i heart pdx
I am in the middle of a tumultuous relationship.
Not the one with Operaman, which was too tame for even my standards and which, in any case, I am no longer in.
I’m talking about my relationship with Portland.
Portland and I met almost five years ago, and I had a crush on him from the start. He had a lot of the things I was looking for, and being with Portland seemed like a way to avoid repeating mistakes I’d made in the past: Portland wasn’t self-absorbed. Portland went hiking. Portland liked to stay up late.
Portland was just my type.
But at the time I was involved with Eugene, and we stuck together for four years. We had laughs and lazy Sundays and plenty of good times, but he didn’t make my heart race. Confession? I flirted with Portland the whole time. I dreamt secretly about what it would be like if we were together.
When Eugene and I finally split, I briefly shopped around. I Googled Vancouver. Austin and I texted. New Orleans took me to dinner, and we had pretty good chemistry. But right then Portland stepped in, and there was no use fighting it. I bought a one way ticket.
It started out cinematically divine. We went for long bike rides and hung out in coffee shops. We saw live music every week. I was falling fast and hard and it was marvelous. My friends indulged my tedious conversation, Portland this, Portland that. I never knew what I was missing until Portland. I think Portland might be The One.
But then, of course, the honeymoon ended. Is there any other story? Once Portland picked me up at the airport, but now my calls go unreturned. I thought we had something special. But it turns out I have nothing to offer that Portland can’t get from countless other star-struck girls with master’s degrees and thrift-store sweaters.
It’s possible I’m overreacting. My friends tell me I might just need to wait it out. Portland will come around, they say. You two were Made For Each Other. Give it time. But I’m nearly thirty and my geographical clock is ticking. I’m ready for an LTR and I don’t have patience for Portland’s commitment issues.
All the same, I’m not giving up yet. I’m going to take my bruised little heart and hand it over, despite the painful lack of success this approach has met with of late. Here I am, Portland. I’m sticking with you. You aren’t easy but I'm crafty and I have a hunch you’re worth it. Give me what you’ve got.
i'm never gonna know you now (waltz #2)
What is it that sucks so much about losing someone you hardly knew that well to begin with, someone who was probably all wrong for you anyway? And by you, of course, I mean me. But let’s go with you. I feel crappy enough.
Most obviously there’s the rejection part. The part where the other person whispered soft assurances like I’m worth it and I think you’re worth it, and you believed him, and you decided to really let yourself like him. And he in turn took a second look at you all vulnerable and honest, and reconsidered. The part where this person who mere weeks ago found you cool and fun and sexy realized that in fact, you are not. And sure, if one looks at it with any sort of reason, it just means that the two of you were not a good match. But you know what? When you’re not the first person to point that out it still feels a lot like a kick in the stomach.
But I gotta say, this is not the part that gets me.
The part that gets me is the squashing of all the little stories you let yourself make in your head. Not the big unrealistic stories you had no business making about thirty years from now, but the small stories about doing the crossword puzzle and making him French toast. And the one about going square dancing – because where the fuck are you going to find another guy who wants to do that? And you didn’t even get to dance together in a non-kitchen venue, not even once. And it probably would have been really nice. And the generic stories about taking him on the midnight bike ride and walking over the bridges and snowshoeing, and the specific stories about… well, the stuff that’s too personal to write about here. But, for example? You never even get to see him in the opera you’ve heard him singing for weeks. Even though you are so excited for him (even though he just kicked you in the stomach). You just don’t get to see it.
And me? I don’t make these stories right away. I usually say right off the bat, I’m not making stories; let’s just see what happens. At which point the guy says, But think of all the fun stories we could have! Let me tell you some stories. I’m putting myself out there, join me for some stories. And I say, Well, you do seem to be putting yourself out there. You do seem to like me. There are a few stories I could imagine…
And the guy says, Squash, Squash, Squash.
i'd be lyin if i said it wasn't easy
Well, there goes Operaman. Exit stage left. As seems to be the unfortunate custom these days, he didn’t actually just tell me. Instead he let me hang on through a rough week and a lonely weekend, waited until I called and asked him to please stop by on his way home from rehearsal, chatted pleasantly over tea until I said I felt like we should check in. At which point he suggested we go for a walk, lit up a cigarette, and told me he’s overbooked.
Well no shit.
But seriously? No one breaks up with no one because of overbooked. And I guess I understand why that is somehow nicer than saying I no longer find you attractive or Your company bores me or Your laugh is embarrassing. Except for the part where you then sit up all night with Wilco and leftover Thanksgiving wine and wonder which of these things it is. Because I generally feel cute enough and interesting enough and sure, my laugh is ridiculous, but that would be even stupider than overbooked. So now I just get to wonder.
And can I just bitch for one minute, because I feel crappy and entitled? Why the fuck do people feel so compelled to invent problems? I mean, the world is fucking brimming with real problems. Having to leave your spouse to go earn money in another country is a Problem. Being in love with someone of the same sex is in most places a Problem. Having a partner who is ill or enlisted or incarcerated is a Problem. Living an hour apart? Having to work late a lot? Not really that into reggae? Can you possibly be serious? Living in the most prosperous time in one of the most prosperous nations in an era of instant communication and easy travel? Fucking Hell. Quit Your Fucking Whining.
And I know I know. These things are just excuses. But I can’t shake the feeling that in the absence of excuses, sometimes people actually manage to make things work.
twenty nine and eleven twelfths
The thing is that I’m turning thirty, one month from today.
Leaving my twenties is like leaving a foreign country I’ve been visiting. Sure there were those times when my bag got stolen and I couldn’t remember the word for ice and I had to share my bus seat with a caged chicken, but I really don’t want to leave. I’ve met fantastic people and figured out the public transit and I know what to order in a bar, and how to say cheers in the native language. And there were all these other things I meant to do while I was here that I somehow didn’t get around to. And it’s not that I’m unhappy about where I’m going. I’ve just really enjoyed where I’ve been. Given the choice I’d stay a while longer.
In my twenties I lived in at least twenty places, dorms and tents and a Brooklyn apartment too small for a bed, and a cabin in the rainforest with a gap between the walls and the roof. I learned to drive stick shift and I learned to ride a motorcycle and I learned to get around with just a bike. I learned a little Spanish and a little Dutch and I got a lot better at talking to people in English – people I was dating and people I was friends with and people at parties and people next to me in line.
I didn’t learn to dance or sing well, but I learned to do them anyway.
In my twenties I fell in love, at least twice in the real way but a thousand other times I’d count as well, and I got my heart squashed in that way that makes you want to not eat for a month. I dated a couple programmers and some rather hot European guys and a sculptor who lived in his van. I grew out of my attraction to depression, tortured solitude, ennui, and martyrdom. I still like messy hair.
In my twenties I got a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree and I got hired a few times. I started doing yoga and I started running and I ran a marathon, and I joined my first adult sports team. I learned to use all manner of loud dangerous power tools. I learned to SCUBA dive.
I stopped watching television and I stopped sleeping late and I stopped being embarrassed, and I mostly gave up guilt, jealousy, and grudges. I do not miss any of these things.
My politics got both more certain and more complicated, and I no longer find it useful or wise to categorically dismiss things like all organized religion and all republicans everywhere. I developed an unexpected and rather fierce, though informed, patriotism. I started listening to country music. I’d like to think these facts are unrelated.
I still don’t smoke or drink coffee, and I still don’t want a white picket fence or a predictable job or kids right this second. But I think I’d be amenable to a partner at this point, if the right guy were to show up with a box of disguises and a good sense of adventure.
So there’s me, nearly thirty.
I’m not much of a planner. I always freeze up when I get asked Was such-and-such what you expected? because my brain just doesn’t work like that – it’s usually too busy being stunned by the moment. And whatever I plan seems to go nothing like I’d anticipated. So I’m not going to make any wild predictions here about the next ten years. I’ll just be honest and optimistic and vague.
I hope that when I turn forty I’m as amazed by everything as I am now. I’d like to know a lot more about a lot of new things. I’d like to be doing work that I love, and that I feel is important. I’d like to live in some small house/boat/apartment/cabin/whatever in some beautiful country American or otherwise, with mismatched dishes and a garden and a dog, and some kids whom I maybe didn’t give birth to and some partner whom I feel lucky about every day.
I would like to be kinder and less judgmental. I would like to do big unwise things to help out people I hardly know.
I have ten people in the contacts menu of my mobile phone right now whom I knew when I was twenty. I’d like them all to still be in my phone – or my credit card or my wristchip or wherever we keep such things then - in ten more years. And I hope many of you new-at-thirty folks will stick around as well. We can visit each other in our flying cars because by then it will be 2016, which by then I guess will sound less absolutely impossibly crazy than it does right now.
happy two-eight, bridgette
Ten words uttered, in their appropriate (if that word can be used here) contexts, ‘round my Thanksgiving table:
cyst
colostomy bag
giardia
child molester
pornography
salmonella
meth
eugenics
And that’s pretty much all you need to know. It was a rite of passage for me, my first holiday-movie-esque Comedy of Errors type Thanksgiving: offensive conversation, spoiled sour cream in the mashed potatoes, missing turkey. And all right here in my own living room.
Gobble, Gobble.
cabin check
The guy whom I just finally started calling My Boyfriend, at his suggestion, is maybe avoiding me, or else ludicrously overbooked. I mean, he’s certainly the latter, but possibly also the former. Sigh. Doesn’t it suck that when you date someone who has recently been screwed over in a relationship, he is more likely to screw you over? Instead of, say, less likely because he remembers how much it hurt to be on the receiving end, and doesn’t want to become the very person he so recently despised?
I guess that’s human nature. Save Yourself. Self Preservation. Regain Confidence By Caring Less. Etc.
I have heard a lot of talk lately about Baggage. As in, by thirty we all have it. And I see why that is, and why it’s important to acknowledge. But while acquiring all that Baggage, weren’t we also acquiring Wisdom? Wisdom like You are not the person who screwed me over before. Wisdom like Expecting the worst is a self-fulfilling prophesy. Wisdom like I am stronger than I think. I mean, if you’re going to haul around all that baggage, you might as well pack some useful shit.
housies
I have two housemates. We are all right now, at one thirty-six on this fine Saturday night, sitting in our respective rooms in front of our respective computers. Earlier the house was empty. But now Brad is working on a paper and Jamey is watching Sex in the City and I am blogging. Which is about as telling as any single moment in our house could be.
There are other moments. For example: Brad cooks a giant skillet of fried rice for the week, and Jenn, lured by the smell of browning onions, appears just in time to snag a plateful before it is stored. Or: Jamey wakes up early on a Sunday morning and takes the whole blue-bagged New York Times, Sunday magazine and all, to the Red & Black Café.
I love my housemates. I don’t tell them this, because Jamey grew up with all brothers and he misreads the intentions of just about anything spoken by a woman. And Brad is a business student. But I think they are marvelous. I love Jamey’s stories and Brad’s quirky humor and the music that floats out of their rooms, and their boy bathroom products. I love the ease of how we share space, where the fridge gets cleaned and the floors get Swiffered and the recycling gets sorted, and we’ve never once had to talk about it, who should do what and how often. We each do the things we like, and sooner or later we do the things we don’t like. We all seem equally tolerant of when it’s later.
Brad moved here from Seattle for business school, and he mountain bikes, and he’s a mystery. Because he reads bulky textbooks on economic theory but then he recognizes Nina Simone on the third note. He doesn’t volunteer much. My understanding of Brad is mostly conjecture. Whereas my understanding of Jamey comes from what he tells me, in long animated riffs, on the porch or in the kitchen. Not from the actual words, though, because he’s too smart and neurotic to let those go uncrafted. More just from the crafting.
Things appear daily in our house that are meant for sharing – furniture and bowls of candy and issues of the Economist – and each gives me a very particular feeling of fortune. It’s the same when I come home and the front door is unlocked, or when I have news and someone’s at the table. The world is less scary for this constant reminder of the good people in it, and it’s the way I wish, in my liberal heart of hearts, that the whole thing worked: I made cookies, you bought milk. You shut off all the lights. I know you got home safe.
sometimes.
Sometimes, after spending the better part of the day feeling listless and down, you might decide to skip both your indoor soccer game and the dancing invite from Amber whom you met at last week’s clothing swap (even though you are trying to make local dancing friends) and instead drive an hour to Longview Washington, a neon-clad sliver of a town with nothing much to draw Portlanders except for you, tonight, to see some musicians your parents know from Philadelphia called Time for Three. You think they are bluegrass players and you think you ought to meet them, since your parents talk about them endlessly and they rarely come out west and there are worse things than an hour of driving to clear your head.
So you arrive at the theater only to find that the tickets are twenty-five dollars, and you talk them down to ten right before you realize you’ve forgotten your wallet, a thing you never do. Except this afternoon at the coffeeshop you got into a long involved conversation with TJ the filmmaker and you left late and had to hurry out the door to the concert, and you didn’t pull the wallet out of your computer bag. So you sit on the floor of the lobby to at least hear the music, and half way though the third number the usher sneaks you in the side door.
The music is marvelous, two violins and a bass, gleeful and unexpected and kinetic.
And afterwards you meet the musicians in the lobby, and they invite you out for drinks, so you dance about as they load their van and you follow them to the Ramada to drop off their bags. And in the lobby the clerk tells you about a casino that will pick you up for free in a limousine, and who can argue with that. So the five of you, you and the three musicians and the tour manager, climb into the back of a stretch limo and eat M&Ms and cheese popcorn on your way to the Cadillac Ranch. And it’s an awful place, bright and sad and filled with the sound of poker chips and the smell of fried, but you stay because your i.d. is in your wallet in Portland and none of the other bars will let you in. So you eat a breakfast, eggs and hashbrowns and buttered toast – a plate of yellow – and talk about touring, and fatigue, and tattoos.
Until sometime after two, when all this catches up, and you wait for your limo on the sidewalk in the cold night air while girls fight in a parking lot, and you borrow five dollars from the manager to get enough gas for the ride home, you’re that unprepared. And ten minutes after you leave, when you’re filling your tank around the corner (because it’s Washington, not Oregon, so you fill it yourself) he is suddenly standing there with a cd. And you listen to it all the way home.
wilco day
It was a week of windstorms – downed trees and blowing leaf piles, gray clouds and the sun low in the sky by three. Here’s November, somehow. And then this morning I woke up and it was cold and clear, and I could see my breath. It’s reassuring.
No one is calling me back about jobs. Not even for an interview. Not even when I am just right, not even when the pay is shit, not even when I follow up. There was a time in my life when I thought I’d be Secretary of the Interior and these days I can’t get a $10-an-hour job shuffling paper for a small nonprofit. They don’t even want to meet me. I’m kind of at a loss here.
Here it is, Friday morning. My next obligation is at 6, and I could even skip that without anyone knowing. All week I’ve been writing cover letters, painting, reading, figuring out creative things to do with rice and eggs. I’m trying not to give in to the overwhelming urge to rent season three of the West Wing and sit in bed all day feeling pathetic and entertained. I'm a week past my due date for Plan B, but I never got around to making one.
I'm open to suggestions.
all the news
Can we just take a quick look at the New York Times’ most emailed article list from this morning, two days after the crazy election? 1. The Minimalist: The Secret of Great Bread: Let Time Do the Work
2. Recipe: No-Knead Bread
3. Maureen Dowd: A Come-to-Daddy Moment
4. ‘Brooklyn Style Pizza’ Meets the Real Deal
5. Op-Ed Contributor: Too Close for Comfort
6. Rumsfeld Resigns as Defense Secretary After Big Election Gains for Democrats
7. $491 Million Sale Shatters Art Auction Record
8. Cosmopolitan Moms
9. A Neuroscientific Look at Speaking in Tongues
10. In Tuscany, Luxury Farmhouses
I just… don’t know what to say.
oh what a beautiful morning
So to recap:
Democrats took the house.
The Senate is close, but that’s looking Democrat as well.
Six states ousted their Republican governors.
Nancy Pelosi is going to be the first female Speaker of the House.
Rick Santorum was kicked out by a 17 point margin. Bye bye fucker.
Donald Rumsfeld resigned. Please see Santorum’s farewell above.
South Dakota rejected a total ban on abortion.
And Arizona became the first state to reject a state constitutional ban on same-sex marriage.
Any chance the Dems won’t blow this? I am cautiously optimistic.
too late
I pulled a book of Kay Ryan’s poems from Operaman’s bookcase last night – last night, the first time we’d gone out two nights in a row, which we both feared might be overkill, but was in fact just a treat – and flipped to a random page. Because I knew her name but didn’t know why. And there in front of me was a poem called Hope, which is a poem I tore out of a New Yorker at least five years ago and have always remembered, because it has one of the saddest and simplest phrases I have ever encountered. The sort of phrase that is so cruel in its precision that you cannot shake it, even years later, even if you mostly hope it’s wrong.
So I will not place that poem here. Instead you get this one, Intention, because I like it, and because I am not in the mood for cruelty today. In fact I would like to stay away from cruelty for some time.
Intention doesn’t sweeten.
It should be picked young
and eaten. Sometimes only hours
separate the cotyledon
from the wooden plant.
Then if you want to eat it,
you can’t.
election day
This morning as I drove down Sandy Boulevard in my truck the country station’s morning talk radio hosts were interviewing a country artist and one of them observed, You sound like G.W. So the musician started doing a Bush impression, and he said, Bush-style, I’m George W Bush and I play the guitar… it’s got three strings. Er, six strings. Well, it’s got a lotta strings. And I thought, did I push the dial selector too far? Is this really a country singer making fun of Bush on the country station? And I take it as a good omen.
Don’t forget to vote.
surrounded
There are eight people sleeping in my house right now who don’t live here. Downstairs are the folks in from Eugene: Julie and Pede in the living room, Joe in the library, John in the tea room. Upstairs are Beth and Sarah from Seattle in the art room, and Sharon – who is in from San Francisco and the cause of all this – and Jamie who just didn’t feel like driving home late, in my room. I’m in my housemate Jamey’s room. Jamey is off hiking somewhere.
There were even more people just a little while ago, fifteen of us playing Celebrities in front of the fireplace, drinking hot cider and eating Deb’s broccoli cornbread. Joshua popped corn. Sarah baked cookies. Thirteen of the fifteen of us have landscape architecture degrees, so there were a lot of design names in the Celebrities bowl. But there was also Bertrand Russell and Big Bird and Maya Angelou.
I love a house full of people. I love that right now all around me are these people I love, sleeping and reading and quietly talking. I spent the first seventeen years of my life in a giant house with just my parents, and that doesn’t suit me at all. I like the sounds of the bathroom sink and feet on the stairs. I like that someone will make a pot of tea in the morning, and scramble lots of eggs, and someone will wash all the mugs. It feels safe and it feels – what is the opposite of lonely? It feels like a holiday.
navigation
The familiar territory is this: that he shifts with his left hand, awkwardly across the steering wheel, so he can leave his right hand in mine; that he reveals too much and then says so, knowing that both are endearing; that each of a hundred small intimacies passes easily.
And then there is the new ground. That he is older than me by a handful of years - not so many, but more than I’m used to. That he has an ex-spouse, which several of my friends have, and two children, while my friends have at most one. That he is neither fervently shopping for a partner nor fleeing those who might potentially be one. That he is more extroverted than I am.
Tonight I’m going to the opera to see him in Faust. I’ve never been so stupid as to date someone in theater. Musicians are bad enough. But so far Portland feels like a feast, and it’s exciting to be able to look up and say have you tried the gravy, it’s divine to someone who will dive in with equal relish. To someone who will then place a pastry on your already full plate and say trust me.
boo
Tonight I was playing Centipede at Ground Control, the arcade bar, and I looked up and next to me was a panda bear playing Galactica. And Oh My. Why don’t people dress in costumes all the time?
