My name is Kyla, and I was born 29 July 1978, on what was very probably a cool and foggy evening, because this event happened to take place in cool and foggy San Francisco, California. I was born in the Mission District, at San Francisco General Hospital, and I have been craving pandulce ever since. I lived in the upper story of a two story flat on Potrero Hill, on the Bay side of San Francisco, where the fog from the ocean doesn’t often penetrate, so my childhood was a fairly sunny one. Our flat was small, but no smaller than the apartments and houses of everyone else I knew. No one I knew owned their own house, and hardly anyone I knew had a backyard. To play, we went to parks, or Ocean Beach, or Lake Anza in Berkeley, or sometimes one of the indoor public pools. (San Francisco is too cold in the summer for outdoor pools.) The hills were too steep to ride bicycles. The local school was terrible, so every day I sat on the bus for half an hour to get to school across the city. The school my parents chose had no grass. My mom worked in the big theaters, where most of her coworkers were gay men who were all dying, one after the other. My dad was a lawyer, and worked as legal writer and editor, which he seemed to hate.
When I was five years old, my mom had my younger sister. My mother’s been a Type 1 diabetic since she was a teenager, and both of her pregnancies were very difficult. She was on bedrest during her pregnancy with my sister, something that had a powerful impact on me - I knew as a kindergartner that I would never have children. Ever ever ever ever ever ever ever. See?
When I in second grade, our flat was sold, and the new owners decided to move into our home. My parents, who had lived in cities their entire lives, gave into the pull of the suburbs and bought a house in Petaluma, California in July 1986. Petaluma is 35 miles north of San Francisco, and was pop. 40,000 when I moved there. It’s 20 miles inland from the Pacific, and I thought I’d never been so hot in my life. My dad bought me my first bike, and my new school was right around the corner. We had an actual, real backyard, with a vegetable garden. Although our 100-year-old wooden house was pretty ordinary and certainly not very large, it was bigger than any of my friends’ houses back in the City.
So, I grew up in Petaluma, a town so ordinary and middle-American that Ronald Reagan filmed his “Morning in America” commercials there. I was shy and socially awkward, and did my best to ignore anyone who bothered me, which, contrary to popular adult belief, did not make them leave me alone. All it did was tell the bullies that I was an easy target, and I remained an easy target for years. I escaped by reading constantly. I spent most of my lunches in junior high in the library, methodically picking my way through the science fiction selection. As a shy and quiet kid with glasses and an armful of books, I gave off the impression of a real brain, but I did horribly in math and sciences, faring well only the social sciences and humanities. I played the flute, and won the award for best musician in my class for both years of junior high.
In high school, I began to open up and talk back to people who gave me shit. Although I never became one of the “popular” kids, I had a lot of friends. Amusingly to me now, we called ourselves “the Trolls”, after thoe ugly little troll dolls with brightly colored hair. It was the mid-'90s, and we were the crazy kids with the plaid flannel shirts stolen from our dads and the Salvation Army cords, with the clunkiest Doc Martens we could find. In some ways, it was an idyllic high school experience. Fights were very rare, and cliques weren’t that big a deal. I was first flute in the marching band and wind ensemble, and I played tennis. I wasn’t any good, but it was fun.
Anyway, I didn’t have any real strong feelings about where to go to school, except that I wanted to stay in California, but not go to Southern California, so I ended up at the University of California, Santa Cruz (home of the fighting Banana Slugs). I majored in anthropology, because it seemed the best way to study religion, which had become my main interest. I decided in high school that I wanted to go to Jerusalem, and that became my main collegiate goal. I was fortunate in that I was able to do this - I spent my third year of college at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, which was the best thing I’ve ever done, and worthy of its own entry, so I’ll not go further.
Anyway, I graduated college a quarter early, and didn’t much know what to do, so I ended up moving back in with my parents. I know, yucky, but it was 2000 and the dot-com boom had driven rents in the Bay Area into the stratosphere, and there wasn’t really any other option, other than leaving the Bay Area altogether, which seemed weird and bad. I ended up working at my favorite bookstore in Petaluma for a year and a half. I applied for and was accepted to the Peace Corps in the summer of 2001, but decided against going when my parents made clear how unhappy they were with that decision. I was an adult and they don’t control my life, but I didn’t want to make them miserable, and I’d already scared them enough by living in Israel for a year.
So, blah blah blah, I finally gave up on the idea that I’d be able to stay at home, and I had a severe case of wanderlust, so I did the road, and moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan, with the idea that I’d eventually go to the University of Michigan. That’s not working out so well, so I’m moving to Chicago in a couple months.
I know. Not nearly an interesting enough life to merit that many words. Oh, two more things: I discovered the SDMB in October 1997, and that changed my life. I sometimes wonder if I’ll still be here, posting to the Dope in another five and a half years. My guess is…probably. And, you may have noticed, there’s not much mention of a love life. Yeah, I’m not bitter or angry at all about that, hahaha.
) I was promptly skipped ahead a grade. In grades two and three I was reading at the sixth grade level.