San Francisco Franco/Is That What the Future Holds?

At San Francisco International, as Nels Cline and Mike Watt hit the stage with Banyan a mere three miles from the hotel I’d checked out of earlier in the day (I will be regretting my haste to get back to Baltimore for years to come), I discovered my flight home an hour delayed, an hour after I’d hastily departed and miraculously hailed a cab from UCSF’s Mission Bay campus, which is mere blocks from the San Francisco Bay, where no cabs ever go, that got me to the airport as fast as anyone had ever gotten me to any airport.

The cab driver was giving a lift to a friend of his who sat in the back seat and appeared to be headed for nowhere in particular. “You straight?” the driver asked his friend as I got in the cab. “Yeah, I’m straight,” the friend replied. A faint odor in the car hinted to me that this had not always been the case. About five minutes into the drive I realized I didn’t have the forty dollars cash the trip may cost. “You have thirty?” the driver asked. I did. “You’re straight,” he said, and so I was, as frustratingly so as Cobain ever was. In the backseat, the driver’s friend talked to someone on the cell about moving to Vegas and getting “a bed full of white ladies.”

It was a good weekend. I flew in on Thursday afternoon and shared an airporter van with a Japanese girl who was on vacation and had just flown in from Hawaii. The van driver was a Chinese guy who complained about how the airport ground transportation crew never helped the van drivers get any business, and asked me to teach him English phrases. When we were driving through downtown, he saw someone on the sidewalk who reminded him of his ex-wife, who had apparently “run off with a white man.” He then proceeded to ask me if I was married or had a girlfriend, and when I said no on both accounts, he tried to tell me where I could find a dormitory full of Asian girls.

I was so hungry after I arrived at the hotel that I ate dinner at the first food place I saw, which was a bar next to the hotel where Heinekens cost $4.50. I took a walk down Market St., which reminded me of New York City as much as any place I’d ever been in my life, that night. Among the things I saw: city hall; a bronze statue of Simon Bolivar; a dude on some stairs who asked if I wanted weed; a pension-aged couple making out in front of what appeared to be a strip club. Either that, or she was a prostitute; I couldn’t really tell. I stopped by the Martin Luther King Jr. memorial in SoMa (which stands for “South of Market St.”), a stone U-shaped hallway in the middle of a park with miniature waterfalls cascading from the roof into a pool. While I was taking photos here, doing my best to remain inconspicuous, a guy in a red hoodie and headphones approached me and asked me to take his picture.

Sure, I said, you got a camera?

He did not; he wanted me to take a picture of him with my camera. “So you’ll remember me,” he said.

So I did, and so I do. It wasn’t until after he left that I began to be genuinely worried what he was going to do next, or what was going to happen to him; I hope he didn’t go jump off the Golden Gate Bridge or something like that. I hope I wasn’t the last person to see him alive. You never know, with such things.

Some time later I found myself in Fremont Square at the north end of Market St. It was utterly covered in dirty, trampled feathers. I suddenly understood why I had been seeing people walking through the streets carrying pillows all night. Tragically unbeknownst to me, the annual San Francisco Valentine’s Day Pillow Fight had taken place there mere hours before, and I was surveying the aftermath. A young couple danced around in the feathered square and skipped away down the sidewalk, holding hands. I realized I was very tired—it was 2AM in Baltimore—and decided to head back.

The interviews themselves were great, if exhausting; being serious and professional all day is simply not something I can effortlessly do. A couple of the professors I met with were applying really amazing methods toward a systematic understanding of macromolecular interactions; the ongoing fusion between the biophysics and bioinformatics branches of research, with both approaches projected onto the third axis of systems biology, was obvious. Some other professors were more interested in talking about the membrane biophysics research I’d done in the past year. I even talked to a graduate student who had studied astrophysics in college, and who was sympathetic toward my wish for a mathematically elegant understanding of biology.

UCSF Mission Bay is The New with capital letters. The campus had not even existed at the beginning of the decade; construction photos showed it bursting from its foundations like Athena from Zeus’ head. The buildings, half of which are still in the process of construction, are colorful, avant-garde in their geometry, and decorated on the interior with abstract paintings. They are also named after currently-extant corporations (e.g. Genentech) instead of long-dead white men (which may be either a positive or a negative, depending on one’s tastes). The Integrative Program in Quantitative Biology is, as far as I can tell, completely free of stubborn, elderly faculty and their entrenched modes of thought; all of the professors are young (by academic standards) and make no attempt to conceal that their grandiose ideals may never pan out.

At the party Friday night at a student’s house, I met our host, who ran an Internet radio station and musical promotions company out of his bedroom, which was equipped with Pro Tools and a MIDI fader board. I met a girl from my interview group who came from a town on the southern tip of Texas on the bank of the Rio Grande, whose parents had no concept of grad school and who was interviewing for Harvard and Washington University in St. Louis (and had already interviewed for the same MIT program I applied to, Computational and Systems Biology, who still haven’t written me back, at the end of January—I interpreted this as bad news for myself). Another kid from the group told me, as we lounged on the third floor balcony by the liquor table, that the worst thing one could possibly do is have an orgasm while high on ecstasy, as it would fry one’s serotonin receptors rendering one forever unresponsive to pleasure while sober. He told me he had a friend who had done this to himself and was subsequently forced into ascetic Buddhism.

I have to admit, all my experiences in San Francisco were pretty convincing. I’d miss the cold and the snow of the mid-Atlantic and all points north, but the city in the desert between the mountains and the ocean is beautiful in its own gloriously arid right, and promises a healthy fix of the crazy whenever I might feel the desire for it. The iPQB program challenges even MIT’s CSB program for progressiveness and innovative modes of thought. I really do hope they accept me. The lingering issue, of course, is that I’ll be two thousand miles from almost everyone I’ve known in the past seven years. It’s even more of a removal than from Baltimore to New York, where most of my best friends from high school had gone to college, and look at the consequences of a mere five hours’ bus ride: the only people from Lawrenceville I speak to semi-regularly anymore are Andrew and Nick. Though maybe that’s as much a consequence of the events of the past four years as of the physical distance. The other issue is the deprivation of deprivation which I have mentioned before. The age of the reclusive scientist-philosopher is over, and probably had been over for generations by the time I was born 22 years ago. In true anachronistic form,“work hard, play hard” never jived well with me; I’m used to having large quantities of “blank time” for reflection (hence these exceedingly long entries), but it seems “blank time” is increasingly discouraged as one moves into the real world.

Back in the summer after freshman year, walking with Patrice past a rain-soaked freshman quad we were leaving forever, I uttered, “This is the end of an old way of life.” I said it at the time mainly to sound cool (though it turned out to be unintentionally, and unfortunately, prophetic), but had I known better, I probably would’ve saved a phrase like that for the present day. I had hoped that the new way of life would be an expansion and refinement of the old way of life, but maybe it’s time to start accepting that may not be the case, that an agonizing dissolution of present comforts and modes of thought may be the form tomorrow will inevitably take.

On the other hand, maybe getting dragged into the future kicking and screaming is exactly what I need to have happen to me. I confess that I enjoy my current almost-asceticism, but some days I wake up and realize that it’s not enough, just not enough, and that deprivation keeps the demons out but does not actually fulfill anything. Discontent suddenly flares like a re-emerging tumor, and the depthless well of gentleness in my heart drains away to nothing, leaving a parched and brittle landscape. Then a few hours later I’ll calm down and return to favoring the silence and stillness again. I wish I could make up my mind. I wish I could know for sure whether I am what I am or still in the process of getting there. I suppose one never gets there.

This much is certain: that I can’t go on feeling like I’ve lost all agency in my future. Like the question of whether I’m happy, whether I will be happy, is determined completely by forces outside my ability to influence: other people, whether they sit on admissions committees or not, and their black box thought processes, both individual and collective. My happiness should not be decided by others’ responses to my hopes and dreams and my own unhealthy desire for things I can’t have—funny how unrequited crushes and grad school rejections converge on my life. I need to regain control of my life and how I feel about it—I just need to figure out how.

"Staring down the barrel of the rest of my life”—that’s another phrase I would’ve, had I known better, saved for my current situation.