just being able to cook for myself and eat healthier, I think it was also the sobering realization that what I was doing with my life wasn’t some sort of opportunistic, transitional phase, but a career that I needed to look after. If  did not create an impression and make myself successful with some sort of vision of my place within that career and some sort of future, I would not only fail at that job, but have a black smear on my resume to which I might never recover. I needed to take some responsibility for my life. All of it.

And so I did. It’s interesting to many people that that can be said of someone who has a roommate at the age of 30, but this is San Francisco. It’s not unusual, and it signified my desire to be an adult about what I was doing with my life. I needed a place to call my own, I could not live out of a suitcase or a residential hotel. I needed a comprehensive new life plan, and I found it.

Over the next year, I re-thought my place at work, my career motivation, and what I was going to do with where I’d come in the five years I’d been with the job. I knew my days were numbered doing what I’d been doing: either I could obsolesce by default, by doing only what I had to do to keep the cart going, or I was going to be transitioned out as new leadership and new knowledge was needed which I neither had nor wished to obtain. I decided that if I wanted to be in control of my life I needed to control my career my way: I needed a plan for how I would succeed with a company that was outgrowing my own role with them.

Many months and conversations with other managers later, the plan was formed, new job descriptions had been shuttled about, and I was once again leaving work at the end of the day feeling proud of what I’d done that day, and like an important and well-placed member of the team. Not something I’d felt, really, since at least a year before I originally moved from San Francisco.

I was also melting pounds off. I had rejected white things: bread, rice, flour, sugar. I was shopping regularly for carts full of vegetables, preparing nearly every meal I ate on my own, and enjoying everything I did in that endeavor. Nine months into the change in me, I was enjoying food more than ever, still researching health and new ideas for keeping that way, and still losing weight. I felt wonderful physically, more alert and clear-headed mentally. I felt like myself four years ago, essentially, only more mature, more successful, and more confident.

Not all has been peachy. I’m still not the best with money, and still somewhat addicted to an occasional bout of comfort Ebaying. I haven’t quite ever recovered fiscally from that year that I started living half my time out of hotels, bought a house, and took a huge vacation all in just a few months. David took me on a quick holiday in October and I had another nervous breakdown. I still don’t know what it is that gives me the blues, but I think it in part has to do with the fact that I spend so much time not being “home” that I have a hard time recreating when not just being home and doing “normal” things. I find I feel most comfortable and satisfied, while not in San Francisco, at the times that I’m just sitting around the house playing on the computer, watching Star Trek, or reorganizing my books or my records or my cord control. Almost a compulsion for routine domesticity, probably because I don’t feel I have enough of it the rest of the time. I just wish this didn’t quite mean confining David to the house and his office to such a large degree when I’m home.

Still, I’m in a much better place now than I was a year and a half ago. A year ago, even, when the whole thing had just started to turn around. It was somewhat jarring and even crushing when, then, just a few weeks ago, my roommate in my Richmond apartment announced that she wished to leave. She wanted to move to Napa full-time and needed to get rid of the apartment. Of course, for me, taking it over was out of the question due to the degree of rent control price differential she was getting, which afforded such a nice big room for such a cheap price for me.

The market was tighter, so I was not entirely sure I could succeed in finding a new home away from home if I restricted myself to the Richmond (not to mention the fact that, only being around part-time, I had massive schedule conflicts with all the people I would attempt to meet for viewings). So I searched just about everywhere. Prices had gone up a bit, but I was surprised when I found a place after only a week of intensive searching. I put down a deposit the morning before I headed back to Winston Salem for a week at home, to return the last week of January and hear my Richmond Roomie admit that in fact she was not leaving, but merely needed more money for my room and was thoroughly convinced that I would not have been willing to pay it.

She was probably right, but it still felt like a dirty trick.

I will miss the Richmond. I spent a few months last fall fancying the idea of writing a book about this neighborhood. Not a nostalgic sepia volume drenched in bygone days, but a here-and-now walking tour of the neighborhood I lived in and loved a few days out of this strange past couple years.

The beautiful, human-scale, walkable and lovable neighborhood that I wish I could have had some free time in over not only the past year, but over the past six years. That strange, disconnected neighborhood that seems too beautiful to be so isolated and impossible to enter and escape, save for the crowded, debilitating confines of the Dreaded Thirty-Eight. A neighborhood more diverse and full of variety than any I have encountered on the West Coast, and perhaps even including the many intriguing and beautiful neighborhoods I encountered in other beloved cities I’ve visited, from Pittsburgh to Chicago to Toronto.

I’ve walked these streets of the Richmond more than many (white, twenty- and thirty-something) full-timers and natives, I think. Maybe not as much as the old Chinese ladies who elbowed me on every 2 Clement morning outing, but I became quite familiar and endeared to the place. Taking the occasional weekend off with no family trip or major agenda and just walking a few dozen blocks to enjoy breakfast at the many regular haunts I enjoyed: Joe’s with the tiny Chinese matron who always kept my attractive brown coffee mug hot and full; Video Cafe, which was always open and welcoming with a hamburger-patty-and-eggs breakfast at 5am when I wanted to get to work early and didn’t want to cook that morning; Hamburger Haven, where, even though I’d only show up every few months would always remember that I took tomatoes with my eggs and coffee, not potatoes; Good Luck Dim Sum, where I could make a Wednesday evening stop and have breakfast dumplings for two weeks or more.

There was Israel’s Kosher grocery, where cheap sesame pretzels were one of my few white starchy weaknesses when I made it by. And speaking of Jews, there was the Evergreen pharmacy, where I would buy my Muni pass and the occasional crock pot. Then there was the little Russian store down the block where I could get tasty (if a bit fossilized) links of sausage or salami, not to mention one of the few places that regularly stocked my favorite heart-friendly herbal teas. There was the laundry across the street, where I tried to go the week after I moved in, only to find that their detergent dispenser was empty (and had probably been so for at least a decade), and then had to walk six blocks with three very heavy laundry baskets, to the nearest stocked laundry.

There was, alas, also that huge, empty former Albertsons one block away. Forever reminding me of how particularly impossible it is to find a full-service, affordable grocery in San Francisco (though I admit that if I didn’t work full-time and was willing to visit 3 stores per day for each different type of grocery, the Mexican and Chinese groceries would be quite adequate).

There were the precious few times I took very long walks, down to the beach, through the park, over Pacific Heights and Nob Hill and down Divisadero to buy my sandalwood oil at the little soap shop in Noe Valley. The fact that, being so remote and impossible to navigate on transit, I was quite encouraged to walk, to explore, and to find new ways to get around and get to know the place at street level, on foot.

The wierd thing about feeling nostalgic - about missing the Richmond District, is that I never really lived here enough to know it well enough to miss. But come to think of it, I felt that way about SOMA after 3 years there, and still feel that way about Charlotte and Winston Salem.

I do yearn for the sense of permanence and place that I haven’t really felt since Fresno. I missed it when I lived full-time in San Francisco mainly because I knew it was a transitional situation: I knew I would not be settling there so I never let myself get comfortable. Despite my resolve to make what I can of my life where it is now - to enjoy my career and be happy with the lifestyle I live in pursuit of it, I still know it cannot last forever - even for much longer.

San Francisco will always be, for me, a fantasy world. A place I never really know, never really feel at home in, never a place I can get too comfortable in, because I know it’s an impossible place for me. I’m not quite sure what I will get from my new neighborhood, or whether I’ll find the same attachment to it that I felt to the Richmond. But then, I can’t really predict how I’ll react to anywhere I am these days. At best, I like to think I’m grown up enough to make the most of it, as the friendly neighborhood advocate of the built environment.