when i finally move to San Francisco, one of the first things i do is call up one of my managers from a previous job. he suggests brunch and i counter with dim sum, so we go to dim sum and meme the hell out of all of our mutual industry friends and frenemies over rice noodle rolls. now we're friends instead of just old colleagues. last week i went to the launch party of a hot internet startup (are we still allowed to call them internet startups?) and walked around the SoMA art-gallery-turned-bar trying to figure out how to match up people's real-life nametags with their chosen names, i.e. their Twitter handles. someone introduces me to a perfectly nice software engineer and i have no idea who he is until he introduces himself by his GitHub handle and it clicks. i only know him by his profile picture, which is a photo of his adorable dog. i was walking around the Mission last weekend and spotted a girl across the street who i'd once spent three hours talking to at a party and made theoretical road trip plans with whom i never talked to ever again, so i walked quickly and didn't make eye contact. a new, wonderful friend (who i also met off of Twitter dot com) earnestly invites me to happy hour at his startup and i can't summon up the courage to go because i interviewed with them over a year ago and they ended up rejecting me after like seven interviews and i was very sad about it? i know that everyone around here has been rejected from at least one thing they were really excited about at some point in the past but that knowledge doesn't make it any easier.

a new acquaintance i'm trying to befriend and/or recruit texts me to meet up while we're at the same startup launch party (because of course we are) and i don't mention that three years ago i spent at least two days creeping one of his GitHub repositories trying to make sense of it and then gave up and wrote something else entirely. i never talk shit too loudly about the industry while at a coffee shop because you never know who's sitting behind you. i've been the one having career-defining conversations at the Blue Bottle before but i've also been the one eavesdropping at the Blue Bottle. i bet the baristas at the Palo Alto HanaHaus could make a killing trading on the secondary market. you either die a hero or live long enough to be the person discussing streaming multiprocessors in a puffy jacket on the street in Rincon Hill.

on a recent whim i went to a dinner party where i didn't know anyone and it was perfectly fine, kind of like what i imagine it would be like if GPT-3 wrote the script for a dinner party and dropped in a bunch of Silicon Valley tech characters. i'm not nervous about not knowing anyone because i'm a blonde asian software engineer and it's practically my birthright to be here; every room in this city needs a blonde asian software engineer. this is a city of blonde asian software engineers and their tech boyfriends; that's all there is, actually, are you mad about it? i have a list of industry acquaintances i keep meaning to ping for coffee but somehow never get around to actually doing it because i am a terrible person. every day i wake up and someone new seems to be working for Sam Altman. but don't we all kind of work for Sam Altman? send tweet.

the people who live across from me look like they're trying to have a summer barbecue on their rooftop patio but they also look like they are extremely cold; i know this because it is cold in this city all the time; there is simply no other way to be, unless you move to the South Bay—but one time i asked someone what they liked about living in the South Bay and they told me that they liked being there because there were fewer distractions and they could get more work done.

these days the sun is still in the sky at eight o'clock. everyone on the east coast is sitting on crowded patios with iced drinks in glorious summer air, but here it is thirteen degrees outside, so i open up ClassPass and make another hot yoga reservation because sometimes yoga is the only thing standing between me and crippling seasonal depression—but without the seasonal part, because there is only one season in this godforsaken town. this town is a single season and only one place and just one time; the season is cold and the place is the internet and the time is to build, assholes.
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