How come nobody has come up with a list of all the companies that run shuttles?

Then, I realized that I am the guy who decided to document all the police agencies who can arrest you in San Francisco. I’m probably the guy to do this. Please note that this list is just from inside my head and what I’ve seen. If there are more, add them in the comments and I’ll update. Fair?

1. Google – Big white busses, run by SFO shuttle
2. Apple – Big gray busses, not sure who runs them
3. Facebook – Big white or blue busses, run by SFO shuttle
4. Genentech – Branded, so you’ll always know who they are
5. LinkedIn – Just graduated to big ones, run by Bauer’s, I think.
6. Electronic Arts – Big branded Bauer’s busses
7. Yahoo! – Never seen ‘em – they don’t run through my area
8. eBay – Never seen ‘em.
9. Cisco – White, functional, SFO shuttles
10. Box – Large blue busses
11. Dropbox – New kids on the block – just saw their small Bauer’s airport-rental-car-size shuttle the other day

That’s what I’ve seen lately. I’d be remiss if I didn’t note that the guys at Stamen made an amazing map of these busses. It’s already outdated – the big tech companies are all doing it these days.

On another note, I’m writing this from a bus, and we just passed a group of outdoor personal-training types who were bending down and lifting balls up and over their shoulders, alternating with each lift. Then a couple of sleeve-tattooed chefs taking out the compost at Delfina.

At 7:45 am, though, San Francisco is 40% people in workout gear.

1) Look at what I’ve done recently (say, yesterday). Hate it. Decide to look at something else.
2) Come back to document, change a sentence or two in yesterday’s work to make it slightly less odious. Go look at some other things.
3) Write a sentence or two, then think a bit about what I’m trying to write and where it’s going to go.
4) Finish a paragraph, then go look at something else.
5) Write another paragraph, then another. At this point, I’m pretty much typing, not paying attention to anything else online, in the real world, the person sitting at the table next to me, or anything else. I’m not writing as fast as I can physically type, but I’m doing pretty close. It’s a great feeling – similar to careening down a smooth-roaded hill on a bicycle or feeling the wind in your hair as you go faster in a go-kart.
6) Hit the wall. It’s usually external (have to go to the bathroom, the bus I’m on gets to its destination), but sometimes it’s just…well, I’m done.

I’m averaging about 500 words/day right now, which is not too great – 1000 is a number that makes me feel like I’ve done something with my day. I’m fitting it in on my bus commute when there’s not other work to do, which is an interesting way to get the external wall.

So that’s how I work. And sometimes I include this blog in that work…but sometimes not.

2) Felt a little sting as I put my contact lenses in, realized that they were going to be unwearable today, but only realized that after I was on the bus on the way to work. Now, everything’s blurry. Sigh.

How is this useful? I think that there is a dividing line (in my head, at least) between informal forms of communication (Facebook) and the more formal (email). It blurs the line a bit, and it just feels weird, and I would like to have some control over this sort of thing. Other than just “delete your Facebook account” – for various reasons I can’t do that these days.

I lace up my shoes at six thirty in the morning, jog through the city gloom to Golden Gate Park and put in the miles. I’m running the San Francisco Marathon this year – my second – and up until today I was a little worried about how it was going to go.

I’m not worried any more. I lived in Boston for four years after college. I watched the end of the Marathon on Boylston, and put in hundreds of miles of roadwork along the Charles River in the snow, the ice, and the summer heat. It was a great running town, a place where people train through the pain of a New England winter for the privilege of running in the greatest race in the world, in front of the largest, best group of running fans anywhere.

I like running alone, sure. But I also nod hi to the other runners that I see early in the mornings as I run in the park. When I used to run in Boston I would give a heads-up to the other lunchtime runners along the Charles. When I lived in Chicago I would say hello to the other people who were crazy enough to go out and do a few miles along Lake Michigan in the frigid winds of February. Sure, I run alone, but even when I’m alone, I’m part of one really big team. Whoever set those bombs did it to my team. I cried for my teammates – those who I’ll never get to run with or high-five after an end-of-race sprint.

We will all keep running. The Boston Marathon will run next year, and I wouldn’t be surprised if my race in San Francisco sells out for the first time ever after this horrible thing. It’s really hard to intimidate a group of people who feast on pain. We’re going to keep on running, and those of us who are training for San Francisco or New York or the Big Sur…every single one of us who was watching today vowed to run a little harder tomorrow. I had a goal time for the San Francisco Marathon, which I’m going to proudly run in two months; maybe now I’ll run it five minutes faster than that.

I’ve also gone nuts and am running the San Francisco Marathon this year. This means that for the next few weeks I am going to be constantly sore, hungry, and a little grumpy. On the plus side, I was running in Golden Gate Park this past weekend, and was passed by a couple of college runners. One was wearing a T-Shirt that read Our sport is your sport’s punishment. Loved that.

The lunch room was on a corner, and each side had an enormous picture window. One looked right smack into the skyscraper across the way, which was topped by several granite statues of faceless women. The other had a nearly-unobstructed view of the bay. I would sit there and eat my sandwich or my Trader Joe’s Rice Bowl and watch the boats sail on the bay. After a few months of this, I started to really notice the cargo ships full of containers. Where were they coming from? What was inside? How big were they, actually?

Back then, the San Francisco Chronicle would publish the schedule of vessels coming in and leaving the Port of Oakland, and there was usually a copy lying around. So I would bring in my binoculars and happily compare the listings in the paper to the enormous, hulking ship on the water.

I left that job, and the wonderful lunch window, but whenever I was running on the Embarcadero or hiking at Land’s End, I would stop and stare when a container ship went by. It wasn’t that they were beautiful (although, as you will see below, they can be)…it was, I think, what they represented. Each ship, from so far away, full of so many things made by so many people, for so many others. The world, encased in steel, all floating on a maritime football field.

Word got around a bit – my dad got me a book about container ships for one of my birthdays, my lovely wife got me a pretty painting of one for our home office so I could look at them whilst working. For a year and a half I worked at an office downtown, right north of the Bay Bridge on the Embarcadero, with a wall of windows overlooking the water. I was in heaven – I would go to the office sometimes when nobody else was going to be there and watch the ships go by. If nobody came in that day, I was disappointed. I discovered Marinetraffic.com, which live maps every container ship in the world, and I would check the ship names as they went by and check the site to see where it was coming from. An odd joy, for sure, but still a joy for me.

Last weekend we took the ferry from San Francisco to Alameda and back again. As we waited for our return trip, the NYK Artemissailed into the channel. We watched it go by, spellbound by its sheer size. After it passed us, the tug on the far side started pushing, and the enormous vessel actually turned around. A 180 is nothing in a car, but for a 300 meter ship? Wow. The Artemis sailed back up the channel and berthed next to the even-bigger Cosco Guangzho, which was somehow even bigger; longer, wider, cleaner-looking.

We sailed past, and a crewman in a jumpsuit waved to us. If you can’t see the beauty in that, well, I don’t know what to tell you.

And I know I’m all “the world is a wonderful place these days, but…man. That’s a very Mustachian way to transport a grill, isn’t it?

“The world is a wonderful place.”

No, wait, let’s go ahead and make it better.

“The world is a wonderful place!”

OK, that’ll work.

So, what’s put this into my now-in-my-late-30s, curmudgeonly head? I live in a small apartment in one of the most expensive cities in the world. When I went running this morning I ached and I was irritated because I was still hurting from a cold that had kept me laid up all weekend. As I ran, I passed by the graying piles of people who were sleeping on the sidewalks on Page Street, which is where most of the Haight homeless seem to crash these days. When I finished running I was still cold from the raw wind that made its way from the sea all the way to my front door. After running errands, I had to drive for 45 minutes to get to where I’m typing this, which is an office.

But…let’s turn it around.

I live in a small apartment that I share with someone I love very dearly, with whom I’m going to spend the rest of my time, ever. We keep it small because we have very few things, and we live here because we can do what we did last night – walk a few blocks to a neighborhood sushi joint and eat at the bar, eavesdropping on college kids as they gossiped about their sex lives. So fun. I ached this morning because I was back to running after only five days off. I was really sick, but I sure didn’t stay that way. I ran past the homeless, and that’s sad, but it’s a problem that I can’t solve on my own. And I’ve never been low enough to be homeless myself. I’m thankful for that. It was cold when I finished, but only about 50 degrees, I can live with that. And I’m typing this from a desk at one of the most exciting places to work in the world, the kind of place that most people only dream of seeing. I’m here.

And the best part? The thing that makes the world so wonderful today? We’re going to Italy in a couple of months, and due to the magic of information technology and communication and everything getting smaller, we get to spend the weekend with Grant and Ellen, who we met in Kyoto last year.

How cool is that? The world…it’s a wonderful place.