The first thing I have to say about being at BlogHer was that, because I didn’t have to keep looking for a boy at my back (not that I didn’t sometimes turn and scan the room for him; it’s a reflex)—-because I was on my own, I got a chance to look at some things a little more.
I got in at the San Francisco Airport mid-Friday morning and took BART, and was briefly disoriented. When I growing up, BART ended at Daly City, not the airport, and went to Fremont, Concord, or Richmond. Now it goes out to Pittsburg/Bay Point …read more

I grew up in California and almost all of my family still lives there, and Jim and I have talked very seriously about possibly moving out west when Charlie is an adult. My dad has lived in Oakland for all but a few years of his life and has long said exasperated things about the city’s politics and politicos (and don’t get him started on Berkeley’s). On hearing about a package of eight autism bills introduced by Senate President Pro Tem Don Perata, D-Oakland, my dad (who is, by the way, a really really nice guy) said that he might …read more

Brooklyn is to Manhattan as California’s East Bay (Oakland, Berkeley) is to San Francisco: Today’s New York Times draws these comparisons:
….there is a young, earnest population that is beating a path between artsy, gentrifying neighborhoods in Brooklyn and their counterparts in the Bay Area, especially East Oakland and the area south of Market Street in San Francisco, or SoMa.
The New York Times describes some 20- and 30- something year olds who, in search of a place with a “messy urbanism”—-a urban, creative vibe of the sort found in edgier city neighborhoods before gentrification sets in—-shuttle between the East and West—the …read more