How to Deal with the Homeless

Living in San Francisco, homelessness is not just a problem you read about. Every day on my way to work I come face to face with dozens of people living on the street who ask me for help. It's made me think a lot about the way society treats the homeless and what I should do when I'm approached for money. I've been doing some research and have come up with a few simple strategies I thought I'd share.

Human Shield: If you're lucky enough to be walking close to someone, position yourself so that they're in-between you and the bum. It's now their problem to deal with. Once in position, keep your eye on the shield. A clever shield will sometimes pull a counter maneuver on you, abruptly slowing down and veering away when you reach the bum, leaving you in the line of fire.

Cell phone force field: If you're talking on the phone you are surrounded by an invisible force field that allows you to completely block out the world. It would be rude of you to not give the person you're on the phone with your undivided attention, and even ruder for a stranger to try to interrupt you.

1,000 yard stare: You take on the vacant stare of a veteran traumatized by combat. You're too busy looking in the distance for insurgents to notice the spanger.

Confrontation: If you see the same bums everyday this might be the best solution of all. I've not tried it myself but my friend Keri at the breakfast place I go to every morning swears by it. Just walk up and give the bum a piece of your mind. "Look, I work too hard for my money to just give it away to lazy bums. Get a job!". While this may be difficult for some of you to do, consider it a long term investment. Instead of having to deal with the same person every single day you only have to deal with them once.

The crazy: Being crazy sucks, but one side benefit is that people tend to leave you alone. As you approach the bum, he'll be thinking of a way to start a conversation. Beat him to the punch and start one with yourself first. My friend Mac is a master of this technique. I think it's because it allows him to let out some of the crazy he keeps bottled up inside while performing his duties as a sane person.

Primetime of Your Life

One of the dangers associated with my job as a technical analyst is that I feel compelled to graph things that probably shouldn't be graphed. Last month when I turned 28 and rounded up to thirty, I got into a conversation with a coworker about quality of life. I said that my quality of life has been increasing every year and that I didn't see any signs that that would change. "So you're on a linear upward trajectory huh?" asked the coworker. "Not so much linear" I said, reaching for the white board marker. And thus began my meditation on quality of life as represented by a one-dimensional curve. Ironically, right after drawing and labeling the axes - quality of life (QOL) vs. Years - I got busy with work and didn't have time to plot my quality of life. The next morning however, I walked into my cube to find that someone had plotted it for me, with a series of large blue dots. The dots presented a rather grim scenario, starting very high in early childhood and dropping steadily through the years, reaching near zero at fifty, and then slowly coming back up in the seventies and eighties. Who could've done this? Most of the people I work with are at least ten years older than I am, so whoever it was wasn't exactly psyched to be on the planet. Or maybe they were plotting my quality of life? Naw. My coworker and I speculated as to who it might be but produced no good guesses.

Figure 1. Quality of Life (QOL) vs. Years

Several days passed and still I hadn't found time to plot my quality of life. Every time I turned around in my chair the dots would stare accusingly at me, predicting my quality of life if I didn't take time out to examine it. Is that what happened to the person who plotted them?

One by one everyone in the office stopped by my cube and asked me about the dots, including presumably the person who plotted them. I would jokingly explain to them my little project and tell them I had no idea who'd drawn the dots. My boss jokingly said he was on a linear upward trajectory and drew a straight blue line that crisscrossed the downward sloping blue dots. The next morning I found a much more thought out line drawn in black. It showed a peak at 21 (the most commonly cited peak of life), followed by a rugged plateau that began sloping down after fifty. The morning after that another new plot appeared, the grimmest one yet. In dark red there were two square peaks, the last of which ended with a vertical drop to zero around age 38. Damn. They'll probably make me erase this the next time someone comes in for an interview.

But today I finally did it! I plotted my QOL in bright lime green. You can see a happy childhood, followed by a significant drop during adolescence that continues until age 18, followed by a near linear increase through my twenties. The little blip in my late twenties would be this year. It started out with the excitement of moving to a new amazing city and starting my first real job and has taken a down turn because its been really hard meeting new people and I get lonely too often. I'm optimistic though. There's so much potential out there I can taste it, and I feel like I'm finally figuring out how to realize it. Now it's just a matter of buckling down and climbing that incline. Maybe I should start working out ....

A beautiful sneer

Beautiful woman sitting with friends at a bar,

Leaning back in her chair, head tilted down, a strand of dark brown hair hanging over her face. She stares at the table with faraway eyes, the conversation raging around her. Her face is still but inside I see a sneering smile. A strange mixture of pleasure and disgust. The accepting of an ugly truth.

Exodus..... Movement of My People

Yes, for the third time in eight months I'm going through the hell that is moving. Oh, did I tell you I found a new place? I got the call back on Tuesday right after I'd given up and decided to move into a hotel. The new house is literally a block away from where I am now in the Mission. I'm moving in with three other people that all seem really cool. One roommate, Maria, is a late twenty-something who's opening a restaurant in San Jose. I've only talked to her for about twenty minutes, but I get a really good vibe from her. I don't know how old Martin is, but he seems like a cool guy.... works in the financial district for a venture capital firm that specializes in bio-tech. The third roommate I've barely said hi to but I'm assured by the other roommates that I'll love her.

I did have an experience earlier today that made me apprehensive though. When I called Maria this morning to see if I could start moving in I didn't get an answer, so I just walked over hoping to catch one of the other roommates. I knocked on the door and a minute later the roommate who's moving out answered the door. Shirtless and bleary eyed, he looked like I just woke him up. Turns out he's not starting the move until probably five thirty in the evening - hence my sitting here at the coffee shop writing this to you. We exchanged phone numbers so we could coordinate the move and I noticed he had a 480 area code.

"You're from Phoenix?" I asked.
"Yeah"
"So am I, what part?"
"Glendale, Chandler, then Tuscon. Where are you from?"
"Scottsdale mostly, spent a couple years in Tempe when I was going to ASU. I just moved out here about seven months ago for a job. How long have you been here?"
"About a year. I got a tech job in the city."

At this point I'm having another one of those moments where I realize I must fit into some bizarre, highly specific subgroup. I am not a special unique snowflake.

"So why are you moving out?" I have to ask.
"Well, Maria and Martin are never around and I was really looking to meet some new people. I just got a room in this five room house with four other people. It's a total circus."
"Yeah, I'm looking to meet some people too..."

So here's a guy, my age by the looks of him, who grew up in the same city as me, who also got some kind of technical degree from a college in Arizona, and moved out here for a tech job some five months before I did. And he's looking for the same type of living situation I am so he can meet new people. And he's moving out. As the ramifications of this information set in I felt a familiar sinking feeling in my chest. How long will it be until I move again?

The answer is probably a long time. I'm sick of this moving shit, and the roommates do seem like really great people, even if I don't see them that much. I can only assume that I'm following the well worn path that members of my subgroup must follow to where we're headed, wherever that is. Who knows, maybe I'll give this guy that's moving out a call sometime and see if he wants to hang out. Nicole, if you're reading this, we should all go out and have a Zonie party.

Rock Star Part Duex

For the last assignment in my writing class I had to write about how I got to my particular career as a engineer/analyst/technical writer. It seemed like a good opportunity to sit back and reflect on things like I used to do all the time when I was an unemployed slacker. I spent almost the whole day Sunday smoking the last of the devil weed I got when James visited and working my way through the purple haze of my past. In the end I had over 2000 words and a pretty good idea of my "story" that I don't think I've ever told in full to anyone. Fortunately for you I had to chop it down to 800 words. So here is the edited version of how I got here, writing to you wherever you are.

Rock Star Something

When I was growing up, I wanted to be the same thing everyone else did. I wanted to be a rock star. Sure, not every kid is as cliche as I was, picking up a guitar at sixteen and dreaming of being in Soundgarden, but everyone wants to be a rock star something. If you want to be a teacher, you want to be Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society, with your students standing on their desks saluting you for changing their lives forever. If you want to be a scientist, you want to be the next Einstein. I even had a friend who in her first year of accounting school dreamed of being Eddie Vedder's accountant. A rock star accountant.

By the time I realized I wasn't going to be in Soundgarden, I was in my first semester at Arizona State University, and had no idea what to do with my life. My first thought was that maybe I could still be a professional musician. Study in the guitar performance program and still make a living doing something I loved. But did I really love it? Looking back, its hard to say. I have vivid memories of loving it. Times when I felt really connected to the music. But those moments were too few and far between. Most of the time my playing was mechanical. I wasn't expressing myself as much as just playing what I'd memorized like some glorified player guitar. Eventually I came to the conclusion that guitar would just be a hobby. What now though?

It's hard to remember exactly how I decided on engineering. I know my dad was pushing hard for it, but I'd like to believe it was more than that. I'd also like to believe that money wasnt a big factor, but I think it was. Things are different now, but in 1996 an engineering degree was still pretty much a guarantee of a good, high paying job, and I liked the idea of making a lot of money. I also liked that engineering was so challenging, something not that many people could do. My thought was, if I can get an engineering degree I can do anything. But what kind of engineering? Rock star engineering of course.

I'd always been into audio gear - guitar pedals and recording equipment and that kind of thing - and thought maybe there was a type of engineering for that. I did a little searching and found out about this whole field called audio engineering. Basically audio engineering is electrical engineering and programming with an emphasis on audio technology. It was perfect. For one, any kind of electrical engineering was considered very hard, even by engineering standards. If I got an electrical engineering degree I could really do anything. And most importantly, I could still be involved with music. I imagined myself inventing the next wah wah pedal. I decided that if I couldn't be on stage in front of thousands of screaming fans, I would invent something that would change music in the subtle yet profound way the wah wah pedal did. I mean, just image what Jimi Hendrix would sound like without the wah wah pedal. Can you?

Doing a little more research, I found that there were actually three colleges with respectable audio engineering programs, but that the best was at the University of Miami - Florida not Ohio. It was an expensive private school that I was going to have to take on massive student loans to attend, but hey, I was going to be a rich engineer soon enough. Debt is the American way, and I'm only in college once. Might as well get the hell out of Phoenix and go somewhere more interesting.

A year and a half later I'd repaired my GPA enough to meet the bare minimum admission requirements for the University of Miami and was leaving Phoenix in the rear view mirror of a U-Haul headed for Miami. It was one of the best moves of my life. The audio program was great. I got to take classes on studio recording in a multimillion dollar studio, learned the mathematics of audio and wondered at it, did interesting projects manipulating audio in myriad ways. I made great friends I never would have met if I hadnt left. Everything was going along swimmingly.

Then something funny happened. During my last year in the audio program 2002 - the dot com madness that had fueled an insanely good job market was crashing and burning along with my job prospects. Where in previous years there had been nearly 100 percent placement in the audio engineering program, 2002 saw nearly half the senior class graduating without jobs lined up. The companies I wanted to work for simply weren't hiring, or not hiring me in any case. I'd had one hopeful interview with Dolby, which would have brought me to San Francisco four years earlier, but they didn't end up hiring anyone from our class as they'd done in almost every other year. In the end I only had one job offer. One that I couldnt take. It was a job at the big local power company Florida Power and Light. It didn't even involve electrical engineering, just supervising construction of new substations going in all around the state. They said they couldn't tell me where I would be working yet, but that it might be rural, real rural.

The rest of the story leading up to my current position as a rock star engineer/analyst/technical writer is pretty much a repeat of the story up to this point with variations. I've chased one rock star dream after another, always coming up a bit short. To date, I have never been in Soundgarden. I don't even listen to them much anymore.

What I have found though is that even if you never realize your dreams, following them will still give you the best life possible. For all my lamenting about not being a rock star, life is good. Ive got an interesting, satisfying job. Im starting my life over in one of the best cities in the world. And who knows, maybe I'll even become a rock star freelance writer....