[PREV - WORD]    [TOP]

SPLIT

                            June 27, 1992  

Living between planets.                 
(In a divided self?)                                  


Doing some capsule reviews of San Francisco bookstores, I
stop in at "A Different Light", a gay and lesbian bookstore
on Castro Street.   

I feel noticeable nervous about being mistaken for gay,
which is weird since that's not really one of my phobias.
Certainly I didn't feel out of place the last time I was
here.  But then, that was with a girl on a date, so it wasn't
really an issue...

That was the time K. had called me out of the blue, and
asked me to go see "Unbearable Lightness of Being" with her
at the Castro Theatre.      

I am a very weird, underground character, to someone as
fundamentally straight as K, so taking me to SF to see an
arty soft core porn movie in a gay neighborhood probably
seemed like an obvious idea. 

But to someone really into the Bohemian scene, I am far too
straight, too conservative, to really belong.  

For example, last Saturday, I met C., a woman who lives in
SF who was down at the Edge to help "George" do the light
show.  She was talking about how she was on mushrooms that
night in order to stay awake for the show, but she felt like
she needed to eat something to cut the effect a little bit.
She was studying horticulture at SF State I think.
When I told her I was into Materials Science, she seemed to
seize on the phrase "materialistic" and went into an
enviromental screed, increasingly vitriolic, because my
reactions were too non-commital. 

Living between worlds, across borders.

--------

((connect to Jennifer Blowdryer piece, about seeming like rough
trade to some yuppie lesbian... Thinking about the way
people see you.)) 

--------

((Connects all over the place... problems of being both 
athletic and intellectual, for example.                 
Or the DRYSPELL node, about being uninterested in               
accumulating wealth, or projecting ideological uniformity... 
Or maybe to places like LESBIAN_DETECTOR?               
All has to do with not being someone who fits in.       
Does it also connect to BOUNDARIES?  )) 
                               
--------
[NEXT - FUTURE]