Squeezed in probably twenty miles in the City yesterday, including a ride down to the Consulate right under the first exit off the Bay Bridge. That down, I dropped off my visa at my mama's house and dashed right back out again, scrambling around for coffee. Spent about an hour at that cafe on the corner of Noe and Market, Flore. Knocked out a good chunk of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: thoughts on pride and ego, on Quality (capital Q of course), how we value logic, how we self-motivate... He goes on this trip about eliminating the grading system in education. I think that might be a fantastic idea. Feedback is valuable, grades are not... If we didn't have grades or degrees at the University, everyone there would be there just because they're nerds, because they actually, you know, want to learn? Crazy. That's the short version. Which brings me to my pre-departure basket-casery. One of the things that's making me wring my hands is this fear of a new education system. I've done pretty well through this one, but in Mexico it appears that it works pretty differently: you sit in lectures all quarter furiously scribbling the professor's every word and then they give you ONE fat test at the end of the semester. Good luck, bub.
Scary!
Unrelatedly I'd like to address the application for an FM-3 visa. This form is called F-1, and includes questions about the shape of your forehead, chin, nose, and moustache. I thought these were funny questions. Is my nose concave, convex, straight or wide? Jeez. I had to get the visa-lady at the Consulate to evaluate my face for me. She was very nice about it. She told me that she'd track me down and sue me if I didn't visit the National Anthropology Museum while I was down there. It must be pretty good. Note to self...
More on yesterday: Josh came into the city and we rode around some more, meeting at 16th/Mission BART and dashing up to the Castro and back down to the Mission again. Then we zigzagged out to Golden Gate Park, hung around the Tea Garden and kicked it at the beach for awhile afterward. We also made a stop at Green Apple, where he found this awesome book for his kid. It's a Nikki McClure book-- she's the one that does all these paper cut-out illustrations that are sort of rural-themed and really beautiful, all in black-and-white.
Black-and-white. I'm really torn about the issue of photography. I want to try out this blog thing and take digital photos, but the quality (I'm not going to invest in a slick Nikon or anything)is going to suffer and I don't think those little digitals do black and white. So... I'm thinking about bringing my SLR and hoping there's somewhere that will scan photos for me. Is that ludicrous? The other issue is lugging that damn thing around. Bringing my SLR means carrying my SLR, and it means paying for film-processing and it means what the hell do I do with my photos while I'm there? But I learned from my coast trip that cheap digital photos aren't rewarding in the same way as good digital or film photos. Ah, the cheapskate's dilemma.
We then rode up Fillmore to have swanky dinner with my mom just off California, this really cool Italian place with brick and church pews everywhere. It was kind of nutty. Best part? They made their own pasta; it was amazing: delicate and eggy, in short, twisty-tie shape, really thin and flippy-floppy. That just about killed my desire to ride bikes, and that was the end of the biking day.
