My personal taxi service (aka mother) went back to work full time recently,
leaving me in a bit of a quandary in regards to my own job, an internship at
the Ventura County Star that inconveniently started later and ended earlier
than her grown-up-person post as a teacher. When I arrived, half an hour
later than usual and decidedly frazzled, the receptionist regarded me with
vague amusement. "Tell your mom you need a car," she said, and though I
smiled politely, I knew a car was uncharacteristically last on my list of
things I'd ever ask for. On top of being fifteen and incompetent, the former
of which makes it illegal for me to drive and the latter simply ill-suited,
I am a public transportation junkie. Thus did I enlist the services of CAT,
Camarillo Area Transit.

    Growing up in San Francisco, I've always harbored a deep love and
appreciation for subway systems - an almost over-zealous love, perhaps
fueled by my indignation at being mistaken for a tourist. I haven't lived in
San Francisco for almost six years, but I am defiant about my heritage,
arrogant and stuffy and generally very obnoxious. It was easy to do in
Camarillo, where a few casual references to Bay Area geography reaffirmed my
status, but a year of living at Thacher, where I found myself
surrounded by real San Franciscans, left me in a constant state of
self-doubt. Sure, I can rattle off descriptions of San Francisco's various
neighborhoods or talk about the historical significance of city board member
Harvey Milk, but I've also been known to wander downtown to meet a friend
without a phone or money, expecting her to just find me. I try to convince
myself I'm really just stupid, not a tourist, but I think people are onto
me.

    These suspicions were reaffirmed last time I visited San Francisco. I
stayed with my friend Noelani, and around midday we decided to go into Noe
Valley for coffee.

    "That's a bus," she explained to me gently, and my mind darted to a home
video I'd seen of my mother, teaching a class of learning disabled third
graders. "This is flubber-agoo," she told them in the same patient voice,
gesturing to a jar of slimey, home-made silly putty. "What do you think you
do with flubber-agoo?"

    The third graders in the video answered her with vigor. "Eat it!" one of
them suggested while another sat and cheerfully picked his nose,  but I was
not going to give Noelani that sort of gratification. "I know what a bus
is," I said irritably and she ignored me.

    "You put the coins in that little slot there, you see? Hey, do you have
buses back in... where do you live again?"

    "Where do you live again?" has come to be the question I fear the most,
because despite all the wonderful things I've gotten from my Thacher
education, it's also left me with a crippling lack of identity. Determined
not to answer with Camarillo but also aware of how misleading it would be to
say San Francisco, my response has become wildly inconsistent. To be honest,
I still haven't settled on one. For awhile I was partial to the rather mysterious, "Oh, all over, really," although when people started to assume I literally traveled from interesting place to interesting place I was forced to stop. "Stepford," in reference to Camarillo rendered responses of, "Oh, in Connecticut?" and "Suburbia," really wasn't a lot better. Most of the
time I tend to just stammer awkwardly before declaring that it doesn't matter, and people will generally leave it at that.

    The CAT, which requires a reservation and is really more of a taxi
service than a bus, doesn't quite compare to San Francisco's MUNI but it
isn't by any stretch the worst way to travel. It may have come a half hour
late, but it showed up nonetheless in my driveway and transported me
diligently to the Star office in good time. There were no singing homeless
people or bus transfers to save against all reason as weird tokens of
appreciation to a city that may or may not be my own, but it got me where I
needed to be, which I think is all most people demand of their public
transit anyway. I might have no identity, but at least I don't have to pay
for gas!