My hellish and delightful morning in San Francisco

I got up at 6am on a Saturday morning to drive from Sacramento to San Francisco to volunteer as a mentor at a hackathon for high school girls.

I was pleased that I didn’t run into traffic, making it to the city before 9am. But that’s when the obstacles started coming at me. The first street I needed to turn on after getting off the Bay Bridge was closed. I still managed to drive to where the inexpensive parking garage I’d found online was, but didn’t see an entrance. Circling the block was a nightmare because of all the one way streets and random street closures and stop lights inexplicably being out.

I pulled over haphazardly with my car’s butt sticking out because my heart was hammering in my chest and I was struggling to stay calm. All the stimulus of the city can freak me out.

I looked up the parking garage on Yelp. Everyone said finding it by its tiny sign was nearly impossible. I thought I’d give up and pay $28 rather than $12 to park close to where I needed to be and make it easy. So I put that parking garage in my GPS. When I pulled back out, I didn’t notice the angle I was taking because I was focusing on not getting rear-ended, and the front of my car scraped against the curb. That did nothing to calm my nerves, and it was still confusing as hell to find the easy garage!

So I said screw it. I’d go back to the cheap one. And this time I did find it. But I had to pee like a racehorse, which was a disaster because I was still a half mile walk from where I needed to be and basically everything in the Financial District is closed on a Saturday morning.

I ran hopefully up to a couple coffee shops and rattled their locked doors dejectedly before finding an open Starbucks. They had bathrooms! But only one was open. The men’s. And it smelled like an old man had emptied his ass in there.

I wanted to cry but I hung in there and used it. When I looked in the mirror, I saw that I appeared just as distraught as I felt, my hair askance and frizzy, making me look like I’d crawled out of a drain. I held my nose and tried to get it together and focus on the positive, like not having peed my pants.

Finally, I walked to where the hackathon was taking place. It was caddy corner to Valentino, just off of Market. I pulled on the door.

Locked.

What?! I almost laughed. It was just too ridiculous. I walked around the block while waiting for a text response from the organizer. A flock of pigeons was on the sidewalk. Someone walked behind them and they flew off — right at me. I yelped in shock and looked to the people walking by for support. They remained stoic.

I went on the website for the hackathon. Guess what?

I was three weeks early.

The initial email I got about the event had the wrong date, and I never double-checked with the hackathon website!

The absolute worst, right?

There are a lot of things I didn’t mention. I could leave it at this, and make you think the morning was a colossal nightmare. End of story. But that’s not true. Life is complicated. Where we place our attention shapes our realities.

When I was driving to San Francisco, I was swept away by hot air balloons sitting in the sky against the background of mountains with fields and trees dotting the earth below them.

In San Francisco, when I surfaced from the parking garage in a fancy office building and was confused, the security guard kindly took me outside to explain how to get back in the building and get my car.

When I was looking for the hackathon, I was on the phone with my good friend. I looked up and sucked in my breath at one point and said, “I feel like I’m in lower Manhattan, right by NYU.” His response? “I know exactly where you are.” I loved that.

I told him to hold on, I had to follow the sound of opera. I found a man next to Valentino, singing his heart out and it was beautiful. I bought his CD for $10 and will listen to it often.

On the drive home, I listened to Malcolm Gladwell’s podcast Revisionist History, and was enthralled. I learned so much about satire (it’s best when it’s courageous, instead of toothless like it often is these days) and generous orthodoxy (I cried at the love a longtime Mennonite leader had for his son, who was gay, especially when I learned the leader officiated his son’s marriage ceremony, even when it meant being stripped of his credentials as a pastor).

At one point I saw a flock of peacocks grazing in a small field on the side of the freeway. At another point, I saw over a hundred motorcyclists riding in a pack. I’d never seen anything like it.

I could tell the story of my morning in a negative way. I could tell it in a positive way. But it’s really whatever I make of it, isn’t it? It’s the narrative I craft about my own life that I play in my head and base my decisions off of.

It’s like Alan Watts says:

Reality is only a Rorschach ink-blot, you know.