As many of you know, each year I do a photoshoot with my best friend Padgett. We take photos that make their way into my holiday cards and onto this blog.
It’s always so much fun coming up with how I’m going to do it. I get to pick an aesthetic, I flip through magazines to get inspired, I make a playlist, and I try to cajole my cat into taking one decent photo with me (which goes about as well as it sounds).
This is what we managed to come up with:
A classic black and white photo on a black and white tile floor:
Here’s how they stack up to the black and white photos of years past:
Processed with VSCO with kc25 preset
Here’s the best photo I was able to get of Calypso and me:
Some random photos:
Some BTS photos:
Every year, the front of the card is a royal portrait and every year the back is something fun that I did the year before. This year, I went with a photo of myself at the Golden Gate Bridge, a shot of my beloved cat, and a picture of myself on the cover.
I hope that many of you received a card in the mail, probably getting to you well after all of the holidays are completed.
Happy New Year!
The Tragic Queen,
Raquel
P.S.: Check out my post on all of the books that I read throughout the end of the year.
–Moon River, from the movie Breakfast at Tiffany’s
In the heart of Golden Gate Park, there’s a serene garden called the Japanese Tea Garden. It has gently combed gravel designed for meditation, statues of Buddha, koi fish in reflecting ponds, bridges you can climb over, and a tea house to eat in.
It’s free to the public on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays before 10 AM, so on my final day in San Francisco, I went there for breakfast.
I had green tea and what was basically well-seasoned chicken nuggets for breakfast, but with a lovely view of bonsai trees.
After that, I stayed in Golden Gate Park to go to the California Academy of Science, where I watched butterflies land on students’ backpacks in an indoor rainforest, and penguins dive into the water of an aquarium, before falling asleep in a warm, dark planetarium.
I took a ride on a cable car as a last hurrah and got some of my best views of the city by far. I couldn’t have envisioned a better final day in San Francisco.
My initial impression was that San Francisco was a charmingly-messy, mild-mannered city.
My new, better-informed impression is that San Francisco is a moody town that’s constantly reinventing itself. It’s in a troubled time, crippled by a homelessness epidemic that is distressing to think about, much less look at head-on, and a gentrified, monocultural tailspin with no end in sight.
But I believe that it will prevail.
So much of what I saw fit the reputation of classic San Francisco.
I saw two men having sex on a nude beach and had them look back at me with a “you lost, girl?” look. Likewise, I was offered magic mushrooms by a guy on the street, which I politely declined. A building had Jimmy Hendrix painted on the side of it, because he’d once lived there, but it had since been converted to a pet shop– the undercurrent of rock n’ roll being never far behind.
I managed to beat the heat for about five days at the start of summer by being in foggy San Francisco, famous for its mild weather year round.
Another beautiful San Fran attraction that you should visit in Golden Gate Park. Please ignore the little boy picking at his underwear.
This trip marks one of the first times I’ve voluntarily ventured out into the world. As a person who likes her solitude, I often have to force myself to leave my house, but I wanted to experience the world, since there’s such a lot of world to see.
While in San Francisco, I stumbled upon a nude beach, walked across The Golden Gate Bridge, tried to get the attention of some sea lions at Fisherman’s Wharf on Pier 39, visited a Japanese Tea Garden, did some thrifting, and rode in a few self-driving cars and cable cars. There are still many more things I’d like to do in San Francisco: taking a trip to Alcatraz and properly seeing Lombard Street both come to mind. But for now, I’ve gotten my fill of the city and will be thinking about it for a while to come.
Thank you again Raj for letting me stay with you and helping me learn enough for my novel. I will never forget it.
On my second day in the city, I saw exactly what I’d dreamed of when I pictured going to San Francisco all of those years ago: the San Francisco Bay covered in glittery fog and the Golden Gate Bridge disappearing into the clouds.
I’d never been to the West Coast before– I’d only ever gone up and down the East Coast. Standing on the opposite edge of the continent, I wanted to go to the beach.
After walking the length of the bridge, I decided to hang a left at the beach.
At first, I walked down the path into a wooded hillside towards the water and then decided not to in case I encountered a bear along the way. (It is on their state flag after all).
The view from sunny California
Having told no one where I was going that day, I decided that maybe it was best not to walk down a mountainside alone and instead made it to Marshall’s Beach by taking the road.
I’d packed a swimsuit for my trip without any plans to get anywhere near the freezing cold water in the Pacific Ocean. Since I decided to go to the beach spontaneously, I didn’t have it on me. Instead, I climbed over the rocks and walked barefoot along the shoreline, discovering for myself that the water was in fact numbingly-cold.
Watching the waves crash, I started to get FOMO and wished I had my bathing suit, despite how cold it was. I turned a corner and realized that this was not the type of beach for which you needed a bathing suit.
When Google searching beaches with which to best glimpse the Golden Gate Bridge, none of the websites mentioned that Marshall’s Beach was a clothing-optional beach with a large gay scene.
And I’m not mad about it. I always love a good trip to the beach.
So did I partake in the nude beach experience? Did I adopt a when-in-Rome attitude and plunge naked into the Pacific Ocean? Did I emerge from the water naked with my long, wavy hair blowing in the breeze behind me like a Botticeli painting?
Maybe.
I can tell you that I came out of the excursion with a sunburnt nose and my bad knee even worse than before, having witnessed a few eye-opening things taking place on the sand, but I loved it. A day at the beach is still a day at the beach.
Following that, I ate bao at a chinese restaurant called Bao, which more than lived up to its name, and got a drink at The Buddha Lounge in Chinatown. I 10/10 recommend both.
Day two was down with another adventurous San Francisco day in the books. I was ready to limp around San Francisco for another adventure on my third day in the city.
The Tragic Queen,
Raquel
P.S.: Check out my previous blog post on what my first day in San Francisco was like.
“I left my home in Georgia, headed for the ‘Frisco Bay”
–Otis Redding, Sittin’ on the Dock of the Bay
School was out for summer and I was in a mood. The kind of mood where I sit around playing California Dreamin’ on repeat as my semester ramped down because that’s exactly what I was doing: dreaming of California, a place that I’ve never been to but have heard so much about due to the total tonnage of songs dedicated to it. I’d made it through my semester and, I’m not sure if you’ve seen the news lately, but that semester was a little bit more difficult than usual.
Around this time, my metrocard was getting low and the temperature was getting high. I found myself wanting to be in a walkable city with famously mild weather.
Packing only the essentials
All of my friends were back to their corners, jet-setting to their own summer plans. I decided to do something that I’ve been dreaming about for a while:
I booked a flight to San Francisco.
Dressing the part of someone who’d go to the Bay Area
In proper girl-on-a-budget fashion, I made plans to sleep on a friend’s couch and then toggled back and forth between the $120 flights on airlines with shoddy safety records, and 15 hour layovers in the midwest, and the slightly pricier tickets from more reputable airlines.
Prior to actually visiting San Francisco, I envisioned a politically-correct mecca, filled to the brim with the liberally-enlightened. I’d seen the same iconic images as everybody else: picturesque, Victorian houses stacked up and down hilly streets, a blue-burnt sky behind them, and the Golden Gate Bridge silhouetted on the horizon.
What I found instead was a not kid-friendly, gritty and grimy city brushing up against a hypoallergenic tech sector. (The amount of signs I saw advertising for strip joints was actually kind of impressive and made it look like a local delicacy). Each street was elbowing the next, with Lululemon-clad women boarding the bus one minute and Boho-hippies boarding it the next. The bus would then migrate over to the decayed financial sector, which has become more of a homeless sector, having lain dormant since the pandemic.
All of these multitudes and more were compacted onto a tiny peninsula.
I was trying to understand where this “out with the old and in with the new” mentality came from. I read the same articles as you (well, some of you): tech people setting up camp and redefining the city, homelessness populations being the largest in the country and turning into a way of life, and the cost of living skyrocketing to untenable heights, all taking root in San Francisco over the past decade.
I had to lay eyes on this for myself.
You’re probably wondering why I went to San Francisco in the first place. I want to set a novel in San Francisco (don’t ask me why because everybody asks me why and I don’t know why, which would indicate that I make questionable decisions) and felt that I could not tell the story authentically until I took the city by storm myself. I slept on my friend Raj’s couch (This is Raj. Say hi to Raj).
Raj has been my brother’s best friend since they were 2 when I was in utero.
While he went to work, I tooled around town.
I arrived the day after the city held one of its biggest traditions, which had inconceivably included both marathons and raves, so I basically showed up during a city wide hangover. It was like a day at the beach when everything is so calm that the water barely moves.
My first stop was City Lights Bookstore, the indie bookstore where Alan Guinsburg debuted Howl many moons ago. After nearly ending up at a lamp store a few times thanks to my GPS, I arrived at City Lights, a beautiful bookstore that was nearly Alan Guinsburg themed at this point, but didn’t sell any of the hockey romance novels that my mother keeps trying to get me to read. Sad.
From there, I went to see this bay that everyone talks so much about. I saw the Golden Gate Bridge, which is blue at a distance and only red up close. I could see Angel Island and Alcatraz on the horizon beside one another.
I closed out my day at Pier 39, seeing –and smelling– the sea lions.
The sea lions on Pier 39 made me irrationally happy as they spun through the water and then flopped onto the stacks of sea lion bodies on the dock. I enjoyed witnessing the Greco-Roman wrestling matches of the sea lions who’d sardined themselves onto a dock and were now biting and barking at each other.
I started to think that if I were to be reincarnated as any animal, it would not be too bad to come back as a Pier 39 sea lion. I particularly related to the one antisocial sea lion on a different dock who refused to socialize with the other sea lions.
He wasn’t dead. He moved a few times. He was just chilling like he was dead.
I spent much of my first day bumbling around, courtesy of my nonexistent sense of direction. Raj was an excellent tour guide, explaining to me the different socio-political forces at play in San Francisco, the geography of where I was, and the best spots in the city. He actually knew the history of where he was and so could tell me the significance of where I was standing at any given time.
Once I was in San Francisco, I felt like I could feel the city’s character muscling its way to the surface, a character that shuns the very idea of the tech industry being anywhere near Haight Ashbury, the home of free love and public fornication. San Francisco is trying hard to maintain its reputation as the beat-poetry, psychedelic-rock birthplace by trumping its newfound granola-tech-people-with-homeless-encampments-lining-the-streets-reputation.
You’ll be sure to learn my thoughts on how that’s going by the end of this four part saga.
The Tragic Queen 