strike that

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.

posted by tortaluga @ 11:19 PM