and there are others
One of the best things about having a housemate is that if you wake up on a Saturday morning bleary-eyed and hung over, and you have to drive to Vancouver to shovel gravel and stack stone for a new school garden, and you get rained on until your clothes are soaked through and your rubber ladybug boots are caked in mud, and then you spend two hours trying to get warm in a dark bar while watching a Final Four game, but you left your i.d. in the pocket of your smoky pants that are on the floor of your bedroom so you can only order a Coke, until you get back on the highway where a guy rides your ass on a scary twisty offramp and then speeds by while giving you the finger, and you get home and it is suddenly clear and warm and you are still in your filthy Carhartts so you decide to work in your own garden, but you don’t have anything to plant even though it is late March and high time for planting, you may to your great delight discover that he has at some point in the past days or weeks bought a flat of vegetable starts and just left them right there, sitting on the soil, roots bursting out of their black plastic six-packs, eager to grow.
And then you can put the mustard greens in the earth and wind the tiny pea tendrils around pried-open tomato cages until the sun goes down.
That is one of the best things.
Furious Angels Will Bring You Back To Me
It all started in college with The One Guy who dumped me for a different girl, and before the week was out had changed his mind. But by then I was on my way to Australia where I met The Other Guy, who a year later left me for another different girl. He has since called this a Terrible Mistake. And then there was BandBoy, who Would Not Leave New York, but who (once I did) implied that I really just needed to ask him again. Which I didn’t.
And is it too much to ask, for a boy who likes me the first time around? Apparently I am most attractive in retrospect. Because here’s Operaman, back again for Act II, proposing midweek adventures and procuring tickets. And here’s Latest Boy Disaster, tracking me down at a local bar in the middle of the night. Where I was definitely not drinking alone, by the way.
Last week I was on the phone with The Other Guy (who these days – along with The One Guy – is a person without whom my life would be diminished beyond recognition) and I asked him about the dump-disappear-doubt sequence. He constructed, as he is wont to do, an elaborate and hilarious metaphor to quell my confusion, in which my metaphorical counterpart was a blender at a garage sale. This is the loving rapport we have after ten years. It made the whole phenomenon more clear, but I still think it’s bullshit.
But I went ahead and saw my first Wagner. My First Wagner sounds like the sort of unfortunate thing sold at one of those new educational toy stores, doesn’t it? So on Tuesday it was The Flying Dutchman, and today I met Operaman’s kids. When we were dating in the fall this was discussed, but never pursued. Now that we are not dating he felt suddenly compelled to make it happen.
They’re some pretty cool kids. The frightening part, though, was post-gelato, when we all went to a supermarket so they could grab provisions for their weekend camping trip. Somewhere between the marshmallows and the hot dog buns I realized that everyone we passed naturally assumed they were my kids. They look not unlike me – dark blonde hair, blue eyes, light skin – and there we were buying groceries on a Friday afternoon. They pushed the cart, I got the high items off the shelf, and strangers smiled. It was profoundly weird. When did I become old enough to be a plausible mother of an eight and a ten year old? And how on earth would anyone think I could handle such a thing?
Back out on the street, walking the bags and the bundle of wood to the car, I made furtive eye contact with the pierced and corduroy-clad hipsters chatting and tapping laptops in front of the Hawthorne coffeeshops. I’m one of you, I tried to tell them telepathically. Today I was in pajamas until two! I stay out late; I don’t even have a dog to walk. I am single and it is spring. We could have Crazy Portland Fun.
Maybe you’d even like me before I’m gone.
I don’t think they heard me.
good directions
My housemates are both away for a few days and they both left behind apples. Perhaps only one of them left behind apples, but there were really quite a lot of apples, so I’m thinking it was both of them. In any case the apples were getting waxy and wrinkled as abandoned apples do, so when I got home from work this afternoon I turned up the radio and cut them into chunks and mixed them with brown sugar and cinnamon in a pot on the stove, and cooked them for a very long time until the whole kitchen smelled like spice.
And it is times like this, when I have a spoon in one hand for mixing homemade applesauce, and a knife in the other hand to cut tofu for a stirfry, and the radio is playing, quite loudly, a song that begins I was sittin’ sellin’ turnips on a flatbed truck, that I wonder how I possibly got here. My parents raised me in a big suburban house full of fragile furniture and classical music, and they hoped that I would either be a doctor or marry one. But instead here I am in Oregon, a state I couldn’t find on a map until I moved here for design school, peeling apples into a compost bin and dancing around the kitchen to a guy who has cracked the Billboard Hot Country Chart four times over.
Who understands the complex chemistry of what makes each of us happy? I remember very clearly the moment in the post-college scramble when a dear friend of many years announced to me enthusiastically One thing I know for sure is I really like marketing! And it was so jarring, so revelatory. Shit! I realized. She really does. Where do we get these affinities from? The big devotions to art or parenthood or the ocean, and the countless tiny tendencies to the tuba or Swedish or sleeping outside. Somehow we find the things that make up our lives and make us happy, even if they are not the things we were ever expected to look for.
calling
Ron who owns Celia’s rang me up last Friday and asked if I could sub today for one of the other baristas. I said of course, even though it involved missing a morning meeting at the city job, even though I missed a different meeting last Thursday when I played hooky, even though it meant I’d have to make up the hours at other less convenient times this week. Partly because my truck insurance payment is due, but mostly because I love working at Celia’s. I wake up at five a.m. eager to go.
I had a friend in college named Christina, and Christina was a fashionista who loved to shop and loved shoes and always had the newest makeup colors. (How is it possible that there are always new makeup colors?) She was also a straight-A biology major who later went on to get a PhD in neuroscience. And one time sipping milkshakes at Tom’s Diner, Christina told me that she wished she wasn’t quite so smart, because really she would like to work behind a makeup counter.
I don’t think Christina would have been particularly happy behind a makeup counter long-term, and I don’t think I’d be satisfied as a barista full-time. But it would not be inaccurate to say that working at Celia’s is sometimes the working highlight of my week. In my ordinary life I enjoy both people-watching and talking to strangers, and at Celia’s I get to do both, for seven hours in a row, while sipping tasty hot beverages and getting tips.
There is something very intimate about the coffee drinker / barista relationship. It’s like the rapport people have with a hairdresser or a bartender, but on a daily basis and at a more vulnerable hour. When my customers come in the door, I know who has had a rough night and who is well rested. I know who has had sex. I know whose baby won’t sleep. I know who is ready for their day, and who is fearing a confrontation with their boss. And as the day goes on, I watch people get ready for interviews and have lunch meetings and look for jobs, and I overhear blind dates. I hear couples squabble and other couples support each other. I know who reaches for their wallet. I see how people treat their children, and their friends, and people they don’t know.
Customers talk to me about their kitchen renovations, and their weddings, and their neighbors. Sometimes they talk about AA and Weight Watchers and ex-husbands and abusive parents. At first I would respond with stories of my own, but I quickly realized that’s not what they need. What most people need most in the middle of the day is someone who is interested in them. And I am.
Last week I was talking to Jake, who is getting his masters in education to be a fourth grade teacher. Why fourth grade? I asked. Fourth grade kids can act out, he explained, but they’re just really great and cool and fascinating, and what they need most of all is someone who simply listens to them.
So.
il faut cultiver notre jardin
I just finished my journal – the real one that I write with real pen on real paper that you aren’t allowed to read. It’s spiral-bound and orange and recycled from an old book, so on the front it says The Teen-Age Library. And the first entry begins: “the teen-age library” seemed appropriate today when i was in powell’s with joshua looking for a journal, because i’m having a teen-age episode at the moment. tomorrow is my first day of the new school year. i have homework to do, and new kids to meet. and i have a crush on a boy who isn’t crushing back. well, to be fair, he does like me. but he’s “confused.” isn’t that helpful? …even the crazy people i dig up have so little faith.
This first entry is dated 25 September 2005, exactly one and a half years ago. So I guess we all know what happens the more things change.
The following pages are packed with ticket stubs and assorted memorabilia from Chicago, San Diego, Quebec City, Alaska, D.C., Austin, Santa Fe, and New Orleans, and of course lots of Portland. There’s a ski lift tag from Willamette Pass and a business card from Red’s Eats, Home of Maine’s #1 Lobster Roll, and a label from a bottle of Abita Beer.
Several friends have asked me in the past few weeks about where I’m heading next, and for the first time in a long time, I’ve been answering Nowhere. For the moment Portland remains New and Exciting and full of surprise, and the prospect of a job and a bike and an address seems brimming with possibility. I’d like to spend some time with my friends. I’d like to do some good work. I’d like to plant tomatoes and stick around to eat them.
This seems a little Candide, doesn’t it? Time to cultivate my garden. Portland is, if not the Best of All Possible Worlds, at least the first place that’s felt like home. Which is really rather delightful.
Of course there’s still The Wanderlust and The List, Greenland and Laos and so on. It’ll happen, I hope. But this year I’m thinking Eastern Oregon. The San Juan Islands. Vegas. Iowa. (More on that last one later.) I am giddy with expectation.
in the mean time
I spent the wee hours of last night in Providence Portland Medical Center’s Emergency Room; Operaman gashed his head open on his hatchback. Emergency rooms are cold and disconcerting places, otherworldly with their stiff, thin carpets and sharp lights. There were a lot of people with children. There were a lot of people who looked like they’d been there for a very, very long time, and had nearly given up on ever finding comfort. It was like an airport with a weaker sense of camaraderie and a stronger smell of latex.
While I sat in the waiting room the guy across from me asked How did your friend cut his head? and I replied Hatchback. And then I didn’t know what to say, because What are you here for? seemed dangerous and intrusive. Operaman’s injury had been obvious from the bloody dishtowel he was holding to the cut, and we both were lucid and chatting, and it could safely be assumed that I had not hit him over the head with a broken bottle, and that the cut was not a sign of graver things. But with most people in the room it would have been harder to say.
I do not want to ever have to wait in an emergency room by myself.
The guy sitting nearby and I talked quietly for a while about the town of Tillamook and the various models of Subarus and the terrible experiences we had both had with nasty EMTs. And at some point I curled up in my scratchy conference-room chair and fell asleep.
Today I built raised beds for a new school garden in Vancouver - I shoveled and pushed wheelbarrows in the rain, on an empty stomach and four hours sleep, and it felt marvelous. I wouldn’t mind a massage but I’m settling for a quiet night in with books and chocolate pudding. Is there anything to do but try to forget emergency rooms once we’ve left them, and be grateful for our returned health? I feel a strange unease, like I’ve seen something I wasn’t meant to see. I am thankful for the dirt under my nails and the blisters on my palms, reminding me that I am well and not waiting.
easy silence
Yesterday I learned the word certiorari; it’s a good word, if not commonly useful, and Latin, and spelled so well, and I wanted to text the Latest Boy Disaster and say Latest Boy Disaster, look at this word I’ve learned! Because it’s the sort of word he knows. And whereas last week I found a puzzle he would have liked and I thought Fuck You and I did the puzzle all by myself, this week I have remembered that there is no time for such nonsense.
This week I learned the word certiorari, and there are only so many people in the world who could answer my questions about this word, and I only know one of them. Actually I know two, but one is on the east coast working hard, and perhaps less interested in a late night call about the American judicial system. So I know just one right here, and what are the chances of that? A year ago it would have been none. And though this particular person does not happen to want to date me and this hurts my feelings, and though he chose a rather grueling and inelegant way to say so, I would prefer to know him still.
He, on the other hand, needs Space. And (it seems) not the kind of Space that one needs when one is sick of someone and wants them to go away. Rather the kind of Space that one needs when one is tired of affecting and being affected by someone. Alas.
My friends X and Y recently gave up on their friendship, because they did not like how they affected each other. And I understand that it happens, and I’ve been there myself and made the same decision. But it makes me terribly sad. All the frustration that X and Y caused each other was such an aside to their very rare harmony, the way they both spoke about the desert, the way they both threw up their hands when the terms were too full of compromise. Sometimes I think we are all so spoiled with each other.
This weekend I was reminded that people’s tiny red planes can disappear into the water on what everyone expected to be a sunny Saturday afternoon flight, and everything left unsaid stays that way. Must we learn everything first hand? I don’t trust time much beyond the minute that I’m in. And right now, in this minute, I’d rather be talking about etymology over red wine, even if it’s awkward, even if it’s a little tinged with loss, even if it makes tomorrow harder. Tomorrow! What a presumption.
progress
Last August ninth I was in Austin Texas and at exactly this time of evening I was writing a blog post called general mayhem, which contained the following prediction:
I know that when I get off that plane in Portland, a grittily beautiful city with bridges and brunches and Powell’s, I will not want to quit this awesome job, and I will live in some small central house with lots of bookshelves, and I will bike around and take swing dancing lessons and barbeque with my long lost friends, and date some dorky hipster boy who makes satirical music or selfmocking art and agrees to learn sign language with me so we can make fun of people in crowds. And all of this will be Good and I will want it to Last.
And to review, it is seven months later and I do live in Portland, and it is a grittily beautiful city whose grit I continue to relish. Just today I crossed the Ross Island Bridge and the Hawthorne Bridge and the Burnside Bridge; just today I had brunch at Genie’s with Melissa – Stumptown coffee and vegetarian eggs Benedict and toast with orange marmalade. Just today I stood on a stool in Powell’s and flipped through a pile of paperbacks looking for the half-off used copies.
I have not one but three awesome jobs, and I live in a (not small) central house with lots of bookshelves. I bike around. I haven’t taken a single swing dance lesson but I made a Mardi Gras resolution to be swinging by next Fat Tuesday, so I’ll be getting on that soon. Two days ago Pede and Sean and Julie and I crammed into the bucket seats of Julie’s shiny red car and sped to the coast, and I dunked myself in the icy cold Pacific Ocean, and before we four wedged ourselves into Pede’s sandy two-person tent there was, if not a barbeque, at least a campfire, with s’mores and beer and stories.
The dorky hipster boy position is still available, but my sign language class starts next week.
So all in all I’d have to say that Portland has been much as I hoped it would be, which is far more shocking than you’d think. Because while this is how it works for many people – they plan something and it either goes that way or doesn’t – I rarely plan things at all. I mostly wait and see what happens. I mostly point myself somewhere, and it works or it doesn’t and I learn from it and call it Worthwhile and then I point myself somewhere new. But with Portland I had an idea of it from the beginning, and that idea was both realistic and hopelessly oversimplified, and its realization has been demanding – which I guess is how it is as soon as you start wanting something specific. As soon as you start wanting something specific you have to start making choices about what you’ll do to get it.
So Portland has presented some difficult choices, requiring more compromise and effort than I expected, and Portland has been, at times, surprisingly lonely and surprisingly harsh. The payoff being that with this effort, it’s starting to look like I hoped it would, and I’m remembering why I wanted this to begin with. It is Good, and I want it to Last.
the life we knew we would
I just went biking all about, over by the river and up to the Steel Bridge, down the west side park and across the flat fountain that wasn’t on because it’s nighttime in March, and the sky was clear and starry and the city was twinkly and flashing as Portland can be with its quirky young skyline and endearing neon, Made In Oregon, and standing on the Hawthorne Bridge grating with the Willamette slipping quietly underneath I couldn’t think of one good reason in the world that all of Portland wasn’t out biking tonight.
good enough / smart enough
I am not unaware that my blog can be a bit too Stuart Smiley. What can I say? It’s not fiction. It’s not my game face – those of you who’ve ever played with me know that I don’t have one of those. I’m just actually this ridiculous. (Which was my favorite comment ever, by the way.) In defense of blog integrity, I also include the crappy bits.
I’ll tell you, for example, about how last night, after such a Rah Rah Life Is Good day, I lay down to go to sleep and I couldn’t. Instead of feeling tired and satisfied I felt suddenly aware of the little stone in my stomach that I thought I’d purged this weekend, and after tossing and turning the stone felt so heavy that I thought I would be sick, and I tried to figure out if it was something I’d eaten for dinner, and I realized I hadn’t eaten anything for dinner at all. And the thing is that I rarely have trouble sleeping, and I never forget to eat. And I lay there and focused on not letting my whole self become a cold little stone, and I took careful breaths, and I listened to Tom Petty singing Wildflowers.
So there are things I couldn’t sweat out, I guess. Like, I don’t know why people who do not want to be mean still sometimes choose to be mean. I am trying very hard not to learn this lesson about how not to get hurt. It happened with Frenchie and it happened with Operaman and I saw it coming with Latest Boy Disaster, and I said out loud to him I need to take care of myself. And he said, Coward! Because those that know you well know how to be most calculating in their cruelty.
So I stepped to the very edge of my comfort zone, and took a big standing long jump out. I can do this, I said. If this is going to fail it is not going to fail because I kept anything in reserve. So I jumped, and hit something very hard and sharp, right there, right away, right in the place he’d pointed me towards. And it fuckin hurt. And it still hurts even though hiking and oranges are good.
But the thing is I am not going to untangle the mystery of why people mislead each other, and I go back to what I had a month ago: We are all doing what we need to do to get by. And what I am doing is nursing a few small wounds and trying to keep their smallness in perspective and trying to remind myself why I’d do the same thing again.
And sometimes these wounds kill my appetite. But sometimes it’s Pi(e) Day, March 14, 3.14, and you just need to buck up and eat pie. Because what are small wounds in the face of Mathematical Humor? Also pie is pretty delicious. Especially the coconut banana cream pie covered in bittersweet chocolate shavings that I celebrated with this evening.
And gosh darn it, people like me.
day
FIRST I woke up early but well rested and lay in bed for nearly an hour listening to NPR between warm blankets and pillows And It Was Good.
Downstairs over the kitchen sink is a line of yellow-labeled glass bottles that I have been setting up over the past two months (or more) in anticipation of Spring, and one of my housemates had filled each with water and a flower, in a way entirely different than what I imagined and entirely joyful. It was Also good.
I’m wearing a skirt today so on my bike ride to work I did not need the little velcro cuff clip that always gets tight before I’ve even crossed the river, and it wasn’t raining, and it wasn’t windy, and I’m in good shape from weekend adventures, so I pulled up to the Portland building with minimal sweaty breathlessness and this, Too, was good.
At the tenth floor elevator lobby I turned left instead of right-towards-the-reception-desk, and used my special ID card to click open the back office door, and this is Always good.
I met with my boss and showed him the results of last week’s mapping and site visits, and he said Great. And then he asked me to go speak about brownfields at an upcoming conference, and I’m not kicking ass yet but I’m floundering less, at least, and this, Let Me Tell You, is good.
At half past noon I ate yogurt on my favorite step in Pioneer Courthouse Square, and finally cracked a John Muir book that I have been holding for years but have hesitated about because of all the warnings that he is inspiring in ideas but dense in prose, and instead he says things like I am not employed by any one except just myself. I love all kinds of plants, and I came down here to these Southern States to get acquainted with as many of them as possible. And That! Is good.
In the afternoon I was invited to a brainstorming session for a new redevelopment program, and I successfully made the case that said program should be called the Rapid Such-and-Such Program rather than the Accelerated Such-And-Such Program, and I usually freeze up when put on the spot for words (because words and I get along better when it’s just us and a stretch of time) but somehow I found Rapid, and Rapid, In This Case, is good.
And now I am going to bike home under a sky that is one hour lighter than before, and sit on my porch and eat a very sweet, round, orange sort of orange that my friend brought back all the way from California and passed from her hand to mine, and it is going to taste like the sun and like promise, and sometimes after a week of mulling I remember that a day is made of one small wonder after another, and what is better than that?
You Must Not Know Bout Me
Crying out problems works ok but sweating them out suits me better so I’ve had a dancing hiking biking weekend extravaganza, involving the Electric Slide and sunshine and my favorite farm and some quality time by the Willamette River, and what is it about the sound of moving water that solves everything? What little distress was left after that leaked right out of me on the top of Spencer’s Butte, when I lay in the moss and turned my palms up to the sky and felt the heat from above and below and seriously? There is nothing in my life worth worrying about.
Most of my blog posts go unnoticed and some of them stir up a string of comments and once in a while one causes my voicemail box to fill with confused messages, and such was the case last week. Sorry for the ambiguity of said post, and my continued reticence here. Suffice it to say that my latest attempt at gusto with a guy met with predictable mess.
I will supply just one anecdote about the Latest Boy Disaster, which is that a few Sundays back we shared a paper over pie, and at the end he lamented not going into work that day – not because he had particularly needed to get work done, but because he had Not Done Anything Special instead. And do any of you who have ever met me understand why I did not flee quickly and completely right then? Yeah, me neither.
Oddly enough the inevitable crash-and-burn this past week was immediately followed by a dinner with Operaman (scheduled weeks before) that I thought would be about him leaving town but was actually about him missing me, which, while not particularly tempting, was at least flattering. And the outing itself, involving chocolate malts and windows down driving and late night spinning on a playground roundabout, was a sound reminder of what it’s like to have fun with someone who really enjoys your company – whether you’re doing something Special or not.
I lost an hour this weekend the same as all of you (except for my faithful Arizona readers) and I think it’s the reset we’ve all been waiting for this long and leggy winter. Some friends and I over a pitcher of cider on Friday plotted the debut issue of You Just Fuckin Missed Out Magazine and I’ve really had quite the run of rejection recently but I’m pretty sure it’s that I suck at judgement rather than just that I suck. But fuck it. With better judgement I’d miss out on lots of Sunday afternoon discussions over pie, which are Enough at least for me.
the (other) rule(s)
A while back some dumbasses wrote a book about The Rules for getting in a relationship. And to add to this great tome of relationship advice literature, I hereby add the rules for getting out of one. Actually, just one rule. One painfully obvious rule that I take for granted adults know and understand. Except, alas, that isn’t true. So here it is in writing. The Rule for ending things:
Everyone Gets A Little Something.
So, for example. Let’s take your average run of the mill ending of things, the one where One Person may still be interested but The Other Person just isn’t. Now if this rule had any influence whatsoever, if I were being Ambitious and Idealistic, I would say the rule is: The Other Person should thoughtfully and respectfully let The One Person know. But who the fuck are we kidding?
So in an effort to approximate reality, all I ask is that Everyone Gets A Little Something.
Which means, if it is absolutely necessary for The Other Person to do that thing where instead of just saying something they send out all kinds of This Isn’t Working vibes, (perhaps even while saying things like Maybe This Could Work but that’s not the point here), even still, in the end, Everyone Gets A Little Something. Namely, The Other Person gets out of having to say out loud Let’s Call This Off, because having to say that out loud feels awful, and they also still get it ended. Meanwhile The One Person gets to save face, because even though everyone knows very well who is ending it, The One Person gets to say it. Which still feels awful, but at least feels like a choice.
You know when this all falls apart, though? It all falls apart when, after The One Person says Let’s Call This Off, The Other Person goes out of their way to say What A Relief!! Cause I’ve Gotten To Know You Pretty Well, And I Don’t Actually Like You That Much!
Because then The Very Same Person who just had to feel shitty and sad about calling it off NEXT has to feel shitty and sad about being rejected.
And I know that rules don’t work, because in the end there it’s every man for himself and everyone is being hurt in some way and no one wants to step up and say Ok, I can carry this, so that this person whose feelings I cared about a short while ago has a slightly lighter burden. I know, it’s not likely. But one of the great things about adulthood is you can actually learn that sometimes, once in a while, there is a Right Thing To Do, and it doesn’t always feel good but sometimes you choose to do it anyway, even in the heat of the moment, even when you don’t want to feel bad, because it’s the kind of person you want to be.
Everyone Gets A Little Something.
keys
Today I drove a city car.
And it wasn’t a pickup truck, but still. I signed it out and picked up the keys and drove it up Grand Avenue with the driver’s side window down, and on the door it said City of Portland, with little roses, because we are the City of Roses.
So perhaps things are looking up.
I parked in a neighborhood in Northeast Portland and locked the car with the little magic remote that makes the lights blink on, and then I walked around taking notes. And the beautiful thing was, I knew exactly what I was doing. Which, let me tell you, has not been the way of things recently. I had a map I made with my remedial GIS skills, and a spreadsheet I made in Excel, and a clipboard and a fine-tipped green pen and my city badge bumping off my hip. And I walked and took notes for three hours, and I only stopped when I needed to return the car. And I didn’t get lost, or even take a single wrong turn, and I didn’t crash. And all afternoon I saw the backstreets of Portland that you’d never drive out of your way to see – warehouses and garages with record stores and art studios hiding in between; residential streets that dead-end on the highway. All the places where people make their Portland lives.
Tomorrow I’m going to wake up and go to a café and read House Resolution 2869 (The Small Business Liability Protection and Brownfields Revitalization and Environmental Restoration Act, of course) and I Can’t Fucking Wait. Sooner or Later, I Will Not Suck At This Job. Really. I Will Not.
And either way I’m not getting fired this month, because this morning my boss signed me up for another conference.
march forth
Today I met some friends for breakfast and read the paper on the porch of a coffeeshop and mended a skirt and weeded the garden and Swiffered the floors and met a different friend for an early evening drink, because he’s recently been wronged by a French Canadian and he thought I’d understand.
And I think all of these semi-meditative activities were an attempt to find some calm with which to start the week, but so far no go. It’s getting near midnight and the calm hasn’t come. I don’t know if it’s leftover adrenaline from yesterday or anxiety about the week or something bigger and less easy, but my empty room feels shaky and my rested head feels loud. I need a little reassurance, about nothing in particular. That at some point I won’t suck at my job. That at some point I will like some guy, and he will like me back, and we’ll both consider that a good thing. That at some point I’ll make my way through the pile of summer mail that’s been sitting in a drawer since September.
In the mean time, since there’s no one around to reassure me, what I can do for the moment is reassure you. Cause we’re all feeling kind of Marchy lately, wouldn’t you say? But I think with a few extra hours of sleep and a few deep breaths and a little extra chutzpah we can make it to the equinox, which – with both an x and a q – is what I’d call a worthy goal.
all that and a hard hat
There is a part in Native Son where Bigger Thomas is standing on a street and a firetruck goes by, lights and sirens blaring, and he is thrilled by it. Thrilled in this particular way that is physical and consuming. It is probably symbolic of something that I had to write an essay about when I read the book for tenth grade English class, but that’s not what I remember. What I remember is the description of the feeling. And I remember it still, fifteen years later, because when I read it I had that specific feeling that great songs and great writing can elicit: the feeling of Exactly. That is Exactly how I feel.
Is there a way to say this without sounding callous and insensitive? I really get off on emergencies. It’s not that I want them to happen, obviously. It’s not that I’m glad that buildings burn down and cities flood and people shoot each other. Obviously. And often during every-day life it is actually so hard for me to disconnect myself from the reality of these things that though I can read the newspaper and then go out with friends the same as everyone else, I feel this kind of lingering sickness and agitation that sits there on the sidelines most of the time. My own personal elephant in the room. I don’t think most people have this and I don’t know why I do, and I do know it doesn’t make me any more useful. I realized a long time ago that awareness mostly just makes people self-righteous about how aware they are, without accomplishing anything much at all.
Occasionally, though – so very occasionally – there is actually something to be done. And when this possibility presents itself, some creepy switch gets flipped. I don’t feel a thing at all, except adrenaline and immediacy, and alarming practicality. Taking down houses in New Orleans was like this: the sledge hammer would swing and swing in my hands for hours in the stifling heat, and only later when all the moldy walls were broken on the curb did the ideas of homeless and flood and refugee come crashing in on me. I guess I like to Make Things Better in the most naïve and selfish sense, and this is the way my brain manages it.
I was not brought up to Fix Things. The reality that a person – just a regular person, a small and soft-hearted person with thin skin and a bad sense of direction – could frame doors and set bones was a thing that took me an embarrassingly long time to uncover, and it surprises me still. But like many overdue and hard-won discoveries, its truth amazes and excites me, and I feel compelled to make up for lost time.
So when I got an email about Neighborhood Emergency Teams I signed up for the four Saturdays of training. NET members are Portland’s community first responders in extreme emergencies when city services are overwhelmed. They taught us about how unreinforced masonry buildings crumble in earthquakes and where to site an improvised medical facility and what to do about bleeding. And today was our final exam.
It happened at Fire Station 2 out on the northeast corner of town, a sprawling lot with firetruck bays and one of those big square-windowed search and rescue practice towers. We put out fires, of course. And we lifted a nine hundred pound block of cement off of a black canvas dummy before rolling him onto a board and duct-taping him in place. We crept around the walls of a smoky apartment, shining our flashlights into debris-filled corners looking for survivors. We did triage, and I carried an eleven year old boy out of the building over my shoulder.
And I get that it wasn’t real. And if it had been real – if all the blood and terrible decisions had not been a drill - I probably would have vomited and cried and maybe passed out. But as it was, I just felt thrilled – in the most neutral, sensory sense of the word.
unconventional
The Oregon Brownfields Conference is a lot more fun than you might think. And by “fun” I mean “fun if you like conferences.” Which, it turns out, I don’t.
There are things about conferences that I like. The menu of sessions, for example. Opening up the conference catalogue gives me the sort of thrill that other people might get from an REI circular or a good list of whiskey. All those possibilities! Tackling Former Landfills or Effective Strategies to Manage Liability – how can one choose?
And the exhibit booths! So much miscellany and schwag. Liquid Boot waterbottles. GeoEngineers keychains. Tote Bags Unending.
But the social dynamic of a conference is not my forte, at least not this week. This week I was feeling antisocial. It doesn’t happen often, and when it happens I can usually bluff. I can usually summon up the energy to Pose Thoughtful Questions and soon enough I’m actually interested in the answers, and things go fine. But at a conference, everyone has a Secret Agenda. Or a Not So Secret Agenda. And I’ve just never been good at this kind of loaded interaction.
Exhibitors at a conference are looking for clients. Clients at a conference are looking for deals and connections. Everyone is looking for partners. And I recognize that this is a Good and Necessary Thing. But there I am with my eight weeks of experience, and my complete lack of power and influence, and I have nothing to offer these people. I just want to learn. And after four hours they are weary of introductions, and they are strategic with their time. Even the water filtration guy didn’t seem very anxious to tell me about water filtration when it was clear I didn’t need any water filtered.
Conferences are also a painful reminder of how public presentation is not an innate ability. I personally don’t understand how one can sit through a single presentation ever and not absorb some basic principles of delivery. Principles like, Appear At Least Mildly Interested In Your Subject Matter. And, Define Obscure Acronyms. And, Don’t Use Six Point Font In Your PowerPoint. Alas, numerous presenters are evidently impervious to Common Presentation Sense. There is a particular conference drone that presenters tend to embrace with stubborn consistency, and it sparks a deep rage in me. I sit at my table digging my nails into my palms in an effort to keep from yelling For God’s Sake This Topic Is So Cool And Yet You Apparently Have No Soul. Because if you yell that sort of thing they take away your complimentary drink ticket.
Although, for the record, I skipped the reception.
