Washington State’s Supreme Court has held, in a 5-4 decision, that banning same-sex couples from marrying is constitutional.
The plurality opinion, concurrences and dissents are found on the Washington Courts site. Despite the depressing final outcome that has left me feeling sick to my stomach, the dissents are a joy to read.
When I moved to the Bay Area last month, I knew that I’d have a real commute again (ok, so it’s just thirty minutes, but the past four years my commute was less than half that), but I assumed that Californians, stereotyped as laidback and easy-going, would be polite, unaggressive and defensive drivers. Boy, was I wrong. In just about any other environment around here the stereotype still holds–in general I find local folk really open and friendly–but I don’t think I’ve seen worse or selfish drivers since I left Boston twenty years ago. And it’s possibly worse here because of all the freeways. On the other hand, three- and four-way stops are ubiquitious in Northern California; depending on fairness and taking turns, overall they work really well, with only rare exceptions noted so far (like the jerk in the BMW convertible last night as I was driving home, who stuck to the tail of the car in front of him rather than waiting his turn at the stop sign).
But there are other behaviors I’m encountering on a regular basis that frustrate me much more. First, other than the multi-way stops noted above, drivers here do not readily yield the right-of-way; merging onto or off a freeway is a frightening proposition when everyone believes that the rule of the road is to permit no one to merge in front at any cost. Then there’s the complete lack of signalling turns or lane changes, even on the busiest freeways and amidst the heaviest traffic; I’m beginning to think that San Franciscans believe the earth’s temperature increases a degree every time a turn signal is activated, so assiduously do they avoid their use.
And since driving in so much traffic, at freeway speeds, among all these aggressive, secretive drivers isn’t exhilirating enough, there’s the added excitement of never knowing what’s going to fall off someone’s car or truck, or when. I first heard of this phenomenon in a KQED radio piece my very first day commuting to work, and thought it amusing in its apparent exaggeration. Then the next day alone I heard traffic reports about two separate incidents of ladders having fallen from trucks, and a third in which a sofa was blocking traffic. If anything, the piece had been a model of understatement. Earlier this week there were reports even of a washing machine that had fallen onto the freeway. It’s like a high-speed obstacle course here; praise Lara Croft, at least all that videogaming over the years has amounted to something, giving me the quick reaction time and well-tuned hand-eye coordination necessary to survive on these Donkey Kong highways.
Even my boss has gotten into the act. This past week he’s been attending the Euroscience Open Forum in Munich. While there he’s been providing daily updates and photos via Livejournal and Flickr that we’ve been transferring to a template–Our Mann in Munich–on the UCSF main site. I think it’s added a nice personal and more informal touch to the site.
When I came here for my interview in May, I discovered that my blogging already was known to the staff and my interview panel. At the time I assumed that Julie, the lead web developer on my team and an LJer herself, had discovered it and spread the word. In fact, it was my boss-to-be, Jeff, who had found the blog (admittedly, I noted in my cover letter that I blog, though without mentioning the URL, as it seemed to have some relevance to the position). It’s nice to be in an environment where this activity turns out to be an asset rather than a potential liability (not that there were any overt issues with my blogging when I worked for the State Department, and I wasn’t generally blogging about work anyway, but I did wonder if eventually Department leadership might clamp down on employee blogging, just as they prohibit or monitor other activities by employees, even off-the-job).
Three weeks into July–and a month since all the work there was completed–and my condo in Arlington hasn’t yet been rented. The property management company contacted me today to tell me that they’ve shown it a few times, and everyone really raves about how much space there is and how nice it looks, but no one is expressing interest in actually leasing it. According to the management company, not being within easy walking distance to a Metro station (even though there are buses every six minutes that get you to the Metro in another six) is the primary reason the condo isn’t renting. I’m starting to wonder if I chose the right management company; no other owner has ever had any trouble selling or renting a unit in our building, one of the most desirable in south Arlington.
Anyway, they want to lower the asking rent by $150, and I’ve agreed, though I already had gone a couple hundred dollars lower than other similar units in the building have rented for. At this point, though, I really need to get the place rented, even if the monthly income won’t completely cover the mortgage payment.
Yesterday Jeff and I traded the cold and fog of Daly City for the heat and sunshine of Napa Valley, taking along Jeff’s mom, his mom’s sister from Concord, and his mom’s brother and nephew from the Philippines for an afternoon of wine tasting and sightseeing. By the time we drove to Concord in the East Bay to pick up Jeff’s aunt and then had lunch at Napa Town Center (at Piccolino’s Italian Cafe), we only had time for a single tasting (we shared two flights, a “classic” and a “reserve”) at Artesa Winery, with its interesting architecture (the tasting and event rooms are built into a hillside) and art collection, and a quick stop to see the faux chateau at Domaine Carneros.
Afterwards, we drove to San Pablo to drop off Jeff’s uncle and cousin at the home of a friend and classmate of his uncle’s from their small town in the Philippines. We thought we’d just drop them off around 6:00 and then head on home, but we hadn’t counted on Filipino hospitality which, I was told again and again that night, required that we stay for a meal. It was closer to 8:30 or 9:00 by the time we finally left. Both Jeff and I were tired and a little annoyed at the unexpected delay (having gotten up early that morning to do the drive to Napa, we knew we’d have to get up early again on Sunday for the AIDS Walk), but the hospitality was quite gracious and the family extremely friendly and engaging. The events of the past week had left us all a little emotionally drained and raw, but even with the extenuating circumstances I’m embarrassed that my desire just to go home was more apparent than I’d have preferred.
Also disappointing was that both cameras’ batteries were nearly exhausted, and the Nikon finally stopped taking photos after just a dozen or so, with each of those even taking 30-40 seconds to focus and save to disk. Some photos I took didn’t get saved at all. It’s strange; in the past my cameras have gone months and months on a single charge, so I’d gotten out of the habit of checking them. But oddly all of my battery-operated devices seem to lose their charge much more rapidly now than they did back in Virginia. My cellphone, which used to go for a week or two between charges, for example, now discharges at least daily; the Pocket PC seems to need charging much more often; and the iPod really has never been able to keep a charge, so I can’t tell if it’s any worse here. It seems on the surface unlikely, but is it possible that there’s something different about the climate or the environment here that would affect a battery’s ability to keep a charge?
This coming Sunday, Jeff and I are participating in the 10K San Francisco AIDS Walk in Golden Gate Park with some of my UCSF colleagues; we just did the one in DC less than a year ago, so I’m not aggressively hitting up anyone for donations. If you are inclined to donate via my participation anyway, you can do so online.
Julie will be videotaping the walk along the way, and sometime later this month we’ll edit and post a multimedia piece about the walk on the UCSF web site.
No, we weren’t eaten by rabid prairie dogs in Wyoming nor abducted by aliens as we drove through Nevada, but arrived safely in California on Father’s Day, Sunday, June 18. Since then we’ve been busy settling in, and we haven’t had Internet access at home until yesterday, when our DSL service finally started. Later I’ll have more to say about the experience of moving, the five-day cross-country drive, living in Daly City, and my new job at UCSF, but there’s an event that has recently and suddenly overtaken our lives and overshadowed all these other issues. Tragically, Jeff’s father died yesterday.
As Jeff notes, his father had been ill only a short time, beginning with flu-like symptoms in late May that eventually led to an interim (albeit wrong) diagnosis of pneumonia. My first day of work at UCSF he entered the hospital, where his rapid deterioration and a battery of tests led finally to a conclusive diagnosis–only three days ago, on July 4th–of very advanced lung cancer. The prognosis was grim, with the doctors suggesting that he would live no more than a few days with no intervention, and not much longer even with treatment.
By that same evening, his condition had worsened sufficiently to require–at his request–that he be placed on a ventilator. By the next day it was clear that even this stopgap measure had come too late, and he and his family made the agonizing decision to have the ventilator removed on Thursday.
I only met Jeff’s father for the first time in October 2004, and on that occasion he was polite but very reserved. I didn’t see him again until May of this year, when Jeff and I came out here for my interview with UCSF. On that trip, though, I felt that he and I really connected, due at least partly to my appreciation of and interest in the architectural and structural details of the house he would be renting us–he’s an architect, and though he hadn’t designed or built the house, he’d put a lot of himself into it. It seemed to surprise and please him that I was interested in it, and ready to help maintain it.
And our connection was never stronger or clearer than over these past several days. He welcomed me fully into his hospital room as part of his family and took my hand, even despite having just learned that he was dying. Tuesday evening, when we weren’t sure he’d live through the night, Jeff and I stood vigil over him together. On Wednesday, though he wasn’t able to talk, he was again conscious and could gesture. I arrived late that day, and when I was finally able to see him in the ICU, he waved frantically to bring me over to him whereupon he grasped my hand and held it a long while; I told him I’d take care of Jeff and Jeff’s mother, and he nodded his head.
Yesterday I left work early to be with Jeff and his family when the life support systems were turned off. I arrived just a few moments before the respiratory specialist, and joined Jeff in his father’s room. Together we watched while his father was sedated and made comfortable, and while the ventilator was removed, and together we held his hand and stroked his brow while he peacefully and quickly passed from life to death.
It’s been a heartbreaking experience, and I’ve found myself grieving not just for the loss of Jeff’s father, but to some degree reliving my own father’s death from just three years ago. And along with the grief I find myself angry at the unfairness of Jeff losing his father so suddenly and so young, but angry too that I won’t now have the chance to get to know him better, or be able to call him “Dad.”
Irreligious as I am, and my inner cynic notwithstanding, I can’t help but have moments of suspicion that somehow we truly were meant to be here now; as my boss noted, there’s almost something about life in California–or San Francisco, more specifically–that can make almost anyone start to feel that way. So many things fell into place so quickly and so readily to bring us to this place at this point in time, where we were able to visit with Jeff’s father in the few short weeks before his death, and to support his mother and aunts through this difficult period. At other times I know I’ve railed about the unfairness of coincidence and circumstance–the terrible misunderstanding that kept my mother and sister from my father’s bedside at his time of death, for example–but for now there’s almost something comforting about feeling that some greater purpose was served by the timing of our move to California.
On the positive side, we have a confirmed moving company and pickup date for our household effects. I also have identified a property management company to handle the rental of the condo after we’re gone (though I still have a massive amount of work to do in terms of getting carpet and a dishwasher installed, and the condo painted). And last Tuesday my sister and brother-in-law filled a 17-foot U-Haul truck with furniture and miscellaneous items that we’ve given them in lieu of taking with us to California.
Not all is rosy, however, and the (hidden) costs for the move continue to mount. Yesterday I contacted GEICO–with whom I’ve had my auto insurance for more than ten years–to get an updated quote based on the California address. We may not be able to afford to have a car in California, it turns out, as at first they said our premium–around $850 every six months in Virginia–would go up to $3,000 every six months in the Bay Area. When I protested (and pointed out that they incorrectly showed Jeff as having had his driver’s license for only 1 year instead of the actual length of 13 continuous years), they bumped it down to $1,300 every six months, still an increase of more than 50% over our current premium.
I told them not to process the change of address, since we haven’t yet moved, and now I’m on the hunt for new insurance. Progressive so far is coming out ahead, at just under $1,000. The other usual names–State Farm, Allstate, Farmer’s–are coming out about the same as GEICO’s revised figure. And while I have my homeowner’s insurance with State Farm, I’ve had a bad experience with their auto insurance: I was insured with them from 1987 through 1994, with a perfect driving record and no claims. Then I applied for renter’s insurance and when they discovered that I had a roommate–who had his own car and insurance and never drove mine–they cancelled my car insurance. When I asked why, they said that my roommate might drive my car, and they considered him an unacceptable risk–he’d been in two accidents that weren’t even his fault (in both cases, in fact, the other driver had actually been charged)–so they wouldn’t insure me either.
And for some inexplicable reason, in the last couple of days Verizon apparently cancelled all the services on our home phone except basic local service–we hadn’t even contacted them yet about changing or moving our account, so I’m completely at a loss to know why. Voice mail, caller ID, call waiting, etc. all stopped working; they’ve now reset our voicemail, but all our stored messages–incoming and outgoing–were gone. They haven’t been able to explain why this happened, and my online account information now shows that I have none of those services installed on my account (last night it showed the correct information, even though the services didn’t work, but today it shows none of the features I’ve been paying for the past nine years).
On Wednesday we had our first in-home estimate for the move. After walking through the condo, making ticks on his PocketPC while I noted which items were being moved and which weren’t, the representative from the moving company connected wirelessly to his small printer and printed out an estimate. Yikes! 5,100 pounds to move at a cost of around $5,000 to do so.
I asked why the weight seemed so high, since we’re not taking much furniture with us; 5,000 pounds is at the upper end of what (according to the Internet) the full contents of a 2-bedroom apartment might run. “Books,” he replied. “I noted a lot of boxes of books, and shelves still to be packed, and books are heavy.” This was after we’d already donated 1,000 or more books to the library.
The estimate would be a little high, of course–it’s provided as a “Guaranteed Not-To-Exceed” estimate, meaning we wouldn’t pay any more than that if the actual weight turned out to be more than 5,100 pounds, but we would pay less if the actual weight turned out to be less–but $5,000 just to move our few remaining belongings came as quite a shock; I think I was expecting no more than half to three-fifths that amount.
So Jeff and I hit the books again, going back through the boxes for another, harder-assed culling. We donated another six or seven bags of books to the library, and have another twenty or so bags still to deliver. We probably reduced our remaining books by an additional third; and have decided to get rid of some other things, too (like the breadmaker, vacuum cleaner, humidifier, and now that I think about it, I’ll probably try to get rid of the microwave, too, as there’s already a small one at the Daly City house) in order to reduce the weight even further.
In the meantime, Jeff and I both separately started to have conversations or do research about using the USPS’s Media Mail rates to mail our books to ourselves. Turns out that one can mail a 50-pound box of books (and/or videotapes, DVDs or computer media) for about $20, which is about half the per-pound cost of transportation with the rest of our belongings. So we’ll probably send any remaining boxes of books that way right before we leave.
One month ago today, April 26, Jeff and I landed at London’s Gatwick Airport. One month from today, June 26, I’ll start my new job in San Francisco.