Jenna’s Model Life

I stayed up for 36 hours the day I left San Francisco. Friday dawned with all the wild possibility in the world, and, accordingly, Bec and I opted for shopping over the Lee Friedlander exhibit at the SFMOMA.

Bec tried on beautiful things.

I tried on hideous things.

(This photo by Rebecca Norris.)

Although I intended the Zebra Jumpsuit Experience as a total shopping prophylactic, I somehow ended up being let out of Loehmann’s by the security guard at 8:15 p.m. having apparently purchased a white asymmetrical Helmut Lang blazer. Earlier this week, Bec helped me lug 5 massive bags of clothing to Haight St., where Wasteland was kind enough to give me a cheque for the endeavour. I would’ve almost done it for the sensation of lightness that followed me as I walked down the hill afterwards. So wonderful to get rid of the skirt that didn’t fit, the synthetic sweater someone gave me, and which I never liked, the top I’d had since high school, the various thrift-store finds that never quite made their way into regular circulation. I think there’s a reason why cleaning out your closet has taken on the aspect of metaphor. It means something to return home to something cleaner, tidier, literally more fitting, in times of strife.

And it also means something to buy a beautiful piece with your best friend that will never, ever remind you of your ex-boyfriend because it is firmly dated post-relationship.

Friday night Bec and I put the matter of Bloody Mary v. Caesar primacy to rigorous testing (verdict: Though Canadians and their snappy portmanteau clamato are very cute, my Bloody Mary is always a winner), and watched Something Wild with my friend Rachel. I sat paralysed in front of my laptop for an inappropriate length of time, worrying about what to do with my books, and then Bec went to sleep and I packed, haltingly. Soon I found myself watching the whitewashed fence that borders the little patio off the bedroom Peter and I shared turn dove grey, and I was still packing, and continuing seemed like the thing to do. By 6 a.m., Bec had cooked breakfast out of a selection of brown seedy things bought in bulk from Rainbow Grocery, and we ate her porridge with yoghurt and banana and then she left to catch her train and I kept packing. I watched the bedroom fill with sunlight that spilled over my apocalyptic mess of stuff, arranged into some arcane off-the-cuff taxonomy of piles that, by afternoon, took on all the tabus and prohibitions of the most long-standing ritual. I watched the sun swing around and begin shining full bore down my little street, lighting the living room, and then I knew it was time to begin putting the piles in my suitcases, and so of course I went to the living room to face the books instead. (Peter had already made his to-keep selections — in fact, earlier, when Bec mined his rejected-by-Aardvark-Books stack for potential reading material, she unearthed the copy of Requiem for a Dream I gave him for Valentine’s Day, 2005.)

I do not regret moving to San Francisco, even though my months in this city seem to me now in many ways fruitless. All told, I’ve spent a mere 92 days in my apartment since I started modeling. Plenty of things always marked me as in some irreducible way an outsider here. I was a person who leased but never would own. I never went to enough readings, or galleries; my investment in the local was such that no Chronicle even came to my doorstep. Every time I came into town for a week or ten days, I’d concentrate on seeing the same four or five people — most of whom I’d known since before moving into the city — rather than on making new friends. I never even got over that newcomer’s delight in being asked directions by tourists on the bus. But still. I’ll miss the wind. I’ll miss the ethereal, theremin whine of the electric buses. I’ll miss drinking through the Christmas beer list at the Toronado. Most of all I’ll miss the mood of post-collegiate hope in which I decided to cast my lot in with the bay area’s. Although in retrospect the move might seem ill-advised, I can’t imagine working up that amount of daring again anytime soon. Far easier to meander the globe, never staying anywhere long enough to have to pay a gas bill or make a commitment. But perhaps far shallower, too, to forever be passing through.

I hope that when I’m next in a position to do choose a home, I will do no worse than San Francisco, because it really does offer a multitude of blessings to those willing to cleave unto it.

Currently, I’m in Lahaska, Pennsylvania, a place in which it is very easy to go tanning or worship Jesus Christ or get electrolysis (COMPLIMENTARY CONSULTATION AND FREE 15-MINUTE TREATMENT!), but very hard to find a restaurant open after 9 p.m. Lahaska seems like the kind of town that, wising up to its potential for pokey, brick-facaded Northeastern cuteness, is just beginning to swap the drive-thru banks and outlet malls and fast food generalities for antique stores and B&Bs. Needless to say, its charms are somewhat less obvious than San Francisco’s. And yet, I am having the most wonderful time here, shooting a story on an island in the Delaware river, accessible only by a barge piloted by a dour custodian named Mark and his rescued puppy Midge.

I think things are going to be all right.