The nice thing was a job interview that I prepared very hard for. The process was astonishingly validating no matter what the outcome is. I feel seen: that I was talking with people who cared to understand me. Then I walked around Seattle and the whole city opened to me like any of the wonderful things that open for you.
A barista asked me how I was doing, and I was ebullient.
Maybe not everything is going to be okay. But some things are going to be just fine.
Update: I live in Seattle now. I don't yet understand what this city is about. That is a novel kind of uncertainty: I tend to believe I grok cities rather quickly, and in Seattle I can't even narrow down a list of potential pigeonholes. What is this place?
@cwood that's definitely something I was expecting — and it's definitely perceptible — but its character is definitely different from San Francisco's full-on tech dystopia, so I'm still figuring out exactly what this stage of that dystopia is like.