Dec 29 2014
2 Comments
Uncategorized

Meet Me at Drevets.co

Snotheads. I hope I can call you that by now. You do mean that much to me, and I hope you know I’m being sincere.

I’m writing this letter to you from a bar in San Francisco. It’s called Yancy’s and I’ve taken up an entire table with my laptop for far too long. I needed to get out of the house. Know what I mean?

Anyways, I have some news for you. It’s a small piece of news, and most of you will not care about it, and that’s an appropriate response. The news is this: that I’m no longer going to be blogging here. I have a new domain name called drevets.co and I spent money on it, so I’m going to be blogging over there from now on.

This is not the end. No, far from it. This is the beginning. Will it be different? Maybe and maybe not. I don’t know. That’s the most honest thing I can say right now. I really don’t know. But I hope you’ll join me on the journey.

Drevets.co is not much to look at right now, and it may never grow to be very much either, but that’s where I’ll be doing things if I am doing them online.

I hope you’ll join me there.

With love,

Emily

Sep 15 2014
4 Comments
Writing

What Is the Click Hole of Darkness?

imageEveryone has dreams. Everyone has a pancake they wish they could turn perfectly, or a pushup they wish they could do while clapping.

It’s human, the ability to project onto a future self and say, “That person will be able to do something that I cannot.” Or the ability to project onto the current self and say, “Me, I am capable of doing this thing that feels really freaking impossible, but I can do it.”

But that’s on a good day, when the sun is shining, when an old friend called, when you went out for a run and pushed yourself harder than usual and it felt good to sweat goddammit. That’s the good day.

But there’s something else everyone has. It’s the darkness, the voice that says, “You cannot,” the voice that says you will never be great.

It says that you are not good enough, that the very idea of striving is ridiculous, that mediocrity and unhappiness is your destiny, and that yes, everyone else is succeeding except for you. This voice is always there, but sometimes it’s overpowered by the beams of positivity radiating from your brain chemicals.

But on the rainy days, the days when no one gets back to you, when you feel alone, tired and sick, when your goals loom ahead of you like a cliff and the idea of getting out of bed to wash a dish feels as impossible as parting the San Francisco Bay, this is the moment of your personal darkness.

The most insidious thing about this darkness is the way it works in the silence and the corners of your mind, never voiced out loud but slowly eating away at your will.

This is why I created clickholeofdarkness.tumblr.com. It is the place my negative thoughts go. Instead of pushing them out of mind, I push them to the forefront and magnify them by orders of 10, 20 and 30 just to see how ridiculous they are and how self-defeating it is to listen to them.

Clickholeofdarkness.tumblr.com is where they go to be made fun of in the full light of God and the internet and the God of the internet, and beneath that spotlight, the thoughts die for the day. Sure, they may resurge on another day in a different form, but I will not fight them lying down. I will fight them sitting up and with a keyboard, for this is my sword, this is my battle, and this is my war to win.

Back to your hole, darkness.

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Sep 12 2014
4 Comments
San Francisco

The People Across the Street

imageSome days when I get back from running, I pour myself a big cup of water from the tap (it’s a blue plastic cup with fish on it that I’ve been drinking out of since college), and sit on the front stoop and watch the houses and street in front of me.

It’s not a very big stoop, just three steps, and there’s not much to look at outside, just some small-ish trees and some dwellings. I’ve lived in the same apartment now for about a year and a half and still don’t really know my neighbors. Maybe it’s because I’m often gone in the evenings or don’t fit in with the demographics of spouse+pet+childrent could also be because I’ve never really made an effort.

I’m not happy about the fact I don’t really know my neighbors though. I want to change it,  so my stoop-sitting is my one small way I get to know the neighborhood. The sitting has had mixed success. Almost four weeks into my experiment, I’ve met one neighbor and gotten to know some of the people that live across the street by sight. There’s a woman who goes surfing early in the morning and two roommates, one with blonde hair and the other with brown (I think) that hang out together sometimes. There’s an older couple with a dog in the house on the far right. And another woman with brown hair and a face that reminds me of Smeagol with a dog on in the same house. A 30-something Asian woman plays golf, or played golf at least once. Sometimes she also sits on her own stoop, which is considerably larger. The windows on the top floor of the middle house are often open.

These are my across the street neighbors, and they don’t know I exist, unless they’ve seen me with my blue cup out there watching their homes and doors for signs of life.  I wonder what it would be like to live on the west side of the road, with the sun coming in the front windows in the morning, to already be on the side of the street closer to the dry cleaner. It must be a different kind of life for those across-the-street neighbors, the across-the-street people.

Maybe one day somehow they’ll be walking on my side of the street and they’ll recognize my sweaty bangs and blue cup and we’ll say hi and I’ll ask them about how their hobbies are going. Or maybe I could switch sides and sit on a stoop over there for a little while and see what life is like from their perspective. I’ll look at my own three steps and window and see my life like they see it.

Until then, I’ll be on my stoop, slightly out of breath with a blue cup full of water.

Sep 09 2014
2 Comments
San Francisco

The Sea Monster at Ocean Beach

The Sunset

I went for a run this morning. The key to this is to not think about anything from the moment I wake up to the moment I put on my shoes and go out the door and start moving my feet. If I start thinking for even one second, then I think about how my knees will be stiff and my ankles will crack, and I’m going to be cold for the first five minutes and then start sweating and breathing heavily and the whole thing is rather uncivilized and awful. That’s why it’s imperative to avoid thinking of any kind.

Out the door I went and instantly uphill. Up and up the hill I went, into the heart of the area directly south of the Inner Sunset, an area I think is called Ashbury Heights but I’m not certain. While the rest of the Sunset is laid out in a neat grid with the streets named alphabetically and numerically (Judah, Kirkham, Lawton, Moraga and 11th, 12th, 13th, etc.) the area directly south of me is a mess of hills and tangled streets.


At some point 9th and 12th avenues intersect, something unfathomable to most people. It’s San Francisco’s equivalent of the Bermuda Triangle. Houses have yards and fountains, strange intersections occur and streets change into other streets as they curl around hills, and nothing really makes sense.

I was near the point where Pacheco turns into Funston Avenue. If you’re not familiar with the area, you probably don’t get how bizarre that is. I might as well say that I was in the part of New York City which is built like a giant picnic basket and governed by people-sized ants. At any rate, I was in that improbable area when I suddenly got a glimpse of the ocean. This was interesting because I thought I was facing the other direction, but it turns out my inner compass had been Bermuda’d and there it was, the Pacific Ocean with what looked like a giant winged sea monster perched on the beach.

That was strange, I thought, and continued to run because that’s what you do when you’re not really thinking. I turned around about thirty seconds later and there it was again, the view of the Pacific and the giant, solitary, motionless winged sea monster. It looked lonely almost, and actually very tiny against the ocean and the endless street blocks of the sunset and their pale pastel squares. It was probably debating on the best way to attack, which public utilities to hit first or maybe where it could cause the most damage and terror.

Or maybe it wasn’t trying to attack at all. Maybe it had come to San Francisco just like many others have come here, looking for fellow dreamers and creative types to do the impossible with. Maybe it wanted to learn how to code, or already knew how to code and had a cool new app idea but needed funding. Maybe it was frozen against the city, stuck thinking of all its passions and dreams and hopes with no idea of where to begin and feeling a little homesick in the fog. Maybe it was afraid of missing the best opportunity.

I don’t know what was going through its reptilian brain and its cold blood, but I hope it figures everything out, and that it doesn’t cause too much damage on the way to its destiny.

Also, I think it was a windmill.

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Sep 08 2014
2 Comments
San Francisco

Come Meet My San Francisco. It’s Not Shiny, but It’s Good.

imageI moved to San Francisco just over two years ago and I know it’s normal but I still kind of hate it when I’m catching up with people and they ask me, “Do you love San Francisco?”

I think about how terrible it is when the MUNI doesn’t come, or the awkwardness of the homeless population that I still have no idea how to deal with, all the tech douches with their cookie cutter jeans, and then all the regular douches. I think of the rent I pay every month, the fact I still don’t know many of my neighbors and feel like the community I have is spread out like a spider’s web with me caught in the middle. I think of the inequality I see and the fact that so many people I love are far away from me forever. I think of how sad and dirty the streets look sometimes in the fog, and I think of the forever cold nights and the long lost dream of drinking an evening beer al fresco without shivering.

Then, I think about other stuff. I think of my first improv performance and the first time I was on stage in this city. I think about sitting in Golden Gate park with my friends and talking about men and how we clueless we were. I think of my plant Deb, dinners with friends, endless breakfasts and cups of coffee. I think of hills upon hills, views upon views, impossibly beautiful cityscapes in an impossibly beautiful landscape, non-stop creativity and casual conversations with strangers. I think of the Pacific Ocean and running into people I know on the street. I think of karoake and dancing and looking at Golden Gate Bridge from Land’s End and I think of all the wonderful people I’m lucky to have met here.

That’s the thing. I don’t know what San Francisco you’re talking about when you ask me about it. I know you know about the postcards, the painted ladies, the bridge, the trolleys and the Fisherman’s Wharf. You know about avocados and sourdough bread and gay people, but that’s not my San Francisco.

My San Francisco is doing Zumba on a soccer field near the Balboa park community center/pool. It’s walking home against a wind that’s colder than all hell from an old Episcopalian church in the Haight. It’s doing improv in the police station in the Mission because they have a community room there that anyone can use. It’s eating a mediocre but oh so satisfying $4.50 gigantic slices of meaty pizza for lunch from Portico with an old co-worker. It’s walking five blocks to the UCSF medical school and looking out at the bridge at night on a balcony without any benches. It’s drinking beer at The Little Shamrock, a local bar with more tiffany lamps than people. My San Francisco is not shiny beautiful all the time, but it’s good, and it certainly is one that I can get down with, maybe even love.

But let’s not get too crazy.

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