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i have spent the last month or so back in school, studying the nature of light. how it comes from stars, how it comes into the windows of churches. how it hits us, how it hits our eyes, how painters mimic the way it hits fabric. texture and photons.

to do this, i've walked daily through san francisco's own grey non-summer non-light, up the forbidding windswept hill to the main campus of city college of san francisco, buffeted by the sky which is too close, which comes down on me even after the sun sets, in layers and layers and layers of cold quick moving fog.

i welcome the austere decaying mid-60s architecture of CCSF.

i welcome the graffiti'd desks, horrific vending machine food, my teenaged classmates who know it all, my elderly classmates who know it all, the odd ageless ones that are just a little crazy (perhaps this is my category?), the quiet ones who float in and out through the possibly useless institution of public education, trying to get somewhere, not sure where.

the whole campus has an air of resignation mixed with determination, of a lot of striving in vain mixed with striving so not in vain. it is satisfyingly complete and enormous, but aging and cumbersome. CCSF cares and tries but struggles under its weight and confusion like i struggle to climb the hill in the cold from the balboa park BART, into the wind. and i'm nearly late in SO many ways. and so is everyone. and there are freezing cold classrooms and very uncomfortable chairs and still every time i go to class i find something to be completely completely amazed by. and the harder class (astronomy) is often more amazing than the easy one (art history).

also, i love the bay area, its diversity, its liberal soldiering on even in the face of budget cuts brought on by our own stupidity. as my instructor said to our overcrowded classroom full of people trying to add the course: "we'll do the best we can, we're crunched, you're crunched, we'll get through it the best we can." that's california. makin' it.