kaliya’s laptop stickers

Originally uploaded by Liz Henry

There’s a lot of geeks in town this week; you may have missed them because it’s Pride week as well. Just fyi, the Web 2.0 hipster influx for Supernova & also for Foo Camp.

I had some serious laptop sticker envy at Supernova. Do you like the stickery punk look on a laptop? I had someone either east-coast or middle-of-the-US tell me that laptop stickering was an obnoxious habit of San Francisco / Silicon Valley brats, that it reeks of privilege, as if to say “Screw you people who don’t think of a computer as disposable, I can take a $2000 machine and crap it up with stickers, it means that little to me.” And in fact that just carrying your laptop everywhere is obnoxious and means your survival does not depend on your computer not being at risk for damage or theft.

This point had not occurred to me at all — since I *am* that brat. I love the stickery thing because it takes the uptight business appliance and makes it a beautiful collage. Fine, it’s mostly a collage of corporate logos… but not always. If you think of the laptop as already having a logo on it, why not deal with that ubiquity of branding by taking control of it and getting a handle on it through bricolage?

The criticism is also a bit weird to me because I’ve never heard anyone say that putting a bumper sticker on a car is an act reeking of privilege and yet a car is an even more expensive appliance. So the principle her is, take an expensive thing, and trash it to show you can, and then carry it around with you all the time as a sort of status symbol. I disagree with that perspective because I don’t think it trashes the computer; it decorates it. And I carry the computer around with me because I’m a geek who likes to be online and (often) because I’m working, so it is no more pretentious than carrying a reporter’s notepad.

I wish there were more people who airbrush and etch their laptops and arted them up. Since I am lazy, and also spent my teenage years making dorky “punk” collages, I’m sticking with the stickers.

If you look at the Flickr Laptop Stickers pool, I wonder how many computers there are West Coast, or specifically SF Bay Area?

What *does* it mean?

phare de la baleine

Originally uploaded by bourget_82

Cranky disabled person report on San Francisco stuff! Warning!

Accessibility for Sugarlump on 24th St. is fantabulous. No stairs, low counter, couches, tables you can wheel up to, and a big bathroom with grab bars and with its door not blocked by junk or narrow passageways. A+ on their access! It is a nice neighborhood to wheel around in. The only criticism I have is that some of the curb cuts are not well maintained. They are steep and have enormous potholes.

The LGBT Center is great. A+ for wide corridors everywhere, very accessible bathrooms, big signs set high up near the ceiling so that people low to the ground can navigate. I like hanging out in the 3DB Cafe there, the only problem is I run into too many people I know and don’t get any work done!

Philz Coffee on 4th and Berry is another A+. I’m loving anywhere that has big spaces. It’s like the wide open prairie, don’t fence me in. There is something great about that section of town, the smooth sidewalks, the tall buildings and bridges, that had me high as a kite. That plus coffee meant that I hung out on the sidewalk outside Philz popping wheelies and spinning around at high speed. A good place to skateboard too, I bet. The wireless, breezy open feeling, interesting coffee, good music, and nice people didn’t hurt.

The Liberties pub at around 23rd and Guererro was pretty decent. Some of the pub was accessible and some wasn’t. You go around the side of the building to get in without steps. Their fish and chips was great and they have ridiculous-looking fancy drinks that I’ll have to go back and try! B for okay but not great access, a bit crowded for power chairs for example. But okay for me.

Osha on 2nd gets an A-.. They whisked a chair away so I could wheel up to a table, without making a big production out of it or appearing to be all flustered. Some places, you would not believe how all the waiters in a restaurant can stop what they’re doing and gather round and act concerned, in order to move one chair! That is very annoying! Osha was nice about it. Points off though for the disabled bathroom being back through a corridor that was partially blocked and also the bathroom being kind of gross which surprised me for a restaurant with such aesthetic sensibilities.

I went to Chow the other night and would be inconvenient but not impossible to get to the back seating area. I would have had to ask a couple of people to move their chairs while I went by. The thought of this seemed to throw the waiters into total confusion. They could not even answer me coherently and I was kind of pissed off. I give them a C just for acting all bewildered and inconvenienced.

Sparky’s was even worse, it was completely inaccessible with stairs just to get into the building. I hobbled up. Sparky’s gets an F for access.

The streets right around Church and Market are okay to navigate, but I had to concentrate on popping my front wheels over the Muni tracks! It seems awfully easy to get hung up, though, especially for a person in a power chair.

I have a further cranky-person note, that people in restaurants who have to choose between bumping into a seated able person and bumping into my wheelchair always seem to choose the wheelchair to bump into and jostle. It goes against any idea of politeness I could imagine and yet it always happens. Maybe they figure I can’t feel anything in my robotic extensions and so it is okay to kick my wheels and lean on my handlebars. It’s not okay… bump into someone else next time!

I had lunch at the Thirsty Bear, very tasty green bean artichoke salad and lamb empanadas.

Wheelchair access is okay to the convention center, but distances are still tough. I always seem to be a mile from the bathrooms and elevators!

Someone told me about a guy here who went up the escalator in his wheelchair while holding on to both rails. Studly! Hearing it filled me with joy.

where the sidewalk ends

Originally uploaded by Liz Henry.

Yesterday I went back to work. I teach at Evergreen Valley College
in San Jose. Lo, I found a few handicapped parking spaces out back of the building where I teach, but it was up a very steep hill, in a sort of back alley with no sidewalk connecting it to campus. Out in the main parking lot, there was a big area of disabled parking spots, so I went for that.

Then I had three choices: Head to the center of campus. Head into what looked like a big complicated indoor/outdoor building maze. Head down a sidewalk that went in the direction of my building!

I chose the sidewalk. As I womanfully shoved myself uphill I came around the corner and beheld a hedge and an abrupt sidewalk’s end, with steep curb. After the cussing stopped I waited a few minutes till someone walked by, then asked them to bump me down the curb. From there I went flying down the narrow, winding road to my building; non optimal to say the least.

On the way back out I figured I’d go to the center of campus and get an errand done. From the central bus turnaround, I could *see my own car* up in the handicapped parking area. As the photo here shows, I could also see a buttload of stairs. Stairs ahead, stairs to the left, stairs to the right. There was no path. So if I’d tried to go from the parking lot to the center of campus, I wouldn’t have been able to.

Finally I headed uphill and into the tangle of buildings and classrooms, because I found a ramp. The maze of twisty little passages all alike disgorged me finally into the parking lot.

Oh, my aching triceps!

When I used to go to De Anza, the same thing was true. Maps (previously constructed able-person maps, or maps on paper) were useless. I had a campus map, and tried to mark it up, over time, with rough elevation changes and little markings for stairs, and highlightered paths to indicate the ways I could actually go.

Every campus should take the time to make an easy to understand map with information for people on wheels. In fact that level of info is useful for other kinds of wheels, namely strollers.

Revolution cafe SF

Originally uploaded by baratunde.

For a few years in the 1990s I experienced San Francisco from a combination of wheelchair, crutches, cane, and my own legs, which occasionally cooperated. Merciful time has intruded and helped me to forget all the valuable lessons learned as I was carried up and down the stairs at the 14th St. faerie house and as I inconvenienced everyone in countless restaurants. Now, from a slipped disc, I’m back in a chair for a while, so I figure I’ll put my navigational adventures on Metroblogging SF. The landscape of a city is very different when you’re on wheels! Every bump and incline counts.

My goal last night was to hang out with friends and to get to the Make-out Room to see Writers With Drinks. My friend and I were able to park in the 21st and Bartlett Garage. Whoa! Did you know that between 21st and 22nd, there is an ever so slight incline? My wimpy triceps don’t make the cut, yet, so I needed a push.

As a creature of habit, “stodgy” even, I have routines, and one of them is to stop at Revolution Cafe for a latte before going to Writers With Drinks. And at Revolution… whoops! A significant step up, about a 4 inch leap, not completely impossible if I had a sportier chair. At a table outside on the sidewalk, I was able to lurk and chat with a stranger while my friend ordered our coffee. My new table buddy, a dude from Sacramento, had extremely beautiful long silver hair, nicely clean and brushed. It’s the rare hippie guy around here who knows how to use “product”… We struck up an acquaintance. I told him where to get pizza (that place around the corner that sells it by the slice, or Little Star on Mission, or Pauline’s on Mission). He told me all about the Piedmont Piano Company, where they have incredibly fancy 10 foot concert grand pianos and have amazing shows with famous blues and jazz musicians that are cheap and have only 15 or 20 people show up, sometimes. Meanwhile, I stared with the most basilisky, baleful glare I could muster at the wooden railroad tie that prevented my going into the cafe to use their bathroom. If baleful glares could melt wood… Hey Revolution people, build a tiny ramp – how hard could it be? Just smooth it out a little.

The Make-Out room had a nice smooth entrance, a bit steep but I could back up it easily in my chair. Clearly someone just smoothed it out, as I wish Revolution would do — it was not the regulation sort of wheelchair-ramp concrete slope, but it was *way* better than a step. In the 90s from my chair I used to argue with business owners all the time, and they felt that if they made an effort but didn’t comply with regulations, they’d get into more trouble than if they didn’t do anything! Anyway. The Make-Out Room women’s bathroom, though, forget it! Once my tiny child-sized Quickie II was in, I was stuck in a labyrinth and also my chair blocked the door completely. So it was the cane and lurching wildly while clinging to the top of the bathroom stall, which, fortunately, I can manage.
Oh, more about bathroom anxiety. The night before I woke up in a cold sweat several times thinking “HOW will I even get near the bathroom when I’ll be trapped in a crowd?” I forgot the magic power of Wheelchair. People magically part before it, as long as they see you. They melt away like panicked smoke.
Pet peeve though, people who bump and jostle a wheelchair or *hold onto it* and don’t apologize. When I’m in it, it’s part of my personal boundary and it should be considered like part of my body and respected as such. For example, do not lean on my handlebars or use them for hat stands, dear strangers, any more than you would put your elbow on my *head*. There’s some free education for you able people, pay attention, you’ll be old someday.
As always, Writers With Drinks was amazing! The readers blew me away and the room was packed.
Afterwards, about 20 of us went down the street to Bahia. I waited an hour for a ceviche tostada. Really, I think they don’t have a lot of business (yet) and so having 20 people appear broke their process. I’m willing to give them another chance; the menu looked good and the appetizer they brought us was delicious: crunchy-soft toasted bread drizzled with various yummy sauces with baby lettuce (what kind of restaurant is this again… brazilian italian mexican seafood fusion? or something?) Plus I was very happy to wheel in the door and into their actually-accessible-bathroom.
You can see that for a while my Metroblogging will be all about hills, inclines, narrow passages, and anxiety about where I’m going to pee next. Stay tuned for more accessibilty reports, because I’m going to have some fun with it.

KPOO has been my constant companion in the last year, with great news and music and things like live coverage of community meetings. I listen sometimes even when it’s not my community and nothing to do with me. Just a shout out that people should give them a listen, 89.5 in San Francisco or you can listen to their stream online, http://www.kpoo.com/hearus.html. (WHY are they not in iTunes? That’s just ridiculous.) Their shows rock. Funk, all the really good good r&b, blues, & some good latin american music, cumbia and Cuban stuff that makes me very happy. The other night I was driving home and caught Lou Rawls’ spine-chilling version of Tobacco Road, complete with his long rambling beautiful intro about black neighborhoods all over the US, “… the almighty hawk, Mr. Wind…” talking about the winter in Chicago. He quoted himself a little bit from “Dead End Street” in that improv poetry introduction.

Technorati Tags: music, sanfrancisco

The other day it hit me that NO, there’s no skunks. There’s big factories of some kind and they release their weird stinky chemical emissions late at night. Right when I’m driving by!

It bums me out. I fear for everyone’s lungs, especially the people who live nearby and who inhale that stuff every night while they’re asleep. I hope the Bay Area Air Quality Management District is on it. Also, I grieve for the forests full of frolicking, happy, wild skunks that my brain conjured up at 2am so many times as I whooshed past the lagoons and ghostly billboards. Ah, lost innocence. (Forests? In Millbrae? What was I thinking?)

Technorati Tags: pollution, sanfrancisco

So I’m getting intimate with the train platform and its surrounding businesses. I can go to the drugstore at Sequoia Station and buy toothpaste or whatever, blow some money on a latte, or get a bagel. What I mostly do, though, is watch people and talk with people. This morning at coffee the most amazing woman in a tight puffy pink jacket with fur trim explained the mechanics of her hairpiece to me. There’s no way to describe the hairpiece without sounding melodramatic. It swirled, cascaded, shone, and made me want to twine my hands in her luscious chestnut tresses. Seriously, that was some pornstarlicious hairpiece! I forgot to brush my own hair this morning or even look at it. The other thing I do at the station in the cold grey morning is whip out my laptop and try to get on the Pizza and Pipes free wireless (like right now.)

No matter what, at the station there are always hunky guys in uniforms doing something. Police, security guards, dudes in orange vests and hard hats with a lot of things hanging from their belts like Harriet the Spy. Then there are smug-looking guys with manicures and nice haircuts with laptops and mountain bikes. There’s a category that I think of as “ladies in nurse shoes” who look like they’re going to work in a hospital or doctor’s office, where they’ll change into scrubs. The upper class looking women clutch their sparkly beaded handbags, lips pursed, brave and resolute, as if thinking “I can’t believe I’m actually taking the train!” Safari time, ladies. Me, I might look like I’m playing hooky from the alternative high school but if you look a bit more closely you will see the analogue to the mountain bike guys: a smug-assed GenX technocrat whose laptop bag cost more than the sum total of all the clothes I’m wearing.

On a recent trip to New York I noticed an odd synchronicity of shoes and bags. On the subway, people’s shoes always perfectly matched the social class of their carrying bags. Sneakers went with backpacks. Leather shoes (whether pointy or sensible) went with leather purses or classy-looking satchelly briefcases. And one category always had fancy square-bottomed twisted canvas-handled department store shopping bags, and the other had plastic bags from the drugstore. It was eerie. Here the rules seems a bit more mixed up.

Caltrain itself is lovely. Clean, bright, quiet, roomy, with comfortable seats. The ride through Redwood City reveals the interestingly squalid back of Cosco, a lot of grey-looking auto body shops in the very sweet neighborhood on the other side of the tracks in back of Target, and then the green, green, gated and walled backyards of people in mysterious Atherton. I think really rich Ents live in Atherton. Menlo Park has apartments, apartments, then a scrubby field, then the train station.

On the way home on Friday people all over the train (I walked from end to end) were drinking beer, kicking back, and talking to strangers. Was that special Friday night mojo? Or is Caltrain in the evening always like that?

I’ll have more to say about Palo Alto later.

There’s a video clip here: cbs5.com but I haven’t watched it yet or read any detail on this story. I’ll be looking at it later tonight and I hope people can add something more substantial in the comments. Basically, I am horrified. It is interesting that a lot of the emails I’m getting are from Anglo-Canadian immigrants… who might or might not be legal immigrants… and who know quite well that they’re not going to be stopped and have their papers checked as they walk their kid into school at 8:30 tomorrow morning. If you think about the destructive effect this will have on our public schools, well, just think about that for a moment.

I devoured some delicious french toast and licked the syrup off the plate, feeling very glad that the 3 Dollar Bill had hot food. Read on for the details of the spoken word performances:

Technorati Tags: cafe, music, poetry, lgbt, reading, sanfrancisco, spoken word, writing

During the first half of the open mic we heard from Barbara, or Priestess Barbara, on guitar, singing “My Favorite Mistake”. Charlie Ballard hit us with some standup comedy that… well… he was very sweet but where I finally started laughing really hard was when he was like “Was that misongynist?!” and Lori Selke shot me a look because I was *just* secretly thinking “Oh, it’s *that* sort of gay man joke about lesbians”. Then some of the lesbian jokes got me cracking up, but mostly because they were dated and lame jokes about women in flannel shirts and mullets, and it was funny to have them busted out on such a not-that crowd full of women. Maybe that was the point and I was missing a level of irony. Then Steven Schwartz read a poem about being Siva-like and stomping and destroying and being Big; a sort of warning poem. Being me, and gossipy, I know the backstory. Giovanna Capone read some flash fiction and then showed us a copy of What I Want From You: Voices of East Bay Lesbian Poets, where she had some work published recently.

Michael something from Pirate Cat Radio read something about supermodels that just left me cold. Lori Selke read some hot smutty hypnotic poetry that had a lot of shiny knives in it. Pangaea then regaled us with memoir, but I confess by that point I was just having an extended aesthetic experience staring at her outfit, which was pink, sparkly, outrageous, and included a pink tail.

Then Gina De Vries read some amazing smut, or erotica, or porn, or a short story, or whatever you want to call that sort of thing. It was shinily well-written, tight, & with cool subtlety about femme/butch power dynamics, flirting, and sex. The excerpt she read from a memoir-ish essay about fashion, her grandma, the 90s riot grrl movement, and growing up queer and punk in San Francisco, also rocked.

During the second half of the open mic we heard from Luna Maia, then me (my first time at this open mic, and I flubbed it a bit from exhaustion and un-practice, but people liked my chat-room poem anyway). John (also his first time at the reading and I didn’t catch his full name) read a good piece called “Blasphemy By Comparison”. Sabrina then read from one of her zines about her first Pride march in New York City. “I knew Pride was corporate, but wasn’t prepared for Macy’s to celebrate my gayness or whatever.” I enjoyed her scary-sharp dry wit. Shiny goth goddess and MC Sherilyn wound up the evening with a piece about fashion, thrifting, clothes, body image, and being “tall like a supermodel”, a comment that tall transwomen often get from tiny cute little genetic girls who don’t quite realize that supermodels have their clothes custom made for them.

Then really the highlight of the evening (other than Gina’s reading) was Amy, who didn’t hang with us clique-whores in the front of the room; a big amazing butch woman with manly blond hair and an eyebrow ring, sort of break-your-heart-cornfield-motorcycle-midwesterny, singing and playing the guitar. Now I’m not the hugest fan of the lesbian folk song genre (despite being able to sing many Alix Dobkin songs from memory), but Amy blew me away completely with her tight complicated guitar, her even tighter and more beautiful lyrics, in a sad song caled “Long Gone”, all focused intensity. (I flashed back to a 1989 Phranc concert; but better than that.) Then she walked out before I could catch her and demand more of her music, so I was all sad. Elvis had left the building. Cindy yelled across the room for her to please, please, please, come back. “I’ll think about it.” That’s the sort of thing that *should* happen at an open mic.