question marks

Yesterday Morgan and I met at 5:30pm on the steps of the Asian Art Museum before walking up Larkin to go to a store called The Magazine which specializes in vintage magazines and catalogues of all varieties. But they were closed. So today we met at 5:30pm on the steps of the Asian Art Museum before biking up Larkin to The Magazine and they were open and we went inside.

I got a bunch of new pictures including this one of a dinner party with handwritten annotations of "?" and "X" on the front. My guess is that the person making the marks was trying to recognize someone specific in the picture by narrowing the options with their ball point pen. Maybe a question like "Which one is my father?" or "Which one should I ask on a date?" For someone like me for whom all the faces are strangers the possibilities for each person seem limitless.

I'm coming up on my one-year anniversary of living in San Francisco and it's interesting to think back to all the people I've met since then and try to figure out if I could have guessed what our relationships were to become upon introduction. When I was a freshman in college a picture was taken on the first day of orientation of the entire class of students standing on an artificial embankment which no longer exists. I have no idea who I was standing next to in that picture because on that day I knew no one. But I'm sure if I looked at that picture today I would realize strange proximity between myself and the students with whom I would be knocking elbows for the next four years. Here in San Francisco the community is small and the elbow knocking is rampant. I wish it was easy enough to commission such a picture of the San Francisco population to see how the proximity changes between me and the people I know, will come to know, or maybe just knock elbows with.