Thats right blog post #50- you have now read, I have now written and my parents have now spell checked 50 of these. Well, I had a nice weekend and I hope you all did too. For me a good weekend is one where I get everything done that I hoped to get done and still had some time left over for fun stuff like painting my nails or writing blog posts.
So far everything is going well, school’s still warming up, hence my nice relaxing weekend - I'm liking my classes for the most part and I’m thinking that this semester will be a bit less stressful simply because of the type and schedule of the classes I have. In two of my classes they moved up the final project, this may not sound like a good thing but it really is, it allows for better time management in the last few weeks of school. In fact I'm realising that even though the work may not be too much for me, it would be super easy to just completely forget about the work for a class, because most of my classes only happen once a week.
So now that I have been in the Bay area for a while, I feel that I can now more accurately make some observations about living here. First off, the people here seem to take something to the extremes, if you're a hipster you a REALLY a hipster. If you're a crazy artist you are REALLY a crazy artist. I think the reason for this is because you will always find other people here who do or believe just about the same thing you do. Somewhere in the several cities in this very small geographical space there will be other people for you to get to know. If you want to be one of those people who tries to eat local, waste nothing and keep your carbon footprint really low, and for that reason you only take a shower once a month and you only wear natural hemp fiber clothes, there are people here who think you are completely sane, and will point out that really cool store that sells cool woven hemp bags to carry your natural produce home in.
Point two would be that because the weather is almost always good and never very extreme, just about everyone has an outdoor hobby. In Seattle it’s rainy and cold for at least half the year; it is a dedicated runner who runs a few miles in the rain and is prepared to do that the next day. In the Bay Area six out of seven days a week are nice, so everyone runs, hikes, is in an outdoor club, gardens or does something outside.
Point three, if the weather is bad its a MAJOR topic of conversation. I think it’s because the weather is always kind of mild, when something out of the ordinary happens people will talk about it for months. No, I'm not kidding, I'm still asked whether I was here when there was all that rain. It was a lot of rain, but come on! The weather’s moved on and so should conversation. The natives seem genuinely shocked by what they think of as exceptional weather. In Seattle some one may comment on the rain, but really only so they can say something to break the ice.
Point four, people dress better here, maybe its because of the nicer weather or simply because the people here take a different attitude to clothes then we do back in Seattle. People look more polished here, moms wear heels while chasing after her kids (or at least fashionable tennis shoes). People have nice fitting coats that are up to current or near current standards. I don't notice this as much on the CCA Oakland campus, maybe because everyones in dirty, semi-dangerous studios all day, but you notice it on the street, and you really notice it on the SF campus. The kids over there are design majors and the majority of their time is spent at desks with paper, computers and exacto knives (the tool that draws more blood than anything else, on both campuses). They can wear dresses and flowing scarves without the danger of getting pulled into a sander.
Point Five, its not like Portland, you can't point out the weirdos. People may be a bit to the extreme but it often doesn't show to the point of staring, when everyone's a bit odd, no one stands out.
With that I think I will sign off, but I will give you two photos I took this past week around the CCA campus.
Here is a gold sewing machine I found sitting on the ground on my way home one night, I have no idea what that is all about.
Here’s a nice photo of some water art on a wall the next day (its made by finding a warm surface, wall, sidewall, whatever, and then taking a plastic water bottle and poking a hole in the cap so that when you squeeze you get a fine stream of water which they use as a drawing tool.)
Thats it for now,by next post we will be back to classes.