Sidetrack

Tomorrow (Jan. 30) I'm flying off to Burma for five weeks of traveling with my friend Lara. We're both going to be posting about our tour of SE Asia here. She's already put up a number of great posts about India. Check in with me there until I return to the states in March.

Wake

I went to a wake last week for a friend of the family, someone I’d never met. He was a life-long fisherman, from all accounts a wonderful man whose heart gave out while his body fought cancer. The wake was held at a bar on Newport’s bayfront. I stood at the windows for the longest time, nervous in a room where I didn’t really know anyone other than the chief mourner, the man’s wife and my mother's friend. Outside the water of the bay was standard-issue Oregon grey, dozens of sea lions lounged on the jetty and on decaying docks which are gradually sinking beneath their tonnage. It was a potluck and I sat with my stepfather and people he’d known for twenty years eating raw oysters in little Dixie cups, listening to stories of their migrations west. It seemed strange that I was the only one at the table who hadn’t been born on the east coast. The room was full of fishermen, men wearing unironic mesh caps and facial hair, about whom stories were told of brothers at sea chasing each other with hammers, threatening grievous bodily harm for some stupidity or other – something to do with pots or nets. It was not an experience I would have had in D.C.

Bullet Points

I've been sinking into the sort of lethargy that only sleeping in your childhood bedroom can bring about, so I've been too lazy to update the blog. But here are the bullet points of what I've been doing, separated into categories:

*Hanging Out - I've whiled away a couple of wonderfully unproductive afternoons with my best friend from high school, Zach. We spent hours at a sidewalk table in the chilly January sunshine last week, shivering but unwilling to not take advantage of the rare glorious day, sharing the most amazing black bottom cupcakes and drinking hot tea to ward off hypothermia. We've played a version of 20 questions (which is different from the standard version in that you can ask as many goddamned questions as you want - one marathon session circa 1994 lasted three days - the game doesn't end until someone gives up) with another highschool friend, while her new, beautiful baby, gurgled happily. We gorged on the most amazing local cheese while reminiscing

*Outdoor Activities - Haven't been doing nearly enough of these. The chocolate and novel training plan I've been following in preparation for my upcoming trip to SE Asia hasn't exactly left me fighting fit. But I have taken a few little wanders in the woods and at the beach. The picture above is from one of them. Remember what I said about Oregon being magical sometimes? This is what I meant.

*Shopping - Oh not for fun things, for scary medicinal supplies that might be necessary if I eat a pad thai that doesn't agree with me in Bangkok.

And that's my life in a list.

Sloth

It’s actually not that easy to let myself sink into complete slothfulness, to go days without putting on real clothes or eating anything but toast and chocolate, to never make my bed and ignore the old cobweb in the far corner of the shower. Yesterday for instance I put on makeup for the first time since New Year’s Eve. Nothing fancy, just the basics I used to put on for a day of work . . . only this time I dug out my Chanel blusher and Shu Uemera mascara for the excitement of a 45-minute drive to the nearest Home Depot to pick up tiling supplies. But I’m afraid that even occasional make-up applications might undermine my current experiment.

I’ve been nursing a theory for a long time - that when I just give myself enough time with nothing to do and nowhere to be, eventually I bore myself so silly and become so disgusted by my own laziness that I’m perfectly ripe for some grand epiphany. It’s happened before accidentally, and I’m trying to deliberately re-create the circumstances that have led to such previous epiphanies as, well, I’m not telling you. Epiphanies always sound silly and obvious when you write them down. But believe me, they were important. Anyway, I’m not sure what type of epiphany might come up this time, but I’m kind of hoping for a lightning bolt telling me that work (for pay) really is valuable in of itself and necessary for living a complete and happy life. That would be nice.

This whole laying around all day reading novels thing? It may look like plain-old garden-variety laziness, but it’s really a deliberate and arduous lifestyle experiment, laziness as a path to self-actualization. And unfortunately it’s not going that well. I haven’t been able to let myself go completely yet. In addition to yesterday’s totally unnecessary mascara application, I keep making my damn bed every day, I’ve yet to go later than 3 pm without putting on real clothes, and this morning I found myself not only showered and dressed before 10 am, but then I started cleaning the bathroom! And I’m not even remotely bored yet. I’m still enjoying the novel-reading. And my little trips to the public library to catch up on my internet reading and publish this blog are still providing just enough structure to my days to keep me from sinking into that sort of perennial and profound drowsiness that precedes, in my experience, grand epiphanies.

In writing this I think I’ve come to the sad realization (not an epiphany unfortunately) that my circumstances just aren’t right for complete sloth. With my flight to Asia only two weeks away, this feels too much like ordinary vacation relaxation rather than real bone-deep laziness. Damn. I think the real experiment and resulting epiphanies will have to wait until later in the year, when I’ve got less to look forward to. DAMN.

Snow Days

I've taken a couple of snow days i.e. I haven't bothered to make the trip into town to access the internet or really done anything at all other than hang out in front of the fire eating toast and chocolate and reading the Harry Potter books for the first time. My mom and stepdad live on the Oregon Coast, about five miles inland and maybe 200 feet above sea level, which is all to say that getting five inches of snow is really not common and so totally merits a couple of days of card games and naps. The monster in the picture is Jack, a dog I have completely and totally fallen in love with in spite of the fact that he takes his responsibilities as the largest creature in the family very seriously and barks at everything (including falling snow) that he thinks might threaten the rest of us.

But I'm not beside the fire now, I'm at the library. I finally brushed the snow off my car and came into town, to check my email and go to the feed store (we have no pet store in town, but the local feed store does carry Sugar's brand of cat food), and basically just have an excuse to put on real clothes. There are a group of teenage boys clustered around a laptop a couple of chairs away from me watching bum fights on YouTube. I think it might be time to go to the feedstore before I feel the urge to say something adult-ish.

Flat

I got my first flat tire in eight years of driving yesterday. It deflated completely in the five seconds it took to turn off my ignition, recognize a loud hiss, and open my car door. Naturally, since I’m only 29 years old, my first instinct was to call my mommy and ask her what to do. Even more naturally, being that I’m me, my second instinct, when mommy didn’t answer her cell phone, was to ignore the flat tire, lock my car, and walk the ten steps to the public library with its free wireless access and start catching up with my old pal the internet. (Oh internet, how I’ve missed thee!)

As soon as I got online, I got an IM from my best friend from high school (let’s call him . . . Garbo until I get his permission to use his real name or come up with a better pseudonym), and when I told him the situation he immediately offered to drive into town and change my tire. Now, I have some fantastic friends in DC. Really, really great friends who I know would do a lot for me, friends who have fed Sugar when my cat sitter couldn’t, planned celebrations of me, and found good homes for my plants. But none of them would in a million years offer to change a flat tire for me. It just wouldn’t occur to them when I could call AAA. I was still too happily engaged with my blog reading to take Garbo up on his kind and completely sincere offer, and preferred to indulge my denial for just a bit longer.

Eventually I started getting this nagging feeling, that maybe, just maybe, I should really take care of this. I squelched it for another hour and caught up on Go Fug Yourself. But eventually I tried my mom again. She was there before I could get pack up my laptop, attaching an air compressor to my tire and waiting with me for thirty fruitless minutes before we realized that the tire was losing air too quickly for that to be any use. So she gave me the number of our local Les Schwab (I’m pretty sure it’s a western franchise - I remember commercials from my Idaho childhood involving a guy in a white cowboy hat with a freezer full of steaks that he handed out with new tire purchases), waited while I called and they told me someone would be there soon, gave me a kiss, and headed back to work. Kyle was there in ten minutes, fixed my tire right in the parking lot in fifteen more, all for thirty five dollars that he felt bad for taking from me because if my leak had been slower I could have made it the ten blocks to the shop and he could have fixed it for free. And he wouldn’t even accept a tip! He didn’t give me a steak, but it was still a good deal. I can’t imagine I would have gotten that kind of service in DC. Right? Anyone had a flat in DC or another big city on the east coast that they can compare this to?

So in addition to all the kindnesses from friends, family, and Kyle, the absolute best part of the whole experience? The fact that I didn’t feel any rage. Never once did I want to scream HATE at the world for frustrating my day’s plans. (Ok, I might have IM’d a single HATE to a friend, but it was half-hearted, a reflex. I didn’t mean it.) After all, I wasn’t losing precious billable time, or even more precious free time. I didn’t have anything I needed to do, or anywhere I needed to be, and anything I wanted to do that didn’t get done, I could get to . . . whenever. No rage people, NO RAGE! Two and a half weeks without a job and I’m so mellow I’m practically in a coma.

End of the Road Trip

3116.3 miles and I’m finally “here”. As I was laying in bed last night, listening to Sugar pace the confines of my parents’ guest room, jumping from floor to nightstand to twin bed to window and back down to the floor, getting to know the boundaries of the small space that will be her home for the foreseeable future (my stepdad is allergic to cats, damn his eyes), I finally started questioning the wisdom of what I’d done. What the HELL are we doing here? I used to have an apartment, with pretty furniture and fresh flowers and now I . . . don’t.

Here are the highlights of how we got here: After that crummy hotel in Ohio, it was a short drive to Chicago and a reunion with great friends for New Year’s Eve. It’s my least favorite holiday, with its high expectations and open bars and bad champagne and mandatory jollity. But this was actually the best New Year’s I’ve had in quite a while. Not only did I get to spend it with people I really like, but we were out, dressed up, in a bar with no smoke . . . where we sat all night on slouchy overstuffed couches while people brought us food. YES! I KNOW! There was no forced mingling in pinching pretty shoes bought just for the occasion with drunken strangers who’d vowed to get their money back at that open bar. Oh no, we were able to hunker down and be the anti-social goobs we are in complete and total comfort, pretty shoes doing their job and being pretty without having to actually support us, while watching drunken strangers do silly things from an ideal distance. It was a revelation. Even though, goobs that we are, we were tucked away in bed not long after the countdown to midnight, I took the next day off to “recover”, i.e. to sit on my friend’s couch (let’s call her Poot) watching the second season of The Wire and calling around to takeout places to find enough open restaurants to keep us fed for the day without actually having to leave the house or turn on the stove. It was motherfucking heaven.

But Poot eventually had to go back to working the corner (that shit won’t move itself) and Sugar and I had to get back on the road heading west (to paraphrase Bob Dylan, which reminds me that my ipod never did bring up his “Train Going West” on the whole drive, which is a shame, though it did start playing “Go West” by the Pet Shop Boys somewhere in Oregon which was nice.) A day and a half out of Chicago I finally hit Wyoming and changed my clock to Mountain Time Zone, both of which felt like home. I know that, technically, Montana is Big Sky country, but Wyoming’s sky is pretty damn huge. Somewhere between Cheyenne and Laramie the country subtly changed and I was back in the intermountain west with its dull brown tree-less hills dusted with snow rolling up into great craggy mountains touching a flat sky and something in me eased. The first time I saw a sign beneath an exit marker indicating that the next services wouldn’t be for over 20 miles I felt positively giddy. I’d really truly and finally left the East, with its tolled turnpikes and conveniently located 24 hour service plazas, behind.

I hit the only subpar driving conditions I faced on the whole trip on my third day out of Chicago, on I-80 between Rock Springs, WY and Ogden. I’d gotten a very early start, so I think I missed the worst of it. The road was never too slippery, and everyone on it seemed to know what they were doing . . . except for that weird foolish girl with DC plates who was taking pictures of the snow with one hand and steering with the other. But in a winter like we’ve had in DC, to finally see SNOW! Falling from the sky! And sticking to the ground! It was fantastic.

The penultimate stop on this stage of the adventure was a visit to my grandparents in Idaho. I’d planned to stay one day, but a conveniently timed bout of stomach flu kept me on their couch (or “daveno” in grandparent speak) for the weekend, watching football while my grandpa rolled on the floor like a kid with their new puppy and my grandma brought me Sprite and soda crackers. It’s been years since I’d had anyone around to take care of me while I was sick, and I’d forgotten how much easier it is to be miserable when there’s someone else to reach for the cozy afghan on the top shelf of the closet that’s oh so far from the couch and to make that trip to the store for supplies.

But finally, yesterday, I struck out for the Oregon coast. As I drove through the Columbia Gorge, the sere brown of high desert gradually gave way to the mossy green of the Pacific Northwest and again I felt like I was coming home. A very different home from Idaho, with its blue skies and old, grey lichen covered lava floes. I love the Pacific Northwest deeply, but it also creeps me out. There’s something fundamentally disturbing in a landscape where everything is either alive itself or is being slowly ground into mulch by something living. Instead of the feeling of open space, of boundless freedom that I get in Idaho or Wyoming, or even Eastern Oregon where even the dry dust smells clean, like pine needles, the Pacific Northwest in winter feels . . . claustrophobic. The grey skies hang low with rain and the air feels soupy and thick and I’m always aware of its weight and heft. Even the smell is denser, sweeter, blackberries and wet leaves. I feel like I’m always flinching here, angling to keep pant hems out of mud, shoes from crushing something small and slimy and alive, trees from dripping down my neck, hands from getting caught by blackberry thorns. But in that living, decaying, messiness is something that can look like magic, and maybe someday I’ll feel like writing about that.

But for now I’m home for a little respite before the big trip. A home without internet (holy hell, I’m posting this thanks to the wireless connection at the local public library, a place I have a feeling I’ll be spending a LOT of time) but with a mom who’s incredibly happy to have me here, and two very big very dirty very slobbery dogs who think I’m alright too. Not to mention a cat that's REALLY glad to be out of this box.