The Californian’s Dilemma

This week in The Bold Italic, we are publishing The Californian’s Dilemma, a series that goes beyond the headlines about the “California Exodus,” featuring essays from San Franciscans about why they’re choosing to stay or leave. Check back daily for new essays.

“Well, your daughter saw two dicks today,” I said to my husband as I carried our two-year-old inside after a brief stroll around the Mission District. Walks were our daily reprieve from the springtime shelter-in-place ordinances, and they had taken a turn toward the graphic. …

1. Inexplicably obsessed with large ships.
2. Needs to be told, “STOP JUMPING ON THE COUCH!”
3. Loves taking vitamins and thinks they cure everything.
4. Disappearances in public are common.
5. Keeps repeating a nonsensical story about alien overlords and frozen space volcanoes and really needs to cool it for a second so I can hear myself think.
6. Thinks a billion years is a standard unit of time for humans.
7. Anyone who doesn’t agree to impossible or unethical schemes is labeled the bad guy.
8. Needs me to be clear.
9. Access to media needs to be tightly controlled to shape values and ideologies.
10. Wants to…

What’s up, Denver!

I don’t know if it’s the altitude or the weed, but I am so high right now! Oh my God, am I the first person to say that? Feel free to use it. It’s just a little sample of that famous California creativity I brought to Colorado with me in my new Subaru with a roof rack. Consider these quips a hostess gift, which are polite to bring to the cities that we Californians are now swarming like locusts. It’s my way of saying thanks for letting my family come and take little sips and nips from your low-cost-of-living buffet.

…

The average rent for a one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco is $3,629 a month. In buyer’s terms, that works out to a monthly mortgage payment on a house that costs about $770,000, assuming you have a 20% down payment, which you don’t.

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The Covid-19 pandemic has many of us feeling cooped up and longing for more space. Maybe months of quarantine has you fantasizing about making a big life change. Maybe you’re looking to skip town on a stack of…

It’s a fact of Bay Area life that renters must contort and compromise in ways residents of other cities would balk at. Buildings are old, electrical outlets are scarce, and vacancy rates are low. The average rent of a one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco is a whopping $3,629 a month. For that amount of money, is it too much to ask that my kitchen layout be less scrambled than the eggs I’m making for breakfast?

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I like my kitchen appliances…

I never think about you. But you certainly think about me. On those warm, restless nights of summer, marked by furtive glances and sticky fumblings, I consume your every thought. As you trace lines of sweat from your sternum to your navel with trembling fingers, it is my own sunlit caverns you imagine. And at that breathy moment when the pleasure shudders violently from your body, it is my name that crosses your lips in a pleading whisper. I am 400 additional square feet of a Bay Area apartment, and you want me so bad.

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Hey Assholes,

I bet you never thought this day would come. There’s a global catastrophe, and you’re bartering pills from your oral surgery for single rolls of toilet paper on Nextdoor. Now that the New York Times has declared the bidet toilet to be the hottest, most in-demand pandemic accessory, the woman one of you artfully called “the queen of anal-retentive eccentricity” is suddenly not looking so eccentric after all…

You may not remember the time you mocked my bidet. You may not even remember me. But I remember each of you, and I’ve waited patiently for ten long years…

Hey Leslie, I saw that you sent a calendar request for a “meeting.” This is the first time you’ve worked for a fast-paced, data-driven startup that creates bleeding edge products and provides global solutions. So I’m going to let it slide. Let’s set up a sync to touch base, and I’ll go over it with you again more slowly.

I think the team is wondering why you requested a meeting when we’ve all already met. It’s pretty simple, really. First we meet, then we sync, then we fuse, then we self-cannibalize sometime before the end of Q3.

Look, I know…