This is a generic picture from the Mision SF, where I'm currently lurking in a coffee shop, having my second big ass coffee and white flour pastry meal (why can't I remember how to eat when traveling?). It's almost 70 degrees and was sort of sunny today. I have been wearing too many layers and taking every opportunity to sit outside. It seems that I'm the only one that thinks it's warm. I'm always the only one sitting outside.

The streets are wide, murals on peeling paint walls, and you could mistake your location for williamsburg except for the random encounter with a palm tree and slightly fresher air.

This is a weird visit. Every step is like a test. Every person is being measured and evaluated: are you a friend? is this a friendly sidwalk? are these houses capable of being homes? will that be the bakery where I go to get empanadas or will I stick with the slick safe, capitol hill-esque coffee shop full of thin apples and pale white faces lit from the screen glow.

This morning I got up and took a "Advanced Release" class at ODC, this amazing newly renovated dance common space in the middle of the mission. The room was moderately populated with compact women, all seemingly half a foot shorter than me with limbs they effortlessly controlled and moved in clean systematic body halves and x-pathways. Somehow I ended up always front and center in the most conspicuous place to demonstrate my loose-limbed momentum-drunk flailing. I met two people, differing levels of cool detachedness, who half-heartedly advised me of places to go and see dance. I'm sure it will get easier right? I danced and walked out into the warm air, sweating in my scarf and put on my sunglasses. . . that's right, I said my motherfuckin' sunglasses.

I spent the day working in close proximity to what will be my office, trying to focus on budget writing and prepping for the conference I'm going to this weekend but still got sucked back into Vera stuff. It seems impossible to imagine not having 80 vera-related questions to answer. I can hardly wait, or so I think.

It's weird not knowing more people here. I was lamenting earlier to lance about how I feel so much more at home wandering the streets of new york, finding stuff to do, stuff to get into, ways to amuse myself and people to bump into. This space is so foreign and so strikingly identical to cities I know that it's baffling to feel like such a stranger. It is new new new. it's is whatever i will make of it and it could be a mirror image. can't you see bedford ave? can't you see 2nd ave in belltown? effortless. right?