On a night in October 1997 I went to a bar with a friend to meet up with some other friends who said they had invited their friend Moya. Moya walked into the bar and announced to us that she had a cold and would be needing orange juice in vodka to cure her cold. She read tarot from the contents of my wallet. She was so dynamic and original and enigmatic and blatantly silly. I got such a crush.
A while later … On November 25, 1997, after dinner with friends, in the middle of an El Niño rainstorm, Moya and I went for a walk in the rain and ended up at a park near my house where there was fog rolling down the rock wall and a flood in the playground and we danced on soggy grass and kissed in the rain. Thanksgiving was two days later.
My gadgets in 1997 were a cellphone, a 2way skytel pager, and a newton. I had a computer and dialup internet connection at my house. Moya had a text pager for work and in her home there was a rotary dial phone and a cassette tape message machine and a turntable stereo and big windows. It was the best studio apartment I ever knew.
We emailed stories to each other. I paged text messages to her. She paged text messages to me. It was IM/SMS for 1997. She picked me up at the office of my brand new company and took me out for dinner. She told me stories about the moon and planets and galaxies. I asked her how far away Saturn is when she showed me her telescope. That wasn’t the point.
(with apologies to Billy Collin’s “Litany”) She is the tray and the letters, the balcony and the plants, the shot glass and the flask, the sleeping bag and the pillow. She is not the minimalist bare wall or the question mark, she is the double dash. She is of course the genius inventor and the naked romp in the Pacific Ocean. She’s the native grass. I’m the palm tree. I am the seams in the sidewalk, full of grit. She is the eye candy arm candy smoky scotch peat candy. She is a sheet of puffy clouds with a jet cutting through. She will always be the sleeping bag and the pillow, not to mention the shucker and the decanter.
I’m so thankful for the past decade+ of me and her. We are officially a tween!
The stairs of The Alexis (where Moya lived when we first met)
Lloyd Street
Happy! (not because of the parking ticket on Moya's car!)
I now belong to a “special” group of approximately 18,000 who are married in the state of California even though the constitution does not allow us to be married. As Ana Marie Cox tweeted:
“CA Supreme Court follows People vs. KFC precedent: no more gay marriage except for 18,000 who already used coupon.” (via @pourmecoffee)
I know there are probably many good logical spins to explain how/why a court who declared us a suspect class has now upheld discrimination against us, but I do not get it. Page 7 of the opinion is no comfort that they even meant anything they wrote a year ago:
Nor does Proposition 8 fundamentallyalter the meaning and substance of state constitutional equal protection principles as articulated in that opinion. Instead, the measure carves out a narrow and limited exception to these state constitutional rights, reserving the official designation of the term “marriage” for the union of opposite-sex couples as a matter of state constitutional law, but leaving undisturbed all of the other extremely significant substantive aspects of a same-sex couple’s state constitutional right to establish an officially recognized and protected family relationship and the guarantee of equal protection of the laws.
This sounds like an awfully thin curtain of one word dividing first class citizens from second class citizens. So my family has the right to a recognized and protected relationship, but the word, when clearly words matter, is solely reserved for opposite-sex couples, even though that word has clear advantages and rights that are being denied to same-sex couples.
At least Justice Moreno included a piece of Varnum v. Brien (Iowa 2009) 763 N. W.2d 862,877 as the introduction to his opinion:
[T]he ‘absolute equity of all’ persons before the law [is] ‘the very foundation principle of our government.’
My company spent 3 years (Dec 2005 – Dec 2008) on Folsom Street in San Francisco – a storefront on a noisy street said to have 80,000 cars pass by every day. When our lease was almost up, we found a new office – happy to leave behind an office where the windows were broken twice, a laptop was stolen, graffiti slashed into our windows, and regular leaks dampened our ceiling (amazing since we were on the ground floor in a 4-story building and the water would leak from the top floor all the way down to our space).
Moving is quite cleansing. There were things in the Folsom St office that had not been touched since we moved there. The new office doesn’t have a full kitchen and full bathroom. The Folsom St office had a fully stocked kitchen (baking! cooking! galore!) and a full bathroom stocked with plush towels. The towels were carted off to the SPCA for cats and dogs to snuggle in. The kitchen supplies went to my house or friends’ houses or Community Thrift. While purging the office and sorting through supplies, we (Thanks, Lori, for the help!) sorted through the earthquake/emergency boxes full of food and supplies and discovered one of the best earthquake/emergency supplies – Asyla Whisky! Only to be opened in case of emergency.
On December 23 the movers moved everything from Folsom St to my company’s new office on 2nd St. I moved Ganesha in my pocket that day on an underground MUNI train – I think he’s worth keeping around. I usually keep him perched on top of my computer monitor.
My new MUNI stop is Montgomery station (used to be Civic Center). My company is sharing space with a small very friendly architecture firm and I’m excited to be sharing space again. We shared some office space 4 years ago when we were in Hayes Valley. When I first started my company I shared office space in South Park (South Park, San Francisco not South Park, Comedy Central) and I enjoy the camaraderie of people working in the same space but not necessarily working together or on the same projects or in the same industry. I’ve noticed, in the few days I’ve been hanging out in my new space, that the architects seem to have very civilized consistent hours and they all leave for lunch in the middle of the day. I haven’t worked around people who take regular lunch in over a decade!
My conference room has a view of a new oyster bar and fish restaurant (Anchor & Hope).
And there are some windows that look out to this airshaft. I love airshafts — old space that got trapped in time.
On Saturday, November 15,we skipped the Prop 8 protest rally and march and went on a school tour (the neverending kindergarten research project — trying to find the best 7 schools for us out of 70+ in San Francisco) with Lucy and her friend Lulu (and Lulu’s moms). Lucy and Lulu thought the tour was dull. They put on princess nightgowns and told secrets in the playground nextdoor.
In the afternoon, Lucy and I took a tricycle ride (her on trike, me walking) to Cliff’s Variety store in the Castro so she could spend her $22 on whatever she wanted. She picked a pirate and some treasure. We ran into some friends – Fred, Minne, Jonathan, Sarah, Esther – and then headed over to Eureka Rec Center where Lucy and Sarah balanced on the teeter totter:
We noticed police shutting down streets near the playground and decided to head home and see what all the fuss was about — it was a sit-in in the middle of 18th/Castro protesting Prop 8:
When we got home, my flyclear card had arrived in the mail – I’m officially not a terrorist!
Then we scampered off to Paul’s birthday party in his backyard with a fire pit and chili (not sure if it was really vegetarian or not but I was polite and just ate it) and yummy s’mores and, according to Lucy, “fun creepy paths” to wander around the dark garden. There was chitchat at the party about prop 8, about someone who’s getting married soon, and I did my best to try to avoid it. I still can’t stop the tears sometimes when people talk about prop 8 and I don’t want to be pitied by straight people. I was slightly relieved when Lucy pulled me away to go play somewhere. Sometimes a child’s whining is a good excuse to get out of an awkward adult conversation.
San Francisco, CA
City Hiker, MUNI rider, Parent, Early Adopter, Cocktail Mixer, LGBT rights activist, Chief Scientist and Usability Curmudgeon and Bug Finder at OTIVO, Reader, Pianist, married to Moya
