Passion

Chinatown in San Francisco has changed less in the last 20 years than any town in China.

This probably holds true for any number between 1 and 100.

16 years ago on November 30th I titled a post Persimmons, Not Parsimony because I'd been tickled orange to find a bowl of persimmons in Charlie's Café, the largest eatery on Google's Mountain View campus. It was the first day of Noogler Orientation and an inflection point in my life. 2⁴ years later I attended an improvised Dickens performance at San Francisco's BATS Theater at which the audience answer to "What reminds you of the holiday season" was "persimmons!" and it sent the story off to a sweet yet tannin-infused evening of long-form improv comedy.

To round the night out, across the street I spotted The Interval, part cocktail bar/artisan café, part museum for The Long Now, an organization devoted to thinking 10,000 years in the past and 10,000 years in the future. I recall hearing vaguely about this group around 2009, and it's fitting that I landed in their bar after sixteen rotations of Earth's celestial gears: on display was a model of a component to compute the equation of time in their 10,000 year clock. Some of the code I wrote in my final months at Google computed the sun's elevation above the horizon at a given instant…in SQL. Over the last several years I've toyed with the idea of writing a book about the various ways humans keep track of time, but I'd forgotten about the Long Now folks… perhaps they could be a human element that weaves a narrative into my nonfiction tome.

There's an alternate history to my professional and personal life. In the fall of 2009 I had no long-term commitments. I had assumed that Google's hiring process involved choosing a location after passing the interview, not realizing that my acquaintance had referred me to a specific Google Boulder position. After quitting my job in early 2009 and traveling for the summer I had imagined that I might end up in the Bay Area, the center of gravity for the computer programming world and a place that hadn't yet lost the luster of early 21st Century techno-utopianism. San Francisco seemed like the hip place to be when I was 30, and I was curious if I would choose to live in biking distance of an office in Silicon Valley and commute to The City By The Bay for cultural enrichment, or whether I'd try a life in the dense urban space and make US-101 my daily journey. (I also interviewed with a company in DUMBO, Brooklyn, near the hipster haven of the other coast, Williamsburg). I wasn't upset to stay in Boulder ("You're already from there," Molly quipped), and as I watched Googlers complain about everything in the Bay Area from traffic to housing to taxes to rain ("You live in a place affected by drought and you're complaining about the rain" I memeed) I got to feel pretty good about sticking to my mile-high xeric roots. I continue to chuckle whenever someone moves to Boulder and is wowed about how cheap the housing is and how efficiently traffic flows.

Geography is destiny; where we are determines so much of the course of our lives. Had I moved to California I wouldn't have connected with Kelly in 2010, we wouldn't have lived through the 2013 flood, we wouldn't have gotten married on Talk Like A Pirate Day, we wouldn't have bought a house, we wouldn't have our cats. I'm in the Bay Area again this week because we visited Kelly's sister and our nephew, neither of whom I would've recognized as anyone special in this alternate history. I would have met other people in San Francisco and around this saucer of mountains. I would have partied with Burners more than once or twice a year. I would have picked up different hobbies, fallen in love with different people, built community in different places. Who knows if I would've stayed at Google for a decade and a half—over the last 10 years Facebook and Amazon kept trying to recruit me to Seattle for some reason, but I imagine a Bay Area software engineer gets lots more unsolicited job inquiries, ones that don't involve a change in homes too. At Google Boulder I made friends with the sourcing team, the folks who identify those potential candidates who aren't looking for a job. Engineering and People Ops had lunch on the porch together, went to the same office parties, and a pair even got married. That cross-organizational connection doesn't happen as much in Mountain View: there are far too many Bay Area Googlers to put unrelated jobs together in the same building. All things considered, I'm happy with the happenstance that kept me at 40 degrees north, 105 and a quarter degrees east, rather than sending me on a long-term assignment to 37 and a half degrees north and 122 degrees east. The weather here is pleasant year round, but that's not a great way to keep time.