It's been 20 months since I wrote that other page, and a lot has happened since then.
Probably the first thing to come up was a crisis on my pert when I first realized that it was inevitable that things would get to the stage where they are now. There are simply too many irreconcilable incompatibilities between the two of us. The first one I ran across, enough in itself to start the crisis, was the mutual distaste we had for each other's place of residence.
I visited him first, and my initial impressions of the community where he lives remains basically unchanged. Santa Cruz has a wonderful amount of hippie counterculture, but unfortunately that's about all it has. Don't get me wrong -- I'm all in favor of white people of privilege questioning the legitimacy of that privilege and trying to subvert it -- but when a bunch of such people form an enclave full of others just like them, the whole effort falls flat. One ends up with a place full of privileged white people who live there because they want to be living in a place full of people just like themselves. Suburbia by another name is still suburbia.
And this particular instance of suburbia is a damned expensive suburb. About as expensive as San Francisco, in fact. Which gets us to another incompatibility. Sure, on the kind of salary a person of my occupation can pull down, I could afford to live in a place with sky-high housing costs. But it would mean either sacrificing my financial future by seriously limiting how much money I could save for my retirement, sacrificing my present quality of life by compelling me to work full time, all the time, or sacrificing my need for personal space of my own. Neither alternative is particularly attractive; if -- if -- I'm ever tempted to make such a sacrifice, I'm going to demand lots of big-city diversity in return. There's no way I'm going to pay San Francisco-style prices and not get any San Francisco-style diversity to show for it.
On Kwai's side (and I'll let him insert a footnote to this paragraph with his side of things if he wants), Seattle is too big, too square, and too counterculture deprived. He's definitely not fond of living in big cities (strangely, this brings up an interesting common point between us: we are both living our adult lives as a rejection to the ones our parents chose for us in childhood; his parents lived in an urban area, and mine always lived in suburbs or small towns). Seattle simply had too much big-city traffic and big-city pollution and not enough interesting hippie stuff to counterbalance it.
A related tension was taking place when this first crisis was unfolding. I had been working for just under ten years at the University of Washington, and had build up quite a large stash of vacation time. My desire to cash in on this time was conflict with the University's desire to have more computer support than they were willing to pay for. In other words, the unwritten rule that systems support staff (unlike everybody else) should never take the full allotment of vacation benefits entitled to them and should never take the fraction they do in chunks larger than a few days, was about to be challenged. On top of that, my processing of personal issues was seriously eating into my ability to focus on work things. The inevitable falling-out happened, and it was agreed by all that I should resign my position.
Initially, this was a blessing. I don't have many expensive habits or tastes, and I at the time I had a lot of savings which I had been accumulating at least partially with the idea of using some of it to buy myself a long respite from work. I felt lonely being at home all the time, so I found a housesitter and headed down to Santa Cruz to spend the winter. I'd miss the snow (or so I thought at the time; it actually did snow a little in Santa Cruz that winter, for the first time in several decades), but I'd be with a man that, despite our differences, I still loved deeply.
I was somewhat skeptical that I'd be amenable to spending that much time in a place that I wasn't very compatible with (there's household issues as well -- his place is well out of the town in a very car-dependent neighborhood, because of the high housing costs his small house is shared with three others and I'd make a fourth with very little space to myself, I doubted I'd enjoy sleeping in an unheated shack through a damp rainy winter, etc.). Kwai dismissed my skepticism with an attitude that had served our relationship well -- I'm still amazed by how much love and support and faith that I'd pull out of it he was able to show me during my periods of moodiness. There had been times that I had been uncertain there was any more future at all to our relationship, and he had persevered with love and support and great times resulted.
But this time my skepticism was borne out; I didn't find my day-to-day life during that visit very pleasant on the whole. And during it, I noticed something change in Kwai as well -- the perseverance was dwindling, slowly but surely. And it was more than just my skepticism over the living conditions -- much earlier I had discussed with him how I thought my sexual desire was, on average, lower than most people's. Short visits were one thing, I'd be able to maintain interest, but on that long visit it didn't take long for the interest to follow its normal pattern for me and wane for long periods.
Whatever the reasons, a lot of the magic disappeared in that long visit. For me, much of it came back once I got back to my house in Seattle -- back in surroundings that suited me, I lost my earlier fixation on having to move in together and was more willing to approach the relationship for what it was. Now I felt that the tables were turned on me and it was Kwai that was losing enthusiasm while I had more than had had in a long time. But even that enthusiasm was tempered with my dislike of plane travel and my being quite "burned out" on Santa Cruz after having spent several months in a row there.
It was also getting to be time to start looking for work again. On that front, I quickly rediscovered what an absolutely awful job interviewer I am, as well as running into some absolutely stunning examples of what I can best call "Seattle timidity" -- if a job applicant hasn't done exactly the same thing they're asking, s/he is proclaimed incapable of ever doing it. I even had one nameless interviewer -- who gave all the impressions of being computer literate -- say with a straight face that my Perl programming experience was not relevant because none of it involved writing CGI scripts, and they were looking for a Perl/CGI programmer!
Just for the hell of it, I had also been sending several resumes out to jobs that looked interesting in San Francisco. I had looked at housing in The City when I was on my long winter visit, and had found some things affordable (albeit barely) by my standards. And it would give me a chance to live in a place with good enough mass transit that I could dump my car (living carless is something that I've always wanted to do for environmental and political reasons ever since I was a child). And of course, I could make visits to Kwai without having to undertake any more of those darn airplane flights. The head-up-the-ass "if you haven't done it already, you're incapable of ever doing it" didn't seem to exist, and several months later than I would have liked to (cue my terrible interviewing skills again), I got an offer, which I decided to take.
But what a difference six months or so in an insane real estate market can make. Rents had gone up about 20 percent, and availability had gone way, way, down. It took about 1 1/2 days of searching to realize that I was probably wasting my time looking for something in San Francisco -- even if I found something that was both affordable and acceptable, it would end up taking a lot longer than the few days I had available to find it, and I really didn't want to spend an indefinitely long time sleeping on other people's sofas. I really need my own space.
So I rented a bike and started riding around the East Bay, concentrating on areas that were near BART stations. It didn't take long at all to discover a number of nice neighborhoods in central Oakland bordering Lake Merritt, and best of all "to rent" signs were much more common than they had been on the other side of the bay, not to mention astoundingly cheaper rents. Alas, the limited home-hunting time I had precluded me from finding a place in one of the elegant old apartment buildings from the early 20th century that I had really liked the look of. But I'm still very happy to have a place of my own, for about as much money as a bedroom in a shared apartment would have cost me in The City. And I'm still safely away from the wretched postwar sprawl developments I hate so much. It's really quite amazing how uncrowded and livable high-density development can be if open space can be devoted to parks and landscaping instead of seas of parking lots.
If only my apartment didn't face south and get so badly blasted by that dreadful California sunshine. I can't wait for the rain to get here; the urban environment is nice but the natural one can't hold a candle to the one back in Seattle. That's probably the tension that will determine how long I stay in the Bay Area -- it is sunnier and drier than I like it here, and there's not enough winter (even Seattle was getting a little too unsnowy for me).
Anyhow, back to the subject of this article. I've been in the Bay Area for just under six weeks now, and I still have this feeling of things winding down between myself and Kwai. Thankfully, we're both not the kind to break up with bitter feelings, in fact I don't think "break up" is a very good phrase to describe what's happening. I still feel way too much love for him for that phrase to be accurate, and we're usually in daily contact with each other. It's just that a lot of the rosy initial fantasies are gone and neither of us is expecting to spend the rest of one's life with the other.