Traveling makes me eat donuts.

On Friday, I was the only person in the security line at Gerald Ford International Airport in Grand Rapids, MI.  There still was a line though, because the woman reading the x-ray scans had yet to lose her diligence. My two computers, jacket, shoes, and two bags formed quite the queue for her to analyze, but I was fine with the extra time standing around in my socks as they were a great shade of teal and the floor looked clean and made the color pop.

My mental attitude was A+ with gold stars, high five.  I had just presented my California driver’s license as my form of identification. Maybe ‘they’ wouldn’t know I actually live in Michigan now, and only have 6 more days before my California registration runs out and I need to get a new license plate that will force me to blend in with the rest of my new state.  For that very moment I was securely a Californian, albeit one that can’t seem to locate the title to her car in order to change said registration, but that’s a worry for next week.

How long does it take to form an affinity to a new place? Michigan isn’t home, but I live in a fantastic apartment that is a great home.  I don’t look like Michigan yet, but my newness allows me to see what Michganders look like.  Yes, Michiganders is the correct word, synonymous with Michiganians. I feel a pressure to continuously exploit and overlay my life experiences on top of my new life, but that life isn’t mine yet. I’m a perpetual visitor, and it’s exhausting.

Maple-bacon donut by Dynamo Donuts. Photo by Yelp user Jonas T.

Is it comfortable and easy, then, to arrive back in San Francisco and take up ‘real life’ again? Quite the opposite.  It makes me drink obscene amounts of coffee. It makes me eat eight glorious meals a day.  It makes me eat donuts.

I pass a store that I once might have frequented weekly or monthly and a guttural panic pressures me to pound pastries and pizza.  “If I don’t eat it now, I won’t get a chance at it again, maybe for months.”  I look like a seagull with the face of a human.  I am a visitor again, in a place that used to be home.  Yesterday, I had coffee from three different places, plus breakfast, brunch, a bloody mary, and a bacon donut all before noon. For good measure, and my current pursuit of building skateboards, I also bought four super-soft pieces of leather for my indoor boards.  Is there anything more satisfying than bare feet on leather?

I love this city because it’s over-stimulating, and full of people that are always ten steps ahead of you in every dimension.  You can touch anything and smell anything and taste anything, and that’s not always a great thing, especially in the Mission, but it is nourishing.  Cities will continue to push and drive design simply because everyone has already thought of everything.  Ideas don’t always have to be world changing…DEEP BREATH between bites!

Cities revel in fantastic examples of the next small thing.

With that, I slide into salty specs of bacon on fried cake with maple icing.