Entries Tagged 'San Francisco' ↓

I wish that stupid restaurant wasn’t so fucking popular. I’m never going to be able to find out why.

A little girl with pig tails and silver teeth spoke fast in Spanish into the receiver of a pay phone. No one was listening on the other end. The child’s mother also spoke in Spanish, and seemed to be urging her to end her one-way conversation. I only caught a few words that I understand. Rapido. Limpia.

The train pulled in after nine long minutes of waiting. I took a seat near the door since the next stop is where I would transfer. It’s where most of us would transfer. I cracked a book. A man slid open the doors that separate train cars, which can be heavy and hard to open, but he foisted them wide with what seemed to be no effort at all. He shouted.

“Let’s go, let’s go! Next stop we get off. I am trying to organize us. You need to carry some stuff. Stop doing that, you don’t need to be trying to look cute right now!” Then he stormed back through to the other train car.

I transferred. I watched the woman who was “trying to look cute’ using crutches and hobbling badly. She chose the seat in front of me. The man who yelled at propped up a bike in the seat reserved for seniors or the disabled.

“You so fat, probably couldn’t find the pussy.” The yelling man with the bike said this to the woman who hobbled.

“That’s mean.” She replied flatly, with little emphasis. “Mean.”

“Lots of things in life are mean,” he told her.

“We in public!,” the third person in their trio finally piped up. “You need to relax man. You need major therapy. Major therapy.”

The three of them, two men, each with bikes and many bags, and a woman on crutches who also carried a large bag, had obviously had more than their share to drink.

“She didn’t get me no Jack in the Box. She know I’s hungry, but she cold, so she just looking after herself.” It was the crude man who called his companion fat who did all the talking. He wore sunglasses on the train at 9 p.m. He was clearly under the influence of a stimulant in addition to his drunkeness. He repeatedly insulted the woman as lazy, berating her for failing to buy him fast food. Over and over and over. He demanded that she send him his stuff back. He needed his stuff. She said he could come and get it, but he insisted that she FedEx it to him. She offered the suggestion to have his sister drive him to her place, but he stomped and yelled more about getting it to him by FedEx.

“I ain’t had none in 5 days,” the beligerent man informed everyone.

“What? Stress?,” the other guy asked.

“No, sex.”

His buddy responded with, “I am not talking to you right now, Mr. Horny,” and I was happy to have a second of comic relief. The argued further about which stop they would get off at. Their debate was senseless and unnecessary. The beligerent man was adamant about getting off at Civic Center, so much so that he repeated the name of his stop until he got there.

“Civic Center. Civic. Civic. Ci-vic. Center. Cen-ter. Civic Center. Civic Center.”

When they exited the car it looked like a traveling carnival, with all the stuff they had. I watched the woman hobble away, a large, stuffed-full backpack weighing her down. The other man said nothing when the angry man told her to hurry up and called her a mule.

All was quiet on the train ride to work this morning, as if the sunny, warm weekend left every rider rested and content to sit in silence. Not even one note slipped from beneath headphones.

The bus was also particularly serene. I sat next to a small Latina woman with close-cropped hair, a pretty smattering of freckles across her lined face. She looked worried — very worried — which I suppose accounts for some of the wrinkles at he corners of her mouth.

She seemed worried about the fact that a man came onto the bus with three very large plastic, lidded storage boxed and an enormous plastic shopping bag that said BIG LOTS and was filled to the brim with something soft, like pillows or the stuffing that goes inside sewn animals. She frowned at his load. It did seem to take up the entirety of the aisle of the bus, but he had to get his stuffung and the plastic containers to store it in home somehow.

The man with the big lot of things got off the bus first when we arrived at 24th Street. I eased by him on the left side of the escalator going down with no problem at all.

On my walk to work after the train ride I kept hearing a bike bell. I use the bike bell ring tone for text messages on my phone, so I kept checking my pocket. I heard it again and again, looking behind me for the cyclist on the sidewalk, but there was none. Soon enough I discovered it was a jackammering hitting something metal that made a tinny sound, much like that of a bike bell.

It warmed up at least five degrees on my way from the front door to the newsroom. Seagulls were the last thing I saw before I ducked inside.

The incredibly talented and kind Julie of Tangobaby shot me for one of her projects. She did so with a camera, in the Mission, after painting my face and adding false eyelashes.

The shoot was for her internet project I Live Here: SF. There she photographs and profiles people who live in San Francisco.

I am incredibly pleased with the results. Julie made me very comfortable, talking to me throughout the shoot, never making me feel awkward or self-conscious. She just chatted and clicked, and I tried not to squint.

You can see the post in which I am featured at I Live Here: SF. You can also read Julie’s comments on our collaboration. And here’s the entire Flickr set of my photoshoot.

I’m a lucky girl.

A tiny poppy seed muffin and a little paper cup of Turkish iced tea sit nestled into an egg crate that was cut down to fit this miniature meal. The few bites and several sips cost $1.

The poppy seed muffin is sweet and moist, with just the right amount of pop between your teeth when you bite down on the flecks that color the pastry. The Turkish iced tea is slightly sweet, a tad bitter and a perfect breakfast beverage a sweltering day in San Francisco’s Mission District. Thanks to a Murat, otherwise known as the Amuse-Bouche guy, Mission dwellers can now have these itty bitty delights almost daily. The rogue pastry and tea vendor has been selling his bites for a buck for about a month, and his popularity is quickly rising. He has fans on Bay Area blogs, and he’s watched his lines grow over time.

Yesterday BART police asked Murat to leave his normal post at the 24th Street station as he did not have a permit. But Murat was back again today, sans permit, to peddle his pretty little pastries to eager commuters. I spoke with him about his operation. When I arrived he has a long line of customers, as two buses had just dropped off loads and a train let our passengers just below. The consumers seemed pleased with the warm weather day substitution of a Turkish iced tea for the typical chilled chai. Murat has recently added tarts and quiches to his repertoire, which cost $2 and $3. They are denser, bigger (not technically amuse-bouche) and take more prep time, but the addition has been a boon for business.

Below I speak with Murat about whether or not he’ll seek a permit, whether or not he intends to expand, and just where he learned to amuse-bouche:

A Taste of the Amuse-Bouche Guy from brittney gilbert on Vimeo.

Follow the Amuse-Bouche guy on Twitter to learn where and when he will be next.

I’d heard people say that San Francisco is a small big city, but I never believed them.

I know so few people since moving to this place, but I see them everywhere. Last night I saw a girl I met once, though I do not think she saw me, walking down the street. It’s just that it was such a peculiar night to spot her.

I don’t think I ever saw this many people I knew regularly in Nashville, and I was born there. I think this is because people don’t drive as often, and are out and about. They are able to be seen.

Saw the amuse-bouche guy this morning, and despite not partaking due to already having had a bowl of Cheerios, it made my day.

Flailing legs and torpedo arms, dancing to some song long forgotten song, I felt the floor rumble beneath me. I watched a porcelain unicorn skate atop the tiny television and fall to the ground.  The figurine lost its horn, the one thing that made it what it was.

That was the first earthquake I felt, some twenty or so years ago in Tennessee.

I’ve been waiting to feel one ever since I moved to the Bay Area nearly a year and a half ago. Yesterday as I sat in silence, writing, I felt my house shake around me. The room rolled. I looked above to the ceiling and assumed that the neighbor upstairs was dancing.

It was the fuzzy boots I noticed first, and her tornado of blonde hair, but it was the man with the parrot on his arm that turned my head. I’ve never lived in a place with parrots, much less a place with so many.

I wanted to ask him about his parrot, but I did not.