San Francisco apres les dot coms

I've been reading Po Bronson's book "What should I do with my life?"

I'm not sure if I'm going to finish it. It strikes me as a bit typical for the overprinted 30 somethings that live in San Francisco or Silicon Valley. I like Studs Terkel's "Working" better although that book is pretty dated.

Basically, Po goes around and talks to people who are friends of friends. These people often worked for Clinton. There are more lawyers than doctors. More investment bankers and scientists than teachers. So far the one teacher quit and got married. He nicknames a woman who wants to find herself "Fluffy" despite listening to a lot of whinging men. His description of the dot com boom involves this gem of a sentence: "Men who no longer had big bank accounts were ditched by their girlfriends." Po is a weirdly traditional kind of guy for being such a hip young thing.

The weird thing for me is that I grew up in the Bay Area and then lived other places and then came back. So, I wasn't here for the dot-com boom and bust. In my view of the world, computer geeks are an overall good thing. They are sweet and myopic and they spend their time doing things that are essentially harmless. So, if the city were awash in computer geeks--even out of work bitter computer geeks, I would be OK with it. But those aren't the people who came here for the dot-com boom. At least in my neighborhood, it's the girls with the pointy toed shoes and the dyed hair. It's the guys with the cashmere sweaters and the business books. It is essentially people who have no scale of judgment other than money and cool. Money is used to purchase cool. Cool is there to help you make money. Occasionally you can trade one for the other. I.e. Cool guy marries Rich girl.

Of course there's still the Haight or the Mission or Castro. But I have a sneaking suspicion that a lot of those dread locked white kids have trust funds.

On the other hand, San Francisco has always existed primarily in the imagination. And the people I like the most in this city don't see it the way I do. They hang out in the coffee shops and the dusty used book stores. They eat pork and beans to afford an apartment with character in a bad neighborhood. They don't want to be cool as much as they want to experience cool things. And they're just hanging in there. They give me hope.