guest blogger!!!!!!!!!!!

i am so pleased to introduce the first guest blogger on should we flee the city...elizabeth sullivan! we first met when she lived around the corner. i noticed that the cool little house with the bright red steps, window boxes full of bright red geraniums and a big flag of planet earth housed an adorable blonde guy about miles' size. miles and jonah quickly found a lot in common (so much in common they were sometimes grabbing it out of each other's hands). elizabeth and her husband gabe are SO COOL AND SMART i can't believe they are our friends. we don't see them much thought because of the lack of cohesive community problem. i sent her these interview questions because i wanted to hear her answers, because she is a friend who both validates me by thinking along the same lines much of the time but seems quite different from me temperamentally (not as crazy, really). maybe we can all live in the urban co-op someday and party late on the roof. i'm ready now!

i think the idea of more parties is important because we need them to get close to people in groups, and bring folks we love from all the little sectors together. i think we used to do this more when we saw favorite bands. so i promise we will have a good party soon, bedtime be damned. and maybe we can all go see rich's band together some night.

thanks elizabeth. other guest bloggers will be helping me out soon.

Questions from Jamie and Answers from Elizabeth

Please describe yourself and your living situation...

Touchy, lazy, Amazon, artsy-fartsy, feminist, mother of boys, in love, in school, in pajamas. I have red hair and red glasses.

I live in the Mission with my babydaddy, Gabriel, my big boy Jonah (who is four) and Rye, the baby. We try not to go out to eat for every meal but it is hard.

Sometimes it seems like we should move to the suburbs so the boys can run feral but then, as I will paraphrase Calvin Trillin "then they would have the disadvantage of having parents who are miserable."

where are you from?

I was born and raised in the suburbs outside of Boston. I grew up in the same house my father grew up in. I was surrounded by a pretty huge Irish Catholic family; cousins, aunts and uncles, grandparents...the whole mafia. My Dad taught English at my high school. I went to church every Sunday to hear about how sinful I was until my first week away from home at college.

what do you do for a living?

Right now I am in school. I am training to be a therapist at the California Institute for Integral Studies. I am in love with my school, learning so much. Right now I'm taking Human Development, Psychodynamics, and Therapeutic Communication. I even have a blog about it! (Jamie, can I promote myself here? http://theladderherald.typepad.com/the_ladder_herald/ ) What I am working towards is having a private practice and writing books, like Kim Chernin or Amy Bloom.

Before that I started a couple of projects: Streetline Networks, www.streetlinenetworks.com, most recently, with my excellent friend Tod Dykstra. And City CarShare, with Gabriel and Kate White. www.citycarshare.org

why did you move to san francisco?

After college, Gabriel and I wanted to live in a "family community," as our zine "Neuter Baby: People Could Learn to Love It" spelled out. We had two close friends who wanted to do this with us, one was in Chicago and the other was in Seattle. So, we visited several cities together and made this big matrix to decide where was objectively the best place. It was literally a spreadsheet of cities we could all imagine living in: New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Seattle, Boston, and a few others. And then we created categories of things we all wanted in a home, for instance, one of the categories that was dear to me was, "a poetry scene," for my friend Kate it was, "possibility of being in a band." There were about 30 or 40 categories. Ok, and then we weighted them, using points to express how important each category was to us individually.

And San Francisco won. That's why I'm here.

I was heartbroken, actually. I really wanted to live in New York, and I still do (as you will see below).

do you plan to stay in san francisco?

Yes. Why, when I kind of hate it here?

a. I think I will carry my restless dissatisfaction with me wherever we go.
b. I have the world's greatest shrink here.
c. After I graduate from CIIS, I think I will need help starting a practice from colleagues and professors who are here.
d. I have been depressed for about two years every time I move to a new city.
e. We know so many good people here (I should have listed this first).
f. We are lucky enough to live on the best street in the city, I think.
g. It would be very hard to leave El Toro, the burrito store (as Jonah calls it). They know his order and correct me when I ask for black beans instead of refried.

I plan to stay here and continue to be broke, unable to buy a house, pissed off at local politics, and in love with Buen Dia Family School.

if you think about moving away, why, when, where...

I've always wanted to live in New York, and still do, though I am slightly less romantic about it now. It's real city—it's not trying to pretend it's a suburb, like San Francisco can be. I went there for a few months just before we moved here back in 1995 and lived in Park Slope, in Brooklyn. The summertime seems disgusting, but otherwise I like almost everything about it. Now my baby sister lives there with her wife, as well as another close friend, and lots of acquaintances. So.

Then there's Boulder, Colorado, where Gabe is from. The fantasy is to live in this beautiful, spiritual place, go to his family's cabin in the aspen trees every weekend, and raise our kids to be left-wing survivalists. I could be a freaky shrink there, and ride my bike all over town like Gabe's grandma. Of course, our children would never be friends with a person of color or have real ethnic food, or be effortlessly exposed to culture...

And then there's Amsterdam. We could bike our kids around in modern design carts, live on a canal, take weekend trips to Paris. A better city than new York, even. So rational and livable. No homeless people because they have housed them all, for free, using taxes!

And then there's Mexico. We could all learn to speak Spanish (except Gabe, who knows), we could be ex-patriots and write and sketch and swim in the warm ocean. We could paint our house like Frida Kahlo's house. American friends would come visit us and be inspired to take photographs and make paintings.

what would be your ideal living situation (Utopian intentional communities,
fantasies about being a billionaire, living with your parents again,
whatever)?

I think I'd like to live in an urban co-housing community. For me to last, it would have to be beautifully-designed, cosmopolitan, and in a dense part of town, not a hippie commune. I'd like to have my own pretty space with my little nuclear family, but to live right next door to my friends and some select family. I'd love to share resources like babysitting, laundry, big appliances, cooking etc. And I would love to have extra space for guests to come for extended stays, and for big outdoor parties—maybe up on the roof?

how important to you is being part of a community?

It's the most important thing I do not have. We know lots of wonderful people here, but there is no gel between them. The connections are individual, and mostly loose. There are neighborhood friends, parenting friends, school friends, bike activist friends, City CarShare friends, SPUR people, Burning Man people (Gabe's friends), and so on...Lucky us! to have such problems. But, I do feel like I am floating, a bit. Not held in community.

how do you feel people's relationships are being affected by communication
technology (email, long distance, etc) and globalization, the movement of
goods and ideas all over the u.s. an world?

I know we're sort of supposed to say it's bad, but I think it's made my long distance relationships a lot better. Email is so simultaneously intimate and protected. You can edit yourself, go back and strike something out, and at the same time, you can get a reply that same hour and feel so in-touch!

I've just started texting a bit in the last year and I love that too--it's like speeded up no vowels email!

what do you think the bay area will be like in the future (you pick a time
frame)

I am afraid to write about this. All I can think about is Global Warming and most of the coastal cities I love being under water. I hope it is not coming like they say it is. And I hope it will be slow, not fast. I hope there will be time to get out. And I hope my boys don't have to be soldiers.

what could you change about your life to make it more satisfying?

More Osento, drinks, and dancing. More free time to stare into space. More time alone with my man in a hotel room. Some gardening, some space in my house to have a party.

anything else??

I love Should We Flee The City? because it is what I am thinking about all the time. And I love your dreamy portraits , and Maya's devilish grin.