indebted
Here I am again at four in the morning, because Julie had one of those flights that makes you hate the world when your alarm goes off after three hours of sleeping, when your stomach turns and everything feels cold and flat. A little good music on the car stereo, though, and I’m awake as day, dancing a little, glad for this slice of the rarely seen.
Each person may or may not have some big purpose in life but everyone has little purposes for sure, the things they do so reliably and so naturally that the importance of them is overlooked. But in the end these million little purposes are the scaffolding of all the obvious stuff. In the end our million little purposes hold us all up. My friend Lauren sends birthday presents – careful, perfect birthday presents – to every one of her nieces and nephews, and that is no small number of packages. My friend Kira will tell you that you are making the right decision when you most need to hear it, will so convince you that you won’t remember any doubt. My friend Dave will read you to sleep.
And one of my little purposes is airports. I will never not ever hesitate about a trip to the airport. I will pick you up or drop you off at any hour and it will not be a reluctant, obligatory sort of ride – I will not think, even once, even quietly, that I wish I didn’t have to do it. It is huge to me, to be delivered to the beginning of a trip, because trips are usually bigger than they seem. And it is huger still to land and know someone is waiting. I am grateful every time to repay the universe with airport karma. I am grateful it is so easy to do something so important.
surrender the day
I went out in my pajamas at three a.m. to find the moon. It sounds easy enough but I have no intuition for it - often as not the moon finds me first, bolting from behind a building or filling my window and surprising me entirely. I usually know how big it will be but I never know where to look in the sky.
So I set my alarm for three and went out in my pajamas, knowing nothing more than that the full lunar eclipse started at two fifty-four here in Portland, and that we were lucky to have it. You can’t see tonight’s show from the east coast. This one is a gift for those of us who watch the sun set over the ocean.
On the dark corner in front of my house I became newly aware of the many old trees on my street, and the small patches of sky overhead all looked empty. It was quiet. I walked toward the park and there were lots of cats, because cats know this sort of thing, and then I heard people howling. I couldn’t find the moon. I felt uneasy.
I got in the car that Operaman left behind at my house this week, and I drove over the bridge. I craned my neck and peered out the dirty windows, desperate for the fiery orange circle I had seen in the paper. Nothing around me but sky and Orion, clear enough, but no moon. It must be low to the horizon, I decided. Somewhere behind all the buildings, or behind the mountains.
On my way home I stopped at the park, one last shot, and there were people on the picnic tables, and they must be looking at something. And there it was, high overhead looking nothing like I’d imagined: a phantom of a moon, a fingerprint. Hardly there at all. Grey red orange and grainy and nearly an illusion, with a border of lighter color on one side. The suggestion of a moon.
I looked at it for a while from under the streetlamp. I watched people in the park come and go – dog walkers and couples and a woman who said, as she climbed in her car with her friend, You can only watch an eclipse for so long. I wish I knew someone with a telescope, someone who would wake up at three in the morning and know where to point it. The universe throws little parties for us all the time. I try to at least stop in.
On the way home I knew where to look the whole time, even though I usually get turned around every time I turn around. The streets were full of cop cars. I parked and watched some more. I can see it from my corner. It was there all along, just not looking like I expected. I’m no good at finding the moon.
twenty twenty
Sometimes I wonder if by this point I wasn’t supposed to have made some Different Choices, bought a house or married a boy or at least kept the same job for more than a year and a half, even once.
And then I find myself lying on a wide flat rock all warm with the sun, dipping my foot into a stream that is flowing through the Siuslaw National Forest, a stream where I have just washed off the salt of the Pacific Ocean and the dust of three days' camping. And over the rock is a half-downed tree trailing ferns like prayer flags, and under the rock is a big crawdad whose orange cuts right through the blue reflected on the stream surface so he looks like a lobster in the sky. And next to me is a man singing opera, singing an aria more for himself than for me but here I am to hear it, in this perfect green corner of the world where for no reason I can think of we are all alone.
And then I think there’s not a single choice I would have made different, not ever, not one.
she's gone from suck to...
I’m reading Kurt Vonnegut. I haven’t read him since I was eighteen, when I read everything he wrote that I could get my hands on and it Changed My Life the way Kurt Vonnegut is supposed to when you’re eighteen. And then I put him aside, and I cautiously avoided his books for over ten years. Because I don’t like losing heroes. I was worried that he wouldn’t be what I remembered.
But since my Portland Life started picking up steam I have been frantic for fuel; I am remembering what it is like to be in motion and to be excited for exciting things. I am even trying out some things that haven’t excited me for quite some time.
So I picked up Kurt Vonnegut. And I picked up David Brower, because ecology used to get me excited too. As I remember it I had big plans to study landscape architecture in order to Make Cities Better, in order to help people build healthy vibrant places to live. And then I started working eight to five in a windowless office tower, and I wasn’t very good at the working, and all the stuff outside the office tower didn’t seem to be coming together either. Last winter felt so full of defeat.
Tomorrow morning, though, I have an interview for a job that is mostly like my job but full time. And it will still be located in the bleak building and for weeks and weeks I was deciding: do I really want to do this full time just for health insurance and a better resume? And I decided, with complete certainty: No.
Which then allowed me to realize why I do want to do this full time. Because I believe in this shit. I believe in much of the same naïve crap I believed in at eighteen. Or at least I believe that abandoning it because it’s so naïve does me no good. I need to believe that I make things happen that make other things happen that make the world more like I want it to be, whether it fails a lot or not. That’s how I get out of bed in the morning.
The northwest has given me a healthy dose of Fuck It, has given me the perspective that I needed coming out of New York to know when to say, I am done working for this week. I am going to go barbeque with my friends. I am going to the coast. I am going to eat eggs florentine and be two hours late for work, because I may die tomorrow and eggs florentine with the right company is why I’m here on earth. But I went a little overboard with that for a while, and lost track of the stubborn part of me that’s got Shit To Do. And without that, getting out of bed was sometimes surprisingly, eerily hard.
Seems like the only kind of job an American can get these days is committing suicide in some way, says Vonnegut’s truck driver. This is the part where I remember that windows or no windows, this is what I was looking for. A job where I make neighborhoods safer and healthier. Even if it feels slow. Even if I’m not good at it yet.
This is the part where I read David Brower. Don't expect politicians, even good ones, to do the job for you, he writes. Politicians are like weather vanes. Our job is to make the wind blow.
put it in your pocket
Meteors are falling down upon us right now and I’ve only had one good look at them, last Thursday from a sleeping bag on a corn field next to a middle school outside Corvallis. Farm country, no lights, new moon. That’s about the best you can ask for, for a meteor shower.
Since then it’s been one thing after another and I haven’t had a second chance to sit under falling stars, and that right there is inexcusable. There was the warehouse party under the Burnside Bridge, my first dancing since the ankle incident. There was a stamp show with my father, moving table to table around a huge convention center room learning about hinges and perforations and stalking the four dollar Columbian. There was the Bridge Pedal - a bike ride I have been anticipating since the weekend I moved to Portland, in which the ten bridges across the Willamette are open to bikers – which was so jammed with twenty thousand participants that we ended up improvising a three-bridge route followed by waffles and the Times.
There was dinner at Jake’s, during which my parents met Operaman over a huge pot of crawfish. They talked about music for approximately nineteen hours, after which they took the divorced-with-kids thing in stride. They liked him so much I could vomit. I count on my parents loathing the people I date, or at least disrespecting their three day stubble and desire to live with me in Greenland for a while. I don’t know how this is going to work.
There were more meals, because meals are such an event with my parents that there’s hardly time for other things between them. There was The Bite of Oregon food festival, where I “sampled” approximately twenty wines in order to handle with better humor my mother’s thoughtful paranoia about the dangers of bicycling. There was a trip to Crowne Vista overlooking the Columbia Gorge, which went well despite my father’s initial reaction to the proposal: Are we going to drive there and it’s just a big canyon in the ground that we look at?
There was this morning, finally, the trip to the clinic out in Beaverton, Debbie and I eavesdropping on a waiting room full of Stories, me getting samples taken from places I prefer to keep in tact, and things looked not so bad, said the doctor, but we’ll really know in two weeks.
And meanwhile we’ve been busily hurtling through the remnants of a comet named for the man who slew Medusa, a comet that’s far, far away at the moment but that left behind a sky full of shooting stars that we’ve looked up at once a year for the past two thousand years at least.
444
Bad news: In four hours, I need to be awake and coherent to have breakfast with my parents.Good news: Jules and Emilee and I are full of hotcakes, and I can dance again.
Things I Would Be Cooler If I Liked,
But I Don’t, Even Though I Know It Would Make Me Cooler, And That’s Just How It Is
rock climbing
curry
William S Burroughs
jazz
whiskey
sea kayaking
Basquiat
Fight Club
Not A Real Green Dress (that's cruel)
Sara Silverman was interviewed in the Sunday Times Magazine back in January. Do you wish, asked Deborah Solomon, that your show was on HBO rather than Comedy Central? No, said Sara Silverman. She had worked hard to make shows for HBO, and they never got shot. Comedy Central liked her stuff. I’m one of those lucky people who’s attracted to people who like me, she said.
I like that.
Yesterday Operaman said he was thinking of driving up here after his Tuesday chem lab. Which we haven’t done before because on Tuesday night he has lots of work and on Wednesday morning he has class in Corvallis and I have Celia’s at seven thirty. Mostly we find time somewhere between Thursday and Sunday. But that was feeling far away so he said it.
And I made it through a long Tuesday - the kind that happens in front of a computer from eight till five, interrupted only by a two hour meeting – thinking that maybe at the end of it all he would turn up. But instead when I got out of the two hour long meeting there was an email, and the email said All Work No Play Tonight.
This made me cranky. Though upon closer inspection I realized that trading my lunch break for a coffee break had perhaps affected my blood sugar. In any case I was cranky when he called a couple hours later to check in, and I tried really hard not to be but I was having trouble putting good sentences together, and we decided to talk again after eating.
Fifteen minutes later I was on my way to the hippie vegan place for a bowl of quinoa and sprouts or whatever when he called again. I think I made a miscalculation, he said. I’m on my way to I-5.
Oh No! I said. I didn’t mean to make you feel bad. I’m just cranky. I need to eat. It was nearly seven.
No, he said. I thought about what I most want to be doing, and that’s doing my work there with you. We Have A Good Thing, he said. It’s Worth Some Effort.
So now if I prop myself up a little and look over the screen of my laptop there he is, writing code, and here I am, feeling like a thousand pearly sea treasures. And can I just say how obscenely nice it is dating someone who goes out of his way to have me around even when it is neither convenient nor sensible? Because I am one of those lucky people who’s attracted to people who like me. Which would sound asinine and obvious, except for the overwhelming number of people out there who are really only attracted to people who Do Not like them. And shit! What a harder life that must be.
I feel like I’m coming off about three years of going out of my way for an assortment of charming boys who were more or less indifferent to me, who maybe liked me well enough, when it was easy. Or who would have liked me, except that I was careless enough to like them back. Or Whatever. And it happened enough times in a row that I was really starting to worry – I mean Really starting to have some issues about it.
And clearly the fact that a guy drives a long way to see you is not sufficient - this one has plenty of kickass to keep me paying attention. But the driving, etc, is Necessary. It is fabulous. And right now it is just what I needed.
Bringing Sexy Back
Just FYI, said Julie, the right lane goes to the coast.
What are we doing in the center lane? I responded, and like that she pulled her Cougar onto route twenty, which heads straight through the vineyards west of Corvallis until it hits the Pacific. You know you’re there when, at the top of the final hill, ocean fills the windshield.
There’s been a lot of resettling in the past year. Ty got a job in Florida. Talley’s in Central Pennsylvania. John came up on Thursday for a farewell dinner before heading to the OC. A Who’s Who of Who’s Left still managed to fill a table that stretched the length of the room. That is no small comfort.
My grad school crew had a collective panic when school was done. They let us out and we didn’t know where to go next, so for a long moment we stood still and blinked uncomfortably in the sun. What’s Next can be a bear, between billable hours and starting over in a new city. It was awkward. And messy. And not always handled with grace.
But it seems, one year and one summer out, we’re finding our footing. Ty has a boat, and John’s about to start programming in a town where he can use his surfboard, and Talley! Is a sculptor. Fuck! Stacey traded in her AutoCAD-all-day gig for a real design job, and Deb and Nopporn are getting married, and Nikki has said the word baby quite a bit more often than it might casually come up. Joshua is househunting. Pede is In Love.
And I think I finally Get my job. I’m still not doing it as well as I’d like, but I’m plotting. In fact I have a new Word document on my desktop called Plans. Things we don’t do that maybe we could. A new pile of kickass shit to learn. The backs of my legs are sunburned from afternoons reading down by the river – EPA guidelines about meth lab cleanup, and GIS manuals, and Supreme Court cases on property rights.
And there’s a guy I like, a guy who today brought me a bracelet from the County Fair with glittery little stickers of Catholic saints on it. On our way to helping his friends move this morning we stopped to pick up muffins, and crossing the street his eight year old slipped her hand into mine. I just about fell over with the wonder of it.
Yesterday on the beach Julie told me about how she’s next going to Change the Campus. And then she caught me up on her current love interests: an Iowa boy in Iowa and an Oregon boy in Oregon and an Iowa boy in Oregon. And I believe this makes it official: we have our groove back. We are Figuring This Out Afterall. We just needed a little gestation. Eight months out and the Year of Gusto rears its marvelous head.
goodnight
I was up at five this morning for the coffeeshop and I'm still up now at practically one, and a lot of amusing things happened in between that I would tell you about but I'm way too tired. I will just tell you this: that this afternoon I hung my laundry out to dry on the line, and now my bed smells like summer.
