The letters to friends below will provide details.

Date: January, 1998 Dear Gail,
Merry Seasons Past!

Here I am in San Francisco, living on Castro Street, two blocks from the streetcar station. Putting up with a roommate, which doesn't thrill me (it's his flat), but we're fairly successful in ignoring each other. Mostly I'm getting my mail at 2261 Market St #72, San Francisco 94114. My voicemail is (415) 273-4695.

I remember that I once told you that the most satisfying times in my life seemed to have been times when I was living in some dingy little place. Well, it seems like I really outdid myself this time, what with this totally dreadful San Francisco rental market.

To start with, my friend Janet had told me that the spare room in the basement in what I used to jokingly call her urban commune would probably be available as of the middle of July. And that's when I arrived, but her other guest had since decided that he needed to stay in San Francisco until December. So I was put in the other basement room, allegedly an office for Jay, Janet's, um, domestic partner. The floor had just barely enough room for my mattress. No closet, nothing with drawers in it that I could use. And I lived there for a month and a half, all the way out at the end of the 38 Geary line. I spent most of my life on the bus, but it kept seeming like there always was some new reason to delay moving into a cheap hotel.

Occasionally Janet's two sons would be brought in from Sacramento. One of them high-school age, the other a little older. And during the afternoon the two employees would show up to help Janet run Greenery Press, whose operations were also housed in the basement. But at least Jay's son (far past high-school age) wasn't living there this summer, nor were there any other temporarily homeless people except for the two of us in the basement, so it wasn't actually as crowded as it had been last summer (1996), except that that summer I did have a semi-decent room to myself.

Anyway, the rent on the house had gone up and was scheduled to go up still more and so Jay & Janet and Tom & Katy (the permanent residents) had started looking for a place to buy. That seemed like no immediate threat, but then through some incredible stroke of misfortunate (from my point of view) they actually found a duplex they liked, went through closing in a hurry, and gave notice on the urban commune as of October 1.

However through a writer I had taken a course from at UH during summer school (Carolyn Lei-Lanilau), I got in contact with two former UH students who had a one bedroom apartment they were living in on Guerrero St. (across the street from the Valencia Street projects). The one roommate was going to be out of town for September and October, so they were very happy to sublet me the real bedroom. (Well, I soon realized that the roommate who was staying wasn't actually happy at all about my moving in, but it did save him from total financial disaster. This roommate --- my new roommate for two months -- had converted the living room into a bedroom for him, which was much nicer than mine except for the lack of a closet.)

My room had a fold-out sleeper couch, which I didn't even try sleeping on, preferring a futon on the floor which filled up most of the room. Well, that was cheap anyway: $360 a month plus minimal utilities. There was no living room in the apartment, of course. My roommate actually managed to cook in the tiny kitchen but I didn't want to even try to make meals there, except for yogurt and muffins for breakfast. The bathroom had an old sink with separate faucets for hot and cold, so that washing my hands involved jerking very quickly back and forth between the two faucets to avoid scalding myself or freezing my hand off. And there was an old claw bathtub with a shower attached. A lot of people think those claw bathtubs are charming in a quaint way, but I considered myself lucky every time I managed to climb in and out for a shower without breaking my neck.

The litter box for the roommate's cat was also in this tiny bathroom with the sink and tub. (The toilet was in a separate room.) He did clean the litter box reasonably often, but I soon understood that there was a good reason why the bathroom window was always kept open. Better to stand there naked freezing to death than deal with the ammonia fumes.

No heat in the whole apartment, in fact, but I was given an electric heater so at least I could keep my own room warm. Except for about a week or so, September and October weren't all that cold here anyway. I'm glad I got out before November.

My roommate was a writer, which explains why $360 a month for rent was difficult for him. Justin Chin: you might even find a book by him, probably poetry, in Barnes & Noble. He's also a performance artist, slowly building himself a reputation on the local "spoken word" scene apparently, and goes out of town to do gigs occasionally. The apartment was actually reasonably nice when he was out of town. We never talked, so I didn't learn that much about him. But once he realized that I wasn't going to object when he played industrial rock in his room at top volume whenever he was home and awake, and had his gay boyfriends over for loud sex, he starting being mildly friendly on the few occasions when we actually encountered each other. (Usually we were each shut up in our own room. There was really no common area in the apartment to hang out in.)

I liked living in the Mission district. A month or so after I left, the Chronicle had a big article in the Pink Section that called it "The Hippest Neighborhood in the City." Maybe so, although I never got involved in the nightlife there. The Latinos definitely didn't appreciate that Chronicle article, and I don't imagine the Blacks in the Projects and the winos and homeless panhandlers on 16th Street thought much of it either.

It was three blocks walk to BART, anyway, convenient for those times when I wanted to go over to Berkeley and pretend to be a mathematician for a few hours. And three blocks in the other direction to Church and Mission where Sparky's is open all night so I had no problem having dinner at midnight when I wanted. As far as I'm concerned, Sparky's might qualify for being the hippest cheap diner in the city. I really like the waitresses there. I just automatically assume that they're all lesbian, although anything is possible. (In this town, anything is definitely possible!)

I was also living three blocks from Market and Laguna, where UC Berkeley Extension holds their San Francisco classes. Very lucky for me, since I had signed up for a ten-week class in novel writing during September and October. At the beginning, I still hadn't got myself a computer, but I bought a typewriter and wrote an outline and two chapters for a novel, without the slightest idea what it was going to be about.

Meanwhile, I had discovered that the computer terminals which now substitute for a card catalog in the public library can also be used for telnet, so I was working on mathematical articles for my web page by standing at terminals in the library. Or else doing it at one of the two cafes near me which had a computer terminal (only one) which one could use by sticking quarters in a slot --- five minutes per quarter --- whenever some homeless derrilect wasn't furiously typing away posting his opinions to a newsgroup. Unfortunately, those cafe terminals didn't really work all that well. Cyber cafes as such have not really caught on here in San Francisco.

Finally I managed to buy a second-hand laptop. At that point I didn't know how many more times I'd have to move before I left the city, and it seemed like there was a good possibility that I'd wind up living in a residential hotel (although even those were pretty full), so it didn't seem like a good idea to buy a desktop system, which I could have bought much more cheaply.

Once I was able to log on from home, I could check the newsgroups for rentals more easily. Mostly all I found were "Wanted to Rent" ads, but there were a few people looking for roommates. I didn't answer the ad for my present place the first time I saw it, because the guy said he was in the Castro district and so I assumed he was gay and looking for a gay roommate. But when he posted the ad again a few days later, I answered and after about two weeks of exchanging email, he was finally willing to tell me where the flat actually is and agree to meet.

Which was extremely lucky for me. Based on previous experience with cheap hotels in San Francisco, I had assumed that in September or October they would start having winter rates and if worst came to worst I could get myself a reasonably large room with a bath in the Tenderloin. But worst turned out to be much worse than worst. Not only were the hotels not offering winter rates, most of them didn't have any vacancies at all. Everywhere I went people kept telling me about the 1% vacancy rate for apartments in San Francisco, as if I hadn't already seen that information in the newspapers a dozen times. (There were indeed some vacancies in residential hotels, though, if one were willing to use a bathroom down the hall. Better than sleeping in Golden Gate Park, at least.)

Here on Castro Street, I'm paying $550 a month plus utilities, and I actually have three rooms, sort of. "Sort of" meaning that the gas heater in my bedroom is essentially the only heat in the flat, and my roommate finds it intolerably stuffy unless windows are open. (He also has a heater in his bedroom, but apparently never turns it on. I'd guess the temperature at night recently has been in the forties.) So that means that when he's home, I'm basically confined to my bedroom with the door closed. However fortunately he works seven days a week and so is seldom home in the daytime.

I don't know if technically he has a social phobia or not, but he's almost pathologically shy. We communicate very little, even when we see each other. He gets upset if my bedroom door is open while he's home, because he says that seeing me in my room makes him feel like a voyeur. (Yes, I'm fully clothed.)

Aside from the novel writing course I've been doing lots of interesting things, a few of which you might prefer not to be told about. This spring I'm going to sign up not only for the second semester of the novel writing course, but also for one in writing mysteries. Since just the one course took almost all my time, what with writing my own chapters and writing comments for everybody else's, taking two will be sheer insanity. However these courses are things I'll never get a chance to take in Hawaii and so I decided that it would be stupid not to take them this year.

It used to be that when I wanted to do something, I'd see all the obstacles that made it clearly impossible. In the past few years, though, I've taken it as a working assumption that there's always some way of dealing with obstacles. I must say, though, that from a financial point of view, in taking this sabbatical on half salary I'm really skating a lot closer to the edge than I had anticipated. The rental income from my apartment in Hawaii has been discouragingly small, partly because the agency isn't getting much rent for it and partly because there've been a number of expenses. And my paycheck is turning out to be quite a bit smaller than I'd expected, mostly because I elected to contribute to the retirement system at the full rate; I hadn't realize that this would mean they would be taking out three times as much as they would have if I'd elected to contribute at a rate proportionate to my half salary. Anyway, I'm spending money at a prodigious rate. I'll survive, but I hadn't expected to wind up so broke at the end of all this.

Every day, though, I'm reminded that this is where I need to be, not Hawaii. But I'll have to wait for the Hawaii real estate market to dramatically improve so that I can sell my apartment at a decent rate. In that case, the money I've spent this year will be of minor importance. But it sure doesn't look like that's going to happen soon.

But otherwise, I won't be able to retire in the near future anyway, so what am I saving for? I'm old enough now so that I can't be sure of my life or health lasting forever, so I want to have the life I want now, rather than saving up for some day when I'll be too senile to enjoy what I have.

And I also have to wait for the current Silicon Valley boom to play itself out, so there won't be such an excess of money around chasing many too few apartments. I'm convinced that this is a bubble. A whole lot of this money is being spent on people who are doing things like web design, and I think that the world-wide web is the CB radio of the Nineties. As soon as web TV and the new web telephones become more prevalent, people are going to start realizing that the web isn't really all that interesting. There are still going to be a few sites offering things of real academic value, but for the most part, people are going to get bored with the web and advertizers are going to discover that it's not really effective.

Okay, so what else have I been doing this year? I decided to go through the SFSI (San Francisco Sex Information, see my web page) training again. Going through it for a second time turned out to be somewhat boring, but I think I was more successful this time at making friends. One of my fellow students has just decided to become a prostitute (call girl, as we used to say in my day). I thought it was only the decent thing to do to give her a little business. She's certainly not cheap, but we had fun together. And now it turns out that she'll be working the same shift on the phones as I am. (I start tomorrow.) That should be lots of fun. She can handle the calls on prostitution and I can handle the ones on S&M. (Actually, though, the supervisor on my shift is a leading figure in the SM community and a friend of mine, so we'll have no lack of expertise in that area.)

I should have given you many more of my books when I left Hawaii. I mailed about nine or ten large boxes of them here. I had wondered about this a lot. On the one hand, if I were going to San Francisco to have a different life for a year, did it make sense for me to drag a lot of the paraphernelia of my present life along with me? But on the other hand, when I come back to Honolulu will I want to be met by an enormous number of books bought at least two years beforehand? So I mailed off a whole lot to Janet's address.

I had counted on being able to leave those in Janet's house until I was settled. What with all the boxes of Greenery Press books already stacked in the basement, mine wouldn't make that much difference. But then when her crew bought a new house it seemed unreasonable that she should have to deal with my books in the process of moving. So I managed to get them over to Berkeley, where for some reason the Math Dept had been nice enough to give me an office. (Well, I share it with two other people, but the only thing I've used it for has been storing boxes of books.) Then, since I've moved into this new flat, I've been gradually bringing one box of books at a time back from Berkeley on BART and the streetcar, using one of those little luggage carriers they sell at the drugstore. The BART segment turned out to not be much trouble, but the streetcar segment was much more of a hassle, since the streetcars are almost always pretty packed. (Naturally, it turned out that a lot of the books I most wanted were in the very last box I chose to bring back.)

So here I am with two rooms overflowing with books. I don't know why I thought that I would have more time to read in San Francisco where there are so many more interesting things to do than in Hawaii. (One of which interesting things, of course, is going to all the interesting bookstores here and in Berkeley. And I'm incapable of going to bookstores and not buying more books.) But I have been definitely taking the time to do a fair amount of reading. I'll never read all these books, but I've realized that the reason I brought some of these books here was that I didn't consider them essential reading, but knew that if I didn't read them this year I'd never get around to it. So I'll just leave them behind when I go back to Hawaii. Also I have to accept the fact that lots of times I buy a book because it looks interesting and I want to find out what it's like, but just reading thirty or forty pages from it, or even just skimming through the pages, will give me as much as I really want.

I've been working a lot on both my personal and mathematical web pages. On my mathematical page, I've wound up putting an incredible amount of effort into an article trying to explain calculus in a simple way. So far, I haven't been able to find anyone in the whole world who will tell me that there's any value in this, so maybe I'm just making a fool of myself. But that's what tenure is about, I guess.

And I've seen a lot of wonderful movies that I'd never get a chance to see in Hawaii.

I went to a class from the Learning Annex one evening given by Nora Dunn (of Saturday Night Live) on how to be a comedian. More entertaining than instructional, but I was glad I went. And took another class on "How to Write Any Book in Two Weeks." That one had some interesting ideas, although I haven't been applying them as much as I should.

I haven't spent as much time going out to bars as I was expecting to. It seems I've mostly lost interest in going to lots of different bars, but I do still go up to Specs in North Beach (see my web page) once or twice a week. Specs himself usually makes a point of talking to me for a while when we're both there. He hasn't quite figured me out, but it's against his principles to actually ask for information. Several of the bartenders know quite a bit about me (although none of them know about my web page), but Specs just says, "I don't know what your name is -- and I don't want to know. I prefer not to know anybody's name, so if some law enforcement person shows up and asks about one of my customers, I don't know who he's talking about."

--Love & kisses,

--Lee

To: Friends
Subject: Mystery Course
Date: Thu, 12 Mar 1998 Janet ---

I'm going to cc this to a whole bunch of people, so I'll repeat some things in the beginning which I've already told you.

The two novel-writing classes are very very different. Opposite ends of the spectrum. The most obvious difference, of course, is that the mystery writing course is oriented towards genre fiction and the other towards literary fiction (although in both classes we've been told that we can write absolutely any kind of novel we want). There are completely different concepts in the two classes of what's involved in writing a novel. Lewis Buzbee has given us the quote from William Styron: "Writing a novel is like walking from Vladivostok to Spain on your knees." He emphasizes that one should expect it to take several years to write a novel.

On the other hand, Shelley Singer is saying, more or less, "If you want to make any money at this game, you've got to produce at least one novel per year. So you've got to learn how to get on with the process and be reasonably efficient at it."

It's simplistic to say that Buzbee's class is about quality and Singer's about quantity, because Singer would certainly maintain that she's also teaching us to be concerned about quality. But for her, that's the secondary issue. The primary thing is learning how to actually get a novel planned and written. Whereas Buzbee's class is like all the other writing courses and workshops I've been in, in that we're asked to write an outline and write some chapters, but nothing is said about how one goes about doing that. (God, if I just knew how to come up with an outline, I'd probably have no trouble in writing the novel itself.) In fact, he's explicitly told us that the actual process is something he doesn't think he can teach us about.

In Lewis Buzbee's class, the emphasis is on how to make what you've written better. Characterization, point of view, "what is a plot," all the traditional stuff one finds in writing books. (Except that when it comes to plot, his answer is from E.M. Forster: plot consists of cause and effect. Rather than the more specific definition, so popular especially in genre fiction, that plot comes from a character with a problem to solve. Buzbee says that a novel begins in a "broken place," and is "a journey from innocence to experience" (Andre Gide), which is slightly different.)

I found the first class meeting in Singer's class very enlightening, in that I could finally see how one goes about coming up with the outline of a novel. If I were to describe the process, it would sound like a completely trivial flash of understanding: just decide on the general situation, and then on a cast of characters that will be involved in that situation, and then what the relationships between the characters are. But, stupid me, I had never really thought of it quite that simply before.

Unfortunately, though, I have found the subsequent sessions of Singer's class much less useful. And getting up for a 10 AM class on Saturday mornings is extremely difficult for me, and pretty much wipes out my whole Saturday, and in fact screws up the rest of my week too, since I can't get up early on Saturdays unless I do it for the rest of the week as well. So I may just stop going to Singer's class.

Buzbee asks us to write an outline and three chapters. Since the class is basically non-credit, there's no real compulsion to fulfill that requirement. But we are asked to xerox the first two chapters and hand them out to the class for workshopping, which does make one feel a certain sense of obligation. I, for one, am certainly not going to come to the workshops with my metaphorical black hangman's hood and criticize other people without putting something of my own up as a target for criticism.

Singer's class is also part workshop, but there the process is that people bring anything they feel like (a chapter, an outline, notes, whatever) and read it aloud. For one thing, this means that it takes a lot longer to workshop one student. In Buzbee's class, we workshop six submissions per evening. In Singer's, we have a hard time doing three. Furthermore, I for one have a hard time making intelligent comments on the basis of hearing something read aloud. In fact, even when I can read something for myself, I usually have to read it at least twice before I get a sense of how to criticize it, and then I have to keep looking at it while I write up my comments. (Buzbee asks us to submit written criticism as well as addressing the work in class. He asks us to submit at least one paragraph of typed criticism for each submission, but I sometimes write as much as three or four pages, line-and-a-half spaced. This takes a hell of a lot of time.)

In Singer's class, in any case, it quickly became clear that the idea in workshopping was to be supportive, while making a few minor suggestions for improvement. One of the first pieces read was a chapter from a mystery novel on vampyrism and the vampire clubs here in San Francisco. There was some fairly interesting stuff in it, but there were also a lot of passages that were very routine, predictable.

For instance, the woman detective goes to a vampire club in the Lower Haight. We're told that she has to drive around quite a bit to find a parking space, then locks her car up and sets the alarm and uses The Club on the steering wheel, and then takes pepper spray and I forget what else with her as she walks to the nightclub. At least half a page description of the process of parking her car, and nothing in any of it that's the least bit fresh. If you asked a dozen writers to write a description of parking a car in the city, they would almost all have turned in identical passages. And if you left the passage out completely and just said, "I arrived at the club," the reader would not miss a thing.

So I said to the author, "You have a lot of interesting things in your chapter. But you've buried these in a lot of things that are boring." And Singer and the other students were quite aghast (although the author's facial expression seemed to indicate that she thought my point was valid). They said, "Oh, no, it's really hard to find parking in the Haight." (And in what central location in any big city is it not hard?) And, "In that neighborhood, you'd really need pepper spray." (Well, yeah. So what are you telling me that's new and interesting?)

Now it's always possible that I was wrong and that spending half a page on parking the car was actually good. But what I immediately perceived was that any sort of really negative criticism in this class was definitely unwelcome. So now, mostly I'm just holding my peace in Singer's class. And I certainly don't feel any urge to bring anything of my own to read aloud.

Buzbee, on the other hand, has given us the quote, "You can't sharpen a knife by rubbing it against a piece of soap." And while he doesn't necessarily encourage students to be as severe in their criticism as I am, he doesn't discourage it either. The aim of the workshop is to make positive suggestions for improvement, not to put people down, but when something in a chapter is really bad, students will definitely tell the writer so.

Singer is requiring us to turn in one assignment on the seventh class meeting (although she's indicated quite clearly that she expects most of us to be late in turning it in). This is to be a "partial": an outline and a first chapter. But it won't get workshopped, she just reads it and comments on it herself. I would sort of like to actually do this for the mystery I've been thinking of writing for several years now: Death of a Dominatrix. On the other hand, I just don't feel any strong sense of obligation to turn that assignment in, so realistically I'll pretty certainly never get around to doing it.

I will say that I read another of Shelley Singer's Barrett Lake mysteries. This was Searching for Sara, which she said she considers the best. And it was much much better than the one she assigned for class: Interview with Mattie. (Although I consider the title Searching for Sara unfortunate, because it keeps reminding me of the movie "Desperately Seeking Susan.") To me, the difference seems to be very clearly that in Sara she really cared about her characters. She spent a lot of time visiting the Larkin Street Youth Center and learning about its operation and getting to know about some of the kids there, and it really shows in the novel. Mattie, on the other hand, is about a Berkeley alternative newspaper (basically the SF Weekly or Bay Guardian), and, as she told us, she thought that was a world she was fairly familiar with, so she didn't do much research on it. And whereas the kids in the youth center were clearly characters she really cared about, the staff of the alternative newspaper were basically just chess pieces for her to move around.

--Lee

Janet (and many others) --

Just before I left the City, I had lunch at a trendy SOMA restaurant with Petra. It was only the second time I'd seen her --- and the first time I'd talked to her --- during my whole year in San Francisco. She asked me if I thought we might ever be friends again, and I said, "Probably not." At which point she got mad and said, "Well, you're just a crotchety old man," and launched into a long tirade.

My first thought was, "I don't have to sit here at listen to this. I'll just get up and leave" (probably forgetting to leave any money for my half of the check to boot!) But then for some reason, the whole thing started seeming funny to me and I started to laugh. "This girl," I thought, "certainly doesn't know much about how to be friends." Anyway, she did eventually say, "I'm sorry about what happened between us," which were words I'd certainly never expected to hear come out of her mouth. And I did say that I was willing to be friends again. Not that that makes anything different. Willingness is scarcely the issue. Several years ago there was a crucial choice point in our relationship and we both made certain decisions that changed everything. I do have to agree with her, though, that it's a shame when two people that like each other a whole lot can't find a way of being friends that works for both people.

Surprisingly, I didn't spend a lot of time going to bars in San Francisco. Somehow it didn't seem as important as it has on previous occasions, and where I was living didn't make it very convenient --- except for gay bars, of course. It took me nearly an hour to get up to North Beach to Specs on the streetcar and bus, but that's still mostly where I went when I went out at all. I did find a bar on Market Street just past Church called the Expansion Bar, which was once rated Best Dive Bar by the San Francisco Weekly. I liked the bartender there quite a bit, although I never had that much conversation with her. I came in one night and asked if she had a glass of Merlot and she said, "What kind of bar do you think you're in, anyway? If you want red wine, I have some."

Two doors up Market Street from the Expansion Bar is the Lucky 13, catering to more of a punk crowd. The first night I went in there, I got served by a brawny bartender with tattoos all the way from his wrists up past his elbows. The woman who was tending bar with him had the same kind of tattoos. I was carrying a bag from City Lights that evening, and after a while the brawny bartender came over and asked what books I'd bought. I showed him (I forget what they were, but nothing new and trendy), and he said, "I love City Lights Books. When I first got into town many years ago," telling me that he was now forty years old, "I was befriended by the Di Prima family. You know Diane Di Prima, of course?" Well, yes, certainly I knew of her, although I certainly didn't know her personally.  "And through them, I got to know a number of writers who had been involved in the Beat movement."

What a city! Where punk bartenders with intimidating tattoos talk about Beat poets. Wheras here in Honolulu, I've met people in the English Department who've never even heard of Diane Di Prima. Or Kenneth Patchen, for that matter, which truly astounds me.

A few weeks later I went back to the Lucky 13 and the same bartender was there again, but this time ... no tattoos!

Oh! I thought. Temporary tattoos.

I did get taken to one gay bar, on Church Street, by that woman Kiki who was at the Bitch Goddess reading at A Different Light. It was interesting the way a number of the gay guys clustered around her and flirted with her. She was not the only woman there, by any means (nor, apparently, the only heterosexual one), but the ambience was very definitely gay. It was not a place I wanted to go back to alone.

The other bar I went to fairly often was the 500 Club, at 17th and Guerrero. The bartender there in the daytime on weekends and on Monday and Tuesday evenings was a woman named Kat who used to be quite famous/notorious as part of the North Beach crowd. I'd met her a couple times at the Saloon when I was living in San Francisco in 1990-91, but mostly I knew of her as someone my friend Brenda mentions from time to time. One night at Specs someone mentioned that she was working at the 500 Club, so I made a point of looking it up in the phone book and discovered that it was about three blocks from where I was living at the time on Guerrero Street. So I started making a point of coming in once a week to see her and continued to do so even after I moved to Castro Street. She didn't know me from Adam, of course, and I didn't try to tell her anything about who I am or talk about Brenda, but one night she came into Specs when I was there, and from then on she had me pegged as a North Beach person, undoubtedly assuming that she had known me back in her North Beach days but that the memory had been lost in that alcoholic fog from the time when she was famous for the number of shots of tequila she could slug down.

Now she doesn't drink. The day had come when she had started pissing blood and had to make the choice between drinking or living. For her, at least, not drinking turned out to be the better choice all around. "I like the clarity," she says.

I was a bit annoyed when I mentioned her name one night at Specs and the person I was talking to (no one I even know), said, "Yeah, Crazy Kat." I'm sure there was a time when she was proud to be called that, probably created the nickname herself, but now she's one of the sanest people I know. I like her a lot, not because of her old North Beach reputation, and not because I'm attracted to her, but just because she's her. She's that kind of person.