California Dreamin', Minnesota Home

I have a California-themed playlist.

It's employed only to avert Weather Related Madness. Say, for example, it's November 11th-12th and it's suddenly cold enough to be February. February. Or it's snowing in September. Or April. Or it's the sixteenth straight day of subzero temperatures and despite the fact that that you really love Minnesota Jesusgodthisweatheristedious. 

That's when I turn on the California Dreamin' playlist.

It is, if I do say so myself, a good one. A nice mix of the expected (The Mamas and the Papas, Otis Redding) and the slightly more unexpected (Jeffery Focault's cover of "Lodi." Rilo Kiley's "Let Me Back In."). It usually serves to pull me back off the edge. After a listen or two I can set myself back to my normal winter pursuits: building a model whaling ship while listening to Moby Dick, baking, eating my weight in simple carbs, winter running strictly to feel superior.

***

You know the feeling of stepping off a plane and immediately falling in love with a place? Instantly getting vacation high because you're somewhere that's new and interesting and (hello, I live in Minnesota and travel in the winter) warm? God, what a great feeling, having a new city woo you with its jazz clubs and rare bookstores and people who don't elongate their vowels (I discovered this week I can no longer say the word "bars" properly). It's a great feeling, one of my favorite things about travel. But I'm usually happiest at the end of the vacation when, exhausted and completely satisfied, I get back on the plane to come home.

Don't get me wrong. I'll be in New Orleans again this winter. If I had an extra $200.00 in my checking account, I'd be spending Thanksgiving wandering around D.C.. Chicago will always have a special place in my heart. I could rattle around Lower Queen Anne in Seattle on my own for hours. I still have dreams about Beijing and Lima.

But then there are those cities where you deplane and it's just . . . different, somehow.

San Francisco was the closest to love-at-first-sight I've ever been in my life.

It was, I suppose, inevitable. When I boarded my plane in Minneapolis there was a snowstorm bearing down and promises of a foot of snow. In April. When I hopped off the plane in San Francisco it was sunny and sixty-five. BART was, for a girl who was living the middle of a cornfield, surprisingly easy to navigate. I heard live jazz for the first time while I was there. I bought a copy of Howl at City Lights Bookstore (swoon) and then drank too much California wine sitting next to the ocean.

And Redwoods. Oh, my Sweet Jesus. Redwoods.

It was (is) hard to keep from comparing San Francisco to the windswept, icy prairie. Even without the heaps of ice and snow, the thirty-mile an hour wind gusts, the -40 temperatures before windchill, California outstrips Minnesota in one crucial way.

There is nothing sexy about Minnesota.

I love this state with every fiber of my being, but we don't have a whole lot going on here to brag on. Ok, yes, we're usually ranked in the top for healthiest states in the nation. We have decent public education, several Fortune 500 companies, the Mississippi Headwaters, Garrison Keillor, and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s birthplace, but none of those are things that you would travel here to see. Minnesota is, by its very nature, cold, uninviting, and a little standoffish.

California, oh, California. No one once bothered to say "Oh, you aren't from around here, huh?" (Probably because it was crystal clear once you looked at my hair.) No one talked about the weather. I never once heard someone ask "Oh, so how spicy is it?" Everyone was preposterously good-looking, no one looked like they hadn't seen the sun for the past four months, there were bike paths and runners everywhere.

California is, it goes without saying, sexy.

***

I am rubbish at relationships.

There. I finally admitted it. I'm not single because I choose to be. I'm not single because I have anxiety or OCD or because the men in whatever city I'm living in suck. I am single because I am stunningly, breathtakingly awful at relationships. I get nervous during sex. I have a tendency to smush all of my emotions down until I accidentally (and usually inappropriately) blurt them out. Last weekend, I stayed in and read The New Yorker, drank herbal tea, and went to bed before 8pm. I hate making new friends, have never, ever made a good impression on anyone's mother, flatly refuse to introduce men to my parents, and tweak out about ohmygodmyindependence usually around month three.

I am fucking awful at relationships.

I am somehow, impossibly, equally awful at, uh, microrelationships (the ones that last between twelve and fourteen hours). I'm usually convinced someone is a serial killer and even if they pass the Not A Serial Killer Test (Don't ask me. I don't know what it is) I have to contend with the Crushing Former Catholic Guilt and Regret and 9.9999999 times out of 10, I'm reasonably confident it's not going to be worth it (Ugh, neck tattoos, seriously?) and just refuse to even try.

Let's not even get into friendships. I owe everyone who has known me for more than three years a cake, a bottle of wine, and some PTSD counseling.

You know what interpersonal relationships I'm great at? Where I unequivocally shine?

Flings.

Give me something with an expiration date, no shorter than a week and no longer than a month, and I will be the smartest, funniest, sexiest girl a guy has ever been with in his life. I don't like to brag (who am I kidding, I love to brag) but if we don't have longer than 31 days, when I finally drop him at the airport or hop the train back to the Cities, he'll think of me wistfully as the girl who got away. It's because I get a chance to be funny and sweet. I just get to be the good bits of me, the non or charmingly neurotic bits. There's a touch of emotional connection, certainly more than a microrelationship (all right, one night stand) but I don't have to tell him that I work too much, that I have all these wires crossed in my head, that I spend large parts of my day in silence or talk to myself or that I have on more than one occasion let the dirty laundry situation get so out of control that I've gone to buy new underwear rather than go to the laundromat.

Anyway, the girl who got away.

It's true. I've got the love letters to prove it.

That last part is a lie. I did receive love letters (or in one memorable case, a thank you card) but I didn't keep them. Because the thing I love best about flings, the thing that makes me so fucking good at them is the ability to walk away. At the end of the week or two or three I can delete a number from my cell phone, spend two or three days feeling wistful, and then go on with my life, maybe remembering the guy for a breathless moment or two throughout the years.

Flings are sexy.

Trust me, I know exactly how this sounds

***

Commuting to work today in the nearly zero degree temperatures (in November, I ask you) I cued up my California Dreamin’ playlist. And it helped, a little. Mainly it made me think about airline tickets and the fact that my favorite nonprofit on the face of the Earth is located in San Francisco. Also about wine and good chocolate and nearby Redwoods and the North Beach neighborhood. I wondered if Duluth really was a fluke, and if I relocated to a bigger city I could be happy on my own, if I could make friends in a city like San Francisco.

The playlist fades out on The Decemberists's "California One/Youth and Beauty Brigade," hands down one of my all-time favorite songs. Before reaching into my pocket to restart the list, I flip my coat collar up and pull my hat down tighter over my ears, cursing the fact that my hair is going to be flat by the time I get to the office. When a new song rather unexpectedly starts I realize I've left myself an Easter egg, a protection against too much wistfulness over something I can't have.

Minnesota isn't sexy. It isn't.  How could it be with so many lefse recipes and so few natural tans? But here's the thing, despite the fact that I had tons of fun in San Francisco, that I think of it and look up plane tickets a few times every year, I haven't been back. I've been to Seattle (twice), Portland, Denver, St. Louis, New Orleans, Boston, and Chicago in the intervening years, but I've never made the trip back to San Francisco. It's a revelation that might sting, but for the Arctic wind that's wormed its way into my heavy coat. I pull off my sweater mittens and reach into my pocket, switching the music over to Trampled by Turtles and already arranging a decidedly unexciting, unsexy, but quietly, reliably, wonderful "My Minnesota Home" playlist in my mind.