What I learned on my summer vacation
I am so happy to be back in Seattle, where it is filled with warmth and sunlight and dogs who are experiencing the world as if for the first time. I know that by no reasonable definition can we consider it the first day of summer, and yet — it feels unshakeable that today is it, today is the longest and brightest day of many long and bright days to come.
Cars, apartments, coffeeshops: everyone has their windows open.
Here are some idle things I learned in San Francisco:
- The scooter thing is weird. Weird is a deliberate word: I don’t think there’s anything wrong with the scooters, nor did I consider them some public menace (not that spending three weeks in SoMa is exactly a sample size that can approximate the gestalt of the city!). But they’re weird, you know? (Also, for the record: number of times I was almost hit by a scooter: zero. Number of times I was almost hit by a car: three. [There is something to be said about the niceties of the placidity of your median Seattle driver.])
- Of all the things that I got rusty at whilst working from home, the most interesting (and frustrating) are the mundane ones: the visual chatter of walkers-by in my periphery, the Herculean difficulty of walking to the other end of a long hall while gripping a mug of hot coffee, the twinge of guilt from not being the last person to leave.
- I did not get to explore everything I wanted to (that’s what return trips are for!) but so many things and folks are extremely lovely. I still shudder a little at the implications of being a city wherein it is economically rational for Redis to buy to a billboard ad, but San Francisco definitely passes the uniqueness heuristic.
Here are some things I will be doing later today:
- Ripping myself, slowly and painfully, from Cal Anderson Park where I’m writing this to go to a place with air conditioning and knock out some long-overdue work on Buttondown. (I am so close to finishing a thing that has been in the works for a few months. Abstaining from screenshots is requiring a high level of self-control, metered by the fact that up until very recently it was very ugly.)
- Figuring out (and then, if we’re lucky, successfully executing) how to repot Bertha, my beloved plant. The repotting is a reward for her stubborn insistence on not dying despite me forgetting to get someone to water her while I was away.
- Finally reading the Atlas Guide on email marketing that I ambituously loaded on my iPad for the flight back before instead committing to The Changeling. (I promise that I will keep the Stripe shilling to a minimum here, but the Atlas Guides are very good!)
Summer, summer, summer. There are days I convince myself (and, perhaps, others) that the soul of the Pacific Northwest is in the rain, in the mist and gray that settles the world — the way every building feels like an umbrella, the way your home feels like a blanket. And then there is today — and all of that is true, sure, but I am wearing sandals and drinking cold brew and watching a corgi chase after a frisbee and I cannot think of anything better.
Happy Sunday.
I hope you get to spend some time outside.