Holy Grail

Directory enquiries homework websites for teachers We took a car. The thing that Hwin was keen for me to understand about his life that week was that it wasn’t really his. For the past several days, he’d been doing a “life swap” with Stephan Jenkins, the lead singer of the alternative-rock band Third Eye Blind. Jenkins has a large and lovely house in Pacific Heights, but his charmed life in San Francisco’s old-money district wasn’t helping him write fresh and edgy music. So Hwin would occupy Jenkins’s Pac Heights studio for a while, and Jenkins would inhabit Hwin’s small, dormlike room in the Sub. (“It’s at the intersection of the gentrification on Valencia and the gritty, hard, dug-in city life,” Jenkins said. “People are walking around with knives.”) Hwin asked me whether I wanted to maybe head over there—it was a pretty sweet place, and Jenkins had hella guitars and shit—and I said sure, and so he called us a Lyft, the app-based car service that’s overtaking San Francisco’s weak cab system. When the car didn’t show up right away, Hwin wondered whether we should try to hail a taxi after all, but finally it appeared, a little white sedan with the furry pink mustache on the dashboard, and we got in and introduced ourselves, because Lyft drivers aren’t professional drivers, just people doing it in their spare time. Hwin asked the driver whether she had an auxiliary feed into her stereo. She did. He gave her his phone, and an electronic ballad started throbbing from the car’s front speakers.