Thoughts on being an "Invader"

I'm not a real techie, I am, but I'm not, as my friend Brooks said;

"She's one of the good ones"

My brother, he's a real techie, but he lives in the approved techie city of Mountain View. That makes him acceptable. He's not Destroying The City, like me.

I'm not a real techie because I'm a machinist who makes NOT TECHIE MONEY hourly. I make about 60% what your baseline real techie out of a state school or India does or 50% of what a  Carnegie Mellon or Stanford Techie makes.

Although I do have stock options, which makes me a techie, they are worth a decent amount in real world dollars, but I am still pretty poor in Silicon Valley Dollars in spite of Winning The Start Up Lottery.

Anyway, I'm Destroying The City with my very presence, or so I'm told. Daily.

I shouldn't take it so personally, especially since I'm Not A Real Techie.

But I'm Not A Real San Franciscan, as well.

Real San Franciscans HATE that Tech Is Destroying The City.

Even though half of them work in Tech as well. Probably more than half.

They think new skyscrapers and condos are "Tragic" that the abundance of high paying jobs is a plague.

Really, motherfuckers?

I'm from Detroit.

OK, just like not being a Real Techie, or a Real San Franciscan, I'm not Really From Detroit, either.

No one is really from Detroit. If you are from Detroit, you are from either the Greater Metro Area, which I AM from, sort of, or if you're from Detroit Proper you say your neighborhood. No one is from "Detroit" That's why Eminem says he's from 8 Mile, and Kid Rock isn't really lying when he says "Detroit" because he doesn't want to admit to being from Romeo. I wouldn't either, which is why I also say "Detroit"

The truth is that I'm not even from Metro Detroit unless I stretch the truth a bit, which I do, because the truth is that I am from Breckenridge, and not the good one in Colorado. I'm from the flat one with the wind farm, but when I was little, it was just a grain silo.

I only lived there until I was 7. Then I moved Somewhere Even Worse.

Now when I say I lived in a shitty small town, I am not talking about the cosmopolitan metropolis that is Howell, Michigan, where I went to high school, nor am I talking about the ironically named Breckenridge, I am talking about the truly hellish and truly remote Hale, Michigan. Had you ever been when it wasn't the height of summer, or Deer Season, you would understand why I prefer to say I am from Detroit, and you certainly wouldn't hold it against me, because you Real San Franciscans would probably go crazy if you had to spend one day in Hale. You Real San Franciscans think small towns are places like Half Moon Bay, or Guernville or Davenport, pretty places, nice places, not places like Hale. I don't think You Real San Franciscans actually know that place like Hale exist or have real people in them, because why would you? The City is Important. Hale isn't even somewhere deserving of our pity like Flint. I've seen how you look down on Fresno. Hale would kill you.

Places like Hale kill lots of people who Belong In San Francisco, if you get my drift, but maybe you Real San Franciscans forgot that not everywhere has problems like the Pride Parade "getting too commercial" now. It Gets Better, but usually only after you leave.

In fact, it wasn't even a town, legally, I think it was a "village" but Breckenridge was a "village" and was a booming metropolis compared to Hale.

"But where will The Next Allen Ginsburg come from if it's too expensive for artists to live here?"

Someone said that, wrote it down somewhere, somewhere that I read it. Probably more than one someone and probably not on paper.

"New York, like the last one?" I thought.

I didn't dare say that though. I've been called out on line for Not Being A Real San Franciscan. How dare I have anything to say about the city that has been my home for 20 years! After all, I'm From Michigan. I have no right to an opinion on The City! I have no right to Be Here! People Like Me have Destroyed The City! It was a welcoming, open place for Free Spirits before People Like Me got here. There was Diversity before People Like Me came and ruined it all!

The thing is, you dickheads don't know how good you have it, you Real San Franciscans are impossibly spoiled. If you grew up in San Francisco, and you are still here, you never had a reason to leave.

If you grew up here and were gentrified out, I'm not even sorry for you. You know why? Because you got to grow up Here. You can still come back to your "ruined" city and lament all the changes and how Terrible It Is that The City Has Lost It's Character. You still got to grow up here, so you don't even have a framework of how good you had it. Also, your parents voted for all the restrictive zoning and building laws that caused this mess so you should probably talk to them about THAT.

You don't know. You really don't know what it's actually like to not be able to go home again, because every place changes, that's how Cities work, that's how they are supposed to work.

As horrified as you are by The Tech Invasion, what if you came back, instead, to nothing? What if you came back, and instead of the skyline getting bigger and brighter, it got smaller and duller? What if the headlines were not about the outrageous rents or the tech boom, but about "what shall we do with these abandoned buildings?" I'm certain that would never happen to The City, so You will never know, so you will never know how lucky you are, and that makes me angry. I am angry that you equate prosperity with ruin, when I grew up with the opposite. You don't know how lucky you are to have Your Problems.

Detroit is in a Renaissance, just like they've been promising since the 70s.

When I did Go Back, I was pleasantly surprised, but it's not the Detroit I Grew Up With.

It's also not a real city anymore. The skyline of Detroit is just as unrecognizable to me as San Francisco's is to you Real San Franciscans, not by addition, but by subtraction. The Skyline looks like it had it's teeth knocked out, but, unlike yours, never filled back in. Back in the 90's those teeth may have been rotten, but they were still there. Now the Riverfront stares at you with a few golden teeth set in a newly healthy set of gums. It's pretty, but still sad, like when you see an ancient starlet from another era, celebrating a hundreth birthday, frail and aged, and riddled with dementia, and understand why so many celebrities want to die young.

Just like Tech Ruined San Francisco, but you know, the city is ACTUALLY RUINED instead of just Different Than You Grew Up In.  

If you're a Native San Franciscan, you have never lived in a place without public transit, you have always been able to go to a museum, or a hospital, or a farmers market, or a decent grocery store, or a theatre, your whole damn life. When I lived in Visitacion Valley, the Locals actually complained about it being a "Food Desert" because the nearest Safeway was a WHOLE 15 MINUTE bus ride away! There were not one, but two produce markets right there on Leland Avenue that held wonders that far eclipsed anything I had growing up, but I guess "Mexican Markets" don't count? You're all crazy. This place is magic, stop bitching. I can't believe how spoiled you are!

You can complain about Muni all you want.

There's a part of me, a big part of me, that still thinks it's fucking magical that I can take a BUS to a Movie Theatre. Let alone that I have the choice of 7 different ones to take a bus to! I'm not even counting the ones that are hard to get to by bus or just terrible. I actually have a choice of what theatre I want to go to to see a movie in. I didn't even have that choice until I was 16 years old, and even then I certainly couldn't take transit there.

But No, You Real San Franciscans, you take that for granted.

I doubt you Real Californians would even believe my tale of how raw cauliflower was a treat when was a kid. Not because my parents were strict vegans or anything, but because it was actually very hard to get raw cauliflower in a small town in Michigan in the 70's and 80's.

You want to know why People Like Me are Ruining Your City?

Because it is great. Not "was great" but Is Great.

Larry

Back when I was in High School, I was, naturally, enamored by The Beats.

Now, most of you probably thought we were wanna be hippies, and you would have been right, except you weren't. Black clothes, LSD, and poetry are a bit older than the hippies, and I knew that. 

Truth be told, I had a hard time following Beat Poetry and fiction even with Ritalin. Maya Angelou was my real favorite, and Langston Hughes and William Carlos Williams rounded out my American Masters taste in poetry. It's more that I *wanted* to appreciate The Beats. 

Then I got around to reading it, and well, having been born with lady parts, and growing up in the 80s:

Damn, these assholes were sexist. 

And, it wasn't even their fault really, I'm sure for the time they were probably pretty enlightened, but you know, I'm of my time and that stuff is pretty hard to read when you watched Sally Ride bouncing around in space and figuring if Geraldine Ferraro could run for Vice President and Mondale only lost because Regan was just so great that...

Yeah, I somehow thought when I was in first grade if women were astronauts and vice presidential candidates that...

We'd be a little farther along by now. 

But I'm letting my ADD get me off track here. The point was that somehow Lawrence Ferlinghetti is still alive at the age of 100, and he's friends with my aunt. 

And somehow I am the only person I know who finds this miraculous. I MEAN HE'S LAWRENCE FERLINGHETTI. 

When Gail and George sent me gifts from City Lights Books I thought it was because it was a landmark near Gail's House and everyone in my family is a voracious reader and I was into poetry. I didn't realize Gail was buddies with the OWNER OF CITY LIGHTS BOOKS FOR CHRIST SAKE!!

When I finally did make it out here, and make it into City Lights Books, it IMMEDIATELY triggered my claustrophobia, which is actually a lovely metaphor for both my experience as a San Franciscan and my visceral reaction to the way The Beats wrote about women, but I'm getting ahead of myself.

I was having brunch with my uncle, his longtime girlfriend, who I grew up knowing as Gail, but now call "Cap" because we're both grown ups, who I refer to as "my pseudo aunt" because she is for all intents an purposes my Aunt as she has been dating my uncle for 40 years, and my brother, when Gail mentions her friend "Larry" who just finished another book and turned 100. How many centenarian authors named Larry are running around North Beach, anyway?

HOLY SHIT YOU KNOW LAWRENCE FERLINGHETTI 

Your buddy was just on NPR! Ok, my buddy was on NPR, too but that's another story, which I will also tell at this brunch...

BUT THATS NOT ALL

So we're sitting there talking about "Larry" I'm stunned that my aunt knows someone who I think of as a historical figure, and my brother is likely unimpressed, and my Uncle is saying something along the lines of "He calls it a book, but it's one paragraph! It's a 140 page long paragraph!" 

I point out to my uncle that The Beats were not generally known for their adherence to grammatical conventions.

That's how short the human life span is, though. That's how fast history moves. I think Lawrence Ferlinghetti is a historical figure, and to my uncle, he's his girlfriend's weird buddy Larry who has no respect for sentence structure. 

That would be a good quip to end on, but unfortunately I have to add the prologue of my going around name dropping that MY AUNT is FRIENDS WITH LAWRENCE FERLINGHETTI to everyone I know, and no one knowing who that is. It was very anticlimactic. 

I can't go home again, either, PART 2

Funny where my mind went last time. I've been a shadow of myself lately, and that concerns me, but I have had this urge to write.

"The Last Black Man in San Francisco" is sure to fuel even more hate for us "invaders" even though I doubt most of the tech hating isolationists using it as an excuse to hate anything and everything that isn't ensconced in their own gilded memory will actually go out and see it. They just want to talk about how terrible it is that "Those People" have destroyed "their city" and in my experience, people who are xenophobic by nature don't make an effort to actually see movies made by black people while they are still in the original theatrical release. Not that distributors make it easy for anyone to see a movie made by black people even in 2019. It really doesn't seem to matter how many "Moonlight"s get made, you still need to go to Palo Alto to see "The Last Black Man in San Francisco"

Try being a Huges Brothers fan in Howell, Michigan in the 90's. You notice these things. I'm surprised how little it's changed. It doesn't seem to matter how many hits and Oscar Darlings are made by black folks these days, you still have to have the reflexes of a sniper to actually catch one on the big screen in theatres.

Yes. I'm a white girl, so I guess I don't have the authority to speak on this. Except for being a Hughes Brothers fan in Howell Michigan in the 90s. You couldn't even see a Spike Lee Joint in Livingston County.

I've lived in this apartment almost 8 years.

Jesus, I'm old.

I can't go home again, either.

Lately I have been struggling with agoraphobia. I haven't wanted to go anywhere outside my apartment, car, and work. I keep making excuses, but it's getting really, really, bad. I am at the point where just going to the beach, which I used to do daily, seems like an insurmountable task.

I used to have nightmares about having agoraphobia. I guess they were premonitions.

There was a time that I actually longed to travel, and then the fear of traveling set in, and it got worse, and worse, and now, it's reaching it's conclusion. I don't want to leave the house. I don't even want to spend time in the yard.

I dream of buying a house, but TSLA crashing from $370 to $180 ended that dream.

I almost bought one last winter in Prunedale. I even started to buy furniture for it, and then I chickened out. It was a long commute, but the house would have been mine. It had wonderful vintage 70's tile. Some flipper is probably going to buy it and tear it all out and replace it with barn wood laminate and quartz.

If a flipped A frame in Prundale goes up in flames in the next couple of years, they might as well come get me.

Who am I kidding? I'm not going to drive to Salinas just to commit arson. I can barely leave the house.

It would have actually been a good decision financially, even if I thought it was a folly at the time. I didn't know my net worth would be halved 4 months later. I should have followed my heart on this one. If I had cashed out and bought that house, I would have had to cash out almost all my TSLA, which was hovering near $400 a share. Now it's around $200, and I still live in a rat infested fire trap.

I could be living in my OWN termite infested fire trap instead!

Rush Hour Fairy

A tiny green woman with huge bug eyes was buzzing around my car with her little dragonfly wings as I blasted the 80's nostalgia station in rush hour traffic on 280 North from Palo Alto to San Francisco. She doesn't show up unless she has something important to say, and I knew why she was there.

She plunked herself right down in the middle of the dashboard and had a seat. She usually doesn't sit down, but I guess even mythical beings or creatures from other dimensions or whatever you want to call her get older. I could tell she liked the car. You wouldn't think fairies would be materialistic, but mine has a thing for cars, she always has.

Luckily she didn't take her full corporial form this time, which was considerate, I'm pretty sure even with traffic going slowly she would be pretty distracting, especially her penchant for wearing transparent dresses. That would keep her out of the G-rated movies that usually portray fairies. She's more of a Pan's Labyrinth type fairy. That movie freaked me out because I always knew she was real, I kept trying to forget she was real. I told myself that the little woman with bug eyes and a woman's body was just a mayfly, that I only thought it was a fairy because I was a little girl.

Until she showed up again.

Dr. Barbie or How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Doll #unapologetic #Barbie

I wasn't allowed to have a Barbie as a kid. My Mom told me that my Dad thought they were too sexy for little girls to play with. It wasn't a big deal because I never really wanted one. I was more of a stuffed animal kind of girl. My friend Katie had mountains of them, but the thing that was really special about Barbie was getting to play with them with Katie. For my own doll collection, I liked My Little Pony better.

That I wasn't allowed to have a barbie says a lot about where my life was headed. Girls who have parents that are anti-barbie tend to belong to a special class. If you grew up in a barbie free house, more than likely your parents were both well educated, and your mom worked. Your house was probably gun free as well. You were read to a lot and read a lot. You were a little odd in school. You probably became a punk who spent time on student council. Yes, you know who I mean. Smart, weird, outsider kids. The kind of kid who goes to art school.

Barbie is not very popular in art School. I've seen women with eating disorders rant about what a bad role model she is. I read weird depressing poems about barbies with melted feet from fire sales in what passed for an English class. I saw a Chicken wire and paper mache' barbie scaled up to human size to show how unrealistic she was. In art school, Barbie was an object to be reviled, an evil pop culture icon made by little girls in the Philippines who couldn't afford one for themselves, a symbol of an unrealistic body image forced on young girls here, a magnifier all things socially, culturally and economically wrong with America. Looking back, I wonder if the anti Barbie bias had anything to do with our proximity to Mattel's smaller arch rival, Hasbro, who recruited on campus.

My world after graduation was not kind to barbie either. I lived with my then boyfriend in Ithaca, New York. They hated barbie there, too. In Ithaca, parents were liberal and idealistic, children played with non gender specified, educational, sweatshop free, organic toys. The same people never noticed that the "handmade in America" store where I worked didn't pay a living wage or offer me affordable health care.

I didn't find a lot of friends of barbie in her home state of California either. Artists in general, particularly female ones, tend to not like Barbie. Perhaps its just part of the cannon at this point. Burning Man had something called "Barbie Death Camp," how original, I saw it, it was even more lame than it sounds.

I'm pretty sure that most of my adult life I've never heard one kind word about Barbie, I began to feel sorry for her. What had she done wrong, really? She couldn't help the way she looked, or where she came from, and she couldn't speak for herself. Of course she has weird proportions, I thought, she's only a doll, its not like raggedy ann looks like a real little girl, either.

I was nearly thirty before Barbie became relevant to my life. All my life I had been taught that Barbie, was a horrible, superficial sexist toy, but I had no experience with her personally, so I tried to keep an open mind. Until I worked with inner city kids. If this were an essay I had been assigned to read in college, this is the part where I would talk about how wrong it was for little African American girls with kinky hair to have Barbie as a role model, but this is my life, a real life where things are not black and white. They're pink.

The little girls I worked with don't have ideal lives to say the least. They grew up in a world where shootings are as familiar as Snow Days were to me. These little girls don't really trust outsiders, but for some reason, they trusted me. One of the things that opened them up to me was my long, blond hair. It was a BIG deal. From the beginning the girls I taught asked me if they could touch it, they begged me to let them comb it, they pleaded with me to let them braid it. They would pull back my hair back to show their friends and exclaim with wonder, "see, it's real!" When they were very, very, good and we had time, I did let them "do" my hair, much to the shock and horror of my co workers, who thought I was crazy to trust the little girls with my long hair. My long, blond, hair, Barbie hair. Even with my "realistic proportions" I looked like someone they already knew, someone they trusted, someone they admired, someone with long blond hair and blue eyes. After being told my whole life how terrible Barbie was, I was Barbie. That's how I stopped worrying and learned to love the doll.

One year for Christmas, my in laws gave me a barbie that they found on clearance for $4 at Big Lots as a gag gift. It's one of those new barbies where her proportions are more "realistic" unlike the top heavy barbies my friends had when I was a kid, shes about a b cup and has wide hips, and dare I say it, a big butt. It's calld "Street Styles Barbie" and has streaks of darker blond hair. She is wearing a miniskirt, chunky platform heels and a striped belly shirt. I have the same outfit, but my shoes are black. It really looks eerily like me.

Now I wonder how being told my whole life that a blue eyed, blond haired, doll that looked a lot like me was wrong had affected me. It seemed backwards of all the barbie criticism. Had I inadvertently developed a poor self image from all the well meaning people trying to save me? What else do I have in common with her? Maybe the people who scale her up to 6 feet are wrong, maybe she's only 5'3" and the heels help her feel confident, and reach the top shelf. Maybe she has the great body from riding her bike instead of taking the car. Maybe she looks that way because she realized she needed to take better care of her body since she's a role model. People say she's too thin, people say her boobs are too big. Maybe she works out because it helps her deal with the stress in her life. Maybe she got the boobs from her dad's mom, who used to take her shopping all the time when she was little. Maybe she got the blond hair from her other grandmother. Did she become a model after her mom sent her to modeling school because she thought she had low self esteem and bad posture? Maybe she always feels just a little out of place, a little misunderstood because of the way she looks, or how she talks, or how she moves. Maybe she doesn't feel graceful with those stiff legs and arms. Why has she had so many careers? She has a lot of clothes, and she loves to shop, maybe she finds them on clearance like I do. Maybe she goes shopping to clear her head, not buying much, walking around looking at pretty things, thinking about how they are made, getting ideas for something creative later on. Maybe she has a lot of clothes she made herself. Maybe she has so many clothes because that's how she expresses herself, or maybe she cant decide what to wear because after all that criticism she's uncomfortable with her body. Maybe people underestimate her. Maybe she's just as self conscious as the rest of us.

Barbie has good reason to concerned, she's getting older. Newer, younger, hipper dolls are on the scene now. After all her changing with the times, she can't keep up anymore. Some big headed, weird looking, ethnically ambiguous dolls called "Bratz" are taking her place. Barbie is becoming kitsch. Kitsch isn't a bad thing really, but its not what little girls want. I wonder if in 10 years someone at RISD will build a life size "bratz" doll, proclaiming no woman could stand up with a head that big. The first little girls who thought I was barbie are older now. I still get compared to her, but the last girls who did it thought it was funny. Blond Hair and blue eyes aren't cool anymore, they are goofy. Now it's all about hip hop and spinners and platinum. But that too will pass. When you are little time goes by so slowly, but watching from the other side it goes by so fast. There will always be little girls and there will always be dolls, and they will always outgrow them one day. Someone is always going to feel weird and good intentions will always have unintended consequences. What is beautiful to one person will be always be odd to someone else. And as we grow up, we realize that things aren't black and white, and they aren't even shades of gray, nothing is ever as simple as it seems and nothing is ever as bad as it seems. No one is ever exactly who they seem because they are always growing and always changing. No one is ever a completely new person either, but we can change our clothes and change our hair and try new things we grow and hopefully keep getting better. When we grow up, we don't need the dolls because we can do all the things we once imagined the dolls could do. So why not be idealized? Why not have fun? Why not play? Love the doll, be the doll. Not the inanimate object, but who she was in your imagination.

Tesla Diss

I don't usually write about my work on my blog, but in this case it links into my activism, which was inevitable, my work has also cut into my activism substantially just due to time constraints. I figure that's OK since, you know, I build electric cars.

The disclaimer is that while I am an employee of Tesla Motors, but I am not in any way part of the media team and therefore must state that I am not speaking as a representative of Tesla Motors. This blog is my personal blog and my personal opinion and does not necessarily represent that of my employer.

The Major Party Candidate *Tesla Diss* made me do some web surfing that landed me on a terrible Detroit News article I am NOT going to link to, however, interestingly enough, the top commenters were Film Maker Chris Paine and activist Dave Rauschkolb, founder of Hands Across the Sand. I started reading Dave Rauschkolb's comment before I realized who he was, and he talked about being one of the S reservation holders, then when I realized who he was, I started to tear up. I get that emotional about the cars, but when I know the cars are going to be driven by someone I admire?

This is something I think about a lot making these cars, part is just a way to mentally pass time doing a repetitive but exacting and very mentally and physically taxing task. Who will this one go to? Since Dave Raushkolb said he was expecting delivery this month, the odds are just over 99% that one of the major engine* components was built by yours truly.

OH. MY. GOD.

*it's not an engine, it's a linear induction motor, but everyone keeps calling it an engine because it's in a car.