13 Mar #2: Midterms & Rain

It’s been raining solidly for nearly a week now. I don’t mind it too much, coming from England it’s not too far out of the norm. But, I guess it did make me realise that I have become somewhat accustomed to the warm California weather. It does make for frustrating days when you wish you could just lay on the beach and get some reading done but the way in which I can walk down the street and actually smell the flowers in the air more than makes up for it. It’s also helping me to do the work I need to for my midterms, with less of a desire to be outside I’m here, writing this and getting essays done. I’ve come out of a phase of almost no work, other than weekly readings and notes, into a stage of slightly more panicked assignments and quizzes, but, like I said last term, the freedom in what I’m studying and what I choose to write about here makes me feel a lot happier about it all, makes it seem more worthwhile.

I did brave the outdoors yesterday though, and sat in a coffee shop around 16th and Market, looking out onto the road as the rain fluctuated between showers and pouring for hours. I watched people both happy and angry about the weather, homeless men barefooted and clutching at broken umbrellas that someone had abandoned at the side of the road, and torrents of water flowing down the streets, trying to find a drain that could handle this amount of rain in a city prepared for a drought.

It is interesting to see San Francisco this way. It gives insight to the different ways in which the people here interact with each other, it changes up the sameness of temperature that we’re used to, makes little adjustments to the way people live. The city looks different too, and, as much as I may prefer to have the choice of wearing t-shirts, with a jacket tucked away for when I wander into a colder part of the city, I do like that I’m getting to see a new side to the city this way and taking a second look at aspects I may have gotten so used to that I just coast by.

-Georgia Tomlinson-Spence (@georgiarts)