eating, drinking; being merry
This morning La went for a long bike ride and I went to Austin Java with J, a recent Austin transplant who grew up in Kansas and strangely reminds me of my college boyfriend Mark, who was also born in Kansas and whom I have been thinking about recently after approximately ten years of not thinking about him at all. Wide blue eyes, freckles, kind smile.
J is an electrical engineer, which was fairly predictable because about half of the boys I end up randomly meeting in my life tend to be engineers. There was a time when I mostly met programmers, which I think had more to do with sheer numbers of programmers around me. But the engineer thing isn’t about odds. You could throw me into a room with a hundred equally cute guys forbidden to reveal their occupation and I would end up talking to the one engineer. It’s probably that I think engineering is awesome, and I’m drawn to all the geeky puzzle robot math logic that goes with it. And engineers tend to like me too because they’re generally underappreciated, and I genuinely think bridge building and circuits and lasers are fabulous.
We talked easily and laughed a lot and drank about twelve hibiscus mint iced teas, until it was late and we’d worn out our table. And then we made plans to go swing dancing on Wednesday.
Then La took me out for a walk in my first three-digit-degree day, around North Loop past the music store and the BYOB middle eastern restaurant and half a dozen vintage shops. We got her bike new tubes. And she introduced me to Amy’s, another essential Austin culinary experience. La and Marc are firm believers in urban experience via food and drink consumption, and all I have to say to that is Oh Yeah. At Amy’s they mash all kinds of toppings into homemade ice cream. Cookie dough and fudge in sweet cream, for example. Or strawberries and Heath Bar in bittersweet chocolate.
Mmmmmm, Austin. It’s not easy getting to know a new place, but I’m really trying to apply myself.
gary indiana gary indiana gary indiana
Way back two weeks ago when La invited me to spend some time in Austin, right after I thought hooray, La! and hooray, Austin!, I thought, Oh shit. Two weeks. I really hope I don’t drive La and Marc crazy. Because (a) two weeks is a long time to encroach on other people’s lives, homes, and schedules, and (b) I’m just feeling a little squeamish about imposing, given recent events. Luckily La and Marc are superfabulous hosts, with long lists of things they don’t want me to miss, and a kitchen full of foods I like waiting for me when I arrived, and even a welcome t-shirt that says tortuga. It has a turtle on it.
But superfabulous hosts make me the most worried, because all that superfabulousness has got to be exhausting. So part of my game plan for not driving them crazy involves getting myself out of their way sometimes. The main obstacles to this being that I have neither a car nor a single other friend in Austin. And herein lies the magic that is Craigslist.
Some m4w was looking for company to an outdoor musical in the park tonight. He sounded cool and looked cute so I wrote up a clever little response. But in the ten minutes it took me to do this, his post disappeared. So I wrote my own post, explaining that I was all excited about the show and did anyone want to join me?
Have you ever posted to Craigslist? It is always amusing. In this particular case I got about 20 responses in the few hours the post was up. Some of them were illiterate or clearly unrelated to my request. Five of them sent pretty cute pictures but not much in the way of text. One of them was the guy who had written the original ad, saying wasn’t it funny that I had done this and we should talk anyway. One of them was the guy I would have gone with if he had written back earlier, whose whole response email was the subject: I’ll bring the ice cream and the message: you bring the blanket. Also he had a big smile.
And then there was M, who I decided to go with because he expressed what seemed like a genuine interest in seeing the show, and because when I Googled him I found something short he’d written that was pretty cool.
Turns out M used to work in theater. So although he was a little shy, and maybe a little nervous, we had a good time – at the musical in the park, and at the Christmas-light-adorned coffee shop afterwards with the band that sounded like a punk Tom Petty. And most of all in the car between these places, when he let me choose a musical from the lengthy selection on his playlists. There's really nothing like singing showtunes with a person you just met and will never see again.
weather / ass report
The five day forecast here in Austin today went something like this: 99, 98, 98, 99, 99.
It’s a “dry heat” which means that it feels almost exactly like you have been placed into an oven.
But I like it. In general I prefer cold to hot - I long for big snowstorms and brisk nights, and in the winter I sleep with lots of blankets and the windows open. But sometimes in summer I find room to love the heat. It feels therapeutic and cleansing. Texas heat bakes your skin, and crackles your hair, and dries your lungs. It is more alert and sudden and sexy than the cold.
For my first few days in the heat, though, I feel sluggish. I decided to beat that this morning by joining La for her weekly Friday workout with Robert, personal trainer and former Philadelphia Eagle. We left for the gym at 6:15.
I have never worked out with a personal trainer. It was actually pretty fun and not at all what I expected. In a single hour we did twenty different activities in rapid alternating fire – lunges, squats, lunges, weight lifting, crunches, lunges. It didn’t feel so bad when it was all happening. Robert distracted us with music and movie trivia and his startling good looks, and I kept thinking Why isn’t he pushing us?
And then we came back home, and I lay down on the bed to read a magazine and couldn’t get up, and so I slept for three hours. And now I am awake but way, way too aware of my ass. My ass. Is very. Sore.
lapse
So, remember all that shit I was talking about being lucky? Cosmically lucky?
I forgot to mention one exception.
I am not lucky when it comes to flying. I mean, I am lucky in so far as I have never gone down in a fiery crash, or even had a ride so bumpy that it made me sick. Which is not nothing, and I realize that. But I do not have the specific airline luck that some people have. Despite flying dozens of times over the past few years, I have never been moved up to first class. I don’t get the back-to-back bumpings that have allowed my friend Talley to fly free across the country over and over. And I know part of this is not luck. Part of it is about being well dressed and/or really difficult. But I dress to fall asleep in a plane, and I can’t bring myself to get angry at a perfectly innocent airline agent. And beyond this, my flights tend to get cancelled and delayed for hours on end, leaving me sleep deprived and rerouted in some back-of-the-plane middle-of-the-row seat with a broken headphone jack.
So here I am at 8:19 in the morning, still in Richmond, fresh off of my mechanically disinclined flight to Dulles, minutes away from missing my Dulles to Austin. Eating cherry yogurt that cost $2.05 so that I could get close to an outlet to use while I wait for my 9:23 to Atlanta. I am really, really starting to wish I had gotten some sleep last night. And I am revisiting my bitterness about the checked bag I have been carting around – the one that is almost surely not going to make it to Austin today – full of the camping gear that Frenchie requested I bring to Quebec. Because I didn't want to be flying about this summer, but I sure as hell didn't want to be flying about with luggage.
But I am cheering myself by recalling the moment in the supermarket yesterday when Kira picked up a bottle labeled “French Lemonade,” made a uniquely disgusted Kira face, and said This sounds awful. And I am re-reading an email that Warren sent me yesterday, which reads in part:
We're struggling with an incredibly ancient piece of modelling software at work designed by an infamously arrogant company located in Quebec. This shit is literally from 1983 and they refuse to make any significant updates to it. We are regularly astonished by its cryptic nature and completely counter-intuitive design. You get the idea.
So my co-worker, having reached the end of his rope, with a look of utter incredulousness on his face, stood for a long moment searching the ceiling for words to describe his total despair--and finally said, "French-Canadians." He caught me in mid-chew ... it was a mess.
Seriously? I have the coolest friends ever.
4:38 am
Kira and I just stayed up all night talking shit and watching reality tv and eating three flavors of Haagen Dazs. Oh, hooray. And now I'm delirious and on my way to Austin.
baby.
(blessed)
Kira got married in 2000. Cara was her maid of honor and I was her bride’s maid. Cara and I conspired to arrive at the reception – the reception that Kira had been crafting since she was approximately three years old, with perfect flowers and little silver picture frame place cards and marzipan fruit – in our appointed dresses, but with fishnets and biker boots. In summary, I like Cara quite a lot. (Surprisingly Kira still likes us both, too.)
Cara happens to be in town this week visiting her dad, so she and her friend Molly came over tonight and invited us out to dinner. They invited us out to fondue.
Now, when I say I have good luck, this is what I mean. Not that I sometimes pull into a parking space with a loaded meter, though I have that kind of luck too. What I mean is that I theatrically and arbitrarily equate Quebec-loss sadness with fondue-loss sadness in my blog, and seven days later in Virginia I get invited to fondue. In Virginia. In a country where I have had fondue a total of one time, ever.
My good luck operates on a cosmic level that I do not begin to understand.
Anyway, we ate fondue. Cheese fondue and chocolate fondue and lots of wine, and it was delightful.
like bookends
There’s something very strange about spending time with old friends. It’s strange the way that it must be strange when your own child becomes a vegetarian or a republican or a Mennonite if that’s something you’ve never been. Like, where did this come from? Were you this way all along, and I just never picked up on it? And are you quietly judging my steak?
My old friends, in increasing numbers, live in big houses and/or in the suburbs. I don’t ever want to live in a big house or in the suburbs. Certainly not in a big house in the suburbs. Not ever. I don’t ever want nice dishes or white sofas or clothes that require dry cleaning. And back in high school my mom patiently explained to me that my tastes would mature and I would come to my senses and want these things, and I took deep breaths and tried to weather her condescension without violence.
And surprisingly, I was right. I’m nearly thirty and I avoid these things just as I did when I was eighteen. I now understand the appeal of living out of a house instead of a backpack, but the dream house I hardly care enough about to dream of is small and uncluttered, with a bed on the floor and a drafting table and a rocking chair. The kitchen has glass jars of pasta and beans, and when people come over we drink out of smaller versions of those same jars. The walls are covered with art from my friends and photographs from my trips and big cool maps. I grow rosemary, and tomatoes that I eat raw. And I keep the backpack in the front closet, next to the snowshoes.
And so the weird thing about visiting my old friends is that many of them have started liking the things that I was told I would start to like. And I just keep thinking, really? You really like the white sofas? What about when you want to paint?
This doesn’t happen with my more recently acquired friends, because we found each other through mutual decisions that imply certain lifestyle commonalities. But old friends are more a matter of alphabetical seating charts and dorm lotteries. And it makes me especially thankful that we have managed to stay close through moving and marriages and ideological shifts.
And though I’m glad for the diversity and challenge and spirited debate, it was also nice to see Jordan yesterday - my best friend in high school and my senior prom date and my first love, who still doesn’t like the suburbs either. In fact he and his partner Adam are about to move to Hong Kong, which is about as un-suburban as it gets. And we talked about it while eating greenbeans and blueberries from the farmer’s market, sitting on his floor.
I've Just Seen a Face
Erin and I met in Kindergarten, and we had a secret club in elementary school, and in high school we learned pool from Ralph in the smoky basement hall of the stripmall near her house. We went to different colleges and started drinking and making Poor Decisions and then she moved to Texas and dated boys with gunracks and I moved to Oregon and dated Beth, and she went to medschool and I went to gradschool and suddenly there I was at her wedding wearing a hot pink dress that she maintains was actually “sangria.” But I was there, and it was hot pink.
I think sometimes we forget how far back we go. We feel too young to have known anyone for 25 years, and besides there is so little continuity between our seventh-grade-selves and our current-selves. Thank God, incidentally. We used to be so dorky and stubborn and self-righteous and now… well, now we pull that off much better.
Erin is a doctor. She is a Doctor with a Husband John and Two Dogs Stella and Milo and a House in Charlottesville Virginia. And once a month her New Doctor Schedule involves two consecutive days off, which as luck would have it happened this very weekend just one hour from Richmond.
I assumed that Erin would mostly want to lie about on the couch with John, but instead we did Everything One Could Possibly Do in Two Days in Charlottesville. We sat on her porchswing sucking FlavoIce, toured Jefferson’s UVA campus and the Rotunda, walked the dogs to the lake, strolled the town center’s pedestrian mall, watched an inexcusably bad romantic comedy like we used to every weekend in high school, and ordered three plates of food plus an extra “for the table” at her favorite breakfast place. (There were grits and biscuits and I sure love eating in the South.)
And John – who last year had to sit through one of those old-girlfriends Rambling Pointless Stories about that time around 1990 when we sat in my parent’s yard in the rain and ate a whole knot of string cheese – brought us a knot of string cheese. Which makes it official that Erin married the Right Guy.
On Sunday we went for a Sunday Drive, and I sat in the back seat with the window way down, wind rushing in till my hair was tangled and my mouth was dry and it felt like Summer. We drove by mountain-framed farms and stopped to taste Virginia wine, and sang the Beatles. We sang the best songs twice.
blessings of the week so far include,
but are not limited to:
one. Frenchie’s mom’s car being in use on Sunday so that we had to rent a car, which – unlike Frenchie’s mom’s car – had a cd player that we made liberal use of for the five hour drive to Maine.
two. My friends Jones and Jon, who live in Portland Maine, and whom I have not seen in four years, and who are quite busy with about nine thousand things of their own, and who nonetheless warmly and cheerfully invited me to stay in their cottage when I had nowhere to go, so that I could figure out where to go from a place of humor, welcome, and fresh blueberries.
three. Ian the bartender at the fabulous Portland venue Space, who told me I was the nicest person he had met all day.
four. Aerin in general, but specifically the game we play where I laugh causing her to laugh causing her to fall over, because she is pretty new to sitting.
five. The fitness room in Kira and Andrew’s development, which has an elliptical machine with a built-in television so that I can run up and down in place while watching country music videos.
six. Television in the south, which has not one but two country music channels, allowing a full workout of country music videos uninterrupted by commercials.
seven. Kira’s guest bathroom, which has baskets of bottles containing creamy multicolored liquids that smell like nectarines and pear blossoms. My post-workout seven minute shower becomes a twenty minute fruity spa.
eight. All the good things coming up, which have to some degree fallen into place in the past few days but which you’ll just have to wait to hear about. I hate spoilers.
New Rule For The Day:
No More Bitching About The French Guy.
Because (1) it’s done and (2) no one looks good in bitter and (3) what would I really have wanted to do differently here? Nothing I can think of. Which is why – as you long time listeners who met this blog way back at the beginning of the week may be wondering – the name changed. I don’t really think I Shoulda Gone to Laos, catchy as that was. Feeling lost and shitty is the price one occasionally pays for jumping on Miscellaneous Adventures. And though I wish the French Guy had not advocated and then retracted this particular Miscellaneous Adventure, there lies the risk of Miscellany. And Miscellany is Grand.
So No More Bitching About the French Guy. Starting as soon as this paragraph ends. Because can I just say one more thing? He sucks.
Anyway. I spent the day with Kira and her ten month old Aerin, who lived in a little fiberglass box in the hospital when I last saw her. Now Aerin is a giant fifteen pound baby with big blue eyes who eats carrots and has a very mischievous laugh. I attribute the laugh to her mischievousness which I attribute to her mom. Her mom, sweet and southern and motherly as she may now seem, once rode a bus to New Jersey with me when we were eighteen to get tattoos.
Now, however, Kira lives in Richmond with Aerin and Andrew and their two dogs. What I know of Richmond so far is Malls and Humidity. So for a girl from Eugene, it’s kind of like another country after all.
headin south
The thing I anticipate feeling, when I expect to spend time with a person and then don’t, is a sense of loss about that person. But the sense of loss I felt on my last day in Quebec was more a loss of adventure, of experience and joy, and of dorky historical trips and speculation about visits to Dubai.
And some of that has to do with Frenchie, because I did like him. I liked our mutual misanthropy and our meandering Wikipedia excursions, his impromptu slide shows looted from the web, his storytelling and his character sketches. I liked that we watched the Vanilla Ice movie, start to finish, because who does that? I liked that back in March he orchestrated three weeks of us living together, though we were practically strangers. It was such a bad idea on paper but he believed in it. And I’m convinced that sometimes that’s all it takes.
That was what I thought we were doing this time, too: willing suspension of disbelief that two people who hardly know each other can fake a big summer adventure and voila, they actually have one. And at the end maybe they move to Vancouver and fake a whole fabulous life, but probably they kiss goodbye and have a really good story involving folk music and fondue.
But instead it never took off. And despite his well-meaning if deeply insulting explanations of why that happened, I think the real reason is he just stopped believing it could work. As soon as I sensed that, I got into self-protection mode. And people protecting themselves are never very cute or likable. So that started to look like the cause.
And it makes me disappointed, because the original plan had some real potential. And angry because after I did so much to get out here he not only didn’t meet me half way, but fled promptly and resolutely. But what it doesn’t make me, fortunately, is heartbroken. He fucked up my summer and bruised my ego, but it’s just not that kind of loss.
Today I biked down Route 77 past forests and crop fields and horse pastures to the rocky shore of Maine, and walked to the beach with the sharp asphalt scorching my summerfeet, and swam in the cold murky Atlantic. And then Jon mixed mojitos with fresh muddled mint and Jones sang and I made squash fritters, and there’s no room for loss here at all.
Southwest, JetBlue; How I, HateYou
For a month now I have been In Transit, and what I hate most about being In Transit is logistics. Sometimes I really, really hate logistics.
Now, for example.
Quebec was supposed to be several consecutive weeks of no logistics except what to have for dinner and what museum to check out and which movie to illegally download. Alas.
So today I wasted about six hours making calls and instant messaging and, worst of the worst, surfing for good airfares. It’s one of those things I feel compelled to do well beyond the point of usefulness, so that after half a day of screen blindness and frustration I know everything about who flies where and when but I’m still paying the first price quoted.
On the plus side I now have a Plan, and though it’s not the plan I started out with this summer or even this week or even this morning, it’s a good one. For starters I am staying here until Wednesday, here in the Other Portland with my friends Jones and John who live by a pond in a house with a garden and with a cottage that they have generously opened to me. A cottage with an Outdoor Shower. Outdoor Showers are on my Top Ten Favorite Things Ever list.
Next I am going to Virginia to visit Kira and Andrew and their baby Aerin, and Erin and John and their dogs, and Jordan before he goes to Hong Kong. And then, in the most miscellaneous twist of events, I am going to Austin for two weeks to see Lauren and Marc. And in Austin I will do what I intended to do in Quebec, namely work on the publication I am editing for my job by day and relish in good company and good summer fun by night, and send out some resumes in the in-between times. Resumes that will hopefully lead to some sort of gainful employment in a city where I will then find a place to live.
So. There we have it. An unexpected but delicious Plan that weirdly involves seeing all three of my close friends from high school as well as the first person in the world who will, with a few more years of language acquisition, call me Aunt Jenn. For someone who just got ousted from a foreign land with way too much baggage and exactly one dollar in relevant currency, I’m feeling pretty splendidly lucky.
sunk costs of Project Quebec
$200 plane ticket
$50 nonrefundable extra month of stuff in storage
$30 gas
$30 language books
$20 changing US dollars to Canadian dollars to US dollars
small measure of faith in first impressions
small measure of self confidence
1 month of job search time
4 days of actual time
2 flip-flops
1 formerly cool, if occasional, backpacker friend.
It was a gamble I still feel ok with, since what I could have won was hiking by lakes, nights out in Montreal, a sketchbook of Quebec City, better French, and a fun romance with a boy who likes to travel and knows what teff is. So no regrets. Just lots of what now?
501 french verbs abandoned
I guess it all started in March when I was going to go to Laos.
I mean, I wasn’t going to GO to Laos until August, but I was thinking about it in March.
So I i.m.ed Frenchie my Quebecois backpacking friend whom I met in an Istanbul hostel in 1999. Because he’d been to Laos, and maybe he had advice.
His advice was: “Get a job and a boy/girlfriend.”
He then recommended himself.
So I went to Quebec for a week, and we ate borek and sang power ballads and had a movie-montage sort of time, and one week became three weeks. And he lobbied for me to come back. And hell, I was finishing grad school and it was maybe my last “summer break” for a while and 2006 is, after all, the Year of Faith and Bravery. So I went. And here I am.
And it’s been three days, and I’m leaving.
I don’t know where I’m going, but I’m not staying here. Sometime since March Frenchie changed the channel from Bravo to Hallmark, so now instead of upbeat foreign adventures we are having High Emotional Drama, which is just not my genre. Especially since said Drama is happening entirely within his head, and being expressed to me only via vague mood projections in the style of a high school boyfriend who doesn't want to hurt your feelings but clearly wants Out. He is worried that if he starts to like me too much it will lead to something complicated, or else he is worried that I like him too much, or else he is worried that I don’t know what and I don’t much care. Hello, and Welcome to Being Thirty. Do try to get your shit together, will you? I fucking flew across the country.
So while this blog was going to be about my temporary life in Canada, it is now going to be about… something else. I’ll keep you posted.
