San Francisco Vs. Los Angeles

After a week and a half in the Bay Area, I'm back in Los Angeles.  I've spent much of the last few years going back and forth between LA and San Francisco.  People love to compare the two cities; they usually focus on issues like weather, pubic transportation, diversity, and cultural life.  The only comparison I'm particularly interested in at the moment is how they measure up as places for completing a dissertation!

In San Francisco, I do a lot of writing in cafes.  My favorite is La Boulange in North Beach, where there's spotty internet, hoards of tourists, and really good hot chocolate.  It's a bad place to try to do any research or extensive writing, but I've had good luck proofreading and polishing there.  I also do a lot of writing in sweatpants sitting at Kevin's kitchen table.  Sometimes the distractions of HDTV and TIVO are too much for me, but his apartment has also been the setting for some of my most prolific and productive days.  Sometimes I end up at my mom's house in the Oakland hills.  It's a great place to write; it's quiet, isolated, and really calming.   And on writing breaks, I take her dogs, Seamus and Frieda, on walks around the neighborhood or through the park behind her house.  In fact, maybe what I love most about working on my dissertation in the Bay Area are the things that I do when I'm not writing: running along the Embarcadero and up Russian Hill, cooking everything the Barefoot Contessa has ever made in Kevin's kitchen, meeting up with my sister or childhood friends for tea breaks and happy hour, and...inevitably...everyday...doing large amounts of Sudoku.

In LA, I'm part of a culture of dissertators.  While I spend a lot of time on my own, writing at my dining room table, I also meet up with friends to work in cafes around the neighborhood.  Study dates have their pitfalls.  We always spend some of the time catching up and chatting about non-academic topics.  But once we actually settle down to work, I find that I do really well with a friend sitting nearby.  I'm much less inclined to check my e-mail or read my favorite food blog with Kariann, Pete, or Joanna across from me, staring intensely at a computer screen.  Like San Francisco, LA's distractions are pretty terrific: strolling to the Grove (basically a mall, but that word really doesn't do it justice), eating at the Farmers' Market (basically a food court in the mall, but again...so much better), practicing the piano, baking, and seeing friends, who are ripe for commiserating about our long days writing and ready to have a good time.

Conventional wisdom says that writing a dissertation is a slow, excruciating process, but, as February 1st--my self-imposed dissertation deadline--approaches, I know I'm going to miss this period quite a bit.