When I ask her about where she’s from, Michelle spends a lot of time detailing San Francisco’s highway system. She tells me where each one begins and ends, which part of the city they run through, whether she thinks they’re useful to the city’s residents or not. The overpass she now lives next to used to designate the boundary of a Red Line district.  Crossing under it is “harrowing” due to the painfully narrow sidewalk, which lacks a protective railing.  And the erratic drivers.

     Michelle’s father’s family is originally from New Orleans but was displaced by a highway, eminent domain taking the house her great-grandfather built. The highway’s middle lane now runs through where it used to stand. I was surprised to hear that her family was from a historic black creole district. Michelle tells me that her father’s family is black creole. She identifies as white. She has curly, blonde hair (she tells me it’s brunette, I say that I don’t understand the distinctions white people make between blonde and not-blonde, she asks me if I’m just looking to pigeonhole her as a dumb Cali blonde, I tell her that today I’m a journalist and I morally cannot misrepresent her like that, she grins and tells me that I can go ahead and do so if it’ll make for a better story), fair skin, and blue eyes. Michelle remembers multiple times in her childhood when strangers attempted to “rescue” her from her father, who has much darker skin than she does. No, she didn’t ever appreciate the thought:  Her dad wears reflective safety vests and stops to take ridiculously zoomed-in pictures of birds. Human traffickers and pimps do not.

     Yes, people are annoying. No, of course she doesn’t hate them. I’m referring to the people who see her as different from her father, she’s moved on and means people in general. Diversity is more than culture and skin color, diversity is the person in her class she avoids talking to because they stand too close and won’t stop making “your mom” jokes. No, of course she doesn’t hate them. She thinks they’re wonderfully annoying — she can’t be around them, but every day after class she sees them walk off screech-laughing with a couple of friends. Yes, all three of them annoy her, but they clearly love one another. Who is she to say that they’re being human the wrong way? Anyway, she’s just spent ten minutes rambling about San Francisco’s highways, so I’m probably annoyed about how boring this interview is. Nah, I’m not annoyed. I like the way she’s being human.