May was hard.
We moved to California. But we didn’t know until the last week of May that the house would be ready. Our contractor was not communicative. It was four months overdue on what he’d claimed would be a two month renovation project.
Maybe he was afraid of overpromising. I think he had real difficulty on his end due to laggardly local permitting authorities. But I also don’t think he cared very much about us.
We chose this guy out of two people we interviewed because we weren’t in town long enough to find and interview more people. He seemed fine. We were in a hurry to get started. Then we didn’t pause the payments when the first delay started. This was the costliest mistake I’ve ever made in my life.
We moved as fast as we could. We preliminarily moved in with one car’s worth of stuff on May 30th, which is the first day of LessOnline et al.
After the very extended rationalist meetup, my partners went back to Seattle to complete the move with a U-Haul while I stayed in the almost-empty house with the baby.
The house still has things wrong with it. The dryer and dishwasher weren’t hooked up correctly. Bewilderingly, the bathroom we added has a light switch that turns on the fan and the heat lamp, but no normal light. Only half the inch-high discontinuities on the floor have a slope thingy covering the discontinuity so you don’t stub your toe. Most superficially, I was offended by the thoroughly colonized fruit I found in the kitchen drawer. It was green all over and sitting on a disc of green.
The Bay amazes me. It’s like the most expensive place in the world to live. We came here because I wanted to live, and raise my kids, in a cultural and economic nexus. But also, both in my house and without, the place I am most reminded of is Guatemala. The beautiful weather. The way things are falling apart because – two ways of saying the same thing – the people are poor, and their ways of transacting with each other are so dysfunctional nothing can be done easily.
My household is rich, but not rich enough to have a safe stairwell or windows that aren’t rotting. It feels strange. The reality distortions of this place are tugging visibly at our lives now.
I’m glad to finally be here. We live near friends with children. I’m glad I have people to ask and learn from when my daughter hits new and bewildering stages of development. Childrearing is too important to not get mentorship from people I respect. The parents I respected were mostly in here, so I entered as well.
And I feel weary about having come here. I’m glad I did it. I expect not to regret it. But I hate that so much talent and ambition swirls here, these cities that smell of obstruction and danger and dysfunction.
When I left Korea to come to the US, I stepped out of SFO after a 12 hour flight and felt like I was finally free. The climate and views of this region still bring that feeling back sometimes.
These hills. Man.