city promises kept

It's been foggy in the evenings for the last few days, and the city looks even more like a dreamland while doing its best to keep up the spontaneity. And there is big payoff to anyone who sticks around town.
On Friday night while hanging out with Igor in his neighborhood, we stopped between bars at the Plough and the Stars near the beginning of Clement, since I know they sometimes have great bands playing. It looked abandoned, but at a closer look it was actually full and cozy inside, and when we entered this spectacular jazz band was tuning up. They had a standing base, a fiddle, a mandolin and this amazing guitar I would describe if I knew the names of guitars, but let's just say it was phenomenal, and we just happened upon it, and stayed through their whole set.
On Saturday I went down to the Mission with one of my roommates and she egged me on to talk to boys. But it was she who got picked up on by a very pretty boy, and I obliged to be versatile by talking to his friends. They convinced us to come along to Beauty Bar, which I was happy to do. Pretty Boy was still chatting up my roommate pretty intensely, who was in turn pretty into it, and I was talking to his friend, this hilarious Pure Mathematician. My roommate leaves for a total of two minutes, and I see Pretty Boy immediately planting seeds in the direction of some provocative looking blondies. Uh-oh, guess he gets around. She rolls her eyes, again not all that optimistic about what's out there in singleland and it's hard for me to find any evidence to the contrary.
The bar closes soon afterwards, and we're waiting for the 14 Owl, but decide to take a Taqueria Cancun pitstop. It takes over 20 minutes to get our burritos, but well worth the wait. When we sit down, we see Pretty Boy outside the window, walking down the street with (get this:) three blondes (How would it play out?). We laugh, and soon a guy asks if all of his friends could sit with us. We say okay, and they are friendly, after a minute it becomes clear that they all work at Google, so I immediately start making jokes and talking shop. I guess my roommate didn't feel like she could relate, but I was totally into it, being acquainted with Google culture and all, plus working in the field. I guess they thought we were great, and invited us to a party several blocks away. When San Francisco throws you spontaneity, it's best to go with it. At the party, we sat on the roof looking at the blurry-white city and drinking Gray Goose, which I admitted I had never had (since I'm pretty new to trying to be classy), and had a great time until we left at 4:00.

I decided to check out the Gay Pride parade today, since I've never been (last year I had pneumonia). I rode my bike down halfway in. What struck me is that despite the unrelated corporate sponsors and gaudy sexuality, the parade really did get across what I think was the message, which is that everybody deserves to be able to find whatever kind of love does it for them, and in San Francisco people should do what they can to make that possible. The parade was also the first parade where I actually thought the presence of unrelated corporate sponsors was excellent, because catering companies and bike tour companies joined churches and nonprofits to go out of their way and reach out to communities that still sometimes have a hard time as consumers. That's caring about customers, I think. I'm not too liberal to be all for business and advertising when it actually cares about consumers.

After the parade I took an epic bike ride through Chinatown and North Beach all the way to Crissy field and back. The air was cool and hot, the clouds were dispersed and fast, and it was generally, completely amazing.