strike that

running away

2009-04-14T16:37:00.000-07:00

i hear it solves everything.

www.indagofelix.blogspot.com

3 * 2 * 1

2009-03-20T16:23:00.001-07:00

For the first day of spring I put on my new (to me) red shoes, which have a little strap across the top of my foot, and which have no heel. I did not put on tights or even knee socks, because it is spring. And although the weather is basically the same as it was yesterday, this morning I left my down vest and my knit scarf and my fuzzy hat in the front hall and I walked down my front stairs in a denim skirt and red shoes because today, unlike yesterday, it is spring.

Then I rode my bicycle to work. I used to ride my bicycle all the time but around November I started finding reasons not to. First it was dark early and the drivers weren’t used to it. Then it was snowy and icy, which was the only legitimate excuse of the lot. When it warmed up I had grown used to my new rhythm, a bus ride in the morning that let me read before work, and an hour-long walk home to unwind. Plus I had a flat tire. Insurmountable!

But you can’t coast through spring on lame excuses. My crocuses are popping all purple and white, and my daffodils, and yesterday I pulled the ivy that creeps over from my neighbors’, and new this week I can walk home from work and still have a beer on the porch before dark. So it’s bicycle time. I got a pump last weekend, my very first bicycle pump ever, and this morning I inflated my tire and then clicked on my helmet, and straightened my antennae, and strapped on my bag, and biked west.

Mist condensed around my eyes and I remembered certain muscles in my legs, and half way to downtown I unbuttoned my cardigan to cool my shoulders. I’ll do it all again in a few hours, after I’ve watched Portland State crush Xavier, or maybe not. It will be dark by then and I’ll put on my lights, the white one in front and the blinking red one in back, and I’ll pedal my way home in the rain.

riddance

2009-03-12T14:39:00.000-07:00

I am remembering the conversation I had with a friend several weeks after the end of Operaman. I think I’m too accepting of small problems in a relationship, I said.

Those problems weren’t small, he replied.

I was on the fence, for a long while, about the Accidental Date. Not about him in particular, but about the whole idea of dating. Because for the past few years dating has left me feeling so bad, and so often.

I hate to admit it but the slide started with Frenchie. When he shot me down it was small enough that I would have popped up quickly, except that I was in a new town with no network and no footing, and while I was down Disaster came along and kicked me. Operaman picked me up and I had just enough time to remember how much fun being up was before he dropped me. Twice.

When the AD appeared I was pretty finished. I felt like Fine. Let’s hang out. You stay over there.

And even after a little while, while I reluctantly acknowledged enjoying his company, I still wasn’t sure it was Something. Because it all felt a little too… easy.

What I needed to figure out, with a little help from the patience and humor of the AD, is that I can be excited about someone without a sense of futility and impending doom. It does not have to taste like Trouble that I can’t help wanting anyway. A kickass relationship does not actually have to Kick My Ass.

I think of this one girl I dated for years, a friend tells me, and how I used to say I loved the way she challenged me. But looking back I realize it felt challenging because everything with her was a struggle.

And struggle simply isn’t synonymous with adventure or spontaneity or growth. Struggle is just struggle, and there isn’t any joy in it, and it doesn’t leave room for much else.

I don’t equate lack of struggle with lack of Issues. Who’s alive thirty years without becoming a little complicated? Issues is not the issue. Ultimately the only Issue of consequence with Operaman was that he didn’t actually want to date me. For which reason I now propose this dating mantra for universal adoption.

I will not date someone whom I do not want to date.
I will not date someone who does not want to date me.

It’s alarmingly easy to come up with reasons to break one of these rules. It’s always a bad idea.

I realize just how bad an idea it is a little more each day, as this thing with the AD continues to not be a bad idea. Like last week when, hearing that I have an upcoming conference in Phoenix, he suggested we make a week of it in the desert.

We did not weigh the pros and cons of a trip or agonize over scheduling. He shot me an email proposing it, and I accepted. We are both busy people so we moved things around, with great pleasure, to fit it in, and now in ten days we are going. I didn’t have to convince him that it would be fun or worth his time. I didn’t have to agonize over whether a week together is at this point a good idea. In fact I didn’t have to do much at all, except say yes. With the AD my inclination to say yes all the time finally seems like a strength instead of a weakness.

getting there

2009-02-27T15:09:00.000-08:00

It sure is beautiful out.

There is a book lying open in my lap but it is, in fact, so beautiful out that I have grown distracted and started looking out the streetcar window.

I turn my head from the window towards where he is sitting. Sure is! I say, upbeat but noncommittal, and return to the window.

Talking to strangers is one of the pleasures of public transportation for me, but I’m not right now in the mood. I am reading a good book. And besides that I don’t usually get to take the streetcar, and its route runs through neat little neighborhoods. I have purposely taken a seat next to the window with an empty seat beside it.

I was just at the hospital, he continues. Sigh, I think. This is not just going to be an unwelcome conversation. It is going to be an unwelcome conversation of oversharing.

I reluctantly turn again. He explains how a bike accident several months ago messed up his leg. How he re-injured it this week. Each time I offer a polite response and turn back to the window, he continues. He speaks across the aisle and the empty seat between us. How he has found a specialist, the best specialist, at this hospital, Dr. So-and-so, how they took an MRI this morning and hopefully it can be fixed with therapy. He doesn’t want surgery. This is the point he returns to.

After four stops a young woman gets on and sits in the seat between us. There we go, I think, but he continues, just as before, so that she has to lean back awkwardly to stay out of the way. Eventually he trails off. I go back to the view. The woman gets up and a man with a cane slides into her place.

I was just at the hospital, says Bike Accident to the new audience. The man with the cane looks at him carefully. Me too, he says.

They exchange stories. Rather, Bike Accident delivers his same story again, while the man with the cane tries to engage him in exchange. They were, after all, both just at the hospital. But Bike Accident has a lot to say. It is hard for him to listen.

The man with the cane is a good listener. He adjusts. He is 71. I learn more about him from what he doesn't say. He is calm. He doesn’t seem bothered when his comments go unnoticed. Bike Accident eventually takes a breather.

I’m curious about this book you’re reading, says the man with the cane. I like the title, he says. I realize he is talking to me. I turn and smile. The book in my lap is A Good Man Is Hard To Find.

It’s a book of short stories, I say. I’ve only read two so far.

He looks at the cover, at the name of the author, Flannery O’Conner. I love that Irish brogue they use, he says. And he smiles a smile of communion. He is probably picturing the author as a reclusive hard-drinking Irishman rather than a twenty-something Southern Gothic catholic girl, but I am glad that my book has pleased him.

Bike Accident picks up again. He brings it around from his injury to the habits of his brother, or father, or stepfather – I am getting my things together to get off so I don’t hear the details. Only that this person yells a lot, that Bicycle Accident doesn’t like being around him. There is something about alcohol.

The man with the cane frowns at the relative’s difficult behavior. You have to learn to love yourself, he says, as advice to the absent relative, and then that love comes out on other people. It is such an honest thing to say on a streetcar.

Good luck with your leg I say to Bicycle Accident as I get out, and I look in his eyes, and I mean it. Enjoy the day says the man with the cane to me. Maybe I’ll be seventy one before I’m the person I want to be, and maybe not even then. I’ll keep practicing.

blogging master cleanse

2009-02-23T10:05:00.000-08:00

The problem with not blogging for such a very long time is that then there is a blog backlog in my brain, and I have trouble choosing just one thing to write about. So many things to write about that I don’t write about anything at all.

So I need to do a little purge. Purging posts are never the best but it seems to me to be the only way to move on.

It’s been a busy three weeks.

I could write about how Iowa came west again for the weekend, how we went dancing and drank cocktails and talked the way we used to talk when we both lived in Eugene, and how much I miss that. I could write about the game of Celebrities we put together – the lamest game of Celebrities I’ve ever played because the names people put in were all actual celebrities. No Sylvia Plath or C S Lewis. All Jay Z and Branjolina.

I could write about the weekend when my Cousin D came up from California, how we ate still-warm appam at the palatial Lake Oswego house of his college buddy, a house that took me twenty minutes to locate because I’ve lost my suburban sensibility. How we played pool downtown at a newly nonsmoky bar and took so long to clear the table that they asked us to quit. How my cousin, a cute and wickedly funny straight guy a few years older than me, recently bought a book called How to Meet Your Husband When You’re Over 35.

I could write about how the City of Portland is switching to a new online accounting system, how it’s driving everyone crazy, how it has made work into one long tragicomic folly with equal parts Dilbert and Office Space. How I’ve had to attend weekly training sessions, some of them two and a half hours long, in which sentences like the following are delivered in earnest: Just remember that what we used to call a Center Code in IBIS is now a Cost Center, or a Functional Area, in SAP, and you can easily recognize this number because it will be something like ESBS0000006, if it’s a Cost Center, but a Functional Area will instead look something like PUASBSRS0000BE- and isn’t that funny, that it starts PU, since it’s the sewer bureau! – but also don’t forget that sometimes a Cost Center is the same thing as a Cost Fund.

I could write a lot about how I went to Austin to meet the one-year-old daughter of my highschool friend, how this daughter makes the cutest frog sound I’ve ever heard, DIP-uhd-DIP-uhd-DIP-uhd, how we made fondue and lay in the sun, how in two days we ate a year’s worth of cheese and chocolate and marshmallows, and how I was introduced to Wii, in which my bowling skills far surpassed my drumming.

Or I could write about how I am falling in love, which would probably be the most fun thing to write about, because I’m at that part where I want to tell total strangers – that part where when someone in line with me at the grocery store says Man this line is slow I want to say Yes, but I’m falling in love. So maybe next time.

hard habit to break

2009-01-30T13:28:00.000-08:00

Living alone has never appealed to me.

Growing up an only child, with two working parents, in a no-sidewalks suburb, on a street with no kids – I spent a lot of time alone. I got really good at amusing myself. I can’t speak to what goes on in anyone else’s head, but what goes on in mine can keep me occupied for days at a time with very little external stimulus. Sometimes in movies when there’s that scene with the guy locked in solitary confinement or stranded on a desert island or languishing alone in a bamboo POW cage in the jungle, I think, Yeah. I could do that.

Which is not to say it would be my preference. Moving into a dorm at seventeen was majestic. There were people everywhere. There were people hanging out in the TV lounge and cooking in the kitchen, people to chat with while brushing your teeth and people in the hall at three in the morning. And though people come with problems – messes and noise and missing food – I decided I never wanted to live alone again.

Since college I have shared one residence after another, with friends and significant others and strangers from craigslist. I have lived with other people, without exception, all the way up until last March when I bought a house of my own. And then, for a few months, I lived by myself.

I didn’t really like it. I didn’t like coming home and knowing no one would be there, and I hated falling asleep aware of empty rooms all around me. I stopped cooking very often because it’s not so fun, cooking for one – and because if I was out of eggs or cinnamon there were no one else’s to borrow. I know that for some people this would be a boon, all that privacy and quiet, everything just how you left it. But it’s not what I’m after.

So as soon as I could manage I got housemates. And technically I have one now. He’s a new college grad, just setting up in Portland. But he works construction jobs all around the state for weeks at a time, without coming back through town. When he’s here he stays with his girlfriend – something about her place having an oven and central heat. It works out well for everyone: I get a check that helps me make my mortgage, and he gets a well-located spot to stash his stuff. We both get to be independent grown-ups.

And I’ve noticed of late that living alone has its sweet spots. For example last night after I walked home from work, under a sky that’s light a little later every day now, I threw my boots on the floor and cranked up a Chicago Greatest Hits album I’d found at the public library bookstore on my lunch hour. I fried up eggs and plantains while belting out What Kind of Man Would I Be. There may have been some dancing.

So it’ll do, for now. I’m growing into my space and letting it all feel just like me. And maybe I have been given this time as a little calm before the storm, as a respite to get grounded and get ready. Because really what I’d like is for this house to be more full of people than is reasonable – friends and family and at least one sloppy dog, people who stop by unannounced and stay too long. I’m already keeping the fridge stocked with beer. I have a sofa now, and a number of things to sit on, some of them chairs.

It is nice, having things that are mine: a roof and rooms, time and tomatoes. I could get even more used to it than I have already. But I think instead I'll give it away.

PS LOL CSNY

2009-01-15T17:03:00.000-08:00

When I was back east in December I sat at a kitchen table with my childhood friend R while she fielded a phonecall about heart attacks. One of her extended family members had been rushed to the emergency room, and her phone number was passed hand to hand until these distant relatives reached out to her for reassurance. R has a PhD and an MD and beyond this, remarkably for someone so skilled at science, she has always been one of the most personable people I know – someone who understands where other people are at and what they need. If I was ever sick with anything, R is who I would want there. She is the person I would trust most to know what was going on and to tell me about it.

So R sat at the table across from me, calmly translating the frantic word-of-mouth from the relatives into clear and careful information. She talked about what the different things wrong might be, and why the doctors were doing the tests they were doing, and what the results would mean. She suggested other tests that might wisely be requested, and then suggested the most effective ways to go about requesting them. I felt so lucky to be there. Because how often do you get to witness what your adult friends actually do?

And listening to R, I also felt – and I hate to admit this – a little bit embarrassed. Because somewhere since high school, R got really, really good at this medicine thing. My other friend from high school has an art therapy practice, and my other friend from high school is a lawyer, and my other friend from high school runs her own marketing business. They are all very good at what they do. What exactly have I been doing with myself while they were getting good at things?

I’ve traveled around a bunch. And I guess that’s enough for me, because I wouldn’t trade it for anything. I lived in some interesting places and held bizarre short-term jobs and acquired quite a lot of miscellaneous skills. But the skills aren’t under any particular umbrella. What's the proper profession for someone who can survey sea turtle nests and make a pretty GIS map and order bread in Dutch? The closest thing my skill set might be useful for is journalism, which is something I planned to do for a while. I gave up the idea in college, and I sometimes wonder why.

I was in a room just now with a community of brownfield professionals, talking about brownfield topics. I’m much more fluent in brownfields than I was just a year ago. And if I keep doing this for even five more years, I could really get something going. It’s a small enough realm that I could confidently get my head around it, and then grow it in directions I find familiar and fascinating.

But while there is something undeniably appealing about being a specialist, there’s also something about it that stops me in my tracks. Five years? In one job? In one field? It’s a little hard to imagine.

In the mean time I came back to my office and I wrote an email that contained the following text.

The site is directly adjacent to the creek (map link below) on the southwest corner of Street and 108th. It’s a 7600 square foot gravel lot owned by BES. DEQ issued an NFA letter for the property several years ago; remaining petroleum contamination was left in place because of a sewer line and other barriers to traditional soil removal. The grant we just received from EPA will fund in situ bioremediation of the remaining contamination pockets. Our contractor is working on the ABCA right now.

The moral of the story is apparently this: if it’s late at night and you’re running low on acronyms and you don’t know who to call, I’m your girl. I can also edit and steam milk.

oh nine

2009-01-02T16:57:00.000-08:00

Two thousand seven was like trying to herd cats. But two thousand eight is all about ducks in a row.

That’s what I wrote last year around this time. You remember last year, don’t you? 2008?

The ducks were shockingly cooperative, quack quack quack. Because holy shit: I bought a house. If that was the whole list right there, I’d have to say it would have been enough. (D’ayenu.)

After buying the house I then (with much help) pulled off many of its floors and walls and ceilings. I haven’t put on new ones just yet but – well, one step at a time. I drilled in a new doorlock and wrenched in a new faucet and replaced the flapper in the toilet. I salvaged a dining table and steadied the steps. In the summer there were eggplants, and pole beans. In the winter there was a woodstove.

I didn’t know how to do any of this, when I started, except the eggplants.

And there would be a longer paragraph of house-things, but there were so many other things this year too. There was hiking and biking and two weekend-long weddings, trips to Detroit and Seattle and Southern California, a seven-day expedition in Eastern Oregon. There was yoga again, finally, and new running shoes that are ready for some mileage.

This past year I continued to hold down my first post-grad-school full-time job, and though it has not been where I’ve directed the force of my insight and energy this year, it’s come along ok. I spoke at a couple of conferences and filled out a few neat projects and helped pull in three big grants. I more or less know what I’m doing now, even if I’m not always doing it as well as I might be.

In 2008 I got out of, and then back into, and then out of, once and for all, a beautiful and surprising and frustrating relationship – a relationship that on its good days filled me with joy and possibility, and that on other days asked me to be more realistic. I’m still pretty sad about it. But as long as I’m laying out good things, I might as well say that I’d never before dated someone with an ex-wife, or with children. These things were really, really hard sometimes, in all kinds of new ways, and I didn’t always do the right thing. But I tried hard to do the right thing almost all of the time. I think I got better at it. I think that most of the time I did the best I knew how to do. There’s that, at least. That and the time we sat on a sunny rock in the forest, and I swam, and he sang. You can’t really regret much when there was that, even if my heart feels more tired than it used to.

I didn’t learn to play guitar in 2008; maybe I never will. But I had Passover dinner in my falling-down dining room, and hosted a night of Celebrities, and ate spaetzle in the park with Mo from DC. I baked a pumpkin pecan pie for Thanksgiving. I hung my first holiday lights. And to close out the year I visited my oldest friend in Philadelphia, a woman I’ve known since we were basically babies, and soon she will have a baby herself. Which is all a little bit crazy, and perfect.

I don’t know what two thousand nine is going to be about yet. I do know that I’ve been going dancing a lot lately. I’ve picked out a bar that’s going to be my bar, and I’ve found a long-term volunteer position that suits me, and I no longer get lost driving to the homes of my Portland friends. I think that means I’m beginning to belong here. Which means it’s probably time to shake things up a little.

seasoning

2008-12-26T15:57:00.000-08:00

Things really got interesting the morning my toilet froze.

It had started with a thin sheet of ice on the surface of the water in the bowl. But by morning it was solid. Not just the water in the bowl but also the water in the tank – frozen into one big block with the black plastic buoy suspended in the center.

We are having a cold snap in Portland. I didn’t worry much about this kind of cold when I got my woodstove. We don’t usually have this kind of cold. When I say that, I don’t mean that we have it only once or twice a winter. What I mean is that years and years go by, decades even, without Portland seeing a temperature in the teens. We are in a valley between mountains. We are wet, but we are temperate.

Once in a while it will snow. It will snow weakly and unconvincingly and the flakes will melt on contact, leaving the same wet pavement we all expect from November to May. Snow on the ground is something Portlanders drive east for.

This year, though, it started falling fast the week before Christmas, and then it just kept falling. A dusting and then an inch and then more than we knew how to count, and it didn’t disappear. It covered our cars and our porch steps and our crosswalks and we stood around and stared. Because surely it couldn’t last.

Then the temperatures dipped to the twenties, and stayed there. Everyone was at a loss. We do not have plows in Portland. We don’t have salt trucks, because of the salmon. We don’t have snow tires. We wrapped ourselves up in puffy layers of outerwear, the likes of which I’ve never seen on the west coast. Where did all these coats and boots possibly come from? And we set out on foot, haltingly navigating to the store, smiling stupidly.

Portland Public Schools were closed for days. The mayor sent us home from work. Stores sold out of chains and windshield scrapers. Buses skidded out across intersections. The citywide transportation information hotline went dead.

And then my toilet froze. Oddly – luckily, perplexingly – my pipes did not burst. They did not burst even though some of them run uninsulated outside the house, and uninsulated in the crawl space, and uninsulated through my bathroom – which, when I am not home stoking a fire, is more or less the same temperature as my yard.

Did I mention yet that I ran out of wood? I was waiting on a load that fell through, and by the time I called around to order a new cord, the storm had hit. Increased demand and impassable roads made waitlists two weeks long. I fished out my space heater, and my wool socks. It’s not so bad, I think. People lived here for a long time without furnaces. My only concern came the morning I woke up to find my boots, abandoned the night before in the hall, still caked in snow.

Today, though, it seems to officially be coming to an end. Current precipitation is wholly liquid, and the ten-day sits squarely in the forties. Soon I will have a new load of oak and fir, and I will not make that particular procrastination mistake again. In the mean time I have a renewed appreciation for my hot water heater, and for fleece, and for flushing.

let there be

2008-12-12T17:06:00.000-08:00

My dining room – the center of my house, and a place where I pay bills, and wrap gifts, and occasionally even dine – has a single light fixture, a small old chandelier with five candle-shaped bulbs. Two of these bulbs have been out since I moved in. When a third popped off last week the room became rather undeniably dark.

When I say “last week” I mean, of course, early November.

Yesterday I finally arrived at the store with a tiny sketch of the needed bulb. An easy enough assignment. But I’ve been diligently switching to compact fluorescent lightbulbs, and so I tried first to find some of those. CFLs use less electricity and last longer. Switching to CFLs is the single easiest thing that everyone can do to get greener.

But if your fixture has a dim feature (which mine does) you need special dimmable CFLs. And some CFLs have terrible light quality, so it’s important to find bulbs with the EnergyStar logo so you don’t get crappy light. Frustratingly the candle-shaped bulbs at this particular store came in either (a) non-dimmable EnergyStar or (b) non-EnergyStar dimmable, and neither was what I wanted.

Furthermore the CFL candle bulbs were $8 each. At $3 for a four-pack of conventional bulbs, spending $40 to light a single fixture felt absurd, even if it would pay for itself within my natural life. Plus the non-candle-shaped CFL bulbs were $4, which felt unfair.

But the conventional bulbs looked all fragile and Made In China, like they were engineered to be thrown away and replaced. They felt wasteful and short-sighted. They felt like the cheap package you were supposed to pick up without further thought, which itself felt like a problem.

So I stood there paralyzed, staring at an assortment of equally inappropriate bulbs and unsure of what to do. I think I stood there a long time.

And I tell you this now not to illustrate the thoughtfulness I put into my purchasing or to educate you about new lightbulb technology, but to remind you that we are all, every one of us, Occasionally Crazy. I stood there with my hands full of lightbulbs as if this decision might Change the Course of History.

I have friends with filthy kitchens because they are driven to clean their kitchens so thoroughly that any cleaning short of a complete cleaning is futile. I have friends who write down their odometer reading in a tiny little glovebox notebook each time they get gasoline. I have friends who mow their lawns in specific patterns, so that the grass doesn’t get smushed down unevenly.

And once in a while, when I witness these ordinary insanities, I find myself rolling my eyes. Wouldn’t a slightly clean kitchen be better than this abomination? I silently wonder. Or, Have you ever even looked in that notebook for any purposeful reason? Or Patterns in your lawn? Seriously?

And then the universe sends me to the electrical aisle at ten thirty on a Thursday night and fills my hands with lightbulbs, that I might become fraught with indecision. That I might face my own Inner Crazy, and remember why it is there.

It is there, for me, right now, because apparently I am craving a feeling of control. Much of my life feels out of my hands but This, this I can do – I can choose the proper lightbulb. I can weigh my options carefully and make the choice that is Right, and it will go just as I plan.

Sometimes it’s there for other reasons. Sometimes we clean or record or mow to feel competent or wise or of consequence. Crazy can be all kinds of useful. And what am I hoping for, anyway, when I wish it away? A world where we all make optimized reasonable decisions based on efficiency? A world where we only think about important things, all the time? Which things are those?

I bought the $3 four-pack. I didn’t feel great about it but I came home and got up on a chair and put them in. I figured out that two of the three dark bulbs weren’t actually burned out at all – just improperly adjusted. I’m sure there’s a lesson there too but mostly it just started me laughing, long and loud in my empty, bright room.

you came along just then

2008-12-06T03:33:00.000-08:00

I could date a boy named Malachi, I thought, when the guitarist introduced the drummer of that name at the Friday night show being held in honor of the end of Prohibition. A Repeal Party, it was called, which I’d never heard of.

We had been on our way to 80s night, actually, but then Allie had heard that this guitarist she adored was playing at the Bagdad. So there I was drinking three dollar whiskey, surrounded by flappers and fedoras in my leg warmers and off-the-shoulder tee.

I wasn’t interested in that specific Malachi. The thought just entered my head unbidden that I could date a Malachi. And I remembered a few years ago in an Anchorage kitchen telling my friend about my plans to fly to Quebec for a boy I hardly knew, whom I’d met years before while backpacking and who invited me to visit via instant messenger. And the friend, happily married, told me that this was the one thing she missed: random and unexpected romance. Possibility.

Malachi, I thought. I rolled the name around in my mouth like a foreign airport.

I have spent the past year in an unfamiliar world of wanting. It might have to do with all of the babies I have witnessed – warm, sweet babies in the lives of people my age. Or it might have to do with this house I now own, the way it is too big for one person, and how scary it is to use the ladder alone. It might have to do with the entrance into my life of a man who seemed as intriguing as keeping my options open.

In any case there I was wanting, and not getting at all what I wanted. There was a lot of sadness.

Since things ended I have been remembering what it was I did before all that wanting. Namely, just doing. Doing things in the world around me as they presented themselves. Projects. Painting. Repeal Parties. And I have been narrating it like so. I feel like a gift he doesn’t want to open.

And up to and including this week, as I have been growing back into myself, as I have been staring in mortified awe at the person I became (who tried to need nothing at all and then less) I was still phrasing it like so. Why can’t I just be myself with him? Why can’t I be frank about what I hope for? His doubt feeds my smallness and my smallness feeds his doubt.

And this week especially, as I have taken stock of myself – as I have seen plainly that actually I am not lonely at all, that actually I have quite a lot of friends with whom I do fun and interesting things (when I’m not trying to keep my whole schedule clear) and that furthermore I often enjoy doing things alone – I was still phrasing it this way. Is he really going to let me leave?

But then somewhere on the dance floor, maybe when the adored guitarist was singing that corny pretty song about Colette, I thought about Operaman, for the first time, in the past tense.

And what has been hard for me, these past few weeks (though things seem decidedly to be swinging my way) has been accepting that Operaman will not be the story of my life. He will be – is already – just a story. Even though he felt so much bigger than that.

Once I loved an opera singer. He broke my heart.

Other things happened next that weren’t about him at all.

ok, just one more thing

2008-11-26T13:05:00.000-08:00

So what are you up to for the long weekend? asked Accidental Date.

Well, I said, I’d like to spend some time outdoors. But Thursday I’m having Thanksgiving dinner with good friends in Seattle.

Huh, he said, and paused for approximately three seconds. So one option is that I could pick you up in Seattle and we could go backpacking.

That’s when I decided to stop being bitter.

on purpose

2008-11-24T12:29:00.000-08:00

The Accidental Date and I had a second, non-accidental date last night. (I guess this means I’ll have to think of a new name for him. Would calling him The Rebound be too true to be funny?) We went to a concert. We danced the whole time. I don’t mean we danced together - I mean he and I both danced all through the concert. If you are not a concert dancer, and specifically if you are not a concert dancer who has dated a non-concert dancer, you may not understand how important this is. So let me just tell you: it’s really important.

It’s so important that when I noticed the couple next to us – a cute guy about our age in a sweet little hipster hat, dancing around, and a pretty girl in red, resolutely standing still even when he tried to dance with her just a little – it took everything in me not to walk up to him and say, You, her? Bad idea.

Afterwards we went to a bar down the street and started talking to the couple next to us. They had been married for ten years and were having a date while her parents watched their daughter. I asked her how they met, and she lit up. She started telling the story – about seeing him when he was visiting a friend in her apartment building, and how he almost wasn’t there that day, and the way they contrived a second meeting – and when he heard her telling the story he lit up too, and joined in.

I was handsome then, he said at one point, and she said You’re still handsome, not in a reassuring tone but just straightforward as fact, and went right on with the story. I was hot then, she said later. You’re hot now, he said smiling.

At the end she turned right to me and said Look. Here’s the point. True love really happens. You really don’t have to settle. You Do Not Have To Settle. We’ve been married ten years and sometimes it has sucked, but we love each other. It can be done. You can meet someone and love them, and just be good to them.

It’s a phrase Operaman and I used often: I just want to be good to you. But we never figured out how to do it. And we never mastered that part where it was ok to take a little risk – I was handsome then – and trust completely that the other person would be there as backup.

In any case Accidental Date and I are meeting up again tonight. And that may be all you hear from me about him and/or Operaman for a little while. Because it doesn’t take much doing to come across this blog, and endless posting about how he’s cool but I’m clearly not over my ex doesn’t seem like the best thing to have out there. (Hello, Accidental Date! Sorry about the whole not-being-over-my-ex thing. I sure had fun dancing though.)

I guess you’ll get to hear a lot more about cement and so on.

don't tell my heart

2008-11-17T12:10:00.000-08:00

This weekend I accidentally went on a date.

I didn’t think it was going to be a date. I thought it was going to be me and a friend-of-a-friend and maybe another person or two getting together for an event we were all interested in attending.

But then the event got cancelled, and the “maybe another person or two” got cancelled. It’s cancelled but I’d still like to go out with you, is what the Accidental Date said to me on the phone in the afternoon. The wording caught in my head for a second, but I assumed he meant It’s cancelled but we might as well do something anyway since it’s Saturday night.

I did not think it was going to be a date because I have been sending out zero flirty vibes in the past few weeks. If I’m sending out any vibes at all, they are saying something like I am a bitter and moody girl who cries at inappropriate times and has started drinking a lot more than before.

When we were all out last week on the night we made the original event plans, I looked up at one point and noticed that the Accidental Date was quite attractive. And my immediate thought was He’s quite attractive! He should hook up with that cute girl at the end of the table. That is how much dating is not on my mind right now.

So I was a little surprised when I opened the door Saturday night and the Accidental Date had a bottle of wine.

OH, is what I thought, when I opened the door. Wine.

I thought you might like this wine, is what he said. But what I heard was, I had this bottle of wine so I brought it for us to drink. Like maybe the wine was for economic reasons - cheaper than the bar! - or… I have no idea. Rationalization is a wondrous thing.

We talked for a while in my living room, drinking wine, and I thought, Ok, we have good rapport, but so what? Last week I took great interest in an article about New York condos. That doesn’t mean I’m in the market.

We went to dinner and he paid. This is just a friendly thing, said my head. Why divide the bill when he can just pay for dinner, and then I can pay for drinks after? We went to drinks after. He paid.

Now, I’m not gonna say I was unpleasant during this evening, but I was not turning up the charm. I was not going out of my way to be likable. And though the dateyness of the evening became more and more difficult to deny, I still wasn’t flirting. I was vigilantly not flirting. I kept my hands in my pockets. I kept my feet under my chair. This is just friendly! I insisted, as we shared a piece of cake.

We stayed out until late, and then he said nice, datey things to me, and then he went home.

And despite my best efforts, I kinda had fun. It felt good to have someone show up at my door with a bottle of wine, and ask me questions, and take me out. And he was cute and funny and interesting, though I tried not to care too much. I would like to go out with him again. But afterwards, replaying the accidental date in that silly post-date way, I couldn’t shake the feeling I’d cheated on Operaman.

reminder

2008-11-14T12:49:00.000-08:00

I find when I’m overwhelmed with inappropriate self pity, it’s a good idea to reorient myself by helping people whose lives actually suck. Last night I went to a volunteer training for a program that would allow me to do this.

After two hours of orientation, we were asked to do the meet-the-person-next-to-you exercise. I opened by asking Berg about his family, and he gleefully began describing his two small children.

We were then asked to come up front and introduce our partners. This is Berg, I started. He lives on the coast with his wife and kids, and he found out about this program from a friend. I continuted for a while, then he introduced me, and we sat down.

A few minutes later we were listening to another pair’s introductions when Berg leaned in to me and whispered, No wife, by the way.

Pardon? I whispered back.

It was a nice introduction you gave me, but I don’t have a wife. Just two children. He smiled a smile that said more than I’d learned already.

And don’t you worry your pretty little heads about this, friends: I’m full up, for the moment, on the divorced / kids / long distance combo plate. In any case I’m not interested just now in dating anyone at all.

But I’m thinking that, though I miss Operaman something awful, and though I have certain considerable concerns about finding someone else so simpatico, the meeting people thing itself will not be the problem.

contingency

2008-11-13T10:08:00.000-08:00

Last night I read a book cover to cover – the first time I’ve done that in a long time – from 5:30 in the stacks at Powell’s to the coffee shop to the bus, to midnight under a blanket in a chair in my front room. It had started unintentionally wile I was waiting for a child to move away from Junot Diaz. Joan Didion was one shelf over. The Year of Magical Thinking caught my eye because magical thinking is an Operaman phrase.

This book is about the year that follows the death of the author’s husband. On the back, boxed in blue, the text says it “will speak to anyone who has ever loved a husband or a wife or child.”

And in case I haven’t laid on the melodrama thick enough in my blog lately, here exactly is the irrational heaviness that has somehow seeped into my life: that I haven’t, and what if I never do?

It’s not really already so dire. I’m doing pretty good, given the heartbreak. I just feel so done with this dating-and-breakup thing. And I’m angry and sad about Operaman. I wanted us to figure things out that we didn’t know how to do.

Two weeks ago I asked a friend if she planned to have a second baby, and she said yes. I told her I was glad because as an only child I think only children are a terrible idea – both too lonely and too good at being alone. Did you have a dog? she asked. I didn’t.

My parents are practical, and dogs are bad for carpets and vacations. Too much to give up for something outside yourself. But I am no practical person. Settle me somewhere safe and I will gamble it for an unpromising alliance. People I have liked and loved lately are wary of what they might forfeit, but I’m terrified of what I might keep.

No-dog love is not the kind for me. No-dog love is the kind Operaman offered, and I struggled with it start to end. It never seemed to suit either of us. I was sure we were up for something more.

I want the kind that can fill two hundred and twenty seven pages with just the first impressions of its absence, the kind that makes you cry that you might never have something so big to lose.

aloud

2008-11-10T10:08:00.000-08:00

The two shows at the Oregon Convention Center this weekend were the Hoilday Food & Gift Fair and Wordstock. I was surprised to find that at the entrance, I couldn’t tell who was headed for which event.

I wasn’t planning to go to Wordstock. Its name makes me think of the literary gathering in Wonderboys – selfserious and cliquey and narrated by a weary Michael Douglas. But on Saturday morning I was talking to an old friend about my breakup, and she said it was for the best. You like to do things, she reminded me. You need to date someone who makes time for concerts and readings. And I realized I haven’t been to a reading in a very long time.

So Saturday I heard John Hodgman and Sunday I heard Alison Bechdel and Selden Edwards and Rachael King. I forget Portland is such a literary place, because it’s not a community I’m part of, and because I still carry around my inner East Coast Arts Snob. Like, Oh, people create things outside of New York?

And Rachel King described how she started writing like this: I realized if I was going to be the writer I always knew I was going to be, I had to actually write something. I like that.

And then I heard William Least Heat Moon, who wrote Blue Highways in 1980 when his marriage dissolved and he headed out in a van around the country. He just completed a second book, twenty five years later, while traveling with his second wife. An audience member asked whether he preferred traveling alone or with a partner. If I’d traveled with somebody for Blue Highways there would have been no book, he said, because back then I didn’t know how to pay attention with somebody else present.

I used to believe I had to choose between paying attention – to what was around me, to what I wanted to do and get done – and having somebody else present. And usually I would choose the former, and occasionally I would choose the latter. And only recently, like maybe yesterday, did it occur to me that just because I don’t yet know how to do both at the same time doesn’t mean it’s not an option.

In my relationship with Operaman, we both felt like we had to choose. He chose paying attention, and I chose him. In choosing, we both chose poorly. Now I remember why I used to go to readings.

get outta the kitchen

2008-11-07T16:11:00.000-08:00

A week after I moved in last March, the oil furnace in my basement died. It was ancient and had never been maintained and I didn’t get it fixed. I wore sweaters and awaited warmer weather.

The warmer weather came, and now it is gone again.

After several months of research into every possible way to heat a home, I’m getting a woodstove. It’s pretty and it fits the era of my house, and it works even when the power goes out and when fuel prices go up. And of all the options I explored, it’s the one I feel the most excited about. I'ts green and efficient and just a little unexpected. If it’s a hassle and a headache I’ll add something more conventional next year, but for now it’s all woodstove all the time.

The woodstove itself was cheap compared to any other system, but the extras quickly added up. There’s the pipe from the stove to the chimney, for starters, and a different pipe for the chimney to the roof. There’s the special legs I wanted, which cost extra. There’s the guy who shows up to put it all together in a way that won’t burn down my house.

A woodstove also needs a hearthpad, so that sparks and heat don’t set the floor aflame. The prefab hearthpads sold by the stove store were made of NASA material trying to look like stone. I just couldn’t pay so much for something so ugly. I decided to make my own.

I’ve had moderate success, so far, at avoiding Home Depot. There are two great local hardware stores in my neighborhood, and no fewer than three used building supply warehouses in Portland. But this time it seemed inescapable: the project required clean fresh supplies and an assortment of appropriate tools. Also – did I forget to mention this? – I waited until the day before my scheduled installation to get started. So I needed everything in one place, and quickly.

Home Depot hooked me up. Three different Home Depot employees and two helpful Home Depot customers provided thorough and only occasionally conflicting advice on tiling supplies and techniques. I left with a full cart and a plan.

At home I spread everything out on my dining room floor. The dining room and kitchen are essentially one big room, and the wood stove is going between them against the wall with the old chimney. I started by screwing cement board into a four foot square piece of plywood. Then the cement board needed cement, but there were no directions on the bag about proportions. One of the Home Depot guys had said “like oatmeal,” but I realized, as acrid clouds of powder filled the air, that there are all different consistencies of oatmeal. Oatmeal like soup? Oatmeal like clay? I aimed for something in the middle.

I also had no idea how much cement I would need. I consulted three DIY books and each said Follow the instructions on your cement. So I guessed.

Ten minutes later I put a skim coat on the cement board. The excess wet cement slopped over onto my hardwood floors, which of course I had forgotten to cover. Then I put on a thick coat of cement, and sculpted it into even little teeth with my trowel. This was ridiculously satisfying. It turns out I hadn’t made quite enough, so I had to scoop out every last oatmeal-like deposit from the bucket bottom with my hands. My hands, and then the trowel, and then my clothes, and finally the floor, became encrusted in (oatmeal-like) cement. But the cement-drying clock was ticking. I ignored the mess.

I pressed the tiles into the stiff cement ridges, slipping little plastic spacers in between to keep the grout lines even. I wouldn’t have time to grout before the stove came, I learned, because it turns out cement needs two days to cure. I would just have to grout around the stove.

For the sides and the front of the hearthpad I cut the tiles in half with a cheapass tile cutter from the Depot. It was awkward and cut rough, crooked lines, but I decided this would add to the Did It Myself charm. Lastly I tried to even out the tile heights. I’m sure there’s a trick to this. I don’t know it.

All in all, though, the hearthpad looks pretty good. It has maybe been my most successful home project to date, saving me three hundred dollars and involving neither blood loss nor despair. And I even had time to grout it, because when Monday came the installer’s wife went into labor. So my stove is arriving next week.

vote

2008-11-04T11:07:00.001-08:00

Beth and I dated for almost four years, and during this time I learned a lot of things. There were the things I learned from her, of course – but there were also the things I learned about other people from how they treated us as a same-sex couple. I learned about the way strangers can threaten you without saying anything. I learned about the way business owners and waitresses can let you know you don’t belong. I learned about the importance of being deliberately, overtly welcoming to people who have come to expect cold receptions. And I learned what it’s like to realize you’ll never be President.

Not that I was going to be president. It’s a very American idea, though – that anyone could be. I remember being taught that in first grade, and I remember writing an essay about how I would be the first woman president. Why the first? my teacher wrote in the margins. It took me a long time to figure out what she meant.

That was the last time I wanted to be President. Politics is neither my interest nor my strength. But one day when I was living in Eugene with Beth I suddenly realized that being president was actually not an option. Not because I don’t want to be, but because of who I am. Americans would never elect a woman president who had been in a relationship with a woman, no matter what, no exceptions. I thought, for the first time, that lots of people can’t actually be president. It’s telling it took me thirty years to realize this. I bet lots of first graders already know enough about the world to not buy that line in the first place.

In first grade I looked at the poster of forty white Christian guys (one Catholic) and I thought, a woman could be up there. Two decades later I know that a gay person couldn’t. A Muslim couldn’t. An atheist couldn’t. And when I was thinking about this list, just seven years ago, I also added: a black person couldn’t. Because what black first grader looking at that poster would ever believe that anyone could be president? What thirty-year-old looking at America could ever think America would vote for a black president, no matter how qualified he or she was?

So even as the economy has come crashing down and my country has been making one tragic decision after another overseas, even as this campaign brought out some of the most hateful, ignorant commentary from our collective closet, I have decided that today I will feel nothing but inspired about America, no matter what happens. Because millions of Americans, friends in New York City and relatives in Kentucky, have decided that they want a man named Barack Hussein Obama to be president. Can you imagine all of the personal struggle that was required for this to happen? Can you imagine all of the demons that had to be faced and conquered? Seriously, look at that fucking name! We are a flawed country, an ugly country sometimes. But we are also a brave country, a country of faith, and better than our fears.

all things considered

2008-10-30T12:58:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I switched email addresses. I sent an email out to my contacts explaining the situation: that I’ve had my Hotmail account since the beginning of time, that they finally drove me away with their new mandatory-big-flashy-advertising format, that I’m finally joining the ranks of Gmail.

My cousin responded right away. (You’re a cousin, right D? How are we even related? Our grandmothers were sisters maybe?) Anyway he writes me back as follows:

I love the back story, told so well. Who knew you were just switching email accounts and not telling of a forlorn princess instead. Great stuff.

Now in retrospect, my change-of-address email does appear to be four paragraphs long. And upon further consideration, I guess I could have gotten the point across in, say, four words.

My point being: this made me laugh a lot. Cause maybe there’s something to the drama queen thing. Could we just not call it drama queen though? Cause that makes me think of someone who believes that the whole world lives and dies with captivating minutiae of her extraordinary life. Whereas I just happen to find the minutiae of most people’s lives, mine included, somewhat captivating – while not believing the world lives and dies for any of us. So if you’re going to have a life it might as well be a good story. About a forlorn princess, for example.

note.

2008-10-28T16:14:00.000-07:00

when we met i was still in my twenties – the end of them, granted, but still – and i was new to portland and new to the idea of setting up space somewhere and new to the interest in sharing that space with someone else. for the first time i had an idea of a direction i wanted to head in. up to that point i’d been kind of day-by-day. i had found that day-by-day was not conducive to the setting up and sharing of space.

he says a little mantra that goes like this. free me from suffering, and from desire, which is the root of suffering. but when we met i was full of desire. more accurately, i was full of a particular kind of desire: not the nonspecific desire i’ve historically been full of for any experience and feeling, but a desire for a certain set of experiences, and for a certain set of feelings. i wanted to try doing things and feeling things with someone else.

and, true to mantra, this desire has brought me a measure of suffering. not the real kind that lots of people live with every day, but enough to make itself known. enough to require attention.

he must be something, if you’ve stuck with it for so long a friend said to me on the phone this weekend. which is true. i think he’s really something. i have met a lot of people and it has been my experience that few of them share the interest i have in trying things out all the time – going to norwegian folk dancing night or moving to rural oregon. it has been my experience that, in relationships, this is just something i have to eat. i end up hearing no all the time – because there are lots of good reasons not to go norwegian folk dancing or move to rural oregon – and eventually i just try hard not to ask.

operaman, on the other hand, strikes me as someone who wants to say yes. alas, we happened to meet just as he was saying a huge yes to something completely crazy and fabulous, something that had nothing to do with me. and now he's following through. and it seems like that commitment has exhausted his reservoir of yes. he wants to do it completely and right, and there is nothing left over for late nights or early mornings or impromptu adventure. there is nothing left for doing what feels unwise or unwieldy.

and how can i judge it? because it comes from exactly the very same piece of him that i admire so fiercely.

but i am so small by now that i hardly recognize myself, so sad sometimes that i am missing the most marvelous fall. and sad is ok, sad is what happens with loving someone. but small doesn’t suit me, and i find myself acting ugly as a substitute for large. we work with what we have.

i wish he would make this as big as i want it to be. i wish we could try things together, and celebrate them when they are successful, and support each other when they aren’t. that sounds to me like everyone getting what they want. but how can i expect him to risk such an important undertaking, in which he's already invested so much, on something as unreliable as another person? i do, of course. i’ve been holding out for it to happen, trying to prove my prescience by my presence. but my presence is increasingly pissy and unconvincing. i’ve undermined my own point.

i’m in my thirties now – my early thirties, but still – and i’ve made peace with my desire. it turns out that it’s not a desire for him but for us, and us isn’t looking like an option. maybe one day it will be. it doesn’t feel like something i can influence at this point. so it’s time to hang out with my suffering, and make peace with it, and figure out what’s next. maybe i can go back to realizing that what’s next is the rest of this afternoon, and what’s next after that is tomorrow.

consequence

2008-10-13T16:33:00.000-07:00

I went to California for a week to attend a conference, and to soak up a little sun to savor during northwest winter, and to see my one friend from college, and to see my other friend from college and her husband and her baby. I stayed in a fancy hotel with crisp white and blue sheets, and soap that smelled like sage, and a tv with that channel that shows home improvement shows at all hours. It was a very good trip.

And I landed at PDX and rode the light rail to my truck, and drove my truck to my house, and unpacked while watching a Katherine Hepburn movie from 1938. In general I prefer Audrey.

I’ve been hesitant to write. One of the comments on my last post really got under my skin, though I’m sure it wasn’t intended to. It said (and I will annotate with additional information for those of you who never went through an Indigo Girls phase) that this blog reminds the commenter of the song The Girl with the Weight of the World in Her Hands. You don’t need to know the lyrics with a title like that. Let’s just say it rhymes “harder” with “martyr.”

I feel so oddly defensive about that comment. I mean, I guess I kind of overthink things. (Allow me to illustrate, with this post.) And I see how this blog maybe comes across as me agonizing about small things, and getting hung up on stuff that isn’t that important. The point of my writing here is mostly to share my life with my good friends - many of whom live much farther away than I would like – and to share not just what’s happening but my thoughts about what’s happening, so that they can laugh and/or commiserate and/or provide advice, as appropriate. It works as well as anything I can think of for that purpose.

But for the record (and I don’t know why the record matters to me but I guess it does) I’m not trying to earn some kind of points here for my drama, and I certainly don’t think my life is any more difficult or dark than anyone else’s. In fact, as I’m sure I’ve said here before, I don’t really understand all the luck I have, all the ways that my life feels blessed. I don’t write about it every time, because I think that would be really fucking annoying.

And I’m not under the impression that the daily workings of my relationship or the way I’m choosing to heat my house are of any consequence in the scheme of things. I just think they’re the same ordinary things that a handful of other people are also figuring out at the same time, and that these ordinary things shape the way we experience the world every day. I like to put them down. I like to draw them out. I like that our whole lives are a series of these tiny decisions and experiences that can mean exactly as much or as little as we choose. It is so frustrating and so marvelous and so improbable.

By writing about all my stupid things I don’t mean to complain about them, and I’m certainly not trying to “solve” them. I’m not trying to make them bigger than they are. But really, they are huge. Have you ever tried to figure out if you wanted a baby? Have you ever tried to pick a woodstove? Have you ever had soap that smelled like sage? It can be so good it’s hard to breathe.

crazy on a night like tonight

2008-09-29T11:11:00.000-07:00

I cranked the heat in the cab of my little truck speeding north from Corvallis at midnight, seven hours and counting down until my alarm would ring for Monday morning, and I tried to focus on Beowulf, the new Seamus Heaney version being read to me from my speakers, and not on my sleepiness - the particular thick sleepiness that comes from a measure of resolution, which Operaman and I have, for the moment, arrived at. I wouldn’t call it an uneasy truce exactly. Truces are for battles. And in the end it felt easy entirely.

We more or less decided not to decide. But not in the wussy way we’ve decided not to decide before – the way that goes like, Oh, it’s late and I’m still attracted to you, so let’s just figure this out later. More in this way: I don’t need to know right now if we’re headed in exactly the same direction, and by right now I mean right now and by exactly I mean exactly.

Needing To Know has never been a thing I’ve struggled with, and I remember being baffled when a college boyfriend asked, exasperated, If you’re not thinking about this as long-term, then why are we doing it at all? Plenty of reasons, I thought. Today, for example, was better than it would have been otherwise. What more is there?

I’m a little older now. I’ve come to appreciate the ways you can know a person better when you stick with them, and I delight in the making of certain plans. I ticked through my twenties in one-to-three-year relationships that suited their time frame and then stopped, and I’ve gotta say my twenties were pretty awesome. But looking out at my thirties, I’m not really hoping for a three-peat. I’m ready for something new. Something not new.

And though I have yet to become someone who asks about retirement plans on a first date, I am not now inclined to launch a romance for its collector’s value, or to sustain one as filler. So after engaging in two years of On Again Off Again Operaman, I feel like I should feel some clarity. Some sense of (gag) going somewhere, or not.

Instead what I feel is that this relationship kicks my ass sometimes, leaves me alone when I’d prefer companionship, refuses to let me lean on it. But also it is full of thoughtfulness and improvisation and adventure. It asks me to show up as a whole person, and as an adult, even when that’s hard. And it’s often an obscene amount of fun.

So we’re not going to make any big decisions right now, since right now school is starting and med school interviews are being scheduled and fall has arrived with all the brisk moodiness it brings. Operaman is going to get through his semester and I am going to figure out how to heat my house, and sometime around December perhaps this will all make perfect sense.

And in the mean time I drove home, and I switched out Beowulf for an Indigo Girls album I haven’t played in seven years, and I sung it start to finish. It felt like the first week of freshman year, and like breaking up and like boarding a plane, like all the things that beat you up and bring you somewhere new. I’m so bad at endings I said to Mo on Saturday. But you’re so good at beginnings, he replied. I’m pretty fucking lucky, to have someone like that at the other end of the phone. Goodbye, September.

curtain

2008-09-26T16:50:00.000-07:00

Operaman and I probably aren’t going to make it through the weekend, something about me wanting a relationship and him wanting a relationship as soon as everything else in life is stable and sorted and certain, which is sure to happen at some point, except not to anyone I have ever met, but tonight, just for fun, we’re going to the opera. Because there really hasn’t been enough You’ve Got To Be Kidding in my world lately. So in a minute I’m disappearing into my civil service washroom with my reusable Powell’s tote and emerging again in a strapless black and gold dress and heels, and we’re going to eat at a place with a French name and then we’re going to the opening night of La Traviata, and then we’ll probably break up. And this weekend I’ll cry a little and drink some and finish the table I’ve been building. This part is getting a little old, this part where the other person decides it’s not worth it, but I can’t say I don’t get off a little on the particular awful way it hurts, and how it’s different every time.

but i'm not much of a screamer

2008-09-16T10:47:00.000-07:00

I was away from a computer for ten days, sleeping in a tent in Eastern Oregon and waking up when the sun rose and eating breakfast, usually oatmeal, and I came back to a screenfull of email messages and a crashing stock market and David Foster Wallace is dead, and I’m wondering if coming back was so wise.

Yesterday when I returned the not-yet-empty ice cream tub to the freezer Operaman commented that I am a moderate person, and I just about wanted to scream. This is an experiment, is what I would have screamed. This all feels ridiculous, this 8-to-5 job and this mortgage and this general sense of decorum, this putting back the ice cream before it’s gone. For ten days I wore leg warmers and a fake fur vest I bought at an Austin tack shop, and I cleaned bikes for hours on end to raise money for a kickass nonprofit, and sometimes I slept and often I danced and always my hands were dirty, and that felt like normal, that felt like real. This, on the other hand, is an experiment, and I’m wondering how long to let it run.

Bo Knows

2008-08-29T11:58:00.000-07:00

Bo Pisko just made me his friend on Facebook. The thing is, Bo Pisko and I were never friends in real life. As far as I recall, all that Bo Pisko and I ever had in common was two years of Madame Cauley’s high school French class. We didn’t sit next to each other or harbor a secret crush for each other or work together on any of Mme. Cauley’s infamous skits. (Aujourd’hui, mes invitees sont deux filles qui ont rencontre les etrangers d’une autre monde!) We were roughly the same level of unpopular, I guess. I think he was friends with some of my friends.

I am a newcomer to the world of social networking. I don’t know why I joined up. I don’t have an internet connection at home and I don’t have a lot of time to kill at work and I’m not looking for new friends. I’m certainly not looking for new “friends.” And I’m still in touch with most of the people who were ever a big part of my life in a positive way. I make calls and send emails and even write real on-paper letters all the time, so I’m not generally sitting around wondering What ever happened to so-and-so?

“Getting back in touch” with people I don’t wonder about was interesting for approximately five minutes. I was only planning on connecting with my actual, current friends, but I quickly found a few folks I was curious about – girls I went to summercamp with when I was fifteen, teachers from the Costa Rican town I lived in before grad school. But soon I was looking at the friends of my friends – looking, mostly, at where people ended up, and at how all the Jewish girls I went to high school with now have hyphenated Jewish surnames. Rosen-Goldberg, Liebowitz-Stein.

And I had a few “huh” moments, like, Huh! That girl married that guy! And Huh! That girl lives in Mexico! And then I felt pretty much done with social networking.

But now people are finding me.

First it was the guy from my freshman floor, the one whom I hooked up with but neither of us told anyone, and now he’s an artist in New York, and married. Then it was the boy from my international student group in Amsterdam, whom I haven’t spoken with since I left the Netherlands. And now Bo Pisko.

It’s kind of neat, I guess, to feel attached to this thready net of people out there in the world. It makes me think of an essay I was reading recently by an Indian woman who thought she was ambivalent about having children, but realized she was just ambivalent about having children in America, where people are so isolated. She moved back to India in order to raise her children in a place where they could feel connected – in a place where, if they traveled to a faraway city, they would still be welcome in the home of someone who knew someone they once knew.

I like the idea of knowing people in lots of different places, even if I don’t know them well. I like that I can flip through the photo rolodex to find someone who might be able to tell me about acupuncture or Nebraska. And, I admit, I like seeing what’s become of people I once knew, even if I only ever knew them a little, because seeing what people make with themselves is one of the pleasures of knowing people at all.

So for the moment, at least, I’m leaving my online shop open. I’m calling Bo Pisko my friend. He was a pretty nice guy, as I remember. Maybe if you’re ever going to Virginia, you can tell him you know me, and you can stay with him.

sprø

2008-08-22T16:25:00.001-07:00

Sometimes I have a long week of overthinking things with Operaman, letting my head spiral out of control about where we’re going to be and who’s going to do what and when, and how it could all possibly come together.

And then I send him an email that says I heard there’s Scandinavian Folk Dance on Friday night at the Knights of Columbus Hall in Salem and he writes back Wanna meet there at seven?

And I think, everything is going to be just fine.

it's all right if you don't

2008-08-19T10:42:00.000-07:00

I started out Friday with my feet up in stirrups and finished in the audience of an outdoor opera starring my boyfriend’s ex-wife, so it’s hard to say if the day got better or worse.

I used to think that I was good at challenging situations, that I handled them with grace. But in retrospect it appears that the situations I was calling “challenging” weren’t actually all that rough. Unemployment is trying. Breaking up is lonely. Buying a house is scary. And the sun sets and rises again.

But the part where I’m sitting next to Operaman and his kids, and the parents and friends of the woman he was married to for seven years, and I’m beating back a landslide of questions that just aren’t going to get answered right then, or maybe ever – questions about exactly how important or not important it has ever been to me to have kids of my own, and about how best to interpret O’s recent application to a med school in Illinois – that part has no grace at all.

That part looks more like me sabotaging a perfectly nice evening in the park, and then staying up half the night staring at my waterstained ceiling. That part looks more like me getting in a car the next morning and speeding to the gorge with three friends, drinking a lot of beer and screaming along with Tom Petty, generally acting eighteen. Eighteen wasn’t any easier but it’s been long enough now that I can pretend.

Wasn’t I just supposed to meet some cool guy with a spirit of adventure and a four season tent? Weren’t we supposed to have exciting late-night conversations about all the things we wanted to do with our lives? Things like overseas travel and meaningful work and some kind of big family, however that is defined? But instead here’s this man with his own life already – and here’s me, with mine. And I feel a little pissed that we’re meeting up with such mismatched pokey plans, each already well underway. Everyone at thirty has a life already. No one is sure how much of it is negotiable.

And I guess what I'm actually pissed about is that mine is feeling more negotiable than I would have expected, and his is feeling less negotiable than is called for. It doesn’t seem like a wise way to proceed. Wisdom, though, has never been my specialty. And I’ve now figured out it’s not grace. Optimism, perhaps? Naivety? Improvisation?

rest your head for just five minutes

2008-08-15T15:05:00.000-07:00

Last night in the dark I reached out and my hand landed right on the bathroom lightswitch, and I thought, this is my house.

I know where the lightswitches are, and I know how the floors feel under my bare feet. It takes me fifteen minutes to water all my plants in pots, not counting the ones in the garden out back – the purple pole beans I eat right off the vine, and the long skinny eggplants.

Huge progress has not been made with the house, to be honest. It’s summer and I’ve been outside and out of town. But little projects are happening one by one. PD and I pulled all the fake wood paneling off the dining room and kitchen walls, and then we pulled off the fiberboard that was hiding behind that. What used to feel like one small dark room now feels like two big bright ones. In the wall-peeling process we uncovered an awesome brick chimney.

Different project days resulted in the construction of a makeshift table for the back yard, and the un-boarding of the door that leads there. We’ve acquired a toaster oven (since the real oven died) and a dozen old Ball jars, now filled with black-eyed peas and amaranth.

And I met with the heating guy who I think will be my Heating Guy, because he was friendly and brought a copy of his license and, unlike the last heating guy I talked to, believed me when I said I don’t like the house too hot. He walked around the basement with me, poking into the electrical box and pointing out possibilities. Maybe next winter won’t be so cold.

Sometime before next winter I need insulation and gutters, at least. And the heating means rewiring, but that’s where it all starts to feel overwhelming. So for now, one small project at a time.

Last week a friend biked by and waved from the street to me on my porch, where I sit to read magazines or talk on the phone. And this week I met my across-the-street neighbor, whose house has no foundation at all. She’s raising the house right now to add a new one, jacking it up a quarter of an inch at a time. That helped me feel my house is easy.

Last night it was hot, an unusual hot for Portland – somewhere in the nineties and dry and still. I lay on my new bed with new sheets and waited for a breeze. All the hot darkness around me felt safe and right.

I will tell the wondrous story

2008-08-05T11:57:00.000-07:00

It took a surprising two and a half days before the first completely surreal moment of my trip to Wisconsin with Operaman and his family. We were running some errands and he popped in a CD of the music for church on Sunday. The kids joined in the song. And the wholeness of the scene hit me like so: I am in the passenger seat of an SUV driving through suburbia, drinking bottled water while the kids in back are singing along to Christian music.

Oh, shit.

I managed to pull myself together rather quickly. We do not live in suburbia, I reminded myself. We are just visiting, for the fiftieth anniversary of Operaman’s parents. And if the rental company hadn’t screwed up the reservation, we would be driving the compact car we reserved. And the Christian music is playing because Operaman is going to perform it. And the tap water in Wisconsin is gross.

This moment of complete dislocation was thankfully just a moment. Most of the trip was crazy and awesome. There was lots of Wisconsinalia – cheese curds still warm from the dairy, water skiing in the lake, two-stepping at the Friday night fish fry, custard twice a day. And there was lots of family – big, loud family – O’s parents and his three sisters and his one brother and all of their spouses and most of their kids, family that filled and spilled out of the cars we drove around and the tables we ate at and the rooms we slept in.

And it was exhausting sometimes, to be honest – every night a late night and every morning an early morning, and all that driving from Rome to La Crosse to Prairie du Chien, and constantly watching my wording so as not to exclaim Fuck! in front of a room of nieces and nephews. And it was my first time traveling with O’s kids, or any kids, and traveling is hard on kids, and I’m not sure I was always so understanding of that, because I was tired sometimes too. But a couple times his daughter fell asleep on my lap, and that felt good.

It felt good, too, when we sped along the Mississippi in the hilly corner of the state untouched by glaciers, and when the sky darkened with a distinctly unOregonian thunderstorm, and when the dusk brought a field of lightening bugs. It felt good when O’s dad told me stories about being a pilot in the Air Force. It felt good when O’s youngest sister hugged me goodbye, and stepped back, and announced We Like You.

It’s not the most natural thing in the world, for a smartass only child who prefers solo travel to suddenly share confined quarters with a shifting population of kind midwestern relatives for five days. But I suppose it is also a bit of a challenge when the sarcastic Jewish girlfriend of your divorced son/brother shows up at your Evangelical church service, even if she joins in for I Will Sing of My Redeemer. I think we all did pretty well.

What Am I Doing? I texted PD when all this felt like the wrong kind of crazy.

Making a life, she reminded me. Making A Life.

rockin

2008-07-17T15:11:00.000-07:00

My friends got married on a boat. It smelled like the sea and like gardenias, and the bride wore blue that blended in with the sky. Ty came from Florida and Talley came from Pennsylvania and John came from California and when the groom gave a toast about how lucky he was, I thought you and every one of us.

Sometimes I wish I could gather up all the people I love and plant them here. That way we could meet for coffee on a whim, and I could hold the babies I know in Richmond and Los Angeles and Austin and smell their baby smell and feel them growing bigger. That way we wouldn’t have time-zone-complicated phone tag sessions that span the seasons.

But it sure is nice when a few of us end up around a table together. My technical family is tiny – two parents, no siblings or grandparents, a few aunts and uncles with three kids amongst them. So the number of good people in my life seems impossible.

Kay Ryan was just made Poet Laureate, and when I was about to post my favorite poem of hers in celebration I remembered that I put it up here already, a year and a half ago, when I was new to Portland. At that time I would say it out loud as an admonition and a reprimand, like what the fuck am I waiting for?

And now a while later it’s more like a rally. Sometimes you take the walls down months before you’re ready to put up new ones. Sometimes you yell the Ramones off-key in a smoky seaside karaoke bar of strangers. Sometimes your family from way east and your family from way west get together on a tiny boat, and you hardly even speak the same language. And there’s everyone, with their hair blowing in the wind, holding on with you.

this is the time

2008-07-10T12:37:00.001-07:00

I used to love Billy Joel. He was the first non-classical music I was introduced to after the Beach Boys, and I bought every album and learned every word. Billy Joel got me through several mid-teen years, before the inevitable late-teen switch to the Indigo Girls and Ani Difranco. I would play Vienna and rewind the tape and play it again and repeat.

I would request If I Only Had the Words from a local radio station call-in show (I think it was about a red headed boy named Matt), and blast Movin’ Out in Jenifer Smtih’s car when she first got her license. Laura and I put An Innocent Man – and nothing else, to make the point extra clear – on a cassette that we sent to the camp counselor she had a crush on. New York State of Mind was my first answering machine message in college. And do you remember that feeling of a song you loved when you were fourteen?

That feeling is the feeling I get when I get off an airplane somewhere far away. It’s the feeling I think some people get when they bike a hundred miles or close a real estate deal. It’s almost like being in love. It’s probably some of the same chemicals. It’s the sort of feeling people fuck up their whole lives for.

So this morning I decided, after a ten year hiatus, to Bring Billy Back. I came across his name in a New York Times article and now, a few clicks later, I have Travelin Prayer and Summer Highland Falls and You May Be Right looping in my ears.

My life in Portland needs a little Billy. First it needed calm, and then it needed roots, and now it needs some volume. Otherwise every email from some friend headed for a foreign country is going to send me spiraling, the way one did earlier this week. This is what I’ve picked for right now, I remind myself, and so I might as well Do It. I’ve been doing a lot of coasting lately, and it doesn’t much suit me. Maybe I just need a new soundtrack.

why we stay here through all that rain

2008-07-07T13:04:00.000-07:00

horizontal

2008-07-03T10:19:00.000-07:00

The truth is, I sleep on the floor.

More accurately I sleep on a down comforter draped over a twin-size piece of camping foam, all sort of mushed into a fitted sheet, on the floor.

Aesthetically I’ve never liked big beds with headboards and clunky feet, and practically they’re a pain in the ass to move. Since leaving my parent’s house fourteen years ago, I’ve never owned a bed. I’ve slept on dorm beds and air mattresses and the trusty foam pad. Twice I’ve splurged on low-end frameless futons, and twice I’ve lost them to breakups.

My foam pad rolls up for moving in five seconds, and it weighs five pounds, and it’s worth about five dollars. It serves my needs, mostly.

But sometimes not. Since I started a desk job, for example, I’ve been noticing the decline of my already mediocre posture. Sleeping on my side on a thin mat isn’t helping. And sharing such a small sleeping space has its challenges. Plus the down makes me sneeze.

So I decided, at thirty one, that it’s time for a big girl bed. I started looking around for something suited to my low-maintenance sensibilities. Something close to the floor. Something simple. Something unlikely to have been made in a nastyass factory. Something I wouldn’t have to hire people to move. Half of the planet sleeps on reed mats, for God’s sake.

And since a substantial piece of my new house battle has been trying not to accumulate the piles of crap that the world somehow wills you to accumulate once you have a place to keep it, I was looking for something that didn’t feel like a big fucking Thing. A heavy, overengineered Thing that I’d feel obligated to guard and care for, the way people suddenly find themselves saying things like Don’t Eat On That Sofa!

What I ended up finding was latex. Latex is tapped from trees in Southeast Asia and can be transformed, via a rather old process, into a very resilient foam that makes an excellent mattress. It doesn’t grow mold or harbor dust mites. It doesn’t involve wood frames and metal springs and chemically-treated stuffing. You end up with something that looks a lot like my foam camping mat, except no petroleum products were involved. It costs a lot more but it lasts about thirty years with no flipping necessary, and in the end when you throw it away there’s still nothing toxic about it.

Latex has started to become trendy with the whole Green wave, so now they’re making artificial versions and injecting it into the middle of conventional mattresses, mostly for marketing. Since I just wanted a big block of the real stuff, I started looking online. And then it got weird.

Because there are about half a dozen websites from which you can order latex mattresses – sites that cater to allergy sufferers and green living. And then there is one site for the only company that exclusively manufactures natural latex mattresses and nothing else, and has been doing this for decades. And it’s thirty blocks from my house.

You’d never know it was there, because it’s just a tiny “showroom” with one sample bed, and lots of cool machines where the covers get sewn. They get sewn by a guy named Gary. He’s been making mattresses for forty five years. He makes them out of latex because that’s how his dad did it, and because he thinks they’re the best.

So Gary’s making me a bed. It'll be ready in a week. I’m not allowed to put it on the floor, because latex likes to breathe. But four inches would do it. Movin’ on up.

jiggedy jig

2008-06-23T15:51:00.000-07:00

Usually when I go somewhere, I’m not that anxious to come back. A day at the coast or a summer in Greece or six months in the Netherlands – it never feels like enough. I may get cravings for certain familiar comforts. I may miss friends. But I rarely ever think for more than a moment, I wish this trip was over now. I wish I was back home for good.

And part of that, maybe, is that I’ve never lived anywhere that felt much like home, any more than anywhere else. Certainly not the suburbs where I grew up. We lived on a street with no sidewalk, in a neighborhood with nothing to walk to. When I was in third grade my parents remodeled the house and I asked for a tiny room just like the one I’d had up until then. They laughed and said I’d like my new big room. I didn’t. At seventeen I fled for a nine by seven dorm and never looked back.

New York didn’t feel particularly like home, either. New York felt like Fun and Late Nights. New York felt like a toxic indulgence that was heady and rich and easy, as long as I didn’t get stuck there. As long as I didn’t become one of those addicted New Yorkers, twenty years in, saying I can leave whenever I want to.

Eugene felt like a fine place for four years.

And I’m realizing, in making this list, that it might sound like my rootlessness is some long-running problem. But it suits me pretty well. I like feeling equally at home wherever I happen to be. It’s one of those things that only starts to feel inappropriate when I’m surrounded by people doing something else.

So it surprised me this weekend, away on an island in Washington, how much I wanted to come back home. My friends were getting married and it was a beautiful wedding – a five tier cake and a swing band and a bride dressed like a princess. Fresh cherries and mountains and the sound of waves in the morning. But I didn’t feel like meeting new people, and I missed Operaman (who was singing all weekend), and I missed my garden. It’s the middle of June, after all. We’ve had a cold wet spring and there’s a lot to do out there.

So Sunday afternoon I pulled up in front of my house and fifteen minutes later my hands were in the dirt. I dug up the hen-and-chicks from my vegetable bed and put them on my front stone wall; I reluctantly cleared the nasturtiums. The tomatoes and the peppers went in at last, though I fear it’s still not as warm as they’d like. I unwound the new hose and with great delight found that the outdoor faucet with no handle still works with a wrench. And I stood in the early evening sun showering my ten feet by thirty: the sweet millions and yellow pears in their cages, the floppy little pole bean seedlings, the lacy little carrot tops just starting to show.

Portland, so far, just feels like an experiment. Parts of it have gone terribly wrong but parts of it are just magnificent. I’m not sure how long I’ll stay, to be honest. I already miss the feeling of Being Away – I hear it tapping its foot at the end of every five day forty hour workweek in my cube. But as experiments go, this one seems worth a while of run time. And while it runs I’ll pinch the flowers off my dill, and sow my squash.

chickens little

2008-06-10T10:07:00.000-07:00

Some people just plaster their ceilings and call it good. But some people, like the people who used to live in my house, feel driven to go the extra mile.

After plastering the ceiling, they wallpapered it. Then they painted it yellow – and it took quite a coat of yellow to hide the paper. Then they glued up half-inch brown fibrous acoustic soundboard. They used thick brown industrial-strength glue, saying to themselves, perhaps, We’ll certainly never want to take down this attractive brown fibrous acoustic soundboard! Because you can’t peel off this kind of adhesive without completely destroying the plaster. But to be absolutely secure they also nailed the board to the lathe, and nailed it well. And by “well” I mean thoroughly. Lots of different sized nails – finishing nails and box nails and galvanized nails and tacks – in random spacing and clustering. Then with the leftover glue they secured a layer of white pock-marked interlocking ceiling tiles. Then they stapled them. Just to be sure.

And I know all of this, now, because at six o’clock last night I looked across the dinner table at PD and said, naively, I’d like to do a little project. Let’s do a little project, she replied with enthusiasm.

I don’t know what made us decide that pulling the ceiling down was a Little Project. I guess at first it seemed like it might just involve ripping off a few foamy tiles. Except even a casual observer would have noted that the ceiling tiles were, as per custom, up on the ceiling, which in my house is quite high. So right from the start we were standing on the counters and pushing the rolling, broken dishwasher into strategic corners of the floor, stretching our arms over our heads with prybars. Dust and staples started falling into our eyes and onto our dishes, neither of which we’d bothered to cover.

By two hours later, when PD said Let’s just take off the soundboard too, we had acquired face masks. We had moved most of the food off of the kitchen surfaces. Sunlight was still coming in the kitchen windows and PD was wearing sunglasses because I only have one pair of goggles. That’s when the plaster started falling.

The acoustic board had been hung in a variety of rectangles of various size, puzzled together to cover the space. Some of the pieces were eight inches square. But others were three feet by seven feet. They were filthy and heavy and would rip free with little warning, propelling chunks of stuck-on plaster through the air to shatter on the floor or the stove. After each bang and burst, a quiet cloud of plaster dust would rain slowly down.

It was all fun and games until the board with mouse shit came down, and PD was right underneath. PD is not someone I would call squeamish. There aren’t many things I can think of that would gross her out. But I’m pretty sure this did it. It was obnoxiously awful, and it fell right on her head. To our relief there was only one board like this – a single board in the corner of the kitchen, underneath the attic space where apparently mice used to live. It was revolting. It was not fun.

It got fun again, though, when we pulled the final side of the final board. We felt so close to being done. There was a mess, for sure, but a manageable mess, and there were holes in the plaster, but the neat little grid of lathe remained. There was no reason to think the last board would be any different. But it turns out that just for novelty, there was no lathe behind the final board. Instead, it had been anchored directly to the ceiling framing of the room, and the board itself – with nothing above it – had been serving as the floor of the mysterious inaccessible attic. So in the moment after we pulled it free – in the moment when it hung in the air, six feet of soundboard suspended by a row of nails along one edge - we saw the layer above: a mountain of mucky, puffy, ancient insulation, loose once-white fluff in a two-foot-thick pile. And then the nails gave.

It took about an hour to shovel and sweep and wipe, to fish the bits of dusty debris out of our stovetop burners and off of our casserole dishes. And then there was nothing left on my kitchen ceiling but plaster crisscrossed with amusing patterns of glue residue, and little cut-outs of lathe.

And then we flew kites in the park by the moon.

baby steps

2008-06-09T16:47:00.000-07:00

Don’t worry. This has nothing to do with babies. (In fact, last week when I was sitting at a dinner table between my friends with their six week old and their friend with her two year old and their other friend, dad of a three year old, and the mom of the two year old asked me – in a brief pause between picking up dropped sushi and a tablewide conversation about poop – Do you think about having a baby?, I answered Not Really so fast, she looked like I slapped her. But I digress.)

Instead, this has to do with the small – and I mean very, very small – progress I have been making with the house.

Since my weekends have been busy with hiking about and bike shopping and hanging out with Operaman’s kids (who, at 9 and 11, do not throw sushi, and deal with their own poop), I have come to embrace the Evening Project. The Evening Project begins the second I get home from work, and makes use of the sunlight-till-ten that is Portland in June, and is all about momentum and a dinner made of snacks. In such a manner I was able, last week alone, to pull down the ugly hulking cabinets suspended between my kitchen and dining room, and take the doors off my kitchen cabinets (I hate cabinets), and transfer all my tools from a pointy pile on the floor to a significantly more convenient and less hazardous wall-mounted pegboard in my sunroom.

In summary, my sink still leaks and my wiring is still highly suspicious and last week my oven baked its last bake, but at least now I can find my hammer.

In other “This Hardly Counts As Progress” news, I finally found the lucky excavator who’s going to drill me a new sewer connection. This doesn’t sound like a big deal, but it’s a complicated, expensive job, and I had to get four estimates before I found someone who seemed both competent and not condescending.

I’m gaining an understanding for how house fixing can drag on longer than expected. I’ve already caught myself looking at the faux-wood-paneled walls and thinking That’s a good project for winter. Luckily the same cannot be said of the insulating, or the heating system, or the gutter replacement. Which hopefully will be enough incentive to keep me up late on a ladder, even on schoolnights.

lining

2008-06-03T12:40:00.000-07:00

(1) Bus riders on the number fourteen (and bus riders here are everyone) say thank you to the driver as they disembark, and not just a quiet thank you from the front door but a practically bellowed Thank You from the back door, one after another. Thank You! Thanks! Thank You!

(2) Two blocks later at my office the non-bus-riders have just gotten off of their bikes, not just the Americorps kids and the summer interns, but the heads of departments in skirts and blazers, tall guys in the elevators in clacking clip-in shoes and ankle to elbow spandex.

(3) Earlier this week the soupcart guy John – with whom I sometimes compare notes on the latest opera – introduced me to the woman behind me in the lunch line, because we both like the same sandwich and are both always in a hurry. But she eats early and I eat late so we’ve never crossed paths.

(4) I met six friends for happy hour last week; we drank cocktails with fresh muddled fruit and sucked on edamame. Then we went next door and drank PBRs in a bar with a mechanical bull. Then I walked home over the bridge.

(5) There is a national forest one hour east of here – One Real Hour, I am not rounding down – named after one of my heroes. This weekend Operaman and I drove there. I put my feet in the Columbia, roll on roll on. We stayed in a cabin that cost less per night than a mediocre meal in New York, we hiked half a day and saw no one. We ate cinnamon bread from the bakery in my neighborhood and ice cream from the dairy on the coast.

(6) My porch smells like roses.

These are the things I remember when I wake up and it’s raining again, when I wake up and it’s June and it’s been raining for eight months – not in a metaphorical way, but it’s starting to feel like it.

and the devil makes three

2008-05-30T15:11:00.000-07:00

PD and I lived together in her house in Eugene when I was in grad school. It was the funnest living arrangement ever. We had spontaneous dance parties and sometimes we put on evening gowns to make dinner. After grad school she was supposed to move to Portland but instead she moved to Santa Rosa, for love or something, and that was that I thought.

But then she got offered a summer internship at a kickass firm up here, the sort of firm that never has interns and has approximately one job opening per year for which nine thousand people apply. So she showed up in her orange car Ollie, with her speedy blue bike and a flat of green tomatoes, and now I have a housemate. Which is Grand. Because she is awesome, and handy, and because I really like living with people, as I may have mentioned, and because already having a housemate has inspired me to fix my too-long shower curtains and my disorganized basement and my questionable kitchen inventory.

Also, so far, I’ve just about talked her head off, because it’s been kind of quiet around my place of late. Look at this loaf of bread I got! I exclaim, as if I’m four, when I get home - as if it’s the most exciting thing in the world, this loaf of bread. But I do love bread, and I did get a really delightful cinnamon loaf from the Thursday farmer’s market down the street, and it’s nice to share that with someone. Look at this milk in a glass bottle! Look at the bookcase I found on the corner! Look where I might put this chair!

If the endless exclamation doesn’t drive her away, she’s planning to reside in the back bedroom for three months. Plans include beer on the front steps, plumbing the kitchen, and the making of blueberry jam. Hazzah.

itching

2008-05-27T12:20:00.000-07:00

The insides of my arms from wrists to elbows are a mess of hot pink angry splotches, because this weekend I was attacked by bedstraw. I guess, more accurately, I was the attacker. I pulled it out by the armful. Pulling bedstraw is very satisfying because it clings to its neighbors like velcro, but then comes free all at once in long sticky tendrils. It rolls into mean bundles that bite your arms on the way to the yard waste bin.

I know that there are more critical things to fix about my house. The plumbing, for example. The framing. The insulation. Things that would make it a safer, easier, more pleasant place to live. But the sun comes out and I can hear the weeds growing. I’ve already missed my window for planting peas. The garden isn’t waiting for me to get my shit together.

May, who lived in what is now my house for approximately as long as I have been alive, put a lot of work into the small amount of land that surrounds it. It’s a third of a tax lot; a twentieth of an acre. But the back was built for vegetables – raised beds, fertile soil, enviable solar access - and the front is in endless bloom. Each time I think I’ve fully inventoried the green, something new and unexpected shoots up: grape hyacinth, trillium, fringecup, columbine. This kind of garden doesn’t happen on its own. A few months of neglect could ruin years of May’s work.

So yesterday, back from a weekend of playing with Operaman and his kids, I pulled on my ladybug boots and dove in. Late showers have made things muddy and lush. It took two hours just to clear the invasive geraniums, whose poky red stems were choking my bleeding hearts. I raked the newly built compost bin. I filed and oiled my Felcos.

And this week, maybe, I’ll finally get around to calling someone about the sewer. But for sure I’ll sink the pole beans in, and the carrots, and the cukes. For sure I’ll cut back the butterfly bush. It’s still gray and wet but it’s spring one way or another.

heart grown fonder?

2008-05-20T15:42:00.001-07:00

There were – and I didn’t look this up, so I’m just going by gut feeling – nineteen thousand four hundred eighty six days in a row of gray skies and rain in Portland this fall-winter-spring, and they’ve ended. They’ve ended with a heat so intense that all the orange and yellow petals fell off my tulips, every petal off of every tulip in a single day, so that the bright green still-young stalks are left sticking straight up from a festive bed of discarded flower parts.

And that, along with the fact that I have a new house and a new old boyfriend, is the reason I haven’t been blogging. That and the conclusion that the “house blog” thing wasn’t very interesting. But this past weekend I talked to the friend I have known the longest of anyone on the planet, and she told me to start again. And she’s seen me through some pretty awkward times, like the time when we had a secret club, and the time when we didn’t go to junior prom together, and the time when we both got drunk at Spring Fling and acted inappropriately. So I try to do what she asks.

Now then. I will here test out a participatory post, to see if anyone is even still around.

Question for you, to chart the coming of spring in a random collection of U.S. locales:
What are you wearing today?

Pad

2008-04-11T13:59:00.000-07:00

I like living with other people.

I’m an only child and I grew up in a big sprawly house in a big sprawly neighborhood, and both felt mostly empty most of the time. College dorms were a revelation. Someone to talk to, guaranteed, even at three in the morning. People in the lounge in pajamas. Friends cooking more than enough to share.

Since then I’ve always chosen to live with people. I’ve been handed seamlessly from one house to the next, and with only one exception they’ve all been great. In Brooklyn I lived with two fabulous gay boys and their miniature dog and all their hair products, and in Amsterdam I lived with Francesca from Italy who had never made pasta. Even when Beth and I moved to Eugene and found our very own place, we decided to rent out a room. I like having people around.

Which is why it’s surprising how much I’m enjoying living alone. By which I do not mean that I am Getting By. I mean I am really enjoying living alone. I can’t rent the extra room yet as I originally planned, because there is so much work to do on the house, and because renters might request things like heat and use of the kitchen sink. But I really don’t mind at all. Between work and classes and soccer and kickball and friends and assorted Portland diversions, I’m hardly home anyway. So when I do get home it’s nice to turn up the radio and throw my sweater on the floor and drink from the juice carton. In fact, I’m kind of turning into a bachelor.

My fridge is a bachelor fridge: beer and takeout and condiments. My “bed” is on the floor. There are tools everywhere. And I’ve found myself saying bachelor things, things like, I’m not seeing other people, but I’m not Not Seeing Other People. Things like, I love you babe, but I’m just not sure we can make it work right now. And after these things come out of my mouth I go home by myself and it feels Good.

And I can’t say with certainty that I prefer living solo to living with housemates, because despite the pleasures I’d probably still opt for the company. But instead of causing me to feel lonely, living alone has actually made me feel delightfully in control. My music, my schedule, my space. My how glad I am it’s spring.

miss her kiss her love her (wrong move you’re dead)

2008-04-08T16:14:00.000-07:00

It’s likely that my house is full of Poison.

It was built in 1896 with nice harmless materials like wood and brick, but since then there have been decades of “improvements.” Covering the oak floors with vinyl tiles, for example. Coating the old moldings with lead paint. Dropping the ceilings with asbestos acoustic board. Gluing fake wood paneling onto the plaster. You definitely don’t ever want to glue anything onto plaster, said the contractor who teaches my Saturday home improvement class.

Apparently the best way to handle toxics in your home is not to handle them at all. Most of the stuff is only dangerous if you breathe it or eat it, so covering it up and forgetting about it is cheap and safe. But the former residents of my home were very devoted in their work. They enclosed every surface, usually several times over. There’s just no room left to layer. The shit’s gotta go.

I’ve been having trouble getting a handle on exactly how much precaution the cleanup warrants, particularly for asbestos. My mental threshold for toxic exposure is on the high side. As a coxswain for my college crew team I was thrown into all sorts of sewage-laden rivers, including but not limited to the Charles, the Schuylkill, and the Harlem. Once while I was waiting a long time for a lift by the hot roadside in South Africa, I pumped some water from a puddle through my little backpacker filter and drank it. My job is all about contaminated land. I wash my hands a lot and I try not to be careless, but thoughts of germs and radon do not keep me up at night.

But asbestos is pretty scary. You read enough about mesothelioma and you don’t really want to go anywhere near the stuff. When my inspector pointed out asbestos tape on my heating ducts, he pointed from a distance, with his pen. Internet resources say things like “A professional should take samples for analysis…. In fact, if done incorrectly, sampling can be more hazardous than leaving the material alone. Taking samples yourself is not recommended.”

That said, it seems asbestos exposure might be more similar to smoking: unwise on a long-term basis, somewhat risky even in moderation, best avoided, but not actually synonymous with certain death. My mom – a worldclass hypochondriac who finds cause for concern every time I mention moving through the world – cheerfully reminisced about how she and my father had smashed through asbestos tiles in their early days. That’s what everybody did! she laughed. Just wear a mask, I’ve been told by a contractor. My favorite advice was It’s easy to get guys to pull it out for you – they don’t care. Let’s not get started on that one.

So while my personal jury on asbestos is out, the first step is to learn how much of it I actually have. I found a lab online that does analysis and tried to follow their sampling instructions – wetting the material with a spray bottle, cutting cleanly with a utility knife, wiping off the sealed ziplock bag. In reality, though, when I was crouched ten feet up on top of a kitchen cabinet, sawing away over my head at ceiling board unsuccessfully, breathing heavily into my sweaty respirator, I just ripped a piece of the fucker off.

(Girl, I, must warrrrrn yoooooooooou.)

since i bought a house

2008-04-03T10:06:00.001-07:00

1. Started running again.

2. Invited people over – despite the lack of both heat and furniture. This has always been a big part of my life, but was completely absent in the hippie house.

3. Acquired a small but growing set of tools. Including a pry bar. Heh.

4. Told Operaman that I’m not waiting it out anymore to see if we can make it work – that even though we both want it to work, he needs to show up fast and fully, or I’m going to start seeing other people.

5. Started seeing other people.

6. Not once taken the bus to work instead of biking just because of the weather.

7. Took my first swing dancing lesson, which I’ve been planning since summer two thousand six.

8. Ok, I went swing dancing with Operaman. But I’m still seeing other people.

9. Written a one point two million dollar grant for work.

10. Joined a soccer team.

11. Felt generally kickass again.

Now granted, some of these things are happening because it is spring, and because I’m no longer brand new at my job, and because I’m no longer brand new in Portland. But damn. I sure do better with a Big Project to rally everything else around, and it turns out a falling-down house is as good as a marathon or a long trip.

now and then

2008-04-02T13:10:00.001-07:00

Today is the second of April and yesterday, on the first of the month, I didn’t write out a rent check. I panicked a little realizing the date, and then I remembered. I didn’t write out a mortgage check either, because my first one isn’t due until May - but once that gets started it’s not scheduled to stop for thirty years.

I’ve been hearing a lot about what a good investment I’ve made. Growing city, good neighborhood. Cheapest house on the block. But it’s hard for me to think of my house that way. I can’t imagine ever wanting to leave it. I can’t imagine growing out of it or getting tired of it or suddenly longing for the suburbs.

Houses are a thing that people sometimes choose to do in order to keep themselves busy. I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing, and it certainly applies to me. We all find things to keep us busy, ideally things that match our values. Writing, politics, kids.

But I don’t want to manufacture long-term busyness for myself with a house. Last night over organic doppelbach at a new brewpub my friend told me about her ex, He didn’t love me so much as he loved what I might become. Anyone not been there? I don’t want to be thinking about the next house while I’m living in this one. I don’t even want to be thinking about how good my house might one day be. I don’t mind that my fixer isn’t fixed. It keeps things interesting. And once it’s fixed, I hope I’ll know enough to say Enough.

A few nights back I bolted up in bed and rushed into my bathroom with a measuring tape, gleeful to discover that my bathtub will still (just barely) fit if I turn it ninety degrees. It will change the whole feel of my single tiny bathroom: make room for a floor mat, leave space for a towel rack, and unblock the window. It felt like an epiphany. And then the idea that it was an epiphany felt instantly ridiculous. Who the fuck cares about the layout of my bathroom?

Why should I even care? I do, of course. I went to design school and there’s nothing to be done. But this isn’t what I want to spend my time and energy on for the next ten years. I love my house now, and I’ll make it more livable – which will be fun – and then I’ll love it still. And in the background I guess it will be a good investment, but in real life it will be the place where I wake up in the mornings, and do the things that feel more important to me than sink fixtures. Writing? Politics? Kids?

learnding

2008-03-31T16:26:00.001-07:00

One step at a time, seemed like the logical way to approach fixing my fixer. That’s how I got through the buying process. When it all seemed huge and foreign I would open up my little notebook and write a list of tiny manageable Things To Do Next. Call three places for insurance. Find old W-2’s.

The fixing, however, has turned out to be more… iterative. Sure, I can make a list that starts with (1) repair gutters (2) get quotes for electrical, because these seem like the most pressing projects. But then I go out to examine the gutter and I see that I will have to move it when the new main water line comes in, so there’s no use repairing it. But since gutter repair should happen without further delay, that means the new water line slides into first position. And when I do the main water line, that’s when I should do the sewer. So suddenly the list is (1) main water line (2) sewer (3) gutters. Except by then the rainy season will be over, and gutters won’t be key again till fall.

And then I realize that to get quotes for electrical – which started as (2) but is all of a sudden (4) or maybe (3), I need a map of where the wiring will go. But to properly place outlets, I have to think about things like furniture and fixtures – things I wasn’t planning on considering for months. And I have to decide where big appliances will go, which means I have to start planning how my kitchen will get used, and if my washer and dryer will stack, and if the current laundry area in the basement might years from now become a third bedroom. And before I know it I am picking out lamps, which should really be more like (437). Except that I need to do that for (4) electrical.

Not to mention how doorknobs and faucets fall off unexpectedly, demanding immediate (1) regardless of any fine-tuned list.

So what I learned this weekend about Fixing Your Fixer is this: you can only do things one at a time, but you have to plan every last one of them before you start the first. So I spent all of Saturday at the Better Living Show, an annual expo center event on sustainable living. I learned about cork floors and recycled glass tiles and low-E windows and tankless water heaters. And then on Sunday I drank coffee on Mississippi and sketched out notes for each room, what the floors and walls and ceilings would look like, what kind of light it would need, what might get plugged in.

And last night I paced around with my notebook and my measuring tape, and I sketched out furniture that doesn’t exist, and I ripped apart magazines for pictures of windows and random blocks of color. And my fingers got numb and I could see my breath and I didn’t want to stop. It was pretty fun. Somehow, all at once and little by little, I guess this is what happens next.

truth in advertising

2008-03-28T11:22:00.000-07:00

“You’ll find that replacing a faucet is an easy project that takes about an hour,” said my DIY Book of Lies. It doesn’t mention that your old sink’s shutoff valves are broken. It doesn’t mention that the guy at the hardware store will convince you to get much longer supply tubes than necessary, making it near impossible to secure them properly. It doesn’t mention that to get where you need to, you will literally have to crawl, completely, into the mildewy cabinet under your sink, and then get on your back, with a flashlight between your teeth. It doesn’t mention debris falling in your face.

It doesn’t mention how the awkward angles and heavy wrenches will cause your arms to shake, and how the tools will cut your hands, which will bleed, and how unspeakably repulsive under-sink-grime will seep into the cuts, causing them to sting, and how you won’t be able to wash them because you’ve turned off the main water line.

In the DIY Book of Lies picture spread on faucet installation, the coupling nuts come right off the tailpieces. Because in the pictures, there is no rust. In the pictures, the new faucet and associated parts look like basic, standard items that can be cheaply procured.

In the pictures, the cast iron pipe that drains the sink is not a hundred years old, and so it does not crumble like tissue paper when touched, spilling corroded metal bits and curry-laden dishwater down your arms.

But five hours and ninety dollars later, I have a new kitchen faucet. And I know just how it works.

Good sign or bad?

2008-03-25T14:20:00.001-07:00

Tonight I have a date with Alaska, the good looking outdoorsy musician I picked up on Valentine’s Day. We’re going to dinner at a hidden little Thai place with a garden patio covered in fairy lights, and then we’re going to hear some indie rock band.

But last night I fell asleep reading my favorite home improvement manual, reading all the parts about different kinds of sinks and how to fix them if they leak (which mine does) and if they are missing handles (which mine is), and all the parts about the various other things in your bathroom that might drip and sputter and run when they shouldn’t (which mine do). And really? If it were up to me? If I hadn’t already said yes to Alaska? What I’d most want to do tonight is go home and take apart my toilet.

get this party started

2008-03-24T16:17:00.000-07:00

I realized, after one week in the new house, that I adapt quickly to all kinds of living situations. And this could be a problem.

Because if I don’t mind living in an unfixed fixer – if I don’t mind the falling ceiling tiles and the bare bulbs and the quirky shower – I could just live this way indefinitely. The furnace quit yesterday and I just thought, Good thing I like it cold.

But the truth is that the house needs some love, and it needs it now. Entropy already has a head start of several years. If I don’t get going I’m going to wake up one morning in a mossy glen that was once my living room.

So Saturday morning I turned a wall of the back porch into a giant calendar, and I plotted out projects from now through May. For each week I have Indoor Projects and Outdoor Projects and Things To Get And Learn, and each week has a project in green that’s the Big Weekend Project. Each project is on a little card held up with a tack so they can all move around.

The first project chose itself. Early last week I was rushing out to work when I discovered that I was locked in. Not a typo: locked in. The front door catch just spun and spun. Since then I’ve kept the door unlocked whenever I’m home – which, let me tell you, is not really what my particular flavor of Home Alone Paranoia needs.

First I had to choose door hardware. Door hardware is one of those things I’ve interacted with every day of my life but never given second thought to. It comes in a lot of finishes and styles. I knew that I needed a new main latch set – because that’s what was broken. And I soon figured out that I needed a deadbolt – because my door didn’t have one, and because I’d told my home insurance company that it did. I had not meant to lie: at the beginning of the door adventure, I actually knew so little about door hardware that I thought I did have a deadbolt.

Door hardware comes in two varieties: Cheap N’ Weak, and Expensive & Sturdy. I tried to find something at the lower end of the second type. This meant it wasn’t in a finish I particularly liked (but was, at least, not the mysteriously predominant Polished Brass), and it wasn’t the style I liked - the vertical-bar handles that look good on old houses but that are, apparently, some sort of door status symbol, and priced accordingly.

Being new to the world of home improvement, and therefore dangerously naive, I first removed all of the old door hardware even though this was not necessary for installing the deadbolt. In my pitifully optimistic brain, the plan went like this. (1) Remove old latch. (2) Install deadbolt. (3) Install new latch. (4) Dust hands off on jeans and go out for a drink to celebrate completion of Official First Home Improvement Project.

Then I realized that I’d purchased the wrong sized hole saw for the new deadbolt. (You won’t need to do any drilling, the very nice and very wrong man at the store had assured me.) So I left my house – not only unlocked, but with three gaping holes in the door where the locks might have been – to run to the store.

Except it was Sunday afternoon. Easter Sunday. Half an hour and three hardware stores later, I was ready to proceed. I drilled a big hole through the solid oak door. Half way the saw started binding, so I had to come from the other direction. The resulting two-part hole was what I like to call “close enough.”

Then I drilled the smaller hole for the bolt. Then I drilled the hole the bolt goes into. Then I chiseled out the depression for the strike plate. Then I chiseled out the depression for the back plate. Then, fumbling with half a dozen greasy unlabeled nearly-identical metal discs that absolutely must be lined up in the appropriate order and orientation, I snapped together the mechanism. And then it was dark. So I slapped duct tape over the lingering holes and called it a day.

And it took about eight times longer than I’d estimated, and probably a locksmith could have done it in fifteen minutes. But it was awesome. Now I not only have a deadbolt, but know exactly how it works, and what it looks like inside. And every time I unlock my door I get to think about it.

And if this project is any indication, this is exactly the sort of meaningful connection I will have with my whole house, when it’s all finished, in approximately twenty six years.

sprung

2008-03-21T15:20:00.001-07:00

I left late for work today – partly because of March Madness recovery, and partly because the door to my garage, where I store my bike, is a riddle wrapped in a mystery wrapped in a network of rotting timbers. But the late leaving meant I got a whole different look at my neighborhood: the start of the school day.

My new house’s good location is mostly about the short commute and about the nearby entertainment and eateries, but it’s also about the school that’s basically across the street. It’s an environmental charter school with a butterfly garden and a ball field and a swingset I can see from my front window. And in the morning many of the kids are walked or biked in by their parents. Being in the middle of that was kind of an awesome, perfect way to kick off the first full day of spring. I got to hear the bell ring.

Then I pedaled west to the river, a fast and easy trip thanks to the fact that I’m on a bike boulevard. Bike boulevards are a fabulous transportation planning feature designed to give bike commuters a direct and speedy route that is separate from the main automobile route. The trick is giving bikers what they want – good visibility, for example, and no stop signs – while using traffic calming measures to discourage cars. So I zip towards town for nearly a mile without stopping, leaning now and then around traffic circles on a quiet tree lined street.

And now here I am at the office, and I’m working diligently on our next piece of p.r., which is coming together rather well actually. But in the back of my head I’m making a list for the weekend. Plane down the garage door so it closes. Get my head around the gutter situation. Take samples for asbestos testing. Draw up a measured floorplan.

Make use of the swings.

before

2008-03-18T09:11:00.000-07:00

I had a dream that I was going camping with the previous owners of my house. I woke up feeling reassured in that way a good dream can make you feel, and I couldn’t recall the details. Brushing my teeth I realized that just before I woke up I was in a gas station convenience store selecting soy jerky from a shelf of clear plastic jerky tubs, and then I remembered that the gas station was a stop on our way to the forest. The owners were still an older couple like in real life, but they were happy and fit and full of enthusiasm. In real life I don’t know about any of these things. I wish that going camping together was the way a house sale worked.

Instead, in real life, I saw the couple only once, for less than ten minutes. My agent brought me by to see the house when there was already an accepted bid on it. The owners would have assumed I was irrelevant. The husband, whom I will call Leonard, sat in a chair watching tv the whole time, never looking up. I got the feeling he had been sitting in that chair every night for many years. The wife, whom I will call May, guided me efficiently but politely through the rooms. This is my pedestal sink, she said in the bathroom. There’s the garden, and it’s all organic, I’ve never used any pesticides on there.

This had been Leonard’s childhood home, and he and May then spent decades there after they got married. During the inspection their photos were still on the wall and so I know they raised a son in the house as well. The rooms had been brimming with things only a week before the sale, but only a few were left behind. There’s a forgotten drawer of cutlery and a child's drawing of a dragon in the closet. There’s a small cross ornament in the bedroom, which perhaps they left on purpose.

And so I think that May and Leonard were full of faith, and I hope that it helped them with their move. I like to think that they were ready for what is next – for not dusting and not going up and down stairs. But I worry that leaving a house you’ve made a life in for so long can only come with terrible sadness. And I wish, if camping is unrealistic, that we could at least have had tea, that I could have heard some stories of the house and that I could have asked Leonard to leave behind any tools he was going to get rid of. He used to have a lot of tools – I can tell by the handmade workbench he left in the garage – and I wonder if he sold them or gave them away. Now here I am buying new tools, which feels foolish. Your tools will be put to good use right here in this house, I could have told him.

One thing I know for sure is that they found out I bought the house to live in – not to fix up and sell for a profit, and not to rent out. They know I am a young woman and that this is my first house and that I’m excited for it, and I hope that this made them pleased. And I am thankful that they left a house that feels so blessed – from the cross tiled into the kitchen floor to the tiny stamp on the entry room threshold that says believe in miracles to the daffodils blooming by the porch.

littlehouse

2008-03-13T12:33:00.000-07:00

progress

2008-03-11T21:02:00.001-07:00

The first three hundred dollars I’m sinking into my new house is all going towards books. When I do something, I like to read about it. I hiked around the Balkans with a backpack full of everything that had ever been translated from Serbo-Croatian into English, and now – against all common sense – I am hauling book after book into the house I am trying to move out of. It started during the search with Jane Smiley’s In Good Faith, a novel about a realtor. Now that I have a real place it’s graduated to real stories: essays and memoirs and lots of how-to.

There are even more kinds of home improvement books than there are home improvement shows on cable. Many of them are not for me. There are a lot of books about building a new house, for example, which I am not doing. And at the other extreme are the books that claim to be about renovation but are actually about selecting some nice new vases. I’m looking for the ones right in the middle: the foundation and the roof stay; the stuff in between is reinvented.

I’ve also been looking for books about sustainable home improvement, but these are harder to come by than I’d hoped. If I were building a straw bale house or moving to the country to live off the land, there would be a mountain of resources at my disposal. But as far as sustainable renovation for my existing urban home, I’ve been pretty disappointed.

So this is the list so far. For recreational diversion and commiseration while this goes on, I chose The Walls Around Us (Dave Barry style) and Gutted (subtitled Down to the Studs in My House, My Marriage, My Entire Life), and a book called simply House. For general how-to I picked up Black & Decker Complete Home Repair and Home Depot Home Improvement 1-2-3 and, because I couldn’t resist, Bob Vila’s This Old House from 1980. For environmental philosophy I got Green Remodeling and for decorating philosophy I got Time Life Book of Repair and Restoration, and for getting ahead of myself I found Good Green Kitchens and Plan Your Bathroom. The latter has a three-part section like those flipbooks for kids where you match one person’s head to another’s torso to another’s legs. Now I can do that with tile.

I am realizing rather quickly that this project is not going to happen in slow easy phases as I’d imagined. If I’m doing new electrical I’m taking down the walls, and if I’m taking down the walls I’m doing new plumbing, and when I do new electrical and new plumbing I need to know where the sinks and outlets and lights are going to go. So I have to set out with the finished product in mind. And while I do all of these things I have to fix the more egregious shortcomings of the house. Its lack of gutters, for example, and its collapsing chimney, and its leaking furnace. Sometime in my future I foresee a large and multicolored flowchart.

In the mean time, fair reader, I have a feeling this is about to become a house blog. I usually move blogs for new subjects, but since the whole house undertaking is about staying put, perhaps I’ll give that a virtual go as well. Half of strike that’s name came from hitting nails, anyway (in New Orleans) – and the other half came from throwing in the towel on plans with a boy. What is it they say about the more things change?

Probably nothing relevant.

crazy

2008-03-11T08:32:00.001-07:00

and THEN

2008-03-07T12:55:00.000-08:00

…I signed a whole bunch of papers and bought a house.

It was awesome, actually. My broker Erica came and my lending agent Kat came and we were all three of us in dark blue jeans and different styles of black sweater and it felt kind of kickass, it felt like Sex in the City but with a really big check handed over at the end.

There was a time, you know, when women couldn’t own property. And to be honest it was strange to me at the beginning, buying a house by myself. But something about this little circle of strong professionals in sexy shoes made me really pleased, even when I had to sign – in three places – next to parts of the contract that had been auto filled in with the phrase “Jane Doe, an unmarried woman.” Like that’s my primary designator. What do you do? I’m an Unmarried Woman.

But I signed and signed and handed the pages over one by one to escrow officer Stormi, the fourth woman in our little real estate coven (whose sweater was pink). And then Erica gave me a hug and Kat gave me a box with seeds and organic cleanser and a compact fluorescent bulb. And I love Portland. And I own a house in Portland, so I guess I’ll stay here a while.

hija unica

2008-03-06T10:31:00.000-08:00

Being an only child has its perks. Your parents are more likely to be able to help you with a downpayment on a house, for example. But it also comes with a mountain of difficulties, which any of you who have met (or, God forbid, dated) an only child may be familiar with: we have trouble sharing, and we can be a little sensitive (from not being teased into toughness), and we’re not always convinced that anyone else actually exists at all.

And, most relevant here, we’re not the best advocates for ourselves. Because we never had to compete with other, possibly cuter, children for time or attention or the bigger half of the cookie. And as adults, we continue to assume that everyone is looking out for us. Though eight years in New York disavowed me of my belief that each stranger on the street has my best interest in mind, I still tend to hope for it in my heart of hearts. When people say I love you or Let me know if I can help or Trust me, I generally take them at their word. And when I say these things I mean them – and am constantly frustrated at how rarely they are believed.

Overall I think this works in my favor. It’s made dating a little messy with unrealistic expectations, but I have friends I’d sell my soul for and I do mighty good with strangers, because with new people you often get what you look for. The one place it all falls apart is in relationships that are linked to financial transactions. Getting my car fixed, finding a new laptop – these things fill me with dread because I know that salespeople are telling me things in order to get something for themselves. And I don’t resent them for that – I understand that it’s their job. But it’s not what I’m used to so it’s not intuitive to navigate. I can’t help thinking Why are you making me negotiate? Why can’t we be in this together?

In this regard buying a house has been a bit… let’s go with the diplomatic word challenging. Because everyone makes more money if I spend more money, and if I spend it soon. Not just the sellers, but also “my” agent and “my” lender – both of whom are cool and kickass women whom I think I’d like quite a lot in any other setting. But this process is designed so that trusting them feels naïve.

Which was all ok, more or less, until last night, when my lender called to tell me that the documents I’ll be signing this afternoon would not be available in advance for me to read. I had requested them a week ago and she said she could get them to me the day before the signing. But they came in late and then there were scanning problems or blah blah whatever and she’s really sorry but they’re just what we talked about and that’s it. Don’t worry, she said, because the escrow agent will explain them all as I sign them.

And I fucking hate this. Because I have learned, as an adult, that this friendly woman who has been nothing but helpful and kind on the phone for weeks is maybe not actually doing what’s best for me. But the only child part of me just held the receiver thinking Ok, I’m sure she tried really hard to get me these documents, and there’s no reason to suspect they’re going to say anything different than what we agreed.

Which, to be honest, doesn’t help anyone. Even if it’s true, it’s not my role in this. My role is to take a deep breath and say, Thanks for trying so hard to get them to me today. I’m sorry it didn’t work out, since we were really hoping to sign tomorrow. But let’s just go ahead and reschedule the signing.

Of course that’s not what I said. I don’t know exactly what I said because I was so flustered and unsure of what to trust, but it more closely resembled No Problem.

And then about nine hours later I got the right words together. But nine hours later was too late for her to be able to amp things up and pull through. That’s the whole advantage of being a good advocate for yourself: you give people a chance to get you what you need instead of taking what they first offer while resenting and judging them. Not being an advocate for yourself initially feels more generous, but it’s not.

Late is better than never, though, and it’s how I’m learning. So this morning I picked up the phone and called my lender and told her I wasn’t comfortable signing documents I hadn’t read. And then I called my agent and rescheduled. My appointment is tomorrow morning. The world continues to turn.

tease

2008-03-05T14:32:00.000-08:00

I love what the sun does to people. After a rainy gray winter the sun pokes out and suddenly everyone is sweet and easy. Portlanders are pushovers when the sun comes out in March.

I just took lunch – a long walk up the park to the food cart where the vendor chatted to me for fifteen minutes about hamsters, and a warm brick balustrade in the square where a guy filmed me saying the phrase under-the-sofa-cushion money into his phone camera, “for a video project.” Somehow these things seem like a good idea with this weather.

Before lunch I went to the bank to find out about getting a cashier’s check for a very large sum of money, which in the next couple of days I will be handing over to an escrow agent in exchange for a cute and crumbling little house. This would feel negligent in November. But here on this scarfless day in March there is a tangible will to optimism, a collective wink, an unspoken agreement to forget that the rain will be back. When I smile, passers by smile back fast and full. A crossing guard this morning literally danced me forward in my Smartcar. And everyone is making eye contact: lingering, loaded eye contact.

I often wonder if residents of warmer climates live this way all the time. When I visited a SoCal friend over winter break a few years back it was jarring how undressed the girls in the bars were – skirts hovering lightly around their hips and tops falling off their shoulders. This is not how we dress in the northwest, and it was lovely. All those white teeth and tan skin. And it's surely tied to mood.

But I believe it’s the change that gets us going in Oregon, the way we get to disappear and then break out each year all new. Not yet, I keep telling myself. Plenty of short days yet to go. But I’m revving up. One little taste, months early as it is, gets us all to the edges of our seats. Last minute preparations. Finishing touches on the best-laid plans for the long stretch of blue sky ahead.

sneak preview

2008-03-04T14:39:00.000-08:00

These are some of the home improvement shows you can watch.

The one where neighbors swap houses for two days to redecorate each others’ rooms. The one where a designer redoes a room in someone’s house inspired by the house of a moviestar or athlete. The one where a designer redoes a room in someone’s house inspired by the house of a moviestar or athlete, but for $1000. The one where an old grumpy contractor goes to the tragically flawed house of a person in need to fix a tiny leak, and ends up ripping out miles of faulty plumbing. The one where a strapping handyman comes to grant fix-it wishes. The one where a house gets a makeover in order to be sold for more money. The one where rooms are redecorated entirely based on color. The one where an annoying woman assigns you a “style” with a cheesy name like “Tuscan contemporary” or “Mediterranean modern.”

There are more, but you get the idea. I know about them because I watched them all. I watched them all between the hours of seven p.m. on Friday and five p.m. on Saturday, because you can watch one flavor or another of home improvement show at any hour of the day, and sometimes more than three at a time. I turned the first one on to unwind from work and I didn’t stop flipping until I realized that I’d wasted half my weekend, neglected the dog I was supposed to be dogsitting, and blown a perfectly good leap night. But I was helpless. The friends I was housesitting for have a cozy couch in front of a wide flatscreen tv with approximately eight hundred channels, and I am defenseless in the face of such Tools of the Devil. It’s why I can’t have a television myself.

Usually when I dogsit for these friends I watch cooking shows or movies, but this weekend in their big beautiful house felt like a dress rehearsal for homeownership. The home improvement shows were just the beginning. I studied their appliances and their outlet placement. I flipped through their back issues of Real Simple and Martha Stewart Living. I considered their wainscoting.

And when I woke up Sunday to a sunny Portland morning, I leashed up Dog and went for a long walk in a new neighborhood. I bought a New York Times and sat at an outdoor table drinking a latte with the pup curled at my feet. People walking by stopped to say good morning. One of them informed us It’s dog-o-rama at the park so we headed off that way, and spent a while socializing on the lawn.

Back at home, warm and tired and pleasantly muddy, I cranked up Tito Puente and baked oatmeal chocolate chip cookies in the sunny kitchen.

I could get used to this.

walls

2008-02-27T13:28:00.000-08:00

I’ve been pretty excited about the possibility of this new house.

It’s about four blocks from my favorite coffee shop, and four blocks in the other direction from a three dollar movie theater. There’s a bakery nearby that sells tiny little muffins that taste more like biscuits and are stuffed with fresh fruit. It has a garage with big barn doors so you can do projects and feel like you’re outside.

I was feeling fabulous about the location and about the luck I had getting my bid accepted, and about all the possibility of such a new adventure. And then I talked to my mom.

My mom and I don’t talk often, and sometimes I forget why. I feel like I ought to want to talk to her. Friends are often surprised, given my general tolerance for and even attraction to difficult people, that I’m so impatient with my mom. They are right. They are right and I should do better and I know it. But every time I try to do better, it fails miserably. Case in point.

I call up my mom to tell her about the house. I call her at what seems exactly the right time: I have navigated all of the tricky steps in the homebuying process with, if not skill and grace, at least passable competence. I have found a house that is both a good match for me and a good investment. And in general I have done something expected and conventional – qualities my mom has been encouraging me to embrace for years.

I found a house! I say to my mom with enthusiasm. Yes? she responds with caution. And I remember that this is how my mom greets any decision I make: wary cynicism. I press on. Yes, a great little house. Little? she says. Yes, I say, very close to downtown. How much was it? she asks. And I tell her – a number at the low end of my range, a range I told her about months ago. A number for which one does not find a house in this neighborhood, ever. A number with which my friends in Seattle and San Diego and DC might be able, with luck and connections, to purchase a well-located parking space.

That much? my mother asks. She sounds surprised. I can’t anywhere in my brain imagine she’s surprised about how high this number is – since it is, after all, a house, and since I don’t live in North Dakota. I decide that she is perhaps surprised at how low the number is, which is the general reaction I have gotten from those who might be considered somewhat In The Know like, for example, my broker and my lender. It’s a fixer! I explain. And this is where the shaking lumbering conversation derails altogether.

A FIXER? she asks with horror. Have you gotten Estimates? On how much all that work is going to Cost You? Which actually, I have. It’s a lot more than she thinks. I mean, I haven’t even said the words “sewer” or “furnace” or, God forbid, “asbestos.” All I said was Fixer. Her horror is probably just coming from the thought that I might have to paint something.

How many bedrooms does this “fixer” have? she asks, and you can hear the quotes around the word fixer. Two I respond, naively, because that is, in fact, how many bedrooms it has. And because I have no idea of the gravity of this answer. No idea that this answer will bring about The Sound.

The Sound is her specialty. It’s kind of a deep grunt / sigh, summoned up from the depths of her tortured and weary soul. The rough translation of The Sound is this: “I hope you realize that through your selfish and stupid actions, you have contributed considerably to my perpetual suffering and eventual untimely death.” The Sound was my mother’s major at Jewish Mother School.

She pauses and makes The Sound again. Twice in a row is really quite exceptional – though it’s happened before, in response to phrases like “hitchhiking in Africa” and “my girlfriend.” I say, quietly, maybe we should talk about something else. She is speechless. Pause. More pause. Finally: Let me put your father on. And she hands off the phone.

And that there kills my house spirit. When I run into a friend the next day at lunch, I hardly want to mention it. It’s a fixer, I say while wincing. And he says: Of Course It Is.

Of course it is! What, like I’m going to buy some Pottery Barn house with carpets and landscaping? Like I’m going to buy some sprawling two-storey out at the end of the bus line? I hate living in big houses. I hate accumulating stuff and I hate dusting that stuff and I hate living in fear that people with less stuff will come steal mine. And I like tearing things down and rebuilding them. I like learning how things work. I like daunting projects that I have no idea how to start.

And it’s no news to the world but somehow it’s shocking how direct a line a parent has to what irks you. It’s just confounding, that someone who has known you so long can know you so poorly. And I wish I could find peace with that.

What I found instead was the home improvement section of Powell’s, and I sat there on the floor for two hours reading Plumbing for Dummies and the Black & Decker Complete Guide to Home Wiring. And fuck. I am psyched about this house.

Birds have been entering the attic.

2008-02-25T12:06:00.000-08:00

That’s my favorite sentence from the forty six page long home inspection report produced about a house I have made an offer on. Other highlights include, “The framing under the bathroom was not well installed and is sub standard.” Also, “Roof – continued.”

The Kitchen section begins like this: The counters are damaged and need to be replaced. The cabinets are damaged and need to be replaced. The flooring is damaged and needs to be replaced. This flooring may contain asbestos.

When I began the house-finding adventure a couple months ago, it felt mostly hypothetical. I guess I’ll look for a house, I thought. I’ll look, and see what happens. Julie got me a little blank book and I filled it with lists. Top Five Qualities. What To Do Next. I found a broker, which was harder than I expected. She started sending me listings.

I was looking for something very particular that was basically all about location. I like my quick bike ride to work. I know that a longer ride would mean that on rainy days I’d take the bus. And my daily bike ride changes my mood and my outlook and how well I sleep at night. I have also learned, from living in two different places in Portland, that being just a few blocks from commerce significantly shifts my lifestyle for the better. I need to be able to walk to good things – things that are open after ten.

But close-in neighborhoods are more expensive, so I paraded through a series of comically awkward houses – houses so bizarre in one way or another that they were right in my price range. Tiny houses next to highways with awful floorplans. Dark houses on busy streets. Houses with ominously sloping floors.

I found one favorite, but it had an offer accepted on it just hours before I went inside. So I wrote a backup offer. Weeks went by. I looked at a few others, but given my budget and my neighborhoods, it was mostly about waiting for the right thing to get listed. I figured I could wait a while.

And then, last Monday, my backup offer got bumped into first place. For whatever reason – probably having to do with the outdated sewer or electrical or plumbing systems, or the leaking roof or the leaking oil tank, but who’s to say – the earlier buyers walked. And in the space of five days I found a lender and had an inspection and had a tank locate and got a sewer bid. And now it seems like I might be buying a house.

It could still fall apart, of course. But at this point it’s looking pretty good. And so now I’m staring at forty six pages of what I’ll be up to for the next couple years. I’m not exactly sure why I’m doing this. I guess it’s another piece in my grand experiment in staying put. I guess it’s a good way to learn about circuits. And flooring. And birds.

weak in review

2008-02-21T10:20:00.001-08:00

I’ve been sick for six days with this achy fevery mess of a thing that went around my whole office. On the first day I denied it, because Jules had come through Portland on her way back from New Zealand, and it’s better to be well if you’re going to eat orange-flavored French toast and look for wooden boxes in old junk shops. That night it knocked me over. But I downed some Advil and propped myself up and went to the opera. I’m glad I did. I love the opera.

Sunday I don’t remember, except that I got myself soup and missed Elise’s baby shower. Sigh. Monday was a holiday so I just stayed in bed. By nighttime I made the unwise choice to grab dinner with VDay Boy, because my temperature had taken a promising dive below one hundred, and because he was about to leave for a two week trip. I didn’t want him to forget me, you know.

Tuesday I took a sick day, read and watched videos when it didn’t make my head hurt. Wednesday I went back to work. My boss looked at me skeptically. He’d had this, so he knew. At noon he said I’m going out to lunch, and you should be gone when I get back. He’s a good boss.

The fever’s gone now but the coughing part has arrived, and I don’t remember being sick for this long since college. It hasn’t been a bad sick – most of the time it’s felt like a totally manageable sick, the kind of sick you can work with. But every time I try to pretend I’m fine, it alters and comes on a bit worse.

So today I’m staying home, even though it hardly feels necessary. I’m going to lie here in my messy bed surrounded by books and empty Gatorade bottles, watching movies and instant messaging and thinking about the eclipse. I think Winter just wanted a little attention.

A VDay Play in Five Acts

2008-02-15T11:43:00.000-08:00

Prelude.
Read the next post.

Act I.
A girl returns from work, high on blue sky and the table of chocolates and pink punch that was set up for bikers on the Hawthorne Bridge. The girl picks through the recently arrived package from her ex, sweetly assembled but a reminder nonetheless that done is done, and she cries just a little bit and listens to Glenn Gould. She considers the options for her evening: mac n’ cheese with the Jane Austen dvd ominously chosen for her by Netflix, or getting the fuck out of the house at all costs. She chooses the latter.

Act II.
The girl heads down to a poorly named local coffee shop she loves – a shop always full of people sitting alone together. The sort of place where being alone on National I’m Not Alone Day will not feel conspicuous. She orders food before realizing that half the seating has been cordoned off for a couples dinner, which seems really unkind for such a single hipster haven, like closing AA on New Year’s. The girl grudgingly enjoys her smoked Gouda panini with caramelized onions and thinly sliced pears.

Act III.
Questioning her earlier resilience, the girl beelines towards her bedroom. Two blocks away she realizes the enormous potential of some dramatic loneliness. While not actually a masochist, she often prefers feeling bad to feeling nothing. She does a one eighty and heads back to Belmont. She sits on a stool at a bar and drinks a drink and giggles to herself, I am drinking whiskey alone at a bar on Valentine’s Day. I wish I had a cigarette. She notices a guy sitting alone nearby and asks How’s your evening going? and he says FineYours?, just that, and looks away, and leaves to smoke out front. And she thinks, You are an ass. You are the only person sitting alone at this bar on Valentine’s Day and a cute girl in tall pink-striped socks comes in and sits right next to you and throws you this opening, and you’ve got nothing. She clinks the ice around in her glass and downs the rest and leaves.

Act IV.
Giving up yet again, the girl is on her way home when she passes another coffee shop with an open mike in progress. She stands staring in the window when a man coming out stops right in the doorway and says What a winning smile. He is not hitting on her. He is fifty at least and he smiles back and heads down the block. She realizes that she is smiling, and that she is in fact having a fairly good time overall. That may be the high point of my night, thinks the girl. She is wrong.

Act V.
After sipping tea for the last few open mike performers, the girl feels she has given it a valiant effort. She goes home at last. In her living room her housemates are assembling to hit a club. She banishes any lingering plans for Persuasion. She puts her phone and her ID in her skirt pocket and gets on her bike. At the club she is being introduced to friends of friends of housemates when she spots a guy at the end of the bar. He is alone and sipping a drink in a familiar way, but he doesn’t look unhappy. I really haven’t been uncomfortable enough times yet tonight, thinks the girl. Who are you waiting for? she asks the guy. Coworkers, he replies. An answer we can work with. She asks more questions and he answers more, and then he asks questions too. Where are your coworkers? she asks after time has passed. They’re probably here because my phone has been buzzing in my pocket for a while now, he says. This, thinks the girl, is a lovely answer. Do you want to check? asks the girl. Not really he says. This, thinks the girl, is a lovely answer too. Then he asks her to dance, and this, thinks the girl, is brave. And they dance till the bar closes. And this, thinks the girl, will do nicely.

(i wrote this yesterday before going out, and shelved it to work on later)

2008-02-15T11:42:00.001-08:00

For Valentine’s Day I got a package from Operaman with all the stuff I’d left around his apartment. I don’t think he timed it like that on purpose but still. Unhf.

Last year at this time, right here on this blog, I wished I was in love. And I realize now that I wasn’t specific enough.

Dear Universe, please allow me to amend my earlier wish, which you were gracious enough to grant me and it was nice being in love so I certainly don’t mean to sound ungrateful so let’s just give it another go with a bit more precision on my part. I would like to be in love with someone who loves me back.

Thank you. That is all.

slide thru

2008-02-14T10:05:00.000-08:00

Last night I went squaredancing. You can learn a lot about someone by how they squaredance.

I remember reading a few years back about job interviews during which the interviewer would “unexpectedly” need to run an errand, and the interviewee would be asked to drive. The driving would bring out all sorts of qualities for the interviewer to observe: patience or hostility or composure. Squaredancing is like that.

For those of you who haven’t squaredanced since fourth grade gym class (and in fourth grade, squaredancing was my favorite unit in gym) a squaredance goes like this. A bunch of people show up, some in couples and some alone. There’s a kickass band with a violin and a bass at least, and there’s a caller who runs the whole thing. At the start of each dance everyone chooses a partner – traditionally not the one you came with, and a different one every time – and the caller does a quick rundown of how the dance goes. There are basic steps everyone knows like promenade, and special steps for certain dances you learn right there on the spot.

Then the music starts and you just kind of wing it. You try to listen to the caller and follow your partner and generally not knock anyone over.

Some people really don’t get the whole “partner” thing. With squaredancing you dance with lots of people and you’re friendly with them all and you look them in the eye, and all it means is that you’re dancing. But Americans aren’t generally well practiced at that. So sometimes you get a partner who is clearly trying not to look at you or touch you excessively, and who doesn’t smile too much. And it’s hard not to lean over and say to them, We’re dancing, so I’m not going to misread it if you hold my hand.

And some people are really bossy dancers. Sometimes they’re good and sometimes they’re not, but either way they think the goal is doing it correctly. They whisper things like Left when you step right. They watch the floor for skilled partners to ask next. They are often frustrated with the appalling level of squaredance incompetence. And I empathize with them, because this is how I was brought up. But somewhere along the line I was lucky enough to get the newsflash - Technical Mastery: Not The Actual Point.

And my favorite people to dance with, of course, are the ones who are having an unreasonably good time. They know more or less what they’re doing, but when it doesn’t go quite right they make something up. When you head in the wrong direction they put their hand just so, and suddenly you’re going the right way. When they mess up they just come find you again. And they know how to spin their partner, which is hands down the best part of squaredancing. Nervous and bossy dancers make terrible spinners. And without spinning I’m not sure why anyone would squaredance at all.

The Five Stages of a Pop Country Fan’s Breakup Grief

2008-02-11T23:45:00.000-08:00

(call me 4.3)

1. Denial. What Kind of Gone, Chris Cagle

Well there’s gone for good and there’s good and gone,
there’s gone with the long before it…
is it whiskey night or just a couple beers?

2. Melodrama. Watching Airplanes, Gary Allan

I'm just sittin' out here watchin' airplanes, take off and fly
Tryin' to figure out which one you might be on
And why you don't love me anymore…

3. Creepiness. More Than A Memory, Garth Brooks

When you’re dialing 6 numbers just to hang up the phone,
Driving cross town just to see if she's home…

4. Coping. Get My Drink On, Toby Keith

I'm gonna get my drink on
I'm gonna hear me a sad song
My baby just left home
I'm gonna stay 'till the money's gone
If it takes me all night long
I'm gonna get my drink on.

5. Acceptance. Brand New Girlfriend, Steve Holy

I picked up what was left of my pride,
And I put on my walking shoes,
And I got up on that high road,
And I did what any gentleman would do..
I got a brand new girlfriend.

metathesis (reaction)

2008-02-04T19:34:00.000-08:00

My friend sent me a book for my birthday called Eat Pray Love. The author Elizabeth Gilbert goes city to city and she concludes that every city has a word, and every person has a word, and to truly feel at home you must find a city with the word that matches your own.

And when I read this I liked the idea, but I thought, Every person has a word? One single word? Just one? But that’s what you get in this game: One Word.

I’ve played out the exercise with friends where we list what we’re looking for in another person with the shortest list possible. Because many of us start with things like Plays guitar and Curly hair but in the end of course there are more essential qualities that stay, and they are few and they are indispensible. My list until this point was Joy and Bravery. My list was too long.

And sometimes I worry that my list needs some fleshing out. Sometimes I look at my recent relationships – at where I was willing to go and what I was willing to do, at how quickly I adapted – and I worry that I am like Julia Roberts in Runaway Bride, in that scene where with the thinnest of metaphors she realizes that she had always liked her eggs prepared however her various boyfriends liked theirs. She has no taste of her own, so adopting someone else’s suits her fine. Sound familiar?

Canada: Ok. Casual: Sure. Kids: Why not.

But actually? I know exactly what I like. I took a very long time, which we could affectionately call my twenties, figuring this out. In my twenties I did basically whatever the fuck I wanted to – lived where I wanted and studied what I wanted and acted how I wanted, significant other or no, frowning parents all the while. It wasn’t the most generous period of my life but I learned a lot.

For example. I like to travel. I like words. I like dancing. I like to grow and make and eat good food. I like getting sweaty outdoors.

But more importantly, I know what matters to me. And how my eggs are prepared doesn’t make the list. Scrambled, poached, overeasy, whatever. It doesn’t mean I lack a sense of who I am - it means I don’t need to negotiate every little detail in order to assert who I am. It means I know when I can say Ok, Sure, Why not - and really mean it.

And I say these things often, because I am who I most want to be in situations that require me to give things I don’t yet know how to give and do things I don’t yet know how to do. Go to design school, learn to draw. Move to Quebec, learn to speak French. Date a father, learn to share. And how else do you discover things that you never knew you’d love? How else would I have come to appreciate Catholic mass and canoeing and reading Supreme Court decisions?

So here’s my word: Game. According to thesaurus.com, that’s brave bold courageous dauntless desirous disposed dogged eager fearless gallant hardy heroic inclined interested intrepid nervy persevering persistent plucky prepared ready resolute spirited spunky unafraid unflinching valiant valorous willing.

And if Elizabeth Gilbert was looking for a city that matched her word, I guess I’m looking for a person who matches mine. I don’t care if he likes the music I like or votes for who I vote for, and I don’t care if he has obligations tying him to one place or dreams pulling him somewhere else. We can make that work. It’s not a compromise. It’s the point.

But he better be Game. Cause I’m likely to want to do all sorts of ridiculous things it’s never occurred to him to do – sleep in our yard, adopt a couple foster kids, speak in another language for a month – and I don’t want him to be all Why would we do that? I want him to say How Intrepid of you! How Hardy and Desirous! Let me go get my Thermarest / deep reserves of openness and patience / Italian-English dictionary. Calloo Callay.

See How We Are

2008-02-03T04:16:00.001-08:00

I woke up and stayed in bed – read and wrote and read some more – and by eleven called my old insightful friend Mo, who was still in his pajamas, too. And he lives on the East Coast.

This is how winter is, he reminded me. Don’t you remember last year? But I always thought of last year as a fluke. I hoped it was a fluke.

This is how it is to be single in winter, he said. And I felt reassured but also bitter. My single friends are newly in couples and my couple friends are newly in hibernation. Here I am alone in the rain and no one will make plans. This is how it goes, he said. He was mostly surprised I hadn’t learned this before.

We played a game called How Long Would It Take For Someone To Notice If You Died, and then I realized I better leave the house.

I went to the coffee shop. I ordered citrusy tea and a dark chocolate brownie and I tried to finish last Sunday’s crossword puzzle, but I was about eight words away. Fuck Being Single, I thought. And then, in a fit of forgetting I was bitter, I talked to the guy sitting across from me. A ream of paper, I asked, is that with an A or an E? And he looked at me like he’d won the lottery.

And that’s about where I remembered it: that I’m good at being single. That I know how to do it, and that sometimes it’s downright fun. That breaking up is hard – No Shit – and that I miss Operaman, no question, but that I am not sad at being single in and of itself. Even though it’s winter.

And then I came home and pulled on my fishnets and my Docs and on my way out the door my housemate said You should party with us more often, and I realized that at thirty one I’m still closer to twenty five than to forty. So I went out dancing with my friend from New Orleans. I drank Makers & Cokes and we danced to John Doe from X, and when he finished we hopped down the street and spun to Prince and Reba until the last bar’s lights came on.

And two thirty was too early so in honor of Mardi Gras we went for a late night snack at the Montage, down under the Morrison Bridge and all full of girls with tight shirts and denim and heels.

And still now here, home at four, I miss Operaman, but newly and refreshingly I don’t miss who I was with him. I was so focused on not hurting him and not fucking with his plans and not freaking him out that I became much smaller than I am. And not once did he ask me to do that, but somehow I fell into it – somehow I assumed that if I stayed my single self I’d constantly be hearing No. And I hate hearing No. I hate that I always hear it and never say it.

So with Operaman I did something unfair to both of us: I reeled myself in to accommodate a respectably conservative schedule and a respectively conservative relationship. I never said Let’s stay out. I never said Let's be bigger. I never said I love you and I don’t give a fuck about your problem set, because here we are both alive at the same time and what are the fucking odds. And it probably wouldn’t have worked for him anyway but at least it would have felt honest.

The point being that now that I'm on my own I remember that actually I'm a lot more kickass than that. And for my next trick I’d like to figure out how to be kickass in a relationship, but for the moment I’ll settle for just kickass, even on my own, even in winter, because Lord knows it’s been a long time gone.

beat

2008-01-30T22:19:00.000-08:00

I went to Chief O’Brien’s place tonight to help him move. We’ve met up a handful of times over the past few months to grab drinks and play darts, and I think we’ve figured out the Just Friends thing just fine. When I got there he was tying his bed onto his truck with the help of his coworker Ross.

At the new apartment we needed to get the mattress and box spring and bed frame up two flights of twisty outdoor stairs, which took some doing. When it came to the frame, O’Brien went off in search of an Allen wrench. Ross and I got to talking. At which point I noticed he was pretty cute.

Huh, I thought. Maybe this is how you find someone to date even when it seems like you don’t know any candidates: one night you’re balancing a box spring in a stiff rainy wind and you look over at the guy guiding it through a too-small doorway and he’s just your type. And then maybe the three of you go to dinner and over steamy bowls of noodles you learn that he lived in Mexico, and likes to cross country ski, and makes maps.

And suddenly the table seemed warm and full of possibility, and I thought, Fuck! I remember this feeling! This is the feeling of being single and meeting someone cool! And it lasted about five minutes.

Around minute six I noticed that Ross kept making fun of the Chief. Like when O’Brien asked if Mexico was all a big desert, Ross basically ridiculed the question. Because, you know – it’s a big country. And later he jeered at O’Brien’s bad grasp of geography, and his mispronunciation of the word Tao. And sometimes in the midst of these You Should Know That moments, Ross looked at me conspiratorially. Like, You knew that, right? And I did. But while I admire worldliness, I admire kindness more.

Right around the time when Ross answered his cell phone at the table, I started thinking about Operaman. Which I guess is gonna happen for a while. Because as much as that relationship didn’t look like I wanted it to look – as much as I never felt sure about his feelings for me, and as much as I never told him with candor my feelings for him – I never wished that Operaman himself was any different than who he is. Because in addition to being smart and funny and adventurous– in addition to having the sort of unknown worlds I’m always attracted to in people – Operaman has a good heart. The kind that struggles and considers and discerns. And there are a lot of people in Portland who look good, and there are a delightful number who talk politics and make music and own tents. But while I love that list, it doesn’t much get off the ground without a good heart. And good hearts are harder to come by than one might hope.

these people need sleep

2008-01-29T15:30:00.000-08:00

Me: Hi, I'm calling to sign up for the Thursday morning shift at Church A.

Red Cross Worker: OK, let me just go get the folder for Thursday. So you want to work the first shift on Thursday?

Me: No, I think it’s the third shift, from five in the morning to eight thirty, Thursday morning.

RC: Oh, well so you realize that actually that’s on Friday morning.

Me: OK, well, I’m available to volunteer on Thursday morning.

RC: (growing frustrated) But you see, the Thursday shifts start on Thursday night, so the shift you’re talking about is actually on Friday.

Me: Yes, I understand, but I’m available on Thursday morning. So I guess what I’m trying to sign up for is Wednesday Shift Three.

RC: (exasperated) Oh, well then I’ll have to get the Wednesday folder. Hold on.

extremists

2008-01-29T11:42:00.000-08:00

I was tipsy by eight from the State of the Union drinking game we were playing between the pool tables at Sam’s Billiards. I would have been drunk if I’d chosen a word like the winner’s – freedom – or even like second and third: surge and the American people. But I’d picked bipartisan because I haven’t been drinking a lot recently so my tolerance is down. Freedom would have put me under the table. Plus I’m optimistic. I only got to drink twice, officially, during the SOTU (No Child Left Behind and social security), but the Democratic response brought me up to speed with progress and earmark, at least.

By nine I was having one of those fun walks home where all the lights are extra colorful, and I was chatting with a nice engineer I’d met at the bar. HELLO my name is Any Nonsense Word, his nametag read. He was engaged, of course, because apparently back in 2007, everyone who wasn’t already married got engaged. I’m happy for all of them, really, but it’s kind of a bitch for my social life.

Consequently I went home and crawled into bed and spun up some Pedro Almodóvar, and did you know that Pedro Almodóvar worked for Telefonica, Spain’s national phone company? As an administrative assistant? For twelve years? Which just makes me appalled at how complacent I was with my life sometimes when I was a barista, like, Oh I can’t do anything important because I don’t have an important job. And I find ways to do that still, waiting around to get asked to do meaningful work as if accomplished people just happen to have been assigned to good projects.

Almodóvar worked at the phone company and wrote a novella at night and, at 35, started playing with a Super 8. Kind of fabulous, don’t you think? Who knows what any of us might get up to at any moment. It’s the beginning of a new year at the end of an old presidency and I’m remembering the part where we wing it.

inside out

2008-01-26T09:23:00.000-08:00

Do you run into things sometimes that, as soon as you become aware of them, you realize you should have become aware of a long time ago? Like when I was a barista at thirty I suddenly realized, Oh, that’s why tipping is so important, even though it’s just a coffee. Or when my first friend got divorced, and I realized that can happen and it’s no one’s fault. Or when I figured out why some people don’t trust the police. It can take a whole lifetime, you know - digging yourself out of a sheltered childhood.

So this is what I learned yesterday: there are a lot of homeless people.

Portland is having a cold snap. Our Januaries are usually mild and wet but this year it’s been clear and sunny and freezing. Last week the Neighborhood Emergency Team that I’m part of got an email about emergency warming shelters. The shelters are opened by the Red Cross when the conditions outside become life-threatening. I signed up for a couple shifts.

My first one was yesterday morning at five, so for the first time since barista days my alarm went off at four something. I drove up empty streets to the auditorium of a big church. A few folks were standing outside smoking – volunteers who had been up all night.

Inside, a hundred and fifty people slept on mats covering a full-sized basketball court. It was warm and stuffy and mostly quiet. I don’t know what I expected, but I was surprised. There were just so many people. And this is one shelter of more than a dozen around the city.

For an hour the guests slept and the other volunteers and I chatted quietly. Most of them were there because the shelters have gotten very strong media coverage this week. A common reason was, I saw the story on the cover of the Oregonian and I realized how cold it’s been, even in my house, so I wanted to help. But it’s so hard if you don’t read something, to think of that all on your own.

At six we turned on the gym lights. Most of the folks waking up looked just like I look in the morning: cranky and bleary-eyed and reluctant to get moving. Many were there alone, but some had come with partners or friends. Several had brought their dogs. This particular shelter is popular because it allows all of these things, whereas other shelters are single-sex or don’t allow pets, or don’t allow you to go outside to smoke and come back in.

We had set out soup and coffee and sandwiches. Slowly, over the next hour, everyone got up. Some folks had very little stuff; when the lights went on they pulled on jackets and left. Others were in pajamas and had rolling suitcases or backpacks or bursting plastic bags. Cold is a bitch when you’re homeless because not only is it cold, but there’s nowhere to keep things like blankets and extra layers during the daytime.

Folks at this shelter on this night ranged in age from about nineteen to seventy. They were white and Hispanic and Native American and Asian and black. Half and half men and women.

Some of them talked quietly to themselves or gave angry looks, some of them laughed and joked and teased each other, some of them packed their things quietly. In other words, a room full of people. We bagged up the blankets and wiped the mats down with bleach water. I looked around and wondered how each person got here. There are so many ways to end up in this situation, and so few ways to get out of it.

Slowly everyone left. It sure is nice to see a smiling face in the morning one guy said to me on the way out. It’s just about the nicest compliment I’ve ever gotten. By seven fifteen it was only volunteers, sweeping and mopping and cleaning out the coffee maker. I don’t know where everyone else went. I don’t know where they’ll go next week when it’s a little less cold and these emergency shelters are closed.

It went like that again this morning. And this afternoon I’m going to look at houses. I don’t know why I get to live in a house when these people get to live nowhere at all. Dumb fucking luck, I think, and that’s a highly suspicious way to run things.

p.s.

2008-01-23T12:59:00.000-08:00

also i'm wearing my shoes that go clack, clack, clack.

dwelling

2008-01-23T12:42:00.000-08:00

It’s been lovely having all of you here but I’m going to try to wrap up the pity party now. Feel free to stick around and finish up your drinks.

Breaking up with someone is just so abrupt. On one side of it you talk six times a day, text about minutiae, and get all excited about things like the back of the other person’s neck. Then you sit down and have a half hour conversation and it all ends at once. What a crappy system.

So now I’m finishing up the part where I delete old emails and gather his stuff up into a box, so that I can miss him whenever I want to miss him instead of whenever I open my closet. And I’m letting the rest of my life pour in to the mercifully small spaces left behind by his absence. The rest of my life isn’t quite as fun to watch movies with, but it’s really going rather well.

I finally found footing at work. My first projects are rolling along and last week I got to wear my steel toed boots and watch soil samples being taken with a drill rig. Steel toed boots! A drill rig! I’m putting together a panel for a conference. I’m making maps.

Not to mention I’ve played in the snow twice this week, and I finally brought yogurt and almonds and oatmeal into work so I can eat breakfast. I’ve been getting back to yoga. I closed my Eugene bank account. Quack quack quack!

And are you ready? Are you ready for the biggest duck yet? This afternoon I have an appointment with a real estate broker.

Little Red Heart

2008-01-22T10:40:00.000-08:00

My friend R and I have known each other more than twenty five years. We had a secret club in third grade, and she picked out my senior prom dress, and I got to give a toast at her wedding. A few weeks ago we had a great conversation which, if conversations had titles, would have been called All the Ways My Life Turned Out Differently Than I Thought It Would. But that is not the subject of this post. Though it would be a good one.

The subject of this post is Ayn Rand and My Lovelife.

In high school R, in appropriate high school fashion, read Atlas Shrugged and became possessed with its commanding truth. It sounded like bullshit to me so I read the book just to argue with her in a more informed manner. Mostly I hated how all of the antagonists were ugly and stupid, which seemed like a real literary copout to me. Make your antagonists attractive and smart and still ideologically wrong, and that’s going to be a lot more convincing. But again, I digress.

R and I boiled our argument down to this: she was a capitalist and I was a communist. It was a gross oversimplification, but fun for the purpose of high school style deep conversation. R would say Self interest brings out the best in everyone and I would say (the only thing I remember word for word from that stupid book): From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.

And you know? I’m an adult now and I’m no communist. But I might be a Relationship Communist. And I’ve recently realized that this leads to confusion when I enter relationships with a certain set of assumptions that, lo and behold, is not shared - because not everyone is a member of the party.

Relationship Communism, for example, takes as given: Two people each motivated by self interest and occasionally cooking dinner together does not make for a good relationship.

It’s clear to me that if you’re going to bother being in a relationship, you’re making your basic unit of decision making bigger than just yourself. Sometimes this leads to elegant win / win scenarios in which everyone gets what they want, and with good company too. And sometimes this means that one person is in the position of being able to give more. So that person gives more.

And yes, I get that if the same person is always the giving one, if the other person seems to be manufacturing need, if the giving person seems to be losing all sense of self identity and self preservation, this is a terrible system. But there’s a wide middle ground there where both people recognize that it can’t be fifty-fifty all the time, or even overall, and neither person finds this terrifying.

So here’s where this has been tripping me up. I’ve been lucky enough in the past few years to fall firmly on the ability side of the equation a good part of the time. I’m mobile and I’m solvent and I’m not generally an emotional wreck. So I find myself saying things like Ok, Canada works for me. Or at least, Ok, driving down there weekends works for me. And these decisions feel like nobrainers. They feel like what I can do for the greater good, and they feel like adventure.

But to the other person – the one who hasn’t read the party literature – these things seem like Sacrifices. And Sacrifices are a sign of something bigger than we’re ready for. And Sacrifices come with strings.

I feel like I’m making tacit promises I can’t keep, Operaman said about five minutes before we broke up. Like what? I wanted to ask, but it would have come out too indignant. Cause I don’t even count on you being around tomorrow. And hey, how about that.

I wasn’t looking for any promises that accounts would be settled sooner or later. Rather what I think we both would have found reassuring was an understanding that as long as we both felt good about things, we would each do what we could. So I never minded driving down there. It was easy and it meant we could spend time together.

And this past weekend was full and fun and wonderful, and was exactly the sort of weekend I have when it’s all about me and no one else: I snowshoed on Mt Hood, went to Quaker meeting, watched a Packers game in a packed bar, and hiked at the coast. And I missed him, the whole fucking time. This self interest thing is bullshit.

geography

2008-01-18T11:43:00.001-08:00

I used to leave my cell phone sitting out on my desk at work, because often during the day Operaman would call to check in. I would try to talk in an even, professional tone, without breaking into laughter. It was hard. We would talk for five minutes about what he learned in orgo or how I drove the Smartcar for the first time. Shit so small that only someone who loves you could possibly care.

And I know, even just a few days out, that our split was the right thing. The number one reason I left New York – picked up my whole life and flew it across the country – was that people there didn’t make time for each other. And Operaman was like a little outpost of that life. It’s not where I choose to live anymore. I still want to do important work and do it well, but then I want to put it aside at the end of the day and go hiking and go dancing and grow squash.

So dating someone who considered it a Tough Call when I was sick in bed but he had homework to do is no longer of interest to me. But fuck, I wish that made this part easier. This part where out of habit I pulled out my cell phone and then realized, Nope. He’s not calling. I don’t get to hear about his lab and I can’t tell him about how I just found the first panelist for the conference session I’m moderating. And the math of it is completely illogical and completely obvious: that you spend time on things other than your hard work, and that that time keeps your hard work from sliding into irrelevance. Because it’s not all of you, and because someone wants to hear about it – even when it’s boring, or goes all wrong.

mezza voce

2008-01-15T11:56:00.000-08:00

In midDecember I predicted a trainwreck with Operaman, but as it happened we just pulled into the station and got off.

I guess that’s about right for our relationship, which never managed to build up the sort of speed required for a bloody ending. And that there was what killed it of course. It was so ambiguous: the sort of quirky / comfortable being together that was exactly on, but then no mention of where we might be headed. It works for a while. I even tried to be optimistic about it. It seemed like the sensible realistic kind of relationship I’ve heard so much about. Sensible and realistic and uninspiring.

In the end I said This feels so precarious and in my head I had a list I’d been assembling during the past few weeks, mostly between the hours of three and five in the morning, of exactly how I wanted to fix that feeling – how we could do differently the little things that leave us feeling unsafe. But then just when the sentence came out of my mouth I realized the symptoms probably weren’t the problem. Probably the problem was that with Operaman’s plateful of commitments, he was never All In. We’ve been acting like it’s doomed because all along he’s been certain it’s doomed.

I wish that I could be pissed at him, or that I felt like getting all drunk and being broken. But what I’ve got is a wholly unsatisfying dry disappointment. And here’s familiar for you: Let’s do this half-assed, and that way when it ends because we did it half-assed at least we won’t have invested too much. And as a bonus we’ll never get to know what might have happened if we’d had balls.

Quack Quack Quack

2008-01-09T16:16:00.000-08:00

There it is, my new motto for the new year. Usually I have something in mind before January even appears, but this year wasn’t handing me anything. And then yesterday while walking down Belmont it made perfect sense: two thousand seven was like trying to herd cats. But two thousand eight is all about ducks in a row.

So far, in just nine short days, they’re waddling into line. You could start every sentence about what I’ve done in the past week and a half with “I finally.” I finally visited my parents on the east coast. I finally ordered a new laptop. I finally opened a bank account in Portland. Plus I’ve seen three movies, babysat a hamster, read something by James Joyce cover to cover for the first time, completed level three database-builder training, and baked a parsnip spice cake with ginger cream cheese frosting for tonight’s Misunderstood Vegetable Potluck.

All that and I even managed to have the sort of Sunday morning that reminds me just why I live here. I walked to one market for the paper and juice, and then to a bakery three streets over for still-warm rolls. I met two dogs. I spread out the Times and read all the parts I like best. One article quoted the French maxim Reculer pour mieux sauter. Draw back the better to leap.

2007: Reculer. 2008: Sauter. Et canards. Quack quack quack.

iDon't

2008-01-03T16:04:00.000-08:00

I just ordered a new laptop.

My old laptop died about six months ago and I’ve been trying to get by, in one of those misguided glorifications of Doing Without. Who needs a laptop! I can amuse myself without being online! That sort of thing. But I’ve been writing less, and when I write less I flip out more. I’ve been shoddy about returning emails. I haven’t been taking photos. And I’ve been spending inappropriate amounts of time on my work computer taking care of personal business. And blogging.

So about a month ago I started the Big Purchase legwork, which for me generally involves a huge amount of research followed by complete paralysis.

My secret mission, when I began, was to buy a Mac. I’ve used Macs in past jobs and liked them fine, but my personal machine has always been a pc. My Mac friends are so devoted, so brimming with Mac love. I began an ambitious campaign to understand the rightness of Mac. I was looking to be won over.

I started on the Apple website. It was friendly, of course. But it wasn’t advertising the things I was looking for. I’m not actually interested in making home movies, for example, which seems to be the most emphasized point of every single page of features. And I’ve never found organizing my photos or music particularly daunting. In fact the repeated message that “If you know iTunes, you know Mac” kind of put me off. I don’t really like the overpriced, disposable iPod equipment, or the way iTunes are just for iPods, or how the whole thing feels like a smiling, user-friendly parasite in your computer.

And the other thing I found on the Apple website was prices. Specifically, prices higher than what I was hoping to pay. Prices hundreds of dollars more than those for pcs with comparable insides. I assumed there must be values that I didn’t know about. So I went to the Apple Store.

Lo! The Apple Store, it is a glorious place. The design of the store itself is beautiful, and then it’s filled with all the glittering products. Plus the young, hip, slightly flirtatious staff, attentive but not in a creepy way. The guy who helped me out indulged all of my questions with confident understanding. But then I said, My hesitation is that it seems I could get a comparable Dell for several hundred dollars less, and he said, Oh, do you work for Dell?

So I turned to my Mac friends. What makes it worth this extra money? And they said: It won’t crash the way pcs do. It won’t get viruses.

Fair enough. But my last Dell laptop chugged away daily for five years, only crashed if I tried to run twelve programs at once, and never gave me a blue screen of death until the bitter end. At this some of the Mac cult got pretty superior. Like, If you don’t just implicitly understand why a Mac is better, you don’t really deserve one anyway.

Lastly I spent some time on YouTube playing the Mac vs. PC commercials. They were so hilarious I watched about thirty in a row, because I’d never seen these before. Which I guess was the final indication that even though I live in Portland and own thick-rimmed eyeglasses, I’m just not the hip guy on the right.

So I got another Dell. I’m going to use it for approximately three years, run Word and Photoshop, play music and store photos and surf the internet. I don’t want any more reasons to sit in front of a screen than I can already think up on my own, and I certainly don’t want to start confusing my life with iLife. I think my new little Dell will be just what I need. And it’s green.

old long since

2008-01-02T11:45:00.000-08:00

The year switched without much fanfare. I ended up in Philadelphia on my high school friend Bridget’s sofa with Dick Clark and Maker’s Mark, and one minute it was 2007 and then we counted backwards from ten and it was 2008. We watched the fireworks, and then we watched An American in Paris. Bridget cut my hair. When I got back to Portland I found all my Happy New Year cards still sitting in the bottom of my mailbox from the week before. Apparently my postman didn’t notice them, or else he hadn’t realized it was time for the new year, either.

I got a little panicky last year, back in 2007. I didn’t meet all of Portland right away, and I didn’t find the right place to live, and I didn’t change the world in my job, and no one fell madly and stupidly in love with me. And I was not only supposed to accept all of these things but stay put despite them – stick it out in this city because of some bizarre gut feeling that it’s ultimately going to crack open.

I’m part of a class action lawsuit that you’re probably part of too, against credit card companies that overcharged on foreign transactions. I found out about it when they sent me a claim form in the mail. It asked for an estimate of how many days I was out of the country between February 1, 1996 and November 8, 2006 and you know what I came up with? Eight hundred sixty-three days. That’s 2.4 years. Between stream ecology research and sea turtle monitoring and Spanish classes and thesis writing and random backpacking adventures, I spent twenty two percent of that ten year period in other countries. And that right there is what I’m good at: six items of clothing and a clamoring bus station. Talking to someone at a bar because he looks like he might speak English. Accidentally ordering chicken.

This shit where I stay put? This is brand new. If you add domestic excursions into that ten year period, I was probably “away from home” – whatever that means – about half the time. So what I’m learning right now is how to start projects at work that might not bear fruit immediately, how to find a place to live where I unpack all my boxes, how to demonstrate investment in a relationship for which no one had to move to a new state. I am not good at these things yet. Being not good at things is hard.

So I hereby forgive myself the dispirited mess that was 2007. I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing in America but here I am, and so for 2008 my plan is to try to get good at it. To get good at it, and then see if I like it. If I do, well hell! How about that. And if not I have a shiny new passport that’s good until twenty seventeen.

Happy New Year All, wherever you are and wherever you’re going, or not going.

moment(um)

2007-12-28T16:13:00.000-08:00

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

2007-12-26T17:00:00.000-08:00

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

2007-12-21T10:55:00.000-08:00

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

2007-12-20T17:13:00.001-08:00

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!

2007-12-18T11:41:00.000-08:00

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

2007-12-16T00:38:00.000-08:00

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

2007-12-13T17:13:00.000-08:00

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

2007-12-05T20:32:00.000-08:00

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,

2007-12-04T11:58:00.000-08:00

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.

random request

2007-11-30T16:46:00.000-08:00

Some of you have gotten this via mass email, but I’m posting it here to reach the six people per month who accidentally end up on this blog thanks to the unpredictable quirks of search engines.

A year and a half ago when I was training for the marathon to raise money for the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society, my friend Dave put a post about it on his blog. Several of his friends and coworkers – people I had never met – read it and made donations.

One of Dave’s friends, Jen, not only made a donation, but also told her mom about my run. Jen’s mom Carol is a runner. She had run in the Anchorage marathon 25 years before. Hearing about my run, Carol wrote me a long email detailing every hill and turn of the course as she remembered it. It was an incredibly sweet and helpful thing to do, and all from the mom of a friend of a friend.

Two days ago I got an email from Jen that her mom has been diagnosed with leukemia and lymphoma. She is currently in good health, and has decided to run-walk the Vancouver half marathon in May for the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society. I can’t really imagine looking that diagnosis in the face and deciding to complete a marathon.

When I was training, all the donations made me feel like I was really reaching a whole network of people… not just doing a lot of crappy running. So if any of you feel like giving a small contribution – even five or ten dollars – you can find Carol’s site here. The money funds important work that could benefit any of us, and the act is a way of letting a total stranger know that she is supported – just the way she did for me.

break my own fall

2007-11-26T15:54:00.000-08:00

Wednesday five pm creeping along in the least stressful holiday rush hour ever, southwest into the sunset. Other cars add half an hour but the farms look pretty as ever and an east coast girl will never take this for granted: interstate highway that looks like country road.

Thursday ten am Packers game playing while Operaman and I load the car with V8 / Goldfish / Rittersport. Rolling Out Of Town for real.

Thursday eight pm Tofurkey sandwiches in the common room of Odell Lake Lodge, curled on a couch reading the New Yorker while kids play Monopoly. There’s a piano. There’s woods. Shivering on the porch with other guests, boots crunching circles in the snow and light caught in clouds of smoke and breath.

Friday eleven am blueberry pancakes, eggs bacon and tea. Wooden chairs at a wooden table in a window over the lake.

Friday midnight empty lodge. O and I and a fireplace for a Jean de Florette / Manon des Sources double feature.

Saturday two pm the Sportsman’s Café in the town of Oakridge population 3700. Everyone else in camo.

Saturday eight pm pick up the Little Os. Meet O’s no-longer-in-laws during the handoff. Really? Really. Swing by Goodwill for a ninety-nine cent scarf. Swing by downtown, wrap the scarf around a bronze dog for holiday photos. Photos that I take.

Sunday noon at mass. O at the organ and me in a pew with my arm around the girl. Really? Really? Really.

Sunday eight pm sipping hot spiked cider with my favorite Eugene girls, neither of whom has had the good sense to move to Portland yet. No room in this cubicle for how much I wish they would.

Sunday eleven pm me and Bliss back on the highway speeding north, fog so thick that only ten feet of dividerline surface in the headlights. Swimming in satisfaction and rest and the perspective of long drives. I Do Not Need To Figure Out My Whole Life Today. Good weekend, ground beneath my feet, head off somewhere else. CD spinning, the Buzzcocks and Fatboy Slim and Starland Vocal Band, made on the spot by Operaman for my drive. Labeled, Do Not Fall Asleep, Jenn!

(thanks)

2007-11-19T16:42:00.000-08:00

Jaime roasted her first turkey. Jaime roasted turkey and Joshua made stuffing and Jane made one of those greenbean casseroles with little dried onions on top. Alex was hung over, even still at noon, so she boiled frozen pierogies. They were delicious though.

I made cranberry relish, because I like the taste of tart and I like an excuse to use citrus zest and I like cooking things that leave brilliantly colored stains. And because one of the students in the class I taught last winter was from a cranberry farming family. You wouldn’t believe how bizarre cranberry farming is. I’ve seen pictures.

When you cook cranberries – the fresh kind, grown right here on the Oregon coast and never frozen – they make gentle satisfying Pop sounds, pop pop pop as they turn from firm round berries into relish. The little slivers of lemon and orange rind hang suspended like a party.

There are few things I love more than a slow meal with friends, overflowing plates and drifting conversations and candles. I grew up in a house of three. My mom usually cooked but my dad didn’t always make it home in time for dinner, and we often sat a small TV right there on the table like a centerpiece. I love a meal that lasts so long you go back for thirds, a crowd so big you switch seats twice and still don’t talk to everyone. I love the way you can call across the room to clarify a story. I love how you feel a hand on your shoulder as someone goes to find the corkscrew.

Dessert was a Pie Off and Operaman judged, blindfolded and tin-foil-crowned at the head of the table. Apple, pear, pumpkin, pecan, and ice cream. Afterwards he played piano. I wanted to sing Christmas carols but the crowd said Too Soon so we ate more instead. And I love this part of being an adult, the part where you get to make new and bigger family, family that reaches out in all directions, that once in a while coils up and crams in a room, laughs and drinks wine and eats five kinds of pie.

alternatively

2007-11-12T14:38:00.001-08:00

I might be just the smallest bit oversensitive, at the moment, to someone suddenly wanting to check out. I might be just the littlest bit overwary that expressing interest in a person will cause him to freak out, given my recent record. There is the most marginal possibility that Operaman has not, in fact, decided we are done; that perhaps – according to a conversation we had last night – much of this general downturn came from a single misunderstanding about what I am looking for, followed by a few weeks of not getting that sorted out.

And so I grudgingly admit that my advice-giving friend who advised Just Ask Him may indeed have been onto something. I Just Asked Him, and when he didn’t seem to understand what I was asking I Just Asked Him two more times in different ways, which was excruciating. But then he understood, and he answered me, and I listened.

And this weekend was good for me in terms of figuring out for myself what I need here, and for accepting that if I can’t get it I need to move on. But O pointed out that there’s a whole part in the middle there. A part where I have to express my needs, and make sure that expression is clear and understood, and give him a shot at meeting them. Holy shit! Excellent point! And you know? I don’t think I have ever, ever been very good at that.

On the plus side

2007-11-09T10:30:00.000-08:00

as soon as I posted that, I received this unrelated email from my friend Sarah.

Tonights agenda:
dixie ... 5:30 (or whenever you get off work and can crack open a tasty PBR or Hamms)
catch the max ... 6:15
get our greg oden bobblehead doll ... 6:30
get a $7 beer in the rose garden ... 6:31
tip off ... 7:00
start drooling over how cute joel przybilla is ... 7:06
find a bar with killer karoke ... 10:00

low bar

2007-11-09T10:22:00.000-08:00

A couple weeks ago I called an old friend whom I can always rely on for brutally honest insight – the kind that you need to hear, but the kind that you can only stand to hear from someone who will deliver it with humor and love.

Why is Operaman doing thing X? I asked him. Does it mean he just doesn’t like me?

And my friend – a person who does not need coercion to give his opinion if he thinks it will be helpful and/or entertaining - told me that he could come up with an explanation, or that I could keep myself awake nights trying to figure out why O is acting the way he is. But perhaps we would all be spared unnecessary heartache if I just asked him.

Which, at first, sounded like the sort of immediately-obvious advice that my friend is known for. Brilliant!

But which, a couple weeks later, I think is bullshit.

Because here’s a thing I’ve figured out in the past two years. And I don’t mean this in a cynical way, in a twice-bitten / fuck you / woman scorned kind of way. I just mean there it is, no way around it, whatcha gonna do. People Lie.

People in relationships lie all the fucking time. I don’t mean the deliberate deception kind of lies like I have to work late. I mean the vague bluffing kind of lies like I think we can make this work. Of course I’m still attracted to you. I can’t wait to see you again.

And I don’t think it’s so common because people are mean. I think most people, when they say these things, want to believe them. They just don’t stop to think about the consequences for the other person who might believe them too.

So whatever Operaman may be saying to me, when it comes down to it he’s not particularly compelled to spend time with me. He finds less and less time to come up, and finds more and more reasons not to invite me down. And I don’t know why he calls and emails and texts and generally talks to me all the time with affection and warmth as if there’s nothing out of the ordinary, as if it’s perfectly normal to be really into someone without ever actually seeing them. I don’t know why and I guess it doesn’t matter.

I’d love to be in a great relationship right now, but at this point I’d feel lucky to date someone who would just break up with me. Break up with me and tell me about it, and not make me do it myself.

sewn

2007-11-06T22:58:00.000-08:00

It’s dark now by the time I leave work for the day which I thought would be sad, but which has turned out to be oddly, wonderfully exciting – all those people bustling home through the streets lit by storefronts and strung-up trees. It’s as if everyone suddenly and simultaneously swung nocturnal. As if all the things we might feel obligated to do in daylight have been dispensed.

I holed up, tonight, in one of my favorite coffee shops, a place with warm lamps and steamed-up windows and very good cake. I read a book and I eavesdropped. I drank a large cup of tea called Roots that smelled of orange peel.

I have been feeling, these past few weeks, a rather doomed-by-definition Compulsion To Relax. People I know are nesting. They are buying new bedspreads and wintercoats, and a lot of them are having babies. Meanwhile I have finally gotten my shit together enough to work on making my life here look more like me. Portland took a while, and I didn’t arrive with much by way of reserves. Now that I’ve unpacked my paints and found good work and found good pubs, I need to remind myself that Making Up For Lost Time is not a sound proposition. It's still just today for today, and the next time I wake up it’s just going to be tomorrow.

I have needed to remind myself of this in all things. My job is a good job, a good and worthwhile job, even though after one whole month I haven’t yet changed the world. My house is a good house, and I don’t need to feel embarrassed about it, even though I would rather live somewhere with a garden, somewhere I could invite people over for dinner. My relationship is a good relationship, and it challenges me and brings me joy, and all the parts of it that are out of my hands are Out Of My Hands. And if some days I feel like I Need To Know, if some days I feel like I can care or not care accordingly, I remind myself I have learned this already. Enough times, I think.

Until Thanksgiving this is my plan: relax and be glad to have my feet underneath me, drink lots of tea, kick up leaves. Move as much as seems appropriate in fall, but not more. Have fun in the dark.

sooner or later

2007-11-04T02:36:00.001-08:00

And this is how the universe works for me sometimes:

At ten p.m. I realize that it is nearly time to Fall Back. And I am sad, because for a number of years now I’ve had a tradition – one of my favorite traditions of the year – to go out and do something fun and silly on the night of Fall Back, something that might be considered A Waste Of Time or something that might be considered Risky, and then to return to my house and turn back the clock. And then it never happened.

You don’t usually get to do that. It feels almost magical: It’s two a.m., and you live for an hour, and then it’s two a.m. still.

But tonight I haven’t planned ahead, and I don’t know whom I can call who wouldn’t be busy or away. And so I resolve to have an inward hour, to get my room in order while doing some mental housekeeping too. It will work because it needs to, but I'm not very excited about it. But I make myself stay awake.

And then, at 1:40, my phone rattles its text message rattle. “Don’t suppose youre both awake & want some breakfast?” says my phone. And I am. And I do.

Ten minutes later I am in a booth at Holman’s, laughing and drawing and awaiting grilled cheese.

I don’t know why it works like this but I’m so grateful for it sometimes I can hardly breathe.

And here I am back home, and I never even left.

extra ordinary things

2007-10-28T23:34:00.000-07:00

Fall fills my heart in such a way that it feels bound to burst open – all those oranges and greens and restlessness and the smell of woodsmoke. Saturday morning found me hiding under my covers from the world, because that kind of fullness can be overwhelming. I’m not sure I can hold my chest together.

But I’ve learned that left unchallenged my hiding can go on for hours, can envelop a whole morning, so I called up Julie and committed to Eugene by noon. In the truck I listened to fall music, Neil Diamond and Cat Stevens and the soundtrack to an old musical called Pippin. Pippin is what I play when I need to remember the primacy of the small and the close-by.

So I slid into the weekend: roasted carnival squash and chanterelles only hours out of the woods, a club full of costumed revelers dancing in masks and stilettos, Julie’s room that fills with Sunday morning sun. Heading north again I drove through Corvallis for a game of kickball in the park with Operaman and his kids. They buried me in leaves and there was the season all around me – leaves holding me up and leaves sticking to my sweater and the quiet atmosphere of a leaf pile filling my lungs.

Fall is a good time for crying, for being busy, for shoring up. For getting prepared while staying present. This is how it has to feel if we’re going to be ready for what’s next. I don’t know how else the geese would summon up all that will for flying, besides being certain that stillness in the fall might cause them to come apart at the seams.

so much for that.

2007-10-26T16:06:00.001-07:00

I went to the doctor’s office. I got weighed. I undressed and draped myself with the little white sheet. And then the doctor came in and told me she wasn’t comfortable doing the procedure.

She explained that it is very unusual for her to do a LEEP on someone for whom she hasn’t done the preliminary procedure – the one with the ugly name, the one that I had at Planned Parenthood a few months ago when I had no health insurance. She said that looking at the results of this procedure she wasn’t convinced a LEEP was necessary, and that even though a LEEP is not a huge deal there is always the risk of infection or various other complications, and there is a certain amount of maintenance that needs to happen afterwards. She recommended that instead I have a second round of the preliminary procedure I’ve already had.

This was, at first, aggravating. I was ready to go. I had taken the day off work. I had made peace with saying goodbye to eight millimeters of my cervix, and all dysplasic cells contained thereon. The preliminary procedure is purely diagnostic – it doesn’t get rid of anything sketchy – and I was awaiting the relief of a certified non-sketchy cervix.

But I liked the doctor, and I believed her. She has been doing her work for twenty years. She also explained that if the results came back troubling, she would make sure I got a LEEP appointment ASAP. It was the first time in my adult life that I sat and had a careful, non-rushed conversation with a medical practitioner whom I was sure would be seeing me again. It was great.

I mean, "great" except for the next part, with the stirrups and samples and whatnot. But whatever. Now it’s the weekend.

on the d.l.

2007-10-25T12:50:00.000-07:00

I got a cheerful message on my voicemail last week. Have a good weekend! And oh, what’s up with your cervix? It was followed, less than a week later, by an email from a different friend asking What’s happening with your cervix these days?

My cervix has never gotten so much of this sort of attention before. It might be blushing. I realize it was weird of me to introduce my cervix here on my blog a couple months ago and then not mention it again. It’s kind of what happened in my head.

A couple weeks after the annoying procedure (which has a name so clinical and awful sounding that I don’t even want to write it) the nurse practitioner phoned up to tell me that the results confirmed the earlier test: highly irregular cells hanging out on my cervix. She told me to go get another procedure called a LEEP. This name sounds better but actually stands for Loop Electrosurgical Excision Procedure, which really isn’t all that enticing either. She said to do it in one to two months.

I was, at this point, within sight of having health insurance. So I waited. I’d like to say that was the only reason I waited, but it wouldn’t be entirely true. Brains react in strange ways to medical news and I just didn’t want to deal with this. I wanted to ignore it and then I wanted it to go away. I realize that is not rational and that it is, in fact, rather self-destructive. Which isn’t how I meant it. But there it is.

Several of my friends pestered me about it during this time, for which I am very appreciative. It clearly worked its way into my reluctant brain because one night I couldn’t fall asleep and I realized I was thinking about it, how I hadn’t taken care of it and it had been a while since the news. I started to get a little panicky. I got up and checked my calendar. It had been six weeks. Not downright negligent, but fairly stupid. Scheduling the appointment would take time. It was hard not to think about the possibility that one particularly ambitious little fucked up cell might float off to settle somewhere else in my body. I was a bio major but there is no logic when it comes to one’s own health.

My insurance kicked in October first. The benefits orientation was the eighteenth, and I waited for this because health insurance is confusing and there were several options. The paperwork took four more days. Yesterday I got an email confirmation, and I took an early lunch break, and I called my new HMO. They were nice. They were friendly. I was worried that I might have to see some in-system doctor to reconfirm my earlier diagnosis – part of my procrastination had been fear that this would happen. Instead I explained the history to a nurse, who told me not to worry because these things happen slowly. And then she told me that one of the doctors had a cancelled surgery on Friday and I could take the time slot.

So there it is. Just like that I’m going to get it done tomorrow. The whole thing takes hardly any time at all – just a scary electric loop slicing off errant cells in a place that’s a little tricky to reach, and then I feel crappy for a few days and check up on things often. And hopefully that’s the last time my cervix makes the blog.

ride

2007-10-17T18:08:00.000-07:00

Since Beth, I’ve fallen for five guys. Plus or minus. I was thinking about it on the el train. I am trying to learn.

The first, the very first, way too soon (and that was the whole point) was graph. That’s not his name but he wrote it like that, with a lowercase letter, like he was bell hooks or e e cummings. He was a sculptor who lived in his van so he could spend all his money On His Art. He was incredibly hot yet oddly insecure about women, which – since I hadn’t dated a guy in four years – was ideal on both counts. It wasn’t about us liking each other so much as it was about him feeling lonely and me wanting to delay my sadness about Beth. It was just fine, and it was just fine that it ended.

And I went to the Netherlands, and looked around for a nice Dutch boy to marry so I could stay in Amsterdam forever. Instead I met Serge, a writer from French Holland who thought he was F Scott Fitzgerald. He called me bebe from the moment he met me, brought me to jazz clubs and tapas bars. He loved all the obvious things that young self-absorbed writers love, bullfighting and cocaine and women and hearing himself talk. The first time he propositioned me was by text message. Soon enough I flew home. Being Zelda is fun but if you try to stretch it out you’re likely to die in a mental hospital.

So I swung the other way, tumbled over myself for Chicagoboy. He had resurfaced from my past, the one in which I favored kind and friendly types, and was delightful rather than just distracting – a dorky engineer programmer who played silly folk music. He seemed like such a gift out of nowhere and I fell for him wholly and wholesomely. I was looking for where to go next and Chicago would have done well, but this he found understandably Insane.

And so I found someone more conveniently located, but I overshot. One door was as insufficient for sanity as one thousand miles. Disaster was a joy and a frustration from the first, and so familiar that his bad decisions still wreck me – wreck me in the way that your parents’ bad decisions can, because you see yourself in them and you want to think you know better.

Which brings me, a bit worse for wear but with lots of good stories, to Operaman. We are good to each other in satisfying ways; when he’s next to me it is thrilling and when he’s not the absence has gravity. He sent a package to my hotel in Chicago. But some days it seems he has nothing left for this. And sometimes I think that relationships have their own math, that when it’s working it gives you time and energy and makes the crappy stuff bearable. But sometimes the balancing of it all just defeats him, and I feel like one extra weight. And I don’t like being a weight - as much as I don’t like being so light that I’m nothing.

And somewhere in all that one would think that I might have learned what to do next, but it just keeps being different every time. The fact that it’s been a fucking trip is enough, I know. But it wouldn’t kill me to have learned something too.

I love the el train.