butterfly effects
new job, new city (prologue)
First impression
I sat on the slope at Dolores Park to wait for C. On the field below, the people of San Francisco walked around in t-shirts, speckling the fresh untrimmed grass with picnic blankets and volleyball games in play. Stacks of pastel buildings layered on a hilly backdrop, and a crowd was gathering behind me for a Dev Patel lookalike contest (lol). It was November yet the sky above stretched the same constant, endless blue you see in movies set in summer. It struck me then that this could be the first of many similar moments meeting friends and spending afternoons at the park for the Nth time, just like one of the people I observed on the field below.
As a mental experiment, I pretended like I was truly one of them, throwing myself 6 months into the future when I’ve come to love the colorful, sunshine energy of the city and accepted the shitty streets as part of a place I’ll call “home”. The good news is that envisioning this future reality makes it less of a foreign idea, and I start to see the parallels between here and the places I’ve lived before:
Union square, Fidi, Chinatown.
Gay white males in the Castro, gay white males in Hell’s Kitchen.
Market Street, like the one intersecting University Ave back in Philly.
But its slant - like Broadway.
Drawing these connections makes it feel like there are parts of this city I already know, even if it is the first time I’m really visiting.
Cycle of causes
My flight will be landing in Tokyo in a few hours. I’ve always liked long international flights for how they force a concentrated chunk of (warped) time, where minutes could be hours, could be two movies, ten chapters, and five or six dreams I almost remember, all merged into one. Recently, I’ve been hyper-sensitive of and ultra grateful for concentrated chunks of time because every day feels like a countdown, not just to the end of 2024 but also to my last day in New York.
Four months ago, I started working full-time for a small software startup based in San Francisco, and I’ll be moving there in January. It’s for a product I love in a role I think befits me and I must say, it is a crazy fortunate feeling to be invested in and impassioned about what you do for a living. My work and life are much more integrated now, and it feels like the hours I pour into work also go towards building a part of who I want to be.
Largely because of these recent and upcoming transitions in my life, I’ve been thinking a lot about how much seemingly small actions taken earlier this year (and some last year) matter so much now. For example, it took a series of experiences and preconditions to manifest this job into existence, including:
Going to creator camp, where I first learned about and became a user of the product.
Meeting W, who introduced me to
A, who enabled me to
spend months freelancing for the company (doing work completely unrelated to what I do now, full-time).
Being open to moving to the west coast.
Committing to a 2-week work trial for a project I was not confident I could complete.
Only 4&6 were actively working towards getting this job, and only at step 6 did I even think it was a real possibility. However, all of the above were crucial, even if at the time all I considered was that it seemed to be in the direction of where I wanted to be, in the broadest sense possible.
I think that we go through cycles of creating the causes and then experiencing the effects, such that some periods of time are dominated by the little choices or ideas first nonchalantly spoken to the world and other periods are dominated by manifestations of those choices when they eventually take significant, tangible shape months, even years, later. I’ve had every intention during these last few months to seize the remaining time I have left in New York, but this period has actually felt heavily reactive, as if a more agentic olivia earlier this year kicked a wheel, or maybe several wheels, and now the wheels are all turning and turning and all I can do is sit and see where they take me.
More ounces:
rediscovered this classic Japanese gem of a song:
update on the excerpt from my 2024 bucketlist I shared in January
yoo im also in sf (although I feel like I'm going to try and move back east in summer...) down to hang if you're around! - connie