Beauty right in our backyard

Every February, HRS schedules a week long break, usually the third full week in the month. Officially, it's called President's Week Vacation, but everyone calls is ski week. My anecdotal information believes that a greater percentage of students are going to warm weather destinations or just staying home. So what have I been doing? Coincidentally, on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday I had an engagement between 4 and 6PM. The three engagements different parts of the city and so I took off early and spent an hour or so walking the stairways of that neighboorhood. (Mom, perhaps we could do this as an activity when you visit in April) There is a great book called Stairway Walks of San Francisco that plots out walks in twenty San Francisco neighboorhoods that have you climbing up and down the many staircases which are part of the character of the area. Wednesday had me climbing up and down the staircases of Pacific Heights. Thursday afternoon I had the opportunity to explore the eastern side of Bernal Heights and this afternoon, I worked out the calves in the hills above the Castro. Only today did I bring a camera to show pictures.

The Liberty Street steps descending from Rayburn to Noe. Note the Art Deco buildings that flank these stairs within a neighboorhood of Victorians. (I read this in a book, no way I would ever have been able to pick that up on my own.)

These steps replace 22nd Street leading walkers from Collingwood down to Diamond.

This is the view from the top of the stairs descending from then cul-de-sac at the end of 20th down to Sanchez"

Then you look back ath what you came down and get this.

This house was owned by Mayor Rolph (1912-1931). Notice the dropoff of the hill.

I'll keep hitting these walks, it's exercise and a look at neighboorhoods that I often don't get to.

I walk away with my dignity.....

It's hard for me to tell my Mom things that are truly personal so if I could tell her something on the phone last night, then I really think that I ended my 10+ month relationship with Scott is in the books. Sometimes when we live life on a day-to-day basis, it's difficult to stop and see the "forest through the trees." So last fall and this winter, there were some days that were difficult and I just didn't have enough experience in relationships to understand what I was feeling. In December, I started to see a therapist to try to determine what I was doing wrong and if there were behaviors and actions that I could do differently to make the relationship better.

So once a week, I would go and sit there for an hour and leave with something really concrete to think about and an approach or skill or thought that I should try and do to reduce the amount of conflict. For those who know me well know that I will always retreat to the world of logic and reason and forget to think about feelings and history. But I learned that I often times I turn to logic and reason in a condescending way. So true, right?

Another thing I do is that I often times assume that I know what another person wants and act accordingly. In the process, I've skipped over trying to know what I want and then actually asking the other person what he/she wants. Translate this skipping from A to D and bypassing B and C and you'll be greeted with a lot of miscommunication.

Ultimately though what happened is that I got the "we need to sitdown and talk" talk from two of friends, with whom I have been sharing my stories too. This past Sunday, my friend Lynn had my friend Carlos and I over for a belated birthday dinner. Lynn and Carlos (Marl and Mom, I know it's weird that these two are, like, BFF (Mom, that's "Best Friends Forever") since I've introduced them to each other last year) asked me some pretty tough questions and called my bullshit on some of the answers I was giving. I sat there and listened to what they had to say. I so wanted to storm out of the room and not hear what they said. But here I was practicing a skill that I MUST work on, which is to not walk away from emotionally difficult situations. My M.O. is to simply leave a situation that is hard emotionally. I just never learned how to deal with them because I never saw them as a kid. A feeling in the House of Chen? What was that?

Ultimately, I had to let them use logic and reason to put together a big picture that I suspect I would have figured out in time, but because they were outsiders could see so clearly. There isn't a need for me to spell out any more than that. I have too much respect for Scott to air out our dirty laundry in this public space. I am more than willing to share with you in an email or phone call.

When Lynn and Carlos pointed out, "going to work shouldn't be a refuge for you", I knew that I was in an untenable situation and radical change was the only solution.

It all started with LBJ

A couple of years ago, I picked up a copy of Richard Caro's Pulitzer Prize winning Master of the Senate, the third volume in his ongoing biography of Lyndon Baines Johnson. It's a book of over 1,000 pages and I devoured it in less than a week. Then for some reason this fall, I picked it up and again read it cover to cover in less than a week. One thing that really made an impact on me was the process within the US Senate that got the Civil Rights bills of the 1950's and 1960's passed. Throughout the sections dealing with the passage of Civil Rights bills as well as the entire book, references were made to senators at that time. Many of these men and one woman (Margaret Chase Smith of Maine) were huge political figures in history of the United States and gigantic men of stature in their home states. Thus began the current theme of my reading, biographies of politicians of the latter half of the 20th century. Obscure? You know it. Here's not only a list, but pictures of the covers of said books pilfered from Amazon.com. They are presented in the order I read them:

Henry (Scoop) M. Jackson (D-WA)
Reading about Jackson demanded that I read about his colleague and Warren G. Magnuson.

Warren (Maggie) G. Magnuson (D-WA)
The common theme through both these books is that even though these two senators were individually stellar politicians, they were as a pair more than the sum of their parts. The role of Magnuson's Commerce Committee, which he chaired, in passing Title II of the 1964 Civil Rights Bill allowing all people the right to public accomodations was one that led to more reading about the entire Civil Rights Bill process.

The three protagonists LBJ (D-TX), Hubert Humphrey (D-MN) and Richard Russell (D-GA)
The following three are men who were mentioned throughout these books and so with Amazon's used book section, they became an inexpensive entertainment option.

Frank Church (D-ID)

Representative Tom Foley (D-WA)

Mike Mansfield (D-MT)
Yeah, I know I'm a bit weird. Tune in next time to see who's biography I read next.