strike that

4.14.2009

running away

i hear it solves everything.

www.indagofelix.blogspot.com

3.20.2009

3 * 2 * 1

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.

3.12.2009

riddance

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.

2.27.2009

getting there

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.

2.23.2009

blogging master cleanse

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.

1.30.2009

hard habit to break

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.

1.15.2009

PS LOL CSNY

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.

: Name: tortaluga; Location: Wallis & Futuna

hi. i'm not really from wallis OR futuna. in fact, i don't even know where those places are. isn't that remarkable? the world isn't so big, that a person should be able to not know the whereabouts of wallis and/or futuna. i'm living in oregon right now. before that i lived in amsterdam. before that i lived in new york. when people say, "where are you from?" i still say new york. everyone knows where new york is. but new yorkers didn't go camping enough for me. alas. i sure miss the bagels.

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