My friend S said that she wanted to live to be a thousand years old, because she wanted to see everything and know everything to come. That's why she's so beautiful, you know, that and she's constantly exploring and trying to convince me why i should finally let myself go and fall in love with San Francisco. It's all about a lack of boundaries, about poets working with biochemistry projects and women unafraid of working with welding machines.

S. told me not to go to one of the bike shops here, because on seeing her, they treated her as they saw her. "I hate people who think of information as power. I asked them for a simple thing and they won't even bother to say why or how to do it. They don't like to share how to do things there. It's really lame." She pointed us to a better place to go. I'm still intimidated by bicycle shops though, by all the gears and the fetishization of expensive equipment. But at least now I know the right people to talk to.

Well, I have fallen in love with this place, S. It snuck up on my very quickly the past few months. Maybe it's the ideas, all these dreamy ideas. I'm just meeting so many interesting people, and it's nice not to feel out of place for being someone constantly exploring, making things for the sake of making them.

There were some friends visiting from Europe a few weeks ago--well there should be qualifiers. Is there a time when someone isn't visiting this town from any random place? Well, they were nagging me to get a new bag, my bag was hurting my back, my laptop was too heavy, and thankfully they weren't after me this time for working too much. When you're passionate about anything you do, how can you not get into it? It just comes naturally. There are just moments where you have to take a deep breath, slow down, but you have to really care about what you are doing.

Well after this gentle nagging, I got a new backpack, made from the same company who'd made my first good backpack I bought almost 10 years ago in New York. Back then I had been obsessed with other silly things, but was seeking something of quality that would look cool, and I wasn't at the point where I was able to do a lot of things alone. I was still very much concerned with going to concerts with friends, although the process had already begun where I'd go wandering alone through Brooklyn and get emotional phone calls from my friends asking me "Where are you?" Buying the first back pack in Chinatown, the people I was with pointed me in the right direction, and it was a good buy.

That backpack lasted through many years through several different countries, time zones and climates. It was hard for me to let it go but it was not one of the things I brought back with me to the States when I returned from Berlin. I wanted to, but someone pointed out that it was ratty and about to pass out. I had been kicking it underneath plane seats on trips to Egypt, put it next to my bed on overnight trains to Poland, and filled it with bathing suits, work computers, paintings--but it was time for this backpack to go.

So I went to the same store but now here in the Bay area, and I bought a new backpack. The company's very famous for good quality but also very clever. They got to me this way: written along the side is the motto NEVER STOP EXPLORING. What kind of marketing ploy that was in whatever presentation someone gave, well it worked. Are you happy now?

And people in the Bay Area never stop exploring. They're poking their noses into everything, like beer.

You know, I had never thought seriously about how to make beer before. In Germany I was very into these historical museums, they call them Freilichtmuseums, showing how people lived in the past, and why things today are the way they are. I sat this weekend and learned how beer was made; there's something incredible wonderful about a tactile experience, where you hold the ingredients in your hands instead of reading about it.

It is pretty magical, making beer. There aren't so many ingredients to doing it, and it's all about paying careful attention to deadlines and temperatures and making sure things are clean and efficiently done. It's dizzying that so many different variations can be made from basically the same elements.

I had never known what hopps were, that they are crushed flowers used to preserve things, and they make beer bitter, and British colonialism are what have made India Pale Ale and Guiness what they are today. Heavy taxes on various elements of the recipe made people skimp on other portions of the recipe and voila, there you are, something that becomes entrench in tradition. Long sea voyages to India made English brewers ad excessive amounts of flowers to their stews, so that's why india pale ale tastes the way it does today. Guiness was created at the beginning purely to avoid an English barley tax, and so was Scottish beer. And that's why things are the way they are today!

It was never my expectation to be sitting outside watching men joke about modifying turkey roasters and using workarounds to make tools to brew beer, but there I was, and they instilled a very nice value in me that I had been suspecting all along. Tools don't need to be prepackaged, and you can make a lot of things that you need by fiddling around with what you already have, especially if you have some time when you don't have the money.

The men answered all of my naive questions patiently with the happiness that comes from sharing knowledge with a newbie. Sadly there were not so many women answering questions there, although the men told me that originally it was women who did all the brewing until the monks stepped in and took it away. Viking women cooked the stuff in big ceramic pots before the Christians came along and told them they were heretics for worshipping their goddesses. Did I ever know that it takes a year to make mead from scratch?

This is what fermentation is when looked at up close in the reality of boiling bubbles of water. I had read about glycolisis in school, and even now regret not deciding to take that genetics class, because I was so wrapped up in things that were not related to what was really important, which is learning for the sake of learning. When I was younger biology as something you studied so that you could become a doctor, that was everyone's understanding. I regret not taking those extra steps. It was an opportunity. But you know, there's still time to pursue that when I'm older, in a kind of reverse fashion, as opposed to the biologist who decides to take up art later on.

Never stop thinking and asking questions and keep in movement. And please don't indulge in too much good beer when you're not really that alcohol tolerant, especially on a somewhat sunny day when there's a good bbq going on. You'll get really drunk and say something charmingly embarrassing, even if you do have a good time.

this reminds me a lot of the little magic shops in Washington heights, except that this is Mexican and those were Dominican.

All those Catholic pagan love potions, charms and statues... so deadly... it certainly makes for a much more mystical experience.

I love how I find these little treasures posted. All those moments I missed are there again.

I've gotten into the habit of drawing again. When I drew this I was staring at Virgin Mary candles lit up, eating fresh-baked pizza dripping with blue cheese and roasted apples, talking to many different people that night. I like how people get into very easy, rolling conversations here, no barriers. There were many life stories. It just takes so much less time to get to that point here.

There was a woman talking about her childhood in the South, about wandering through cypress trees with Spanish moss and pretty little towns disappearing under traffic lights and suburbs. There was a man after a big change speaking in exclamation points: "I'm still young! But the world is small. Everyone knows each other! Yes! I'm so happy I made this change!" and the bartender speaking in loud rollicking English accented with Russian recounting a bar fight the other night.

It was the night when everyone liked to tell me their hopes. I was especially jealous of a young man about to go travelling for the first time and move to another country; somehow, even though I am still touched by new things, nothing is quite the same as being really young and flying across an ocean for the first time. I wish I could forget a few of the things I have seen that are so wonderful, so that i could see them again for the first time.

Lately the weather has changed...the sky's gone out! The wildflowers blot out the sun and we're plunged into an ashen sky, something that the dinosaurs would feel. I like the mood though, to go from boiling heat into a nuclear winter. We went outside and drew on the chalkboard. It's infectious, this drawing. People called out to me on the street, harmless people, but quite strange. The colors were pale and rubbing on my fingers--I keep meaning to tear myself away from the computer and paint again, get my fingers wet with pigment, but it's never so.

sometimes when you're walking and then something catches you in the corner of the eye; no, no, it was probably a coincidence. How many people have that chin, that way of moving. In San Francisco there are so many waves of women that come into the city that have a certain tone of voice.

How many really striking woman are there that look so much like someone else? I think I often write it down to a mistaken accident though when it is probably the real thing, and that makes it even more uncomfortable, because then there are two people who are consciously ignoring each other as the world is a very small place and when someone is that important to you you do not forget them.

It's so hard to see what insecurities people harbor around each other until years later. Did she know that she made you feel unsure of yourself? Probably she didn't, because she was thinking about how you unsettled her and made her question so many things about herself, so much so that it blotted out all possibilities of reconciliation years later.

There are these angry letters or curt exchanges years later, and it takes a few years after travelling over thousands of miles and then you lean back and say, "Ah, I understand." There's so much pressure to be great, and how can a young woman not compare herself to everyone around her and then react in any way but anger?

There are so many people who look like other people here in San Francisco, because it is one of those physical melting pots. Walking around a provincial town in southern Germany, it was very easy to stand out with my dark hair. Or sitting in a coffee shop in Poland, it was very easy for the many faces and bodies to melt into each other, and then look up in surprise when an African man materialized out of a sea of blonde dredlocks. Of course it's now the fashion for girls in northern Europe to dye their hair black or lay in tanning salons, watch MTV Shakira videos and then I'd blink my eyes and get the momentary illusion that I was in some kind of Latin America country with medieval castle background sets.