A listing of grievances:

• Two stupid girls have a hair-tearing fight on the bus
• Liquid and curly fries fly everywhere
• The guy in front of me puts up his arm, so I do too
• The fighting high school girls roll out the door as it stops
• I continue listening to my podcast, because, meh, stupid girls
• People start coughing and opening windows
• PEPPER SPRAY! Hooray!

Interlude

• The guy in front of me has pepper spray in his eye
• I have some on my face
• The fighting girls are long long gone
• We all have to get off the bus
• We are coughing
• We are annoyed
• The 24 bus comes roughly every three years
• Why can’t they fight on a busier route?

Interlude

• My cheek hurts and I want to go home
• I get a cab
• I tell the driver what happened
• He immediately asks “What race were they?”
• I ask him what that has to do with anything
• He tells me he is interested in “Sociology”
• I say anyone who knows a damn thing about sociology knows better than to draw from a single data point
• I tell him that we aren’t going to talk any more
• He tells me he isn’t racist because he campaigned for Obama

Interlude

• I stiff him on the tip and go inside to take a shower
• Stupid girls
• Stupid pepper spray
• Stupid racist cab driver

San Francisco, my adopted home, offers a municipal compost service. They give you a big green wheeled garbage bin, and you can toss in everything from coffee grounds to wooden crates. It’s not gross, like home-composting, in that you don’t have a huge bag of festering goop in your house.

It’s just like taking out the trash, except you split the stuff into two bins – one for dead food stuff, and one for everything else. In our case, since we have a recycle bin too, “everything else” is mostly cellophane packaging, and it’s amazing how little garbage you actually generate when you pull out the food waste.

All the compost gets turned into soil for farms, vineyards, landscaping, and highway erosion projects, instead of piling up in landfills.

Plus our trash smells better, because all the icky stuff goes outside in the big green bin.

Tonight I walked home from the 24th and Mission BART stop. It was Valentine’s day, and the neighborhood celebrated by being outside.

Stores stayed open late. Perfumed Latino guys pushed and egged each other on, nervously buying flowers for sweethearts and would-be sweethearts. The bodas civiles joints lubricated their trade with sidewalk tables of cheap teddy bears wrapped in red cellophane.

I walked home in my pink dress. Women holding little girls walked by, clutching roses, boxes of chocolates. Women completed errands, hauled children, and bought food with the same grim determination, red cellophane emerging from their purses.

I saw a beautifully happy couple. Their little daughter ran up the sidewalk in front of them. I caught the man’s eye as I passed and saw satisfaction on his face.

More people were on the street than usual. More police were around. I saw two huge officers, giants. One had his hand on the back of a tiny fast-talking man. There was no sense of potential violence, just a solid hand on the back and a posture that clearly communicated that whatever jig there may have been was now thoroughly up.

There was music and the smell of onions cooking. The jazz club was setting up a show. As I walked home, buses drove back and forth full of people like me, heading home, and out, and home again.