withdrawl
Brad moved out. He was the MBA student whom I rarely spoke about here, because he rarely spoke much at all. If I had to guess I’d say that it wasn’t so much shyness as that he just didn’t like me. I don’t think he disliked me, exactly – though I think he disliked my music and my occasional chattiness and my less occasional dirty dishes. But lack of dislike is no good way to keep house, so he packed up and crossed the river.
Brad took the kitchen radio and the pasta pot and the table lamp with him, but most critically he took our internet connection. He took the account in his name and the little blinking magic box o’ wireless. And suddenly things around the house are very different. Now when I get home I no longer open up the laptop automatically, and it’s not where I go after dinner just to check my email. Instead this week I’ve been reading and gluing things together and cooking with the Roommate Who Remains, and generally not missing the internet much at all.
Today the city job ended early, so I biked through the sharp freezing rain to the coffee shop where I’m writing now, a dim hipster spot called Tiny’s. There are five laptops, four messenger bags, and one large dog amongst the nine customers, who are arrayed on barstools and loungy sofas and retro swivel chairs. NPR’s classical FM station is playing at a pleasantly loud volume. There is a wall of fliers. The painting to my left is for sale.
I am sipping a small but tasty café au lait and wondering what it is I do online for all those hours I spend there. I read a handful of blogs, but most of them have been low on posts lately. I meander around Craigslist. I take long erratic voyages through Wikipedia.
It’s likely that when Brad 2.0 – who I believe prefers being called Winslow – moves in this week, he will restore our internet connection. To my great surprise I think I could take it or leave it. I’m not an anti-technology convenience-scorning Luddite and I’m not a gadget freak; I’m somewhere in the wide uninteresting middle: a place populated by cellphones and instant messaging, but free of microwaves and TV. I’m the type of person who buys an external hard drive, but I buy one exactly the size I need, even though twenty dollars more gets twice the size. I like new electronics but then I use them for as long as they work, and then as long as the duct tape holds them together. I blog, but my Sunday paper’s made of paper.
And I love the ease of the accessible universe from my bedroom. I love that I can read about rhododendrons at whim and get mail at two in the morning. But here I am right now of necessity, surrounded by organic juices and a rack of zines and a Ripley’s Believe It Or Not pinball game and girls in hand-knit hats. And I’m thankful for the inconvenience.
dis/traction
This morning I caused a guy to walk into a door.
It had nothing to do with me; it had to do with spring. Let me start a little further back.
He came into Celia’s; I made him a drink. It was busy. By the time he was walking out I was on to the next drink, or perhaps the one after that. But I always try to say goodbye to everyone. When it’s busy, no one expects that.
So as he was pushing open the door he happened to glance back, and I flashed a big smile, and he got that Surprised Boy expression and then he banged right into the doorframe. I pretended not to notice.
And though I have my cute moments, I am not the sort of girl that guys walk into doorframes over. I’m not being self-deprecating here or fishing for compliments. I know those girls; some of them are my friends and we go out together. Guys around those girls tend to drop things and lose their train of thought and feel inspired towards alarming acts of idiocy. It’s sort of amusing and sort of tiresome, but that’s a different post.
The point is, I’m not one of those girls. And Bam, there he went. Because I am not the only one itching for spring.
Portland has been unexpectedly showered with brief glimpses of warm yellow sunshine, and every time it disappears you can feel the city buzzing with expectation. Or frustration. Because we all know that the real stuff is months away, and there’s nothing to be done but feel the wanting in our cores.
Last night was Fat Tuesday and plenty of that wanting spilled out onto the streets. Two flights up on the Crystal Ballroom’s bouncing dancefloor, midriffs and ass cracks made early appearances. We are collectively hungry for heat.
Sometimes crowds infuriate me. Sometimes the noise and the pushing make me feel downright violent. But last night I had crowd euphoria, where every unknown hand on my back and every sudden smell of pineapple body lotion made me feel like part of an eager, animated organism. Here in this last half of February we are feeling inappropriately racy. We are feeling high on possibility. We are giddily unfocused. We are walking into doors.
March might be a Mess.
You Gotta Run
(when God makes you an offer)
Two thousand seven is falling away week by week and already there are crocuses – crocuses and irises on my wet walk home. It’s the beginning of the long ambiguous backpedaling Northwest spring. Two-steps-forward-one-step-back uncertainty until May.
My new years are always filled with grand ambitions but the details often catch up by Presidents Day. Or is it Presidents’ Day? And did that well illustrate my point?
I put in a half day for the City today, but I was the only one on the whole tenth floor. So I made a few maps and headed home over the bridge with Anything Goes playing in my ears. I don’t usually wear headphones but they do help with cold rainy walks, particularly when they are filled with Cole Porter. With Cole Porter there is dancing.
This afternoon I am grading my students’ (exceptionally fabulous) midterms and putting together my next lecture and Writing Letters. I am listening to folk music. I am plotting small revolutions. I am sipping soup.
When I moved to this corner of the country nearly five years ago I didn’t know what crocuses were, or irises even, and I didn’t know February as any different from March. I didn’t have a blog. I didn’t bike. I am learning the names and inner workings of things little by little. And the trajectory is good but still sometimes a Monday Morning is a hard place for Progress, and Oregon winter can be consuming. I am craving the hell-bent confident clarity of spring. But there are months between here and there, and one of them is the cruelest, so I need to buck up.
Today was the first federal holiday honoring an American Citizen. I wonder if he ever Got Shit Done on Mondays.
icebreaking
Enough about love. Let’s talk about biking.
I biked to work today for the first time. It was one of my (smaller-scale, more concrete) new year’s resolutions. Being a biker was always part of my Portland plan, but when I got here I was surprised – given its reputation – at the scariness of biking in this city. While Portland clearly offers better biking than many American metropolitan areas, it’s no Amsterdam. Bike lanes disappear unannounced. Hills loom. Drivers honk.
Consequently for four months I pointed at my flat bike tires and used my feet and my truck and the bus. Then two weeks ago Jamey got a bike pump in the mail, significantly calling into question the insurmountability of my long-running excuse. I don’t know what makes The First Time so hard with things like biking to work. Do you remember activation energy from highschool chemistry? It takes energy to get a process started, even if – once started – that process will itself generate even more energy. Which is good, insofar as the world does not burst into flames around us. But less good in its metaphorical applications, e.g. biking. Summoning up activation energy is one of the great challenges of life.
Last Sunday I rode eighteen miles around town, and my friend Lauren, for example, regularly rides twice that before I’m even awake in the morning. But for me it was monumental. It was perhaps the farthest I’ve ever ridden on a bike at once, and certainly the farthest I’ve ever ridden while wearing a polkadot cocktail dress. This made it officially inexcusable to further delay bike commuting.
So this morning I got up and got on. It was windy and spitting rain, and my hood blew around and my ears hurt. But it was thrilling. I felt like I was moving. I felt like I was a Portlander. I felt wet, but sexy-tousled wet. Darryl Hannah in Splash wet. Of course when I arrived I looked more drowned-dog wet, sweaty, soaked and snotty. Not particularly appropriate for work. But perhaps I can get in better gear and better shape and figure this out. Either way it was splendid, and I think I can do it again.
(all you need is)
I miss being in love.
I don’t miss Being in a Relationship, in and of itself. I mean, I’m not actively avoiding it – but I’m not seeking it out for its own sake. I have a not uncommon Relationship Ambiguity, which is to say that when I’m not in one they seem ideal and when I am in one they don’t. And I’ve been around enough to realize that’s how it is for me, and for lots of people, and that feeling is just backdrop to the stuff of every day. It is a hangup that does no good. So I no longer fiercely crave a relationship when I’m solo, and I no longer gleefully sabotage it once I find one. All in all I’d call this Progress.
But I miss being in love, for its own stupid sake. I miss being driven to utter distraction by the thought of someone, and I miss the way one’s distance from that person bends the whole world. I miss the unlikeliness of so much celebratory proximity. I miss the secrets.
Often I fall in love with people on the street, or in the coffeeshop, for the way they speak to their children or order a drink. Sometimes I fall in love with my friends for their goodness. Recently I fall in love with boys who are in no place to love me at all. I am glad for all these loves. But I am greedy and these are not the loves I’m looking for.
Right Now I would like to be in love with someone who does not find it inconvenient or embarrassing, even though it is sure to be both. This is the Year of Gusto. I would like to be in love with someone who says Irresponsible? Unreasonable? Potentially disastrous but with a small shot at crazy joy? Sign me up. I’ve unpacked my stuff and I’ve secured a few jobs and what I’ve lost is good solid abandon, and I’m hurting for it like heroin, and I feel like I’m the only addict at the party. For two years I’ve been getting a whole lot of we live too far apart and my schedule’s really full and I need to be single for a while and I get it: wrong guy, wrong guy, wrong guy. But seriously? Seriously no one around here thinks I’m cool enough for some Bad Choices? I mean I realize that tomboy sciencegeek smartass isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. But also I live in Portland in two thousand seven and it’s not no one’s tea, either.
So come on world. I want the good stuff. The random romances and the hilariously bad dates and the blessedly regular sex have all been much appreciated, but I want the stuff that’s gonna make me cry really hard when I lose it. I want some mutual awe. I want revelry. I want just a few days of that shit where I blurt out at a lunch with coworkers So-and-So likes peas, and there aren’t even peas on my plate, just beans that made me think of peas. Where can I get me some of that?
Happy V Day.
At two o’clock this morning
I was sharing a booth in a karaoke bar with a woman named Heather and her boyfriend Tony and their friend Collin, because there was nowhere else to sit. I assumed Collin was British when we were introduced, entirely because there is a movie I watched recently in which one of the main characters, a British character, had that name. It was loud enough in the bar that it was hours before I realized he just wasn’t. That was the ridiculous flavor of the evening.
I ended up in this booth with Heather and Tony and the wholly American Collin courtesy of Geof, whom I met earlier at a different bar half way across town on Mississippi Avenue. The band there had a keyboard and a guitar and two violins and a steel drum, which together produced a fabulous orchestral rock calypso sound. They wrapped up at midnight and we sped around blaring the Smashing Pumpkins until we found the Ambassador, where the karaoke goes late.
Geof sang twice, songs I didn’t know – this was a serious karaoke crowd, not the kind that sticks with the Beatles and The Tide is High – and so did his friend, whose name I lost somewhere between the three-fifty Bud and the round of murky sweet shots that Heather brought over on a tray. Once when a woman from across the room was on stage belting out a strange but inspired pop medley, her friend leaned off of the dance floor and whispered to me by way of explanation, She’s Swiss.
Sometime around two thirty Geof asked if I had any plans for today and I explained that in fact I’m biking eighteen miles, because today is Portland’s Worst Day of the Year Ride. We agreed it was perhaps time to call it a night. Cities are such marvelous inventions, and now I’m going biking.
lest i be accused of only complaining about men
Typical one minute excerpt from a meeting with prospective new male housemate:
Hey, great house. Can you park bikes in the shed? Wow, you guys are big readers. (Standing at door of potential room): Sweet. Yeah, let me know.
Typical one minute excerpt from a meeting with prospective new female housemate:
So, do you guys have people over a lot? I mean, I understand, and I do sometimes too, but you know, that can be annoying. Oh, cute! Are these your dishes? Would there be room for my dishes? There’s not ever, like, a pile in the sink is there? And is sharing the shower a problem? When I used to live with my ex that was always a problem. What a jerk. He was such a jerk. Anyway what’s traffic like on the bridge up there? Is it bad? I hear it’s bad. Wow this is such an ordeal. I just don’t know. (Standing at door of potential room): Does that window face south?
beans & bellini
Joshua turned thirty-one yesterday, so tonight we filled up a table at Montego Bay and passed plates of jerk chicken and curry goat and gungo peas and plantains. It’s a not particularly popular restaurant on a rather forlorn corner, but inside the walls are hot pink and lime green and the drinks come in similar shades. The meal was delicious and the rum was overproof and the company was grand. We could have sat for hours sipping coconut cocktails and spooning out second helpings of plum pudding, but at quarter to seven the birthday guy and I bid farewell to the crew and ran ten blocks east to the opera.
A couple months back Joshua and I had talked about seeing Norma, the Portland Opera’s February offering. Operaman and I haven’t swapped a word since December, when we had a seemingly earnest really, let’s definitely keep in touch No Really sort of email exchange, just before he disappeared completely. But I still like the opera, and it hardly seems creepy to go if I sit in the balcony and can’t even pick him out from the other company members. And then three days ago, the day after I write the Dear Operaman post on this very blog that I’m almost certain he doesn’t read (do you Operaman?), I find an envelope clipped to my mailbox with two tickets inside.
Since ambiguity seems to be the m.o. of most of my recent relationships with men, I didn’t even bother trying to figure out why he does not want to talk to me but does want to leave me small unsigned mailbox booty. Whatever. If I’ve learned anything about ambiguous people of late it’s that they’re just waiting for you to decry the ambiguity. That way they can get annoyed at you for being needy instead of actually dealing with the mess. So I sent a Thank You and we went to the opera. I think Joshua had a good birthday.
proof
Tonight as I was heading out to pick up juice and yogurt, I pulled the front door closed behind me and the knob fell right off. It was suddenly heavy in my hand and then it was falling and then there was a loud bang, and there I was standing in the dim glow of the porchlight, in shock from the noise, with my fingers outstretched.
I picked up the knob, an object I’d never noticed before, and pushed the door open, and stood confused for a moment – because I had been on autopilot, a simple plan for a run to the store, and suddenly this loud noise had thrown everything off, and the door could not be left. And in my confusion I looked up and Brad was sitting on the sofa with his laptop, and I smiled and held up the doorknob.
The next thing I know he is down on one knee and I am bringing him the screw from between the wooden slats of the porch, and he is aligning the screw hole and I am holding the handle just so, and then I am fishing a screwdriver out of our utility drawer and he is proclaiming There, that won’t fall off again.
I am an independent person; I can do all the daily shit that is required in the world. But I don’t always want to. Last month when my computer gave me the blue screen of death, all I could do was cry. Twenty percent over the potential loss of the computer and eighty percent at the prospect of having to call someone to fix it. In the end Jamey found a phonebook and did it for me.
This very afternoon I took my truck to a garage to check on the front tire’s slow leak, and it’s the sort of thing I hate. I hate that they will ask me questions like When did you last have your alignment checked? and What kind of new tire would you like? and I won’t know the answers to these questions. But I went – albeit weeks after first noticing the leak - and I answered as best I could, and I got the tire fixed. That took what I had for today, though, and it left me in a place where the smallest help with a doorknob was huge to me, and that’s so often how the equations of favors are: an effortless action on one end lifts a disproportionate burden on the other. The bizarre math of the universe of Other People.
Superb Owl
Today was a Sunday for all Sundays. The archetypal Sunday. The most Sundayest Sunday I’ve had in a long while.
It started with sleeping in, as all good Sundays should – but sleeping in just enough to feel rested and not so much as to feel wasteful. Then there was a bagel and juice and This American Life filling the house as I wiped counters and gathered laundry, because Sunday is a good day for feeling that you have Restored Some Semblance of Order. Then there was A Prairie Home Companion, but it was the unfortunately annual Jokes show, so there was a sunny spot on the new red couch with the New Yorker.
Next was the Superbowl, cause it doesn’t get more Sunday than that. Seven of us crammed around a table in a packed Hawthorne Street bar, drinking beer and passing baskets of onion rings and occasionally yelling at the game, but more often laughing at the Puppy Bowl being shown on the adjacent screen. Four hours of puppies running about on a tiny model football field. Can you imagine pitching that to the network?
On the way home I detoured to the coffee shop where I often spend Sunday mornings, and I unrolled the paper next to a steamy apple chai, because it had been a while since I decided I don’t like chai, and it was perhaps time to give chai a second chance. It turns out I still don’t like it. I read about Kosovo and a bookmobile in rural New Mexico and John McCain, and then I unrolled the magazine and for the first time ever, ever in my whole life, I completed the Sunday Times crossword all by myself, in one sitting, every last square. And when I penned the final C I let out such an exclamation of surprise (that I think sounded something like WaHah!) that the woman at the next table turned and looked over her reading glasses at me.
And here I am with eight minutes of Sunday left to go, with clean clothes and sorted recycling and Kim Richey singing I’m Alright on repeat, and I think I’m getting back to myself again, and Monday here I come.
Dear Operaman,
The boy who walked me to my truck tonight glanced at the cd case on my passenger seat and asked sweetly, Who are La Boheem?
As if (they) were a band, perhaps stylistically related to Yo La Tengo, or other bands with foreign articles.
And this is still better, I guess, than the boy who I had a drink with shortly after you dumped my overeducated ass, who accused me of making up the word modicum.
Or the boy who, when I said coyly that the freckles on his shoulders were disarming, looked worried and asked what I meant.
I am no longer stuck on you, Operaman; I have sufficiently Moved On. But you did spoil me a bit in the smart / attracted to smart departments. I have yet to find another date who not only speaks in crafty sentences with obscure references but finds this sort of conversation – would it be too optimistic to say sexy?
In any case part of me is hoping you have to explain who Sappho is each time a cute girl meets your car that bears her name. (Like how effortlessly I edited out eponymous?) But most of me, honest to God, just hopes you are faring better.
me and yogi tea
I turned down three invites out tonight in favor of alphabet soup and a smoothie. I am fighting a cold. I was an only child who was fawned over when sick, so as an adult I am no stoic about illness. You can see it right here in this paragraph: the smallest sniffle and every sentence is Me Me Me.
I know I shouldn’t complain because what is lurking in my fevery sleep is a cold at worst, whereas in the last two months I have had friends endure knee surgery, ankle surgery, a tonsillectomy, a throat infection, and a shot somewhere really awful. Whereas I made it through the past year with one humorous if briefly terrifying trip to the emergency room. That’s pretty good given my bad judgment and lack of health insurance.
When I feel sick I want someone to stroke my hair and bring me Gatorade. No one seems to be waiting in line for this job of late, so tonight I found solace in a steamy shower and a copper kettle and a new Kasey Chambers cd. It’ll do.
Goodnight, big bloggy world. Stay well.
