San Fran Voice

Growing up is all about taking what you learn from one part of your life and using to better understand yourself so that you stop making mistakes in other areas of your life.  You learn tough lessons from your experiences and you do better the next time and that’s how you become the adult that you are.  San Fran Voice thinks that there are tons of different things to do in this city that all teach you something about the world in general and yourself individually.  And what you learn in this city can be applied to your love life if you look hard enough at how.  Today’s lesson in San Francisco love comes from the world of San Francisco transportation.  That lesson is:

Enjoy every moment; it’s all in the journey.

See, transportation in San Francisco is an interesting thing.  In comparison with other cities, I think that San Francisco transportation is awesome.  I can step outside my North Beach apartment and walk just a few steps to a bus or cable car.  I can hail a taxi, make a quick trip to the pier to get a ferry or head not too far at all to jump on BART.  Without too much effort, I can get to trains, rent (or share) cars, find a rideshare ride, or make it to the airport.  But the flipside of this is that it sometimes gets hard not to expect public transportation here to be easy.

What I mean is, San Francisco is so used to great public transportation that when something causes a hold up – the N Judah line gets stuck on the tracks or the cable cars need maintenance and switch to shuttles or you get the ride share ride but can’t for the life of you find a parking spot – we can get impatient.  But if you stop to look around at the people who are by you as you’re making your way through the city, you really see that the fact that people from all walks of life are using the public transportation here makes it possible to have interesting experiences every single time that you step outside to go somewhere.  Sure, when I try to go somewhere and the process is slow, it’s frustrating.  But I always get to where I wanted to eventually and often the best experiences of the night are those noted as I was trying to get there.

Love, of course, is the same way.  In a way, many people expect – or at least want – love to be easy.  And dating can be easy here because there are so many single folks looking for the same things that you are (more or less).  But if you have a goal in mind at the end, you can really get distracted from what’s developing in front of you.  If you’re whole plan is for marriage … or in this city, for a certain kind of one night stand act  …  you might get to where you’re going eventually.  But if you can keep your heart open to the experiences happening while you’re trying to get there, you might find that those are the ones you’ve enjoyed the most.

On-the-street interviews about the history and present life of the GLBT community in San Francisco.  Professional travel-based video which offers superficial, not entirely accurate, but none-the-less intriguing information about gay San Francisco.

Every area of life has its lessons, and if you look closely enough, you’ll see that those lessons can be applied to other parts of your life as well.  Being able to take what you learn and make use of it throughout your life is what makes you a well-rounded person who is able to cope with all of life’s different experiences.  One of the main areas in which many people feel at a loss is in the area of interpersonal relationships (um, yeah, dating).  Smart people who are confident and successful in other areas of life find themselves bumbling through love on a regular basis.  San Fran Voice is here to help, giving you lessons from all areas of San Francisco life and helping you apply them to the world of love.  This week’s San Francisco love lesson is:

Try it, you might like it.  Or you might not, but at least you know.

There are so many facets of San Francisco life that this could apply to that it’s almost hard to decide which one to go with, but I’ll share a personal story that highlights the point.  It’s the story of my experience with sushi.  See, San Francisco is a sushi city.  I’ve met more people in San Francisco who love sushi than I’ve encountered anywhere else in my travels.  And I really, really wanted to like it when I moved here, so much so that I told my first best friend in the city that we needed to have a sushi date as immediately as possible after I’d arrived in San Francisco.

He chose a place that he thought I’d like and ordered a bunch of different things so that if one didn’t suit my palette, another might.  I tried the basic California roll first.  I didn’t like it.  I didn’t hate it, but I didn’t like it.  And that’s not even “real sushi”.  We moved on to the real sushi and the fishy taste filled my mouth and I went from sipping to swigging my plum wine to get rid of the taste.  Then came the sashimi.  I put a slice of tuna in my mouth and the taste and texture both felt terrible.  My friend pointed out a final slice of raw seafood on the plate and told me to try it.  I didn’t know until later that it was eel but I did know that it literally slid out of my mouth and on to my plate because I couldn’t swallow it.  I chugged the plum wine.

So, we didn’t find any sushi that I liked that night and even though I’m a San Francisco girl, I’m still not a sushi girl.  But the experience itself wasn’t awful.  My friend and I created some lasting memories that night.  And I discovered a love for plum wine that I hadn’t known I had.  So, all in all, it was worth the experience even though I didn’t like what I’d tried.

And this is true for dating as well.  You can come up with all kinds of theories about dating and have all kinds of ideas about love, but you aren’t going to actually know what you like … in other people, in dating situations, in the bedroom … until you just jump in there and try it and see what happens.  You aren’t going to like everything, but you’ll broaden your own experience of the world of love, learn a little bit about yourself and probably create some memories to look back on later.

We’ve learned a lot from rock climbing lessons in love (see here if you don’t know what I’m talking about) but it’s time for San Fran Voice to move on to learning about love from other San Francisco activities.  In sticking, just for this week, to the theme of sports activity in San Francisco, we’ll take a look at another one which (like with rock climbing), I tried for awhile, loved and gave up.  The sport activity was super slow strength training.  And the lesson I learned from it that applies to one’s love life was:

Short and intense can do wonders for your body.

Super slow strength training is a form of weight training that I was doing in the first year that I moved to San Francisco.  Let’s face it; this is a fit city.  I didn’t want to be one of the few people around without a working out kind of body, but I had to admit that I wasn’t really a working out kind of girl.  Then I discovered Super Slow.  Super slow strength training is a gym-machine-based workout which takes less than half an hour but works each of your body’s muscles to its failure point.  The result is that it’s hard to get used to at first, but you get these amazing little workouts that do wonders for your body in a quick amount of time.  For a girl who would rather not be working out, this was terrific because the workout was over almost as soon as it began, and the results were almost immediate.

And if you look around at the San Francisco dating scene, you’ll see that this short and intense approach can be applied to it as well.  San Francisco is such a transient location that people are here and then gone in the blink of an eye.  Combined with our super busy lives, our love for instant gratification and the plethora of options in the singles dating scene for anyone without regard to orientation or fetish preference, this creates a situation in which many people are indulge in short, super intense affairs.  They may not be right for everyone.  There are certainly long term relationship oriented people in the world and probably even some in San Francisco.  But for the twenty-thirty something group which makes up the bulk of the urban singles scene here, it can be an excellent way to get what you need from love.  As for the way it applies to your body, I’ll stick to explaining the benefits of super slow and you can draw your own conclusions on the rest.

What does it mean to be dating in San Francisco?  Well, it means lots of things to different people.  Today’s YouTube pick shows off a single girl’s search to find a dating situation in San Francisco.  Great footage of some of the interesting spots in San Francisco.

For the past couple of months, San Fran Voice has been giving you lessons in love learned from the art of indoor rock climbing.  While that’s been fun, I’ve been slacking on the rock climbing these days so I’m taking a break from those lessons.  But, since San Francisco is a city where it’s easy to be seduced, there are plenty of other places here where love can be learned.

Every facet of life has its lessons, and if you look closely enough, you’ll see that those lessons can be applied to other areas of your life as well.  Being able to take what you learn and make use of it throughout your life is what makes you a well-rounded person who is able to cope with all of life’s different experiences.  One of the main areas in which many people feel at a loss is in the area of interpersonal relationships (um, yeah, dating).  Smart people who are confident and successful in other areas of life find themselves bumbling through dating on a regular basis. 

So San Fran Voice is about to embark on sharing stories about dating and love in San Francisco.  Personal true stories that probably reveal too much of the heart, little snippets of SF life that apply to the world of dating, and funny stuff from San Francisco’s favorite dating tool (Craigslist) are all fair game for this newly broadened section of San Fran Voice. Keep your eyes out for more as the weeks go on!  And if you’ve got any ideas about love stories or dating advice for the San Francisco single, drop a comment on the page to let me know.

Oh, and if you know any single ladies interested in being a guy’s rock climbing partner, the friend I abandoned would probably love to hear from you!

San Francisco is host to a number of annual festivals, including the late summer / early fall Love Fest.  This clip from Love Fest’s popping circle shows off the modern dance skills of San Francisco.

San Fran Voice usually loves the silly and strange YouTube videos, but every once in awhile, we want to take a look at the serious.  This clip touches on issues tangential to gay marriage which are directly affected by the fact that same sex marriage is not legal and discusses one marriage which took place during Newsom’s famous period of marrying gay couples in San Francisco.