Tropical Zen

I just moved in to SF proper. We’d been up in the north bay area, miles from anywhere useful in a suburb that seemed built by Crate & Barrel. I thought I’d be happy to live in a town where there were no chain stores, but these are all upscale boutiques: fashion clothes for dogs, woo-woo-yoga for a prettier soul, Art galleries, that kind of thing. It’s damn annoying and really expensive.

Anyway, now I’m in a sublet in the Mission at 22nd and Guerrero for the next 3 weeks, and it seems like a neat place. I’m very much enjoying my lessons, and also my teachers as people. I like them a lot. Michael is sort of a cross between my daddy Charlie and me: he’s a curmudgeonly computer-gadget-loving dedicated meat/beer consumer who gets nervous around health food, and also a showoff and great physical comedian who enjoys smaller groups rather than larger parties. He’s got this thing he’ll sometimes do he calls “oranguatango” where he does a very good job mimicking an orangutan, and leads an entire song dancing tango while doing it. It’s super funny, and I’ve been encouraging them to get some clips up on YouTube. Oh, he’s also a quintessential Canadian, which interacts strangely with being a curmudgeon, because that means he’s a very polite curmudgeon. I’m not quite sure how one does that, but he pulls it off wonderfully. Beatrix is extremely sweet, sometimes a little too much but then she’ll make a joke out of language or do something weird and funny. German is her first language and she has a heavy accent; she has a hard time with “th” not coming out as “ss,” and she knows it, and she plays with that sometimes. She used to be a therapist on Salt Spring Island, not too far from my lover Derek. I bought her some glove warmers recently because her hands get so cold its painful for me when she touches me. She doesn’t seem to mind her hands being cold, but *I* mind, so I’ve provided a solution.

So there.