9.28.2007

worth doing badly

I’m getting drunk tonight, at home, by myself, with a bottle of wine that Julie and Melissa brought when they moved me here. It’s just that kind of evening.

The daytime temperatures are dipping into the sixties and the branch ends of the maples are starting to turn, and here’s fall, which doesn’t usually make me sad. But I soak up emotions around me and people around me are heavy with it. I feel more sad than heavy. Not the bad kind of sad. There aren’t enough words for the different kinds of sad in English.

I went to my old house this week, because my old housie Dubya called to tell me there was mail. Big fat mail that turned out to be Benefits. Benefits should cheer one up but the old house was hard. Figs and grapes that were not mine, and stairs where I used to like to sit. My new house does not have conversation on the porch, or pots of tea, or anything to make jam with. For all my talk of tomatoes it turned out to be too shady here. No one reads at all.

And I fear I’m doing it again, falling for a guy who doesn’t have it in him to fall back, and I swear that as far as I can tell I’m not subconsciously seeking this. Jamey once told me that my problem (and he was good at identifying other people’s problems, a dubious gift I wish I didn’t share) was that I mostly like everyone, and consequently keep falling for pussies. This is not entirely untrue. I do not like everyone, but I do have a certain softness for pussies with potential. I suppose it’s because I’m one of them.

So here I am at the end of September shoring myself up for a new lot of disappointment, trying to figure out if I should be honest and get squashed or be safe and... be safe. Safe is pointless but squashed is getting old and I don’t like this run I’m on. The last person who told me he loved me delivered it like bad news, held it like an unwelcome weight. And I feel this coming on the way you feel a cold in the back of your throat, not bad yet but getting worse and inevitable, and I wonder if I have it in me just now, to think someone is fabulous and have him think I’m... fine. I’m tempted to cut and run.

I won’t, of course. I’ll take it in the chin and I won’t even tell me I told me so. I will hope all along that it goes another way.

I will at some point figure out what I’m doing that keeps playing out this way. I am open to suggestions. I am open to Whatever Happens Next. I am opening a second bottle.

posted by tortaluga @ 11:30 PM 1 comments

9.26.2007

ten facts getting me through humpday

one. When, in my last year of grad school, people would ask What do you want to do next? I would answer Well, I’d most of all like to work for the City of Portland.

two. I work in the Portland Building. It has no natural light and I can hear about a hundred people’s private conversations, but these are the sacrifices we make for an Icon of Postmodern Architecture. Also I have a little badge that gets me through secret doorways, into break rooms, out of stairwells, and down to the garage.

three. I can wear my Docs to work.

four. Yesterday I drove over the spectacular St. John’s Bridge in a city car. On the side it said City of Portland, The City That Works. I rolled the windows down and turned the radio up.

five. No one else around here has a design background. Last week my boss handed me an illegible public survey and said, Can you make this look good?

six. My Bureau is taking part in the Bike Commute Challenge month, and the past two years we beat the Department of Transportation. Take That!

seven. For said Bike Commute Challenge, one biker brings in a treat to share each day of the month. Today was my day. I brought graham crackers, marshmallow fluff, and chocolate frosting: office s’mores. I made several new friends.

eight. Last week I got sent to a training workshop in contaminant chemistry. I learned about why contaminants act like they do. Why, for example, a dry cleaning solvent spill might require vapor extraction but will not be a threat to groundwater. Ten years out of a bio major I used organic chemistry for the first time ever.

nine. There are big cool maps on my cubicle walls, of things like Portland Public Schools and Contaminated Sites in the Willamette Greenway and Neighborhood Associations. I fucking love maps.


ten. I have a new hardhat. And a vest.

posted by tortaluga @ 4:35 PM 2 comments

9.24.2007

lost in let's remember

My mother, when she was in college, played the organ at church services, and my ex-girlfriend’s mother is a church organist in New York, and now my boyfriend is a church organist too. Let’s not dig too deep into that, agreed? The point being that like any good little Jewish girl I celebrated Yom Kippur, the holiest of holy Jewish days, by going to Catholic mass.

I didn’t dip my fingers into the holy water (I wouldn’t have known what to do next) and I didn’t cross myself when everyone crossed themselves, but I answered and also with you when the Deacon said God Be With You. I listened to the sermon, which was smart and funny and well delivered, and which was essentially about tolerance. And I sang when Operaman raised his arms, because – did I mention this part? – for This Sunday Only he was also the cantor, standing right up front leading the congregation through all the songs. Their previous cantor quit and their organist broke her arm, and a week later in walked an opera singer with a minor in organ. So.

I got down on my knees and prayed, just like in California Dreamin’, just like the religion I was raised in expressly forbids. But after short consideration I decided that I don’t believe God cares if I’m on my knees or not. I decided that since I don’t believe in God so much as I believe in something big and beyond reason that I might as well call God because I don’t have a better word, there’s definitely no problem being full of awe and thankfulness and atonement and the other things that Yom Kippur is about, things that I think are Important, on my knees in a Catholic church. I bowed my head and folded my hands and whispered what I could remember of the Kaddish.

Operaman isn’t Catholic, either. He’s a nonpracticing Lutheran who likes music. I’ve decided, at thirty, that it’s ok to sign up for things I still have reservations about. I’m ardently patriotic, for example, though America sometimes makes me furious and sad. I’m an environmentalist even though patchouli and the oversimplified slogans that go with it make me roll my eyes. And I respect religion for the – may I reclaim this word, please? – values it holds dear: community and generosity and gratitude and Living One’s Ethics.

And I’m Jewish, I guess, because I sure like Passover, and because I soaked up all that bookish wry sarcastic skeptical stubborn Jewish character, and because it’s no use being nothing just because nothing’s perfect. But I’m the kind of Jewish that went to mass for Yom Kippur, and then went back to my tattooed Christian boyfriend’s apartment for Dutch baby and bacon. Hosanna! Good yuntif.

posted by tortaluga @ 6:52 PM 3 comments

9.23.2007

equinox

Just before each footfall dozens of crickets jumped for safety across the field on the top of Mary’s Peak, where Operaman and I drove on Friday night to catch the last camping of summer. It was warm and bright until it wasn’t. And then it was icy cold and clear. It was the kind of camping night where you pull the sleeping bag over your head just to fill the inside with warm exhalations, just to wake your skin enough to sleep.

So there’s no doubt about it, this was the weekend when summer rocked into fall, and there are leaves on the ground and general dis-ease and sometimes the chill is enough to make you aware of the inside of your nose. We walked around the Oregon State University campus where Operaman’s classes start tomorrow. It seemed an appropriately fall thing to do.

Tomorrow is my first day of my first full-time work week for the city, and who knows what happens after that. Last week I gave a tour of brownfields to twenty women training for careers in the skilled trades, and I knew what I was doing, and it felt good. I also got issued a hard hat. Which is a useful thing to have around in the fall, even though fall isn’t full of the kind of surprises that tumble down on your head, necessarily. It’s more full of the kind of slow surprises that unroll from the inside out.

Today the sun spent the same amount of time below the horizon as above it, but that didn’t make day and night the same length. That’s a myth. Because the upper edge of the sun is already up, being daytime, when the middle crosses the line. Fall is in the details. I’m curious and a little nervous about what that could mean.

posted by tortaluga @ 11:23 AM 0 comments

9.21.2007

rest & motion

I marvel at the bodies of tall bikers, how they send all that power down into each pedal while hardly moving at all above the hip. I know by my shadow that I ride erratically – rocking and swerving just to get forward. All that wasted mechanical energy. But tall bikers glide. I sometimes pull behind one on the bridge, just to watch his clean acceleration as his bike is swept away. Right foot down, left foot down, Gone.

I am grateful for my body. The prayer that gets me up the hill is often Thank you, Feet. Thank you, Elbows. Thank you Small of my Back. My body has gotten me many places and after thirty years it still surprises me, still gives me brand new sensations. But it is no tall body, which is no complaint. But I do find them captivating sometimes.

I’ve always been more attracted to bodies more my size. Compact bodies I can look in the eye. Bodies I could wrestle with and possibly win. Bodies that will sit with me in Small Places. But a tall body on a bike is a thing of beauty, all speed and no gravity, and today on the esplanade it was one after another. The air blew through my hair as they flew by.

posted by tortaluga @ 5:53 PM 1 comments

9.15.2007

nothing flamable

I am in Southern California at all because almost exactly one year ago Julien and David had a baby. This baby is pretty amazing.

This baby’s name is Sean Lee, and her name is also Boram, which in Korean means Sweet Treasure After Long Hard Work. She has small feet and pink cheeks and big eyes that remind me of mood rings, deep dark brown that goes all blue and green and gold from different angles. To be honest I was really expecting a baby, but Boram is a little person. She climbs up things and makes faces and changes her mind. You can watch her think.

I would like to know more people in Portland with babies. My friends got married regionally - first the ones living in the South, and then the Midwesterners and then the Northeasterners and lastly the West Coasters, so that half my Oregon friends are still single. And they’re having babies in more or less the same order. But I wouldn’t mind more babies in my life. Other people’s babies.

Sean Lee’s first birthday party is tomorrow so Julien and I had the arduous task of cupcake tasting. I find the new trend of cupcake boutiques a little unsettling, but also delicious. We did what needed to be done.

Filled with sugar we hit the Pasadena farmer’s market, where Sean was transfixed by a man playing the steel drum. I was transfixed by the artichokes bigger than my head. California produce is a beautiful thing. We have bounteous vegetables in the Willamette Valley, but we sure don’t have citrus. Tomorrow I fly home again with a backpack full of grapefruit.

posted by tortaluga @ 4:24 PM 2 comments

9.14.2007

urbia

It takes a few days to get my city balls back so when Julien left this morning for class I considered reading on her porch in the sun all day. Fortunately the first book I picked up was a guide to LA, and I’m speedily seduced by guidebooks with their pages and pages of places I’ve never been. Twenty minutes later I found the subway. LA has a subway! Who knew?

In fact LA used to have many subways, Julien explained. But when the city privatized them they became the property of automotive companies, who bought them to shut them down. So now it can take an hour to drive fifteen miles on eight lane freeway. I decided to give the lingering lines a shot.

The trains were actually clean and quick and took me right downtown. I toured Frank Gehry’s concert hall and sat in the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels. I drank a milkshake at the base of a skyscraper.

And now I remember big cities, how to act in them and how to love them, and I am thankful for the citysense that kicks right in – the way transit maps and ticket machines are all intuitive once you’ve learned them one place, the way you turn your bag so the opening is against your body, and look certain, and don’t smile.

I’d forgotten how men in cities make strange sounds at women – clicks and hisses and hums, as if that’s a thing people do to each other. Really? I thought, the first time on the subway platform. Don’t you feel silly? But that’s a city thing born of city anonymity and city contempt. It erupts like the yelling drivers and the short-tempered parents.

I’d forgotten how city blocks can be long and hot to walk down, with the rippling air coming off the building faces and the car exhaust blowing through in waves. The people act stoic and the trees look ill. And the LA River passes through, one of the saddest things I’ve ever seen, a three foot wide sheet of murky water on a thirty foot wide concrete culvert. It hardly flows. It reminds me of a third world sewer. And I wonder what would live here, if it had banks and vegetation and a sandy bottom. I wonder how people get by in this desert – Little Tokyo and Compton and Hollywood with millions of cars clotting in between. I wish LA could start again.

posted by tortaluga @ 2:48 PM 0 comments

hang in there little tomato

My friend MP is very brave.

You could guess that just from the fact that she likes capes, because superheroes like capes, and superheroes are brave. You could guess it from the way she says yes all the time, even when your proposal is maybe not so well thought out. You could guess it because she constantly does things that scare her – teaching and traveling and so on – and she does them until she kicks ass at them so much that they aren’t scary any more.

Most recently you could guess it because she left behind everything familiar, lots of friends and family and a house she practically rebuilt, to try a Grand Adventure. A Grand Adventure of making a life with someone new. Such a thing requires bravery even under the best of circumstances, and this had the additional challenges of timing and geography. But she packed up her thesis and her bike and her very cute dog and she left to give it a one hundred percent type try. There’s not really any other type of try worth giving it, she realized. The Highly Improbable slides right into Impossible if you’re half-assed about it.

So she’s down in California figuring it all out: her space and her job and her network, her new landscape and her new relationship. Putting it all back together after taking it apart, is how she puts it. And it reminds me of a year ago, when I’d just landed in a new place that felt both exactly right and wildly out of control. I think I’m just restless for what’s next, I wrote this week last year. Ask and Ye Shall Receive.

What’s next was a wreck at times, lonely and frustrating and full of bad judgment. Unexpectedly, unnecessarily hard. Portland felt like home before I even got here but I still managed to lose myself once I arrived. The winter was the least I liked myself in a while.

But now I look back, one year out, and think No Shit. If you take everything apart it’s going to make a mess. You’re bound to trip over the pieces. The best you can do is try not to break many, and keep a couple good friends around who look at the disarray and say Damn, that’s one ambitious project. It’s a good thing you’re so handy.

One year out I still have some scratches but fuck if what I was restless for didn’t come raining down upon me. In a week I start a full time job with the City of Portland, which work-wise is what I most hoped to find here. I met new Portland people who do cool Portland things. I’m dating a guy I like quite a lot. I know where to go biking after dark and where to drink mojitos with friends and where to see a movie alone. What’s next has become wonderfully irrelevant.

Making a mess isn’t a problem as long as you remember that messes don’t mean you’ve done something wrong. They’re not a problem unless you look at the clutter and decide to cut your losses, as if it would be easier somewhere else, as if easier was the point. It’s a mess, MP, because that’s one ambitious project you’re working on. I can’t wait to see it when you’re done.

posted by tortaluga @ 1:05 AM 2 comments

9.13.2007

on our way home

This city is not for me, this city with its wide hot broken roads and fast drivers, with its pastel stucco houses perched on brown hillsides and its thick gritty air. This city blows out in all directions like some cinema apocalypse; it is sprawling and hidden at once with a million unmapped rooms like a world in a video game.

Julien left me here on the misleadingly named Vermont Street while she runs errands, left me between the grungy Taco Mucho and the adult video store and the probiotic yogurt place, and at once I felt lost, felt all Girl in the Big City as if I’d never lived in New York, felt the long slow stares as I walked past all the people sitting in the heat. They look angry, and they look like they’re waiting for something that’s been a long time coming. Rain, probably. I hope it rains this year, said Julie this morning.

This city fills my head with movies, which I guess is not surprising. LA Story and Swingers and Crash and Pretty Woman, and the people all strike me as actors, styled and studied and empty. I look at them one by one, and at the storefronts and the skyline, and wonder if anything here at all is real besides me.

I found an art store and spent ten minutes picking a pen. Relishing the familiar. Sepia Prismacolor, .005, and a slim black notebook to write in. I’m hiding on a bench in the vestibule of a boutique with creepy window displays, paper mache children with balloon heads suspended by wire. I don’t know what they sell here. I don’t want any.

I am trying out watching, instead of being watched. I’m hoping LA won’t look at me - I don’t want to start feeling that I have something to prove. I want to dry out and get tan and smell eucalyptus, and leave unnoticed.

posted by tortaluga @ 12:34 PM 1 comments

9.12.2007

Quaint Little Fetish

There are three ethnic groups at my departure gate: Portlanders leaving home and Californians going home and Midwesterners, far from home. You could walk down the aisle of the plane and sort them out by their hairstyles. Instead I drink orange juice and fall asleep.

In LAX, the appropriately slick name for this airport, the Californians are the sudden majority. There are women in skinny jeans with heels, and men in Levi’s with sport coats. There are surfing clothes on surfing bodies. Everyone has sunglasses on.

They wear colors here that we would never wear in Oregon, but the palette is the one thing the Californians and Midwesterners share. Hot pink and teal and other shades fresh from a Cuban parking lot. The surface area covered is different, though, and the sheerness and the height of the waists.

I feel pale, sitting under the United Arrivals sign squinting in the sun. I feel like a hippie in my earth tones and unbleached hair. But it is warm, good dry crispy warm, and there are palm trees, and I’m craving a Coke. I guess I should order Diet.

posted by tortaluga @ 1:29 PM 0 comments

9.06.2007

in passing

Somewhere south of Salem three men in coveralls and paint caps stood outside behind a long low building and waved as my train passed by, and then a small plane landed on a grassy airfield and the sky turned pink. It’s seven thirty seven and I’m heading to the Albany Oregon station, past lumberyards and car part piles and big round bales of hay. The whistle is blowing and we’re following a phone line, and how much longer will telephone poles be part of our landscape? Not much longer, I think.

There’s a cow, now, and another set of lean houses wanting paint; there’s a windbreak of poplars. And now we’re along a two lane road. Gates are flashing red.

The guy across from me looks like a cross between John Cusak and my college friend Cindy’s college boyfriend, and the girl in front of me brought an armload of snacks back from the dining car.

I love the train, all the places it can take you and all the things you see getting there, and the crazy idea of building a set of tracks across a country. I love the way you can sit on your bike at an intersection staring up from under your helmet at the row of little faces zipping by in little window frames, and the way you can rock through town after town staring back.

posted by tortaluga @ 7:47 PM 0 comments

dear faithful reader

OK, maybe there are four of you.

Sorry for the absence. My computer got a nasty virus and I don’t know how to deal with it. So I’m ignoring it and hoping it will go away.

In the mean time I am doing all kinds of fun things, but I’m only writing about them in my head. Sooner or later this will drive me crazy and I’ll suck it up and figure out what to do.

posted by tortaluga @ 12:15 PM 7 comments