resolute
I was reading the New Yorker this morning; it’s one of the “fiction issues” and I hate those. But there was a short story I liked and here’s part of it.
The present was enough, though my work in the cemetery told me every day what happens when you let an unsatisfactory present go on too long: it becomes your entire history.
I am not resolving to be more patient in the New Year. My impatience suits me fine. In fact if I could resolve for other people to be less patient I would, but alas. That’s not how it works.
Two thousand six was the Year of Faith and Bravery. It was a little brutal, to be honest. The bravery sent me walking out onto limbs that ended up being too thin, and the faith didn’t soften the fall. But there’s Faith and Bravery for you. If you already know how things will turn out, you don’t need much of either.
So for the new year I’d like to retain the faith and bravery, and add persistence. Because though I’ve gotten good at charging in with confidence, it takes surprisingly little to send me into retreat. My bluffing is marvelous but I freeze when it’s called. Which is silly because I’m a lawyer’s daughter and I know how to hold my ground. Persistence is the natural follow-up to bravery. The quality that makes faith more fruitful.
The new year could also use a hearty dose of panache. All the unrequited liking of the last twelve months has led to a certain amount of second-guessing, and from second-guessing it’s a slippery slope to bland. This caution is hereby banished. Kazaam!
Sadly The Year of Persistence and Panache has no ring to it whatsoever. So let’s go with this: Two Thousand Seven, the Year of Gusto.
And while I’m making proclamations? I wouldn’t mind if two thousand seven kicked off with a Really Good Kiss. Not tonight necessarily, but soon. Soon enough to qualify as a kickoff. The sort of kiss where no one is being careful.
All the best in the new year, all. May it be brimming with the Entire History of your choosing.
fuck. yeah.
Yesterday I got a call from Dream Job Employer. The one that I mentioned two weeks ago, when he interviewed me and told me he was going to decide in a couple days. And then he emailed and said it would take a couple extra days. And then he disappeared. And I pretty much assumed, really safely wholly assumed, that That was That. Because no one around here bothers to tell you when you don’t get a job. There are just too many applicants.So yesterday morning he calls. He has “follow up” questions. Am I really going to stick around for this job? Aren’t I likely to leave this part-time job as soon as I’m offered some glamorous full-time job? And I try to explain that this, this very job, is the job I would leave other jobs for. He seems unconvinced. Can we meet again? he asks. Except he’s leaving town for a week. So I tell him I can come into town immediately. Name the time. Two o’clock, he says. I’ll be there, I say. It is 11:30 and I am at the house where I’ve been dogsitting. And all the clothes in my bag smell like wet dog.I literally run to my truck. I race home. I shower; I scrounge for non-smoky non-doggy passable interview clothes. I run to the corner drug store, because in my haste I left my toiletries at the dogsitting house. I make the 1:14 bus.Dream Job Employer and I go to a coffee shop. This process has been really hard, he explains. We chat some more about the work, which involves helping property owners and developers turn brownfields – contaminated land – into productive urban space. In summary, a mix of science and design and community activism. In summary, a job working with lots of different people, speaking and writing and working through crazy bureaucratic shit. In summary, twenty hours a week of making Portland even more fantastically Portland, and sometimes getting to drive a City of Portland truck. I mean, he didn’t specify that last part. But don’t you think?And then in the middle of the conversation he just turns and says, You know, I want to offer you this job. And I pause for a minute, and think, Did he just offer me the job? And he did. We shook hands. One minute I don’t have it, the next minute I do. The universe has been quite the mystery to me lately.So I have a job. After three-plus months of pasta and pity, I have a fucking Kickass Rockstar Job. Actually, I guess I have three.Also I have a new hat. Melissa made it.
merry merry
My last day as a twentysomething is coming to a close. It was a pretty fine day: walking in the rain with the dogs I’m sitting, wrapping up presents for all my December birthday friends whose birthdays I somehow mentally clumped with mine as “just before the new year,” a Sunday paper, a lot of loud singing along to Christmas music, and an anonymous cake in my mailbox with a handful of letters. Oh How I Love Mail. I’ve been collecting mine unopened for the past two weeks so that I can open it tomorrow, along with a bottle of champagne that Nik left me for cat feeding.
Tonight Nopporn and I are heading out for Lebanese food, followed by a jam at an Irish pub. A multicultural, food-and-drink-filled Christmas eve. Tomorrow after some fun unwrapping and champagne drinking I think I’ll find myself some Chinese food and a movie, as we Jews are prone to do, and then Nizar and I are going to drive around looking for good lights. I can’t believe how much fun I’m having this holiday season. It’s not what I expected. I’m so… relieved. I could just break into song. Maybe something about snow, or reindeer.
Happy holidays all.
i know the difference between a latte and a breve
I know how much the chai is going to expand when it gets steamed, and when to pull the shots so they’ll be full just when the milk is ready, and I know that an Americano is a really stupid drink.
And some of you are reading this and smiling, and some of you are reading this and thinking, Oh, dear God, what has become of Jenn?
So just to clarify, I fucking love being a barista. It’s not something I want to do forever, but I’m downright buoyant about it right now. It is this whole new thing I never knew how to do before, and I’m big on New. And it gives me a particular feeling - a feeling similar to when I first framed a door and first made jam – that I have learned something real and visible and useful.
People almost always leave Celia’s felling better than when they came in. They want a drink they enjoy, or they want someone to ask how they are. They are cold or tired or working hard. And for a few minutes, I dwell on them completely. They are the center of my little barista world. I smile and I listen and I make something special, something exactly as it is asked for. It is maybe the only time this happens to them all day. And I am good at this. Because I like people, and I particularly like people who aren’t comfortable around people. Uncomfortable people are my specialty.
Uncomfortable people make most other people uncomfortable, but they put me instantly at ease. It is the most natural thing in the world for me to lean over a counter at some punk rock / programmer / physicist type and say Do you want nutmeg? And what kind of name is Hagen? And then they feel at ease, which they are not used to. And then I hand them a steamy delicious beverage of their choosing to take away. And it makes them happy.
So once a week for eight hours, I make people happy. I get to wear my kneesocks and my tattoo and my half-laced boots, and I get to talk about James Bond and Iraq and Will Shortz, and I get to meet a dozen people every hour whom I never knew before. I get to hear about little pieces of their worlds, and admire their hats, and validate their tastes. Once a week for eight hours I get to nourish my own socially awkward impulse to enter the lives of total strangers, in a context that makes them feel cared for and cool.
And I still have big plans, honest. Plans about urban design and environmental justice and Better Living Through Chemistry. And I sure as hell hope someone hires me to get moving on this sometime soon.
In the mean time, I make coffee.
my friends kick ass
Like Jesus, I was born on Christmas. And also like Jesus, I was raised Jewish. Consequently (like Jesus) I was spared the two-gifts-in-one angst of Christian Christmas Babies. Being a Jewish Christmas Baby is actually quite the boon when you’re small: no school on your birthday and a reason to get gifts on a day that would otherwise involve gifts for everyone but you.
Being an adult Jewish Christmas Baby, however, is crap. The last time I celebrated my birthday with multiple friends was when I turned 21. My high school crew, home from college for winter break, took me to a hole-in-the-wall Philly bar filled with lonely single men who happily joined in the celebration, presenting me with so many shots that I ended the night by falling over in Lauren’s driveway.
But there has been no such raucous fun since then, and this year’s upcoming birthday was looking particularly bleak. The three month lead-up has been filled with job rejections and getting dumped. My Portland friends are all heading out of town for the holidays. My housemates are already gone. So not only will I not be celebrating my birthday, I also won’t be participating in the caroling / cookie eating / Christmas tree fun that is a wholly joyful alternative. I think it would be fair to say that for the past two weeks I have been downright mopey when the subject comes up. What are you doing for your thirtieth? people keep asking. Dogsitting, I say. And then I try not to feel miserable.
But then tonight at seven thirty my doorbell rang. And there were my Portland friends, singing a Christmas carol. Which morphed into a dreidel song. Which morphed into Happy Birthday. And before I knew what was going on, they were hanging fairy lights on the mantel and slicing fruit in the kitchen and setting up a remarkably extensive bar, so that within the hour we were all gathered in the sparkly living room drinking blackberry brandy cocktails and feasting on chocolate fondue. And did you catch that part? Can I just say it again? Fondue. They got me a fondue set and brought all of the melty ingredients and all of the dippy bits and… Fondue. Holy Fuck.
And then – what’s the opposite of adding insult to injury? – they whipped out the activities portion of the evening: giant origami. Giant Fucking Origami. Can you think of anything more perfect? So while passing around spiked eggnog, we folded huge discarded site plans from Nopporn’s landscape architecture firm into schools of giant goldfish and swarms of gargantuan dragonflies.
To Recap: Angel food cake covered in dark chocolate. Cocktails with pineapple garnish. Jelly fish stories. Knitting jokes. Kitchen dancing. Big paper arthropods. Several attempts to photograph said arthropods “in flight.” A tiara making rounds. First adult birthday with friends. First surprise birthday ever. Completely fucking awesome.
front row
Doing things against my better judgment almost always comes out right.
I went to the opera. I wanted to wish for it to suck, but I couldn’t help wishing it would be beautiful. And then it was. It was beautiful. It was a beautiful story beautifully told, and it left me with that feeling of having been very close to magic. And all night I felt blessed and also, of course, sad.
And then this morning I went to an interview for my dream job, the job that to the last detail is exactly how I would design it. And I probably didn’t get it because it’s Portland and that’s how things seem to be going, but I did what I could. I was all there.
This is my world for the moment: crazy cool people I don’t get to know and crazy cool jobs I don’t get to do, but I feel giddy with proximity. All of these things I want in my life are close and real, and they are not my life yet but they brush up against me and this, for now, is enough.
As I was walking down the street after the interview a guy waiting for a bus called after me, Your aura today is beautiful, and you know? I’ll take it. I did the crossword at the Powell’s coffeeshop and spent my lunch money on poetry, Wislawa Szymborska and Robert Hass, so Jamey took me to a restaurant thirty stories over Portland, looking down at the barges and the quiet little lines of cars. It is a difficult thing, sometimes, to be so close to what you want. But one could do worse than longing.
recitative
I could tell you about how I spent Sunday giving away four hundred bikes to underprivileged kids with the Community Cycling Center, but let’s face it. The best posts aren’t the cheerful ones. So luckily I’ve been tempering my happy-to-be-in-Portland general joy with some good wholesome lonely bitterness, the kind I learned in New York. The kind born of being underemployed in a city where everyone seems to be living loud and late, except for the people I actually know, who have suddenly decided to settle down. The kind fueled by the fact that meeting new people is a process, and finding work is a process, and processes take time, and I am not big on patience.
I would prefer to work very hard at some ridiculously demanding job and also romp fearlessly around the city’s backstreets and also stay up very late and also get up very early and also bike very fast and also everything else that is Portlandy, right now, This Very Moment, with no more waiting. Because waiting, to be honest, has never interested me that much.
So in the spirit of working with what I’ve got, I’ve been riding the lonely bitterness for all it’s worth. I’ve been having some moody melodramatic fun, drinking alone, sending unwise text messages, writing unsent letters. I went to a dark independent film by myself on a Saturday night. I smoked my first post-marathon cigarette, followed by my second. And right this very moment I’m wearing a black turtleneck over a black dress over ripped jeans over Docs. It’s quite delightful.
And just to drive the point home, just to leave no teen-angst stone unturned, tonight I will be stubbing out the last smoking remnant of my burnt-down bitter on the last little raw place I can find. Tonight, my friends, I am going to the opera.
fix
Five a.m. my phone plays Arabesque. Five-oh!-five it plays Latin. Five ten the clock radio country station pops on and that’s the end of the denial, time to pull on boots and tiptoe down the dark stairs, check for wallet-phone-keys, drive north on Sandy Boulevard in the moonlight. I’m wide-eyed by the time I duck under the top half of Celia’s split back door, practically giddy with sleep deprivation, riding my Pavlovian association of predawn awakeness with thrills like travel and kissing. And the coffee shop is no let-down.
Celia’s is a stand-alone building, three hundred square feet with a retro COFFEE sign, and at five thirty it radiates light and heat and noise on an inky cold quiet street. Inside the NPR is drowned out by the grinding of coffee punctuated with clenking cups and beeping French press timers. For one hour I install the artifacts of a perfect Portland morning: glass jars of bagels, an icewater pitcher with lime, stacks of brown-on-the-outside-white-on-the-inside doll-sized macchiato cups. And around me Celia’s buzzes and hums and grows warm and fragrant.
By the time the first customer sets the front door bells jingling for his four-shot Americano I am flushed and full of anticipation, but it comes out more like disaster. Packing the grounds and pulling the shots on our bulky machine makes me feel like part of a muscular, mechanical composition, but my choreography is all off. I switch caf and decaf. I scald milk. My tiny glasses of espresso sometimes settle out just right like Guinness - dark on the bottom bubbling into thick crema on the top - but sometimes they sit there in uneven pairs, the liquid still and flat.
I am too busy quizzing myself on the basics – water or espresso first? cinnamon or nutmeg? what is that white syrup for? – to chat with the customers the way I’d like to, and sometimes they come and go before I’ve ever looked in their eyes. I am unfamiliarly self-conscious. I am there both to make good coffee and to look like I know how to make good coffee, and I do neither. I drop spoons and splatter the counter with foam.
I don’t actually feel bad. Unemployment was a good warm up for the defeat inherent in a new job’s learning curve, and it’s only my second day. But I sure hope I don’t get fired. It’s warm in Celia’s and the air has the sweetness of hot milk and don’t let this get around, but the morning is almost as good as the night.
when it rains
One week ago I had no jobs, and this week I have two. I’m working on a third.
Chuck Palahniuk, author of Fight Club, writes in Fugitives and Refugees that everyone in Portland has three lives. It is true and fantastic. Filmmaker / bartender / librarian. Editor / web designer / bike advocate. So here I am, easing into my Portland self: barista / professor / something else. To Be Announced.
Anyway back to the first two: Monday mornings I pour coffee; Fridays starting in January I teach landscape planning. Let us not discuss which hiring process was more rigorous.
This “getting hired” thing has many perks. For example, I no longer have to feel pathetic and worthless. I mean, it’s not like I’ve been sitting in a dark room for three months sobbing, but I’ve been at about 70% of my usual self. I’ve been quieter and less decisive and slow to put down roots. I’ve been a little flakier and a little needier and considerably more concerned with how the bill gets divided than I would prefer. And with what I’ve got so far I’ll still just be covering rent and my cell phone, but hell. What more does a girl really need?
So this morning I woke up and went to work. It was grand. It was grand even though it was five a.m., which is traditionally about the half-way point in my sleeping. I woke up and went to work at a fabulous little coffee shop that for the purpose of this blog I shall christen Celia’s, and the owner made me a big welcome latte because I lied and said I was a coffee drinker, and then I spent a caffeinated heart-pounding morning learning how to pour espresso.
Fuck yeah.
my year in twenty text messages (but really sixteen)
Today I visited a lake that smekks od sulfur!
Tuffy Jan 8, 10:02 pm
My pen has died writing your letter
fuck
paco Jan 14, 3:36 pm
Oh, “biker”… I’m an idiot.
Warren Apr 9, 1:58 am
JUST PASSD YR TRUCK MORNIN
Ty Apr 15, 11:33 am
Flossing complete… West Wing also complete. Moral superiority lost.
Tuffy Jun 1, 1:08 am
Sweet life in 15 if ur up.
Takey Jun 5, 10:04 pm
Do they have corn in Canada?
Tuffy Jul 11, 9:12 pm
Hot boy w a green mohawk? check. ah diplomacy.
Takey Jul 12 12:51 pm
we need to move to detroit
paco Jul 31 8:59 pm
do u look at nathan’s ass and miss me?
gym Sep 3, 5:56 pm
Bye-bye rumsfeld!
Takey Nov 8, 10:09 am
I’m at reh. Should i save the xword?
David pdx Nov 16, 8:32 pm
Good morning! The coffee is hot and they’re playing Gillian welch.
Jamey Nov 19, 10:25 am
Where are you? We’re drunk and need somewhere to go. Ps we’re drunk.
Jamey Nov 25, 10:48 pm
Depends on the level of haste you use in getting to the airport.
Ryan T4T Dec 1, 3:59 pm
Five on the Best Of 06 List were censored: two for being too racy, one for being too personal, one that was clearly just an ego trip, and one because I need to move on.
One other was four days early for 2006. It read (in entirety):
About elk.
