moment(um)
This morning I was driving the City Prius back from a meeting in which I was the person from the City – a meeting I thought might be a disaster since this was my first time flying solo but which, ultimately, was just fine – and I was sipping an eggnog shake from Burgerville and listening to a station called, simply, the Wolf, when a City pickup turned in front of me. And the driver smiled and gave a little wave. The kind of wave that says, “Hello, fellow City employee.”
Heh. Hell yeah.
The Next Thirty Years
is the name of a country song that was playing on the radio as I drove home from Jon and Elise’s last night. My favorite lyric in the song is, “The next thirty years will be the best years of my life – raise a little family and hang out with my wife.” I just love that he says hang out. It’s so calm. It’s so accepting. It’s just right: What to do with the next thirty years? Find someone cool. Hang out.
My birthday sucked as usual. It started with dropping Operaman at the airport, still sleepy from midnight mass. It ended with wishing bars in Portland were open on Christmas, but with that not really mattering since no one was around to have a drink. In the middle there were a couple good parts even though my main plans fell through. I got the most beautiful scarf from Bridget in the mail. Elise, who shares my crappy birthdate, shared her elegant birthday dinner with me. And Talley called drunk off her ass at eleven, which was the next best thing to being drunk off my ass on a barstool next to her.
Though the timing in many ways leaves much to be desired, I will say this: it’s nice to have a birthday at the end of the year. Because then it all starts over at once. And though 2007 wasn’t full of the sorts of tragedies that make a Bad Year, I know more than a few people who aren’t sad to see it go. It’s not been a Bad Year but it’s been a lame year sometimes, a cranky and unsatisfying year. A year of questionable choices. A lot of treading water. Waiting for the right job and waiting for the next elections and waiting for something that feels like arrival. That last one will screw you, of course.
And 2008? Look at it, all even and round. What a promising year! I know a couple babies who will be showing up to kick things off. There are a couple weddings on the calendar already. I’m shaking off 2007 along with being thirty. The last thirty years have been rather splendid, actually, but this last one was a bit embarrassing. Not quite up to standard. So let’s try this again, like we mean it. Once more with feeling.
sistere
First I am cold.It’s December, after all, and it has been dark for a few hours, and the dew of Jeff’s yard is soaking through my boots. I stand near the fire shelter where twenty-two large stones have been baking under a pyre of boards. My jeans grow prickly hot. I step back. It’s early in the evening, and I still think it’s up to me.
I had planned to go to a movie tonight. A half-hearted plan made when other plans fell through. Then in the hallway outside my room I bumped into my housemate whom I rarely bump into, and he was “getting ready for a sweatlodge.” I’d heard the term before just enough to know that I didn’t know what it was about. He invited me along, thinking I’d say no.
Just west of the fire shelter is the lodge – a frame of lashed branches wrapped in wool blankets and canvas. By the fire I strip down to a sarong, bare feet on the wet ground. Asher cleanses me with a bundle of burning sage and it feels like a blessing. I duck through the door.
Inside it is too low to stand, so I step carefully clockwise around the empty fire pit until I find a place across from the door. Jeff is already inside. I can’t see him, or anything, except the fire through the doorway and Asher’s legs as he brings in the stones.
Jeff welcomes the stones one at a time, places them into the pit. I give each an offering of tobacco from a pouch. The tiny dry leaves are invisible in the darkness, invisible on my fingertips and falling through the air, but when they hit the stones they burst like sparks. Five stones placed and Asher steps in; Jeff pulls a cover over the door.
There is no light at all in the lodge and no breeze, just the pleasant dry heat of the not-burning fire. We start with the West and with Fall. Jeff drums and sings and I sing along without knowing the words. I dance and no one can see me.
We pass around a rattle made from a gourd, and before and after we speak we rattle and Jeff pours water on the stones. It grows hotter and wet. A different wet than humid. I can feel the air in my nose and I am surprised it is still so easy to breathe. The first round is even.
The door opens and the lodge exhales and Asher brings in four more stones.
North and winter is hotter and my body breaks open, my skin disappears. I press my palms onto the ground for refreshment. Sweat streams down my wrists and gathers there in pools. My body feels old and bent under the heat, and then it is so wet it feels unborn.
East and spring is the round that undoes me – six stones and I lose my sense of certainty. I lie flat to fit myself into the inch of air just about the ground. I imagine it is cool and still. I try to keep hold of my insides and of my head but I feel myself decomposing and dispersing. It is shocking how quickly and fully wellness leaves, how slow time goes when it’s gone. And then it comes back in a rush of cold air and it seems you were just being weak.
South and the summer is perhaps hottest yet, but I sing again and speak because of course the heat isn’t the hard thing. By the close I am flat again, turned into the corner but this time only glad, for the barely perceptible probably imaginary draft under the lodge wall and the wet leaves crumbling against the canvas. I could eat these leaves, I think. It is so very hot and I am lying twisted on a thin cloth on a dirt floor in the dark and all I can think is Here I Am. I Could Eat These Leaves.
Outside I sit in the same night as before, right under the moon. I sit on the grass and I see that it is frosty by my pale bare feet, and nothing has changed about the weather but I wouldn’t call it cold anymore.
last longest night
And so ends December 20, the shortest day of the year, four forty-five and from the nearest window (nowhere near my desk) ten floors up it’s just headlights and streetlamps and a thin rim of pale blue over the west hills. How on Earth are we supposed to see where we’re going?
Two days ago I told Mo This isn’t how I pictured it and he laughed a sort of snorty laugh that I recognized – because I’ve known Mo a long time – as not condescension but compassion. Coulda gone a lot of ways, he pointed out, but this is the only one that matters.
Now’s about when I quit my fall music and turn up the wailers: Long December and Wish I Had A River and the Decemberists, of course, and a handful of carols so I know it’s not too serious. The timing couldn’t be better, really. Even though all of winter is still stretched out ahead of us, even though we’re not going in with the most robust of reserves, it’s already getting lighter, sure enough.
io, Saturnalia!
Did you all have a good Saturnalia yesterday? You know, Saturnalia?
It’s a Roman festival of feasting and gambling, and you had me at feasting. As recently as last night, Wikipedia also designated Saturnalia as a day of Tomfoolery. Today, however, that has been edited out. So I’m glad I got to celebrate what was potentially the last Tomfoolery-laden Saturnalia.
Amidst the general revelry, Operaman showed me how to make thumbprint cookies for my office holiday party. For those of you out of the cookie loop as I was, thumbprint cookies are little cookies with a little thumbprint in the middle which you fill with jam. They are the sort of cookies I would pass over at a party for their egregious lack of chocolate, but they came out rather tasty. In fact at this very moment I am trying to ignore the two dozen of them in the bottom drawer of my file cabinet.
Cookies and feasting seems an appropriate post just now, here in what I think I need to rename My BiPolar Blog. On the plus side I got a mass email this morning about depression and the holidays that cheered me right up. Because seriously, if an email is going out to our whole bureau - an email with tips like “Try not to fret over getting everything done and done just right” and “Remember to have fun” – there are people a lot more crazy than I am.
homestretch
I could have done a lot of things today – written letters or gone for a hike in Forest Park, read the newspaper in a coffeeshop. I could have worked on a Habitat house or opened a bank account in Portland, so I can stop mailing my paychecks to Eugene. But I didn’t do any of these things, or anything else, today. I lay in bed and sometimes pulled the covers over my head. Occasionally I read, just to feel less like I was doing what I was doing.I don’t have a lot of these days – a couple a year. And it’s been a while.Five hours after the sun went down I left my house for the first time, went to see a movie down the street. One of the characters is walking around in boxers and he has long, knobby legs and in the background Au Champs-Elysees is playing, and I thought of Frenchie, whom I don’t think of often. But there it was, sudden and warm, and I smiled before I knew it. There is the up side, I am reminded. The up side to all of these difficult lovestories I try to embrace that always seem to turn out more Difficult than Lovestory. I know this character. And though I didn’t know him long or well there’s the part of my life that I get to keep no matter what, when I flew to Quebec with one suitcase and no return ticket.That part is there next to the part where I fell in love with my boss in Brooklyn and we kissed in a canoe, next to the part with the boy who plays accordion. (There’s actually more than one of those.) And lately I’ve been a little wistful for consistency, but it hasn’t been panning out. One day Operaman calls at noon, to catch me on my lunchbreak, to ask about my morning. But the next day he is so far away I’m convinced I've misjudged the whole thing. Is it frustrating for you, watching me think I’ll figure this out?This is a part of my life I get to keep no matter what. The part where he sings and loans me socks, the part where we share everything we order for dinner. And maybe the next part is some sort of trainwreck, or maybe I’m reading it wrong again. Bravery, I am trying to tell myself. Bravery and breathing for two more weeks till the end of this strange uncertain year.
reindeer games
For a More Festive Holiday Season, I hereby recommend the following for the month of December:
Running across a park when it’s really cold. The grass crunches and it makes your lungs ache (but in a good way). Note: this one is hard to execute in Texas, Virginia, etc.
Kazoo caroling. Best done in groups, while drinking.
Glitter, on anything really.
Making silly faces into a mirror. During the work day. In elevators, for example, or in the bathroom right before a meeting.
Leaving voicemail messages entirely in song.
Hot beverages with things sprinkled on top. Cider / cinnamon, eggnog / nutmeg, etc.
The sending of photos to the cellphones of friends.
Turning music up loud and conducting. In your living room, or in your car at red lights. Really, it’s a lot more fun than it sounds.(your suggestions encouraged)
intro
On my right at happy hour was Kurt who just got back from Thailand. He kept talking in low tones across the table to Joshua about hookers, so I tried to keep looking left. But on my left was Ella who had also been to Thailand, after college, and was convinced this made her the most interesting person ever.Oh, did you go to this Thai place? she would ask, apropos of nothing, shouting it down the table to be sure everyone knew that she knew about Thailand. It was so much cheaper than Mexico. Kurt just stared, leaned in to Joshua again.When she’d gotten all the mileage she could out of Thailand she talked about being Jewish, which is apparently the most unique and interesting thing you can imagine, next to traveling in Thailand. Don’t out me, I telepathically told Rae across our Martini glasses. I don’t want anything in common with this woman.After half an hour of talking about herself, she turned to me. Have you ever been anywhere interesting? she asked. Here and there I replied. And I turned away. Fine. I’m the bitch.Finally I left in the middle, stood up abruptly and looped my scarf around my neck and said goodbye, which I guess was kind of rude. But after the conversation about how much I ought to like Superbad, about how it was so funny that even if I don’t like that kind of movie there is no way I wouldn’t like it, it seemed the least rude response I had in me.I like people, I really do. I like strangers and difficult people, too. But some days I like best the people who write books that I can read alone at a coffeeshop table, or people who make movies that I can watch alone in an old theater. And I like best the people whom I already know and love, who don’t give a shit that I lived in the rainforest, and who know that I’d hate Superbad.
Dear Cafe V Baristas,
I am glad you are down the street from my office. Your coffee is delicious, your foam is creamy, and your pastry case is the best in Portland. Most importantly, you are not a Starbucks. Unlike the Starbucks across the street, the Seattle’s Best next to the Starbucks, and the misleadingly named City Coffee two streets away, you are not even owned by the Starbucks empire. You are the only independent coffeeshop I’ve found within grab-a-coffee walking distance of my office. That said, you manage to ruin the coffee-getting experience for me nearly every time.
It starts with how you look at me when I order a twelve ounce drink and hand you my twenty ounce travel cup. I am not, as you seem to suspect, trying to get eight ounces for free. If I were just being cheap about coffee I would go to one of the many places that charge twenty five cents less per drink. Or I would order your eight ounce drink – to get twelve ounces for free. I order a twelve ounce drink when I feel like drinking twelve ounces. I don't carry around a set of nesting travel cups. I carry around one twenty ounce cup. If I order a twelve ounce drink, just put twelve ounces in it. This is the sort of high reasoning for which I pay you twenty five extra cents.
Next. Don’t be so bitchy about what all the pastries are called. You have at least two dozen different kinds of pastries in that case, so if I ask for “the one with pear on top” you don’t really need to scowl at me. It’s not like I asked for a “crescent roll.” I know my napoleon from my éclair, but you carry six different items that might be considered brioche. Not to mention the thing you insist on calling a beignet has very little in common with actual beignets. Rest assured I'm terribly impressed by your mastery of pastry nomenclature but really, that one time when I asked for the “small brioche” and you raised your eyebrows and said, “the mini brioche?” That time I almost slapped you.
Finally, it’s pretty transparent the way you smile and coo thank you right when you’re handing me my change. If you’ve been unpleasant since the moment I walked in, this two-second episode of pseudogeniality isn’t going to inspire me to drop a bill into your jar. I’ve been working hard all morning and this is my ten minute break. I’m not about to tip you well for trying to make me feel small during it. Perhaps this works on insecure people who desperately want to win your approval. But I’ve done your job and I know it only takes a little more effort to make people feel good, especially if you’re not using up all your energy being condescending and fake.
Thanks, that’s all. See you tomorrow.
