A Girl...

Big Small World

San Francisco is a big city. According to the 2005 census, if every person living in San Francisco mailed me a dollar, I'd be just shy of able to afford an average house on an average street within city limits. That's a lot of dough, yes, but since we're putting a temporary hold on all talk of real estate, let's focus instead on the fact that that's a lot of people--730,000 give or take, it's a mere pittance to New York City's 8 million, but, crammed into a compact 47 square miles, we are the second densest urban area in the nation.

Now let's say I had a dollar for every person I knew personally, by name, in the city. What could I afford? Probably a tank of medium-grade gas ($3.36/gallon!). Vast oil conspiracy aside, the point here is that I don't know very many people in the Bay Area. I work at a teeny, tiny company (if everyone gave me a dollar I could by a CD) and I have about 2.5 friends outside of the office. As we've already established, this scaled-down social circle is just fine by me, although I'm trying to be better about forging friendships if only for the sake of my people-person boyfriend, blah blah, but that's not the point either. The point is that for me to randomly run into someone I know in San Francisco is practically unheard of, and on Saturday it happened twice. There's really not a point to that either except to say I felt all cool and stuff, that after five years I really can say I'm a local.

Saturday morning we went to the city for brunch with one of Simon's former coworkers and his boyfriend. We met them at Citizen Cake (the standard appetizer is doughnuts!) and then we all walked around hip-happenin' Hayes Valley, popping into art galleries and Swedish furniture stores and custom felted rug factories. There were many dainty dogs tripping down the streets of the city smiling at everybody they saw whilst wearing sweaters made of authentic pashmina wool and diamonds; it was that kind of neighborhood. Just outside the rug factory, we came across my coworker, all hip-happenin' and wrapped in pashmina herself. A few stumbled introductions, four-square handshakes, and awkward good-byes later, I walked away feeling like Sally Socialite, albeit somewhat rusty on some of the finer points of conduct. I was glad to have been wearing one of my more sophisticated outfits (kitten heels!), because even though I sometimes feel like a poseur when I get dressed up for anything less than a wedding or a funeral, I always get a kick out of blending in with the Haves for a few hours.

Speaking of blending in, on Saturday night, after a nap, we went back to the city, to the hip-happenin' Haight neighborhood, for a karaoke party. The dress code, according to the invitation, was "Jem, Truly Outrageous!", and since the party was hosted by the former roomate with whom Simon orchestrated legendary theme parties*, we rolled out our sparkliest, flashiest, clashiest duds and I took blue eyeshadow to places it'd never been before. We showed up expecting wigs and body glitter and gold lamé hotpants, but it turned out that we were the only ones in attendance not wearing Oxford shirts and sensible loafers. That's not to say that the partygoers weren't fun and nice and cool, but really, every button was buttoned and all of the slacks were professionally pressed by a professional presser.

So what to do when you walk into a room full of slacks and blouses wearing a sparkly rainbow butterfly spandex shirt and eyeshadow that fades dramatically from azure to cerulean to the pale blue of a clear mountain lake somewhere in the vicinity of your brows? Why, be the first up for karaoke, of course! Had "Love Shack" not come on when it did, we might have settled into the groove of the party a little before taking to the microphones, but it just wasn't to be. We walked in, took off our jackets to unveil our flair, and then before anyone knew what was happening I was bellowing "Tin roof! Rusted!" at a crowd of strangers.

Well, strangers except for two people: the host, of course, and the upstairs neighbor, who happens to be a friend of my coworker. I'd only met him two or three times before, most recently in August of 2005, which I remember only because it was the first time Simon and I sang karaoke together. "Love Shack," naturally. (Look at those sideburns!)

Over the course of the evening, Simon performed, among other things, Elvis and Vanilla Ice and "Endless Love" with another man, and I did Britney and "Rapper's Delight" (without looking at the words, thank you very much), and just about everything else, whether I was holding the mic or not. They had to kick us out at 3 a.m., when everyone else was gone and we were still screeching through cracked voices "All I Ask of You," Simon holding his hand over half his face like a mask. They way they had to pry the microphones out of our hands, you'd think we never got out of the house and/or never got over to the city and/or never hung with friends and/or never got to sing karaoke. Judging from just last weekend alone, though, none of that is true: in just twenty-four hours, we brunched in the city and partied in the city and ran into random people at every turn (okay, only two turns, but still...), and--confession time--we spent Friday night exploring our on-demand karaoke options from the comfort of our living room. We weren't wearing our Jem, Truly Outrageous attire (in fact, we weren't wearing much at all), and we didn't have an audience (save for the guy living upstairs who I'm sure found our medley of "Grease" tunes inspiring), but we had fun all the same.

Truth: Singing karaoke at a party can make friends out of strangers, if only for the night.

Truth: Randomly running into someone you know can make a big city feel small. Randomly running into two people you know on the same day can make a big city feel like the neighborhood you grew up in.

Truth: Hugging and kissing and then putting on an airplane the person you love most in the world can warp the space-time continuum, make a small apartment seem vast, a night an eternity, and bring to crystal clarity every miniscule thing you adore about his presence and can't wait to have back again. I just got the final good-bye call from seat 13A; thus begins Day 1.

*For the Space Disco party they covered an entire room in tinfoil. For the Big Top party they rented a bouncy castle for the backyard. The best costumes were for the King of Kings Sponsored by King of Beers World Tour party, in which people remixed religion with pop culture to great comic effect. Simon was a Buddhist Punk.