before she left for pennsylvania
Talley and I sped down the highway to Eugene past the sheep and fall colors. We sang the Jayhawks, who were playing so loud we couldn’t talk over the music. I’ve known Talley long enough that I don’t flinch when she rockets between an oil tanker and a concrete divider at eighty miles an hour with one hand on the wheel and one hand on the stereo volume. I trust Talley implicitly.
When we stopped for gas she asked if I wanted anything from the quickie mart and I replied green Gatorade. She called my cell from inside to check that I meant straightforward lemonlime, not one of the many other green flavors that have emerged as part of the wholly unnecessary phenomenon of Gatorade evolution. The wrong kind of Gatorade can make all the difference, she explained. It’s true, you know? And when she came out she had string cheese sticks, too.
and speaking of books
From zombiesquirrels.blogspot: 1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the next 4 sentences on your blog along with these instructions.
5. Don't you dare dig for that "cool" or "intellectual" book in your closet! I know you were thinking about it! Just pick up whatever is closest.
These people carry military C rations and covered casserole dishes. They cradle warm garlic bread wrapped in tinfoil. The idea is, we’re going to the first potluck after a nuclear holocaust: Portland’s semiannual Apocalypse Café. Marcie says, “I hope nobody has to use the bathroom, because the toilet facilities at the event are a little primitive.”
or I could just be a mime
Today I had lunch with my landlord’s sister, who works for the Portland Development Commission. It’s not exactly where I want to be working, but it’s close. She invited a colleague and we chatted about planning in Portland over food I couldn’t afford, and they told me that (1) planning is an impossible field and (2) Portland is an impossible place to do it and (3) good luck. But at the end they smiled and said my determination was good, and that the secret was that on the west coast they don’t care about your resume; they care about who you know. This doesn’t much work in my favor.
So what I have to do now is get in touch with all these random people and agencies who are not hiring, and try to get them to talk to me, in the hopes that they will like me, and then remember me one day in the indeterminate future when an entry level position becomes available. I guess it’s time for me to get good at networking.
My head was so full after lunch that I had a pressing need to sit and take notes. I swung into Powell’s. On my way to a chair I passed the History of Science section, so by the time I was sitting down my notebook was in the shadow of a tower of books about navigation and aromatic hydrocarbons and the invention of artificial dye, and my notes began having side notes about this book I’ve had in my head for six years or so. And soon the whole page was split down the middle, with full time planning job notes on the left and a mix of part-time job ideas and book writing notes on the right.
And Good God, the world does not need another book or another writer, and OH how I am aware of this. I find the whole impulse embarrassing. But it seems this permanent-job-finding thing is going to take a while, and perhaps an overambitious and conceit-filled project would give the meantime some direction. Fuck.
Fuck Fuck Fuck.
So I sat a few hours longer, and read and noted, and spent my bus fare on coffee, and walked the four miles home.
true brew
Hello, fabulous new (to me) coffeeshop.
Hello, fabulous new (to me) coffeeshop, which is also a used bookstore, and which is two blocks away from my house. Which has wireless internet and big comfy chairs and tall windows and soft pleasant music and pastries that look tasty rather than just pretty, and $1.50 free refill café au laits.
I do not make a habit of coffee. I find it delicious and the smell is divine, but so far I can muster wide-awake manicness without it, and even small quantities make my heart explode. (Not in the good way.) And I’d rather not develop the sort of coffee dependence that causes headaches and unpleasantness in its absence.
But if you will forgive me this generic hipster inclination, I sure do love sitting in coffee shops. Right this very moment for example I am listening to the whir of the steamed milk dispenser and the clinking of tip jar coins, and watching a dorky high school kid play video games and a nervous woman scan books. And I’m trying not to make way too much eye contact with a cute curly haired guy in the corner with ripped jeans and a Mac. The woman at the counter now, who I can’t see, just ordered a sixteen ounce hazelnut cap with nonfat milk, but she wants the whipped cream. Hazelnut coffee reminds me of the worst boss I ever had.
I came here this afternoon to feel productive. There is a cover letter that’s been half written for two weeks. (Hazelnut woman just left with her coffee, and the barista tried to give her back some of her large tip, but she said the last time she came in she was out of money and hadn’t left any tip at all.) I wrote half my thesis in coffeeshops, and it’s where I did most of the work for my last big editing job. I’ve been applying for these kinds of jobs lately as filler. I sure wouldn’t mind coming to work every day in a coffeeshop. But I’m unqualified for the work behind the counter and so far unhired for the work you can do at the tables.
There is a small boy ordering a cookie at the counter. I love when parents bring their kids to coffeeshops. If I were a kid in a coffeeshop I’d feel painfully cool and adult. I guess I still do.
This coffeeshop closes at six, one hour from now. Which means if I’m going to finish this cover letter I better get to it. The shop down the street is open twenty four seven, but then I’d have to buy a new coffee and that would be one too many. Even my resilient heart has its limits.
spoiled
So here’s a thing that’s lame.
I am not a cynical person. I have healthy scientist/New Yorker skepticism, and a fairly firm grounding in reality. But for the most part I live in a rather optimistic, full-of-faith reality of my own, in which people are essentially good and helping people is the right thing to do and small sparkly fairies populate the forest.
And I get that that’s naïve and I don’t much care, because it doesn’t come from a place of sugarcoating and denial. It comes from my personal assessment that my actions are more in line with my ethics when I imagine the best of everyone. One tends to find what one is looking for, after all. So I look for the interesting parts of everyone and lo and behold, it turns out everyone is interesting. And I look for the good qualities in strangers and sure enough almost everyone has them. It’s made me more open minded and it’s made me more compassionate and it’s made me a lot better at parties.
But last night I went on a second date with Operaman and can I just say? It was a fucking fabulous date. We joked beforehand about him picking me up like in some Real sort of Date, the kind no one I know goes on anymore, and so he showed up on my porch in a dress shirt and tie, but the shirt was a 70s collared ugly print shirt and the tie was wide and green, and it kicked ass. And we ate at a sidewalk table of a brightly colored Cuban restaurant, four little plates of tiny delicious food and festively garnished lemonade. Followed by a divine chocolate dessert down the street.
Now back in my more youthful days, I’d be pretty unreservedly thrilled right now. This guy is cute and cool and he seems to like me. He says the sorts of things one says when one likes someone. He appears eager to see me again. He is prone to sending rather delightful post-date emails.
And yet this very small part of me is frustratingly, maddeningly, unshakably suspicious.
Because the last person who said and acted as if he liked me in fact did not like me at all. And if one can’t believe words and actions, what exactly is one supposed to go on? I suddenly feel so gullible. He sang to you in French? my housemate has asked incredulously about the Quebec debacle. Yes, I am easily seduced by the most archetypal of clichés. This one sings in French too. He’s in fucking Faust.
So while 99% of me has spent the day in post-good-date-bliss, there is this excruciatingly irritating 1% I’m really pissed about. And it is saying, he ordered in Spanish and uses words like prescience and looked enamored when you finished the crossword? Maybe he’s selling a bridge, too.
But luckily the 99% part is a lot bigger, and is about to kick the shit out of this I-can’t-fucking-believe-this-is-still-getting-to-me new part before I start acting sensibly instead of diving in.
the last 55 hours
in chronological order:1. A date. A really fucking good date. The first date I have had since arriving in Portland that was 100% cool and fun and 0% bad in any way. Also? He's cute. Also? Literate. Also? An opera singer.2. A career fair. During which I gained no useful contacts and did not distribute a single one of my freshly printed resumes, but did have a lovely conversation with Jeanne from Salem Habitat for Humanity, in which she directed me to several good resources for finding planning jobs here.
3. A cafe au lait. At Powell's. With Chuck Palahniuk's book about Portland.
4. A dinner. Hosted by Jon and Elise in honor of the season finale of Project Runway. The designer I liked won. 5. An email. From the date mentioned in item (1). Which contained the following paragraph: "I'd like to see you again, if you're game. Soon. Sunday? Cuban?"
6. A hike. With a mycologist, around Larch Mountain, for six hours. We identified mushrooms.7. A concert. At the Aladdin yet again, with Joshua yet again, this time Greg Brown. Greg Brown! What a voice. And followed by8. Breakfast. At night, my favorite time for breakfast. At the 24-hour HotCake House around the corner from my own (non hotcake) house.Oh, hoorah. Deciding not to feel like shit is really working out. I mean, not financially. But in all the other ways.
fall stories
Today I found out that BandBoy is getting married.
BandBoy and I met my sophomore year of college. There was a big rockin party in my suite, and I bumped my way down the hall between the bodies into Tito’s room, and there he was, next to some loud awful college band, leaning against the wall drinking a pint of Jaeger. And that night he stayed up until four in the morning talking to me and Kapil in the kitchen, wishing Kapil would leave. And the next day he called and asked me out to Tom’s Diner, the one from Seinfeld.
And this was all new to me in my sophomore year of college – the idea that some boy could see me and think I was cute, and then talk to me and think I was cool, and then call me up and ask me out on a date. Because in high school I was a big dork and the other dorks I sporadically dated were in the band, not a band. And freshman year I had a Long Distance Boyfriend. So sophomore year I was still figuring out how all that being a single girl shit worked.
But this was not the most important thing I learned from BandBoy, who incidentally was in a real New York City sort of band that played in New York City sorts of venues. The most important thing I learned from BandBoy was what it meant to be in a Real Adult Relationship. I learned this from him several years after this initial meeting, after he had graduated and we ran into each other on Broadway and he asked me out to Indian food. He was always good at the asking out thing.
BandBoy and I dated for three years, the longest I’d dated anyone up until that point. He lived in a basement apartment in Brooklyn, and I crashed there for a month when I was looking for my own – the first time I’d really lived with a boyfriend in an I-don’t-even-have-my-own-place way. It didn’t go well. It was too soon for us to be sharing space, and I was resentful at having cut short a trip for him, and he was a daytime workaholic and a nighttime pothead. From this era comes one of my all time favorite stories, the Worst Birthday Ever story. But that’s better told in person.
But despite the problems, or perhaps because of them, I learned things from that relationship that I now realize some thirtysomethings still haven’t figured out. I learned about how you sometimes have to tell people, out loud, what you need from them. Sometimes you have to tell them several times. Because assuming they know what you need and then feeling angry when they don’t give it to you, while sadistically satisfying, does not actually lead to relationship bliss. And I learned that when you think something is up, you are almost always right. And at these times you need to crack whatever is wrong open, right there in the living room, even if the mess spills all over, because it’s not going away. And I learned that sometimes people want to be encouraged to give more, and sometimes even want to be changed some. But I’m still not good at those two.
And in addition to all the learning, BandBoy and I had a shitload of New York fun. We went to smoky bars and unmarked clubs and loft parties in the secretest corners of the outer boroughs, and we would know the DJ and the photographers and the guy who wrote the parties up in New York Magazine the next week. We made chocolate chip pancakes on weekend mornings, and sipped tea with the newspaper at the Fall Café, and squashed next to each other on the crowded subway. We talked about science and politics and what we were reading. I loved him even when it sucked, and I loved him after it was over.
We kept in touch for a long time. Not politely in touch, but really in touch, for years. We talked about presidential candidates and job prospects and new significant others. He visited me in Oregon, and when I came to New York he would invite all our friends over to his house for dinner. He had a deep streak of generosity for his friends.
And then at some point about two years ago BandBoy figured out what he wanted: a good relationship, soon, and eventually a family. And when he had this realization I was so happy for him, because he started paying attention to his girlfriends in thoughtful and meaningful ways. And I thought, Hoorah. He gets it.
But I guess I should have seen it coming, because he’s one of those ultrafocused programmer types, and there’s no periphery. So I stopped hearing from him. And when I did hear from him, the conversations were a mixture of comical and unbearable.
Me: I have a cold.
BB: New Girlfriend has a cold, too.
Me: So you’re going to Boston? There’s a great science museum there.
BB: New Girlfriend doesn’t like museums.
Me: I think I’m going to run a marathon.
BB: I got New Girlfriend a pair of diamond earrings for our five and a half month anniversary.
Me (swallowing both my political views on diamonds and the non sequitur): Um, oh, that’s very thoughtful.
BB: They cost (some crazy amount of money).
So that was it. And I thought, OK. New relationship. Important relationship. It’s the intense part that lasts – what? – six months? a year? And you forgive your friends this self absorbtion, because it’s a fun place to be, and you understand.
But then today I found out that BandBoy is getting married. And I’m happy for him, and (not to be condescending) really proud of him, because he finally got his shit together in a way that allows him to be present for another person. And it’s something he had to work really hard on in his personality and in his life, and I respect that in a huge way.
But I’m so sad. Because he’s not the one who told me, and I guess I’m not going to hear from him again. And I guess the person I miss isn't him anymore, or I'd call him up myself. But his fiancée is a sculptor, and I bet she’s awesome, and I would have liked to know her. And he was such a big part of my life, a friend for ten years and a confidant and a debater and someone whom I loved, and I wanted to dance with him at my wedding, because it used to be a joke of ours, that we went to weddings together. I was excited to go to his.
call me heloise
I made an executive decision on Monday, after waking up depressed at the prospect of another week of unemployment, that it’s high time to quit my fucking whining. Thankfully the whining has been mostly in my head. But it’s persistent. Unemployment makes me feel like shit. Particularly this part where I’m just sitting around waiting for people to look at my resume or worse yet, waiting for the right job to open up in the first place.
So henceforth I’m going to do what I can do each morning – search the various job sites and write cover letters and throw together work samples – and then when that’s done I’m going to go live my life, and not continue to sit in front of my laptop as part of some futile stab at productivity. And I’m going to do this until mid November, because I do have a few leads out there of varying promise, which will either pan out or not by that time. And at that point – shall we give it a date? how about November 10? - I’m going to panic and drink a lot and come up with some sort of exit strategy. And I’m not talking about this right now because I’m not thinking about it right now because I really don’t want it to happen.
In the mean time! It has been two highly successful days of ignoring my unemployment. I’ve been lurking on the Craigslist Free page like a vulture, and yesterday I swooped in for a rather lovely set of bookcases. So now our house has a library. And this library no longer has my housemate’s box spring in its center, because I advertised and emailed and sold it. And then I put together my drafting table, so we now also have an art room. Yup! I’m living in pretty high style for an unemployed girl. Of course, I’m eating a lot of pasta and the other night I bought my hot chocolate with dimes. But at least I can eat my pasta in the library.
Additionally I have weeded and read and made a second batch of jam, fig this time, which involved climbing quite high in a tree. So basically I’m being a homemaker. How fucking creepy is that? Luckily I don’t have a husband or I’d probably be ironing socks. And luckily alcohol is way out of my price range.
PDX
And why is Portland fabulous? It is fabulous because the weekend kicked off with the Midnight Mystery Ride, a monthly (you guessed it!) bicycle ride at midnight to an undisclosed location. Sixty or so assorted bike fans and freaks streak across the dark streets, a parade of blinking red lights and occasional bike horn tooting, winding through neighborhoods and parks and industry for an hour or two before arriving at some secluded destination – in this case a cemetery for Friday the Thirteenth – where everyone mingles and drinks and breaks into freestyle beatbox circles etcetera until the wee hours of the morning. And at four a.m. I found myself scaling a fence with my housemate Brad and a biker named Buffalo Dave and our three bikes, which was pretty stupid except that I got to exclaim I tore my fishnets on the barbed wire! Which is pretty much the mark of a successful evening in my book.
Portland is fabulous for its kickball league, which on Saturday threw a midseason barbeque, so that several dozen of us gathered fieldside in the unlikely October sun and grilled burgers and played sloshball, which is like kickball except all players must be holding a beer at all times. And then I entered the Beer Olympics with three people I happened to be standing next to, and our team won every single event from Beer Flip to Beer Hunter, and we got a baseball trophy jammed into a PBR can. And we took a picture with said trophy that is sure to surface if I ever run for office.
Portland is fabulous for its Quaker meeting, which I finally checked out this morning. Sunday meeting is the Quaker equivalent of church, and involves sitting in silence in a room full of people for one hour. The town where I lived in Costa Rica had a fantastic Quaker community – it was the first time I regularly attended any religious service in my life. I found it to be moving and centering and inspiring, a transition from one week to the next and a chance to regroup and make a smaller scale equivalent of new year’s resolutions. And unlike the Eugene meeting, which just didn’t resonate with me, the Portland meeting is welcoming and full of intention.
Portland is fabulous because I came home to my big old house and the Sunday Times, and I ate figs from the fig tree and grape jelly from the grape vines. And Jamey baked two perfect loaves of bread, so that the whole house smelled like warmth and comfort.
And Portland is fabulous because hours later, after fresh bread and a bath and a few chapters of a novel I just started by the recent Turkish Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk, I walked two blocks to the 24-hour Fireside Lodge with my laptop and my letter-writing stuff and I got a hot chocolate with whipped cream and one of the last empty tables, and here I am.
burn all the letters
I’m having a Lilith Fair night, me and Ani and the Indigo Girls and Liz Phair and Alanis and PBR, because I had a shitty day. I mean, it was hardly a shitty day on any sort of objective scale, as it involved fresh figs and October sun in Oregon and finishing a rather good book. But fuck. I hate not having a job. I like to have a two-page todo list at any given time, because the more I have to do the more I get done. But when there’s three things on the list I put them off indefinitely. Overcommited types are terrified of empty lists. And it’s just driving me crazy, what I did today compared to what I might have done.
I went for another voluntary run and you know? This is probably going to stick. I ran on a new dirt trail this time through Oak Bottom, and I sat for a while by the waterside watching dragonflies. This city is… just right.
Tonight I’m going for a midnight bikeride with a pack of bike fanatics. I’m trying to summon up some bravery because I don’t know a one of them and will walking into a crowd ever be easy? As many times as I do it and as better at it as I get it’s never easy.
Do you know that October is Write A Book month? And it’s already the thirteenth. Man. This day Sucks.
(Yeah, I'm done now.)
follow up
The post on thirty-something guys (hereafter TSGs) from last week keeps coming up with my friends in phonecalls and instant messaging and late night conversation. The reaction can best be summarized as (from the women) yes! and (from the men) yes, but….
So can I clarify something here? I was really trying to advocate something very specific, and no more: that when a TSG meets a girl who he is actually into, who he feels attracted to and interested in, that he not immediately launch an exhaustive search for a thousand reasons real and imagined why it can’t work.
I am not suggesting that TSGs should come on to every girl they meet, or hook up with girls who are clearly more or less invested than they are, or try harder to like girls they don’t actually like, or continue dating someone whom they have come to realize is not compatible, or ignore big-red-flag warning signs, or otherwise abuse the emotions of themselves and others. Over the past week many of you have told me emphatically about the hazards of these and all manner of other behaviors, and I COMPLETELY AGREE.
But I stand by my observation that TSGs have become hyperfearful of going out on a limb, and going out on a limb is part of what makes falling for someone so joyful. And many of the TSGs around me seem so set on self-preservation that they miss out on opportunities for great joy. I don’t think learning from your past experiences is stupid. I think letting your past experiences scare you away from new ones is sad.
And maybe this doesn’t actually happen as often as I think. Maybe, as my housemate so kindly suggested in a bout of drunken insightfulness, all the guys I’ve been into in the past two years just didn’t like me. Super. Fine. All the more reason for me to hope that if some guy who actually likes me comes along, he act on that instead of convincing himself that I’m too interested, or that breakups hurt too much to justify dating, or whatever. Who doesn’t like to think that they are worth a little risk?
sweet
Moving from New York City to Oregon was an education. I learned when to plant which vegetables, and how to make dishes on a pottery wheel, and how to mend clothes, and other basic life-sustaining skills. The sorts of skills that my parents worked their whole lives so that I would never have to learn, because this was a sign of success, except that it ultimately just left me feeling uneasily unaware about how all the things around me worked. Sometimes parents just can’t win.
I also learned how to can things. Which for you northeastern urban folk is the process by which you take fresh food (perhaps out of your very own garden!) and preserve it in little glass jars for later. First I made blackberry jam, and then applesauce, tomatoes and tomato sauce, plum preserves. And one of the best things about canning is that, like with baking bread, you end up with more than you might really want to use in a practical time frame. So you get to give the extras away.
The first time I made jam I sent it in small padded packages to friends back east, because I thought it would be a cool Oregony thing to get in the mail. But I think the little jars of jam mostly just aroused suspicion. How quickly the pacific northwest made a New Yorker eerily domestic. And, is this really safe?
But what I really wanted to tell you about was grape jelly. Which I made last night for the first time.
We have three kinds of grape vines in our backyard, and two of them are currently filled with grapes. Even with constant grape-eating there are bunches and bunches spoiling on the vine. So this is what you do.
You fill a big metal bowl - preferably propped on your hip harvest-style – until it is overflowing with grape bunches. You sit on the front porch sorting the grapes, pulling out the stems and tossing them into the rosebushes, and you talk with your neighbors about pumpkins. You fill the bowl with cold water and swirl the grapes around, washing them gently and well. You tip the bowl into a large saucepot and roll the grapes in.
You realize you have no appropriate utensil for grape-mashing, so you use your hands. You open and close your fists in the increasingly liquid stew, releasing a sharp sweettart scent and a flood of deep purple juice that stains your skin. You pop the most persistent grapes one at a time between your thumb and forefinger, and they snap open with the satisfaction of bubblewrap.
You boil the pulpy seedy soup for ten minutes until the kitchen smells like candy and wine. You pour the still steaming mix into a strainer, pressing the empty skins against the sides with a wire whisk. Cloudy juice spills through.
You heat the juice and pour in cup after cup of sugar, stirring as the mixture becomes thick and dark and glossy. You stir in the pectin that will help the jelly set. You ladle it into seven jam jars lined up on the counter while listening to Michelle Shocked sing Strawberry Jam and you screw on the lids fingertip-tight. You arrange them on a circular rack and plunge them into fiercely boiling water, and the heat causes all the air inside each jar to bubble out.
You set the jars on a cloth and you turn the music down and you wait. The jars cool and the air inside contracts and the lids are sucked down, sealing in the jam. And when this happens they make the most marvelous sound, which is the greatest delight of jam making.
Pop.
it’s all in your head
You know that Fiona Apple song Paper Bag? You probably do, but you think it’s called Hunger Hurts. Much as I always thought the lyrics were hunger hurts, but starving’s worse.
And as it turns out, she actually sings hunger hurts, but starving works, when it costs too much to love.
Which is… well, it is what it is. But I’m going to keep singing my version.
falliest day ever
This time of year, fall is my favorite season. In spring it’s spring and in summer it’s summer and in winter it’s winter, but right now I’m with fall all the way. (I used to be Grass is Greener but now I’m Love the One You’re With.)
I read under the covers in my bright brisk room until Jamey called good morning from the hallway, and isn’t it fabulous to live with people? Because they say things like Good Morning and Sleep Well and Do You Want Tea, I’m Boiling Water. And for only children, these things are small marvels every one.
Jamey had a Plan involving the improvement of our semi-neglected garden. So after fresh figs and yogurt on the porch we went to the downtown Saturday farmer’s market, which this time of year is a festival of abundance: eight kinds of thinly sliced apples for tasting, four colors of potatoes, twelve shapes of squash. Goat cheese and scones and hazelnuts and garlic. And bluegrass music.
Next was a nursery for winter veggie starts. I hate pulling out the tomatoes, but the time had come, and it made room for rainbow chard, collard greens, purple cabbage (which apparently everyone else calls “red cabbage” but I’m sticking) and oh so very many beets. Beets in every nook and cranny, hiding between the broccoli and crouching by the pea trellis. More beets than one can reasonably expect to eat, even if one were wild for borscht which I am not. But what’s to be done when the plastic pot is bursting with little sprouted beets? Their little beet bodies withering on the path is more than I can bare, with all they have invested in shooting out leaves from nothing. They must go in the ground.
And then! Josh & Nikki, Nate, Joshua, Deb & Nopporn and I drove out to Suavie Island to celebrate Deb’s birthday. The idea was to explore the corn maze but we got so distracted with corn on the cob and caramel apples and picking-our-own pumpkins that the afternoon grew late, and in the last light we rushed to a nearby wetland to watch sandhill cranes through binoculars as the sun set. And for cinematic effect we drove home under a harvest moon.
to the lighthouse
Craigslist has found me houses and housemates, furniture, and a kickball team. It is my default procrastination once I have checked the blogs of Dave, Kira, Adrienne, Warren, La, Caroline, Nathan, and Mick. I read it all, from the BestOf to the Barter, because it is a crazy and constantly changing community of people looking for and finding things, and more astoundingly of people trying to give things away.
So tonight at 8:30 when I was ready to retire to my room for a quiet night in with Virginia Woolf, I took one quick scan before closing the laptop. I was hoping for a free bookcase, but instead I found Jack. Who was like a free bookcase, but more like a guy visiting from Santa Barbara.
Jack is in Portland this week visiting his sister, except his sister’s gone for a few days. Which was similar to my situation in both Austin and San Diego when CL folks came to my rescue. So Jack and I hit Trendy-third Street. We drank Black Buttes and talked about all the usual stuff, Jungian psychology and systems theory and reincarnation mostly. And Jack believes that there are certain innate personality categories like introvert/extrovert that stick with a person for life. But my first year of college I hid in my dorm room pretending I was tired when Tom and Leslie invited me out, because I was afraid of acting wrong. But now I drive across town to sit at dark tables with people I’ve never met, and we lean in and smile and talk until we're asked to leave, and I learn about lives I don't get to live. And it always feels like exactly what was supposed to happen.
city
Up the hill from my house and then down under the freeway through the industrial blocks and a sharp left at the railroad tracks to the eastern esplanade, north along the Willamette by the science museum and the pedestrian piers and across the Hawthorne Bridge - low and humble bike-friendly cousin to the other hulking crossings. Spat out into downtown rush-hour traffic, taxis and trolleys and emptying parking garages, weaving my way past the park blocks to the sudden shift in city grid, the north-south axis bent at Burnside into northeast-southwest, under the Chinatown gate to the überhot Saucebox. Not my choice, but an experience at least: too salty edamame and a rum drink with muddled banana, hiphop blaring into the small spaces between inclined hipster heads. Out into the now-dark night slashed by the bright white gallery lights of First Thursday, beers for the pierced artists and wine for the buyers. (It’s no New York but it’s no Eugene, thank God.) And the gallery goers heading home, dodging the mobs of arriving club kids spilling out with the music onto the sidewalks. They don’t move for anyone. Legendary late-night Voodoo Donuts appears out of nowhere, right where you’d want it, with a revolving tiered glass case of overdone confections, pink frosted and Fruit Looped in donut form. And back on my bike, past the guys on the corner talking about That Band and the girls leaning on lampposts taking a break from Those Shoes, back over the bridge and home to Brooklyn.
The door’s locked but the light’s on.
n(o)de
My friend Dave, whose blog I check daily with gleeful anticipation, recently composed a rather marvelous post on the merits of thirty-something women. It was eloquent and funny and flattering and probably designed expressly to get in some girl’s pants, but no matter. I ate up every word.
And I would like to reciprocate here, to wax rhapsodic about the unexpected joys of dating men in their thirties, the balance of sexiness and sensibility that marks this decade, the girlish giggles and soulful stirrings they inspire. Alas. That shit’s just not gonna happen.
Now don’t get me wrong. I love guys in their thirties. They’ve learned all this stuff since college: how to be confident without being cocky, how to stop before going too far, how to floss. They make things and do things and fix things with awe-inspiring ease. They’re still playful, but seem constantly surprised by their own capacity for maturity. Which is, you know. Pretty cute. So thirty-something men are awesome to be around.
But dating them? In my experience that’s just been fucking fraught with peril.
Most thirty-something men have decided – in all fairness, perhaps due to a decade of exposure to twenty-something women – that relationships are impossibly, discouragingly difficult. Such an ill-fated proposition as dating must therefore be approached with either neurotic, ulcer-inducing care, or avoided altogether. For years we aging women have been lightening up, revelation by revelation: This breakup did not in fact kill me! This particular guy wasn’t interested, and yet I still have value as a person! We have no long term potential, but check out his hands! Meanwhile there were the men, unlearning all they so carefully taught us. Two ships passing in the night.
So now all the guys who haven’t written off dating entirely – if not outright, then on a case-by-case basis while pointing at logistics and timing and blah blah fucking blah – approach each relationship with so much caution and logic that there’s nothing left for rash action and potentially humiliating declarations and all the other things that make new love so fabulously great. (And did you just cringe at the word love? Y’all overthink everything.) Twenty year old boys weren’t much to talk to, but at least when you kissed them they weren’t thinking Shit if I kiss her much longer she’s going to think I like her and then she’s probably going to fall for me and I don’t want to lead her on, especially after last week when I called her twice in a row without her calling me back in between, I never should have done that, she’s probably already naming our kids and I can’t take this, one of us is going to get hurt. Twenty year old boys were thinking This hot girl’s kissing me! Which is what we’d like you to be thinking now, and we wish we’d never gotten so good at hearing the things you don’t say out loud.
So come on thirty-something guys. Buck up. We’re glad you have feelings now, really, cause that shit you pulled on us at 23 sure could be brutal. But seriously? We miss the part of the cocky ass who at least had the courtesy to work for a smile, and dance around triumphantly when we gave it.
it says here
It helps, after a day of moody unemployment, to sit in the sixth row of a tiny late 20’s vaudeville house and listen to Billy Bragg sing I have faith in you. Billy Bragg who, when not kicking your ass, simply mesmerizes you with the way he sings an-ti-ci-pa-tion, each vowel different than you’d expect, the sounds all British and twangy and wrong, the word hanging parsed in the air for seconds. Billy Bragg whom I’d never heard of until a bus in Turkey in 1999, when Frenchie suggested I scrawl his name on a To Check Out list along with The Beach (a surprising choice for him in its semiliterate mediocrity) and some movie about Ireland. Billy Bragg who sings here and library in one sentence, and they get two syllables each. Hay-ire. Lie-bree.
and I lied to myself bout the chances I’d wie-steeeeeeeeeehd
The encore was a whole album, not montaged but quick-succession one song after another start to finish, a bonus concert to drive home the banishment of cynicism he’d been preaching, and I don’t know how some performers manage to make every person in every audience every night feel that they have just witnessed an unreplicable moment of passion and creation, but there it is.
And then Joshua and I played guitar on my porch till the wee hours, rattling strings and scaring away all the cats.
shirts & skins
Portland – as is discussed with appropriate awe and wonder by many new arrivals – has an unlikely concentration of hip attractive young people. It’s downright improbable. Go to any concert or coffeeshop or busstop and there they are in swarms, wearing marvelous ugly clothes while reading alluringly obscure books. All the geeky misfits I used to gravitate towards at east coast parties have packed their bags and moved here. And what do they do on Sunday afternoons? Why, they play kickball.
You remember kickball, right? Third grade recess, big muddy field, red rubber ball. So little skill required. A game that even mathletes could enjoy. And now that we’re all grown up – that motley crowd of third graders who used to ask for things like foreign coins and chemistry sets on our birthdays – we have returned to the sport that caused the least last-picked angst on the playground.
So aside from providing a chance to run about in the sun, kickball is a Who’s Who of Geeky Portland. Just like third grade, except now we wear the kneesocks with pride and drink PBR with abandon and claim the infield for ourselves. And now, incidentally, many of the geeks are hot. When they’re not running Intel, the grown-up geeks rockclimb.
In an alarming stroke of accidental genius, my Craigslist-assembled team never filled out its roster. So each week we hunt and gather players from other teams to join us. It's a movable feast of smart sporty Portlanders. Our curly headed pitcher last week was a ringer for Chicagoboy. Our blonde bombshell right fielder was an electrical engineer. I got a ride with a future filbert farmer (who currently designs closed circuit television networks) to a bar on Alberta, where we all shared pitchers around pushed-together tables. And that’s kickball, my friends. Every Sunday till dodgeball season starts.
