Relief

Last night was pretty great, wasn't it? There are so many beautiful, tear-inducing things on the internet today about the election, I don't know that I can add much. I'm thrilled, I'm relieved, I can finally lift my 8 year ban on television news (not that I have the ability to watch TV news at the moment, so the ban has been essentially symbolic for over a year anyway, but still). I'm proud to be an American. And it doesn't feel embarrassing to say that, for the first time in a long time. As I told Zach yesterday, we can finally tell Europe with their snooty (and completely accurate but horrifically hypocritical) accusations of racism to shut up. I mean, can you imagine France, Great Britain, or Germany electing a racial minority as president? Heh. Non, no, nein. And, on a completely personal note, I think it is awfully cool that the next president of the United States is someone who once graded a paper of mine. I mean, honestly. No degrees of separation!

I'm also proud to be my mother's daughter today. Yesterday Zach sent me a frantic text from the beach where he'd found an abandoned, cold, shivering kitten. He brought it home, and the other abandoned cat that's basically taken up residence at his house freaked out. Being a 12 hour drive away I couldn't do much other than volunteer my mom to save the day, and she did. Zach brought the cat to my mom's gallery, she left work and installed it in the greenhouse at home, and there's one more kitten who won't be starving in the wilderness. I'm not sure this is a permanent solution, but it will work for now. My stepdad is allergic to cats and this kitten seems to want to be an inside cat. So if anyone lives in Oregon and wants a really sweet kitten, let me know!

Back in the Cold

My trip to Oregon was lovely lovely lovely! I really wish I'd stayed an extra day. It was sunny, and beautiful, and I had a fabulous time with my mom. She taught me how to knit! (We couldn't find any cross-stitch fabric in Newport. In response to the anon commenter on my last post, I want to do both cross-stitch and embroidery, but I have a cross-stitch project in mind first.) I promptly ruined all the work I'd done on my "scarf" as soon as I got home, and after a couple of frantic calls to my mother where I tried to articulate what I was doing, and she tried to explain what I was doing wrong, I finally got the appeal of webcams. Because with visual aids we might have been able to figure it out. As it was, I finally worked it out for myself using a simple knitting guide she'd sent me home with. I'm really enjoying the knitting, but . . . I'm having a hard time imagining myself ever being good enough to make anything I'd want to keep.

Oh, and did I mention that while in Newport Zach made a three course luncheon? (It wasn't lunch. When it's three courses, served on an insane mix of colorful antique pottery and wildly patterned china with silver demitasse spoons from Mexico and complete with both jam tarts and lemon cake for dessert? It's luncheon.) Photos of the crazy quilt luncheon later.

Not Very Green

I'm doing my damndest to speed global warming and not feeling very good about it. Since I bought my new car in May, I've driven almost 14,000 miles. In FIVE YEARS I only put 28,000 miles on my last car. This is . . . not good. But I can't help myself. I want to go places! This week I drove to Newport for a very very short visit. I left on Sunday and returned on Tuesday for an almost 700 mile roundtrip. Ridiculous. The weather was perfect, I had some stuff I needed to retrieve from my old bedroom, I wanted to see my mom and play scrabble with Zach before winter sets in and the roads get bad and I'm too nervous to do more than drive to work or the grocery store and I don't see anyone on the days that I'm not working. Anyway, I needed to confess that ridiculous extravagance. It was a lovely trip, really perfect, but . . . I feel bad.

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In other news, my BarBri materials are on their way. Can you feel my terror and dread through your computer?

Picnic

I've had a couple of small panic attacks in the past 24 hours. I woke up at 3:30 this morning and couldn't get back to sleep what with all the racing my mind was doing, worries about money, whether I'm making myself unemployable by being out of the job market so long, etc. rumbling and tumbling in my head. And then today I made the horrible mistake of looking at my law school's online job postings. Oh my was that a really really bad idea. I saw a posting for the job that had sort of been my ideal escape plan back when I was working - pre year-off brainstorm. And what with the new car, and the sudden hit that my savings account has taken, and just general anxiety that is setting in as I get close to the 6 month mark, it sent me spinning. Maybe I should apply? Maybe that would be the right and responsible thing to do? The two people I was IMing with when I saw the posting sure thought so.

But it doesn't feel right. Stop, I'm not going to start thinking about all the pros and cons again because I'll undo all the good that was done by the intended subject of this post. With me completely freaking out at him by IM, my dear friend Zach suggested I come over to his house and he'd feed me tuna salad and we could go for a walk on the beach. When I showed up it was to see this lovely picnic lunch, complete with tablecloth and linen napkins set up in his beautiful overgrown yard full of wildflowers. It was so perfect. We talked about the snobs you have to deal with working in retail, insurance, ugly babies, and other inocuous subjects and when the shadows covered the table we retired to the beach where a little light exercise on a clear day in beautiful surroundings cleared the remnants of clutter from my head and left me calm and still. This kind of afternoon is why I'm not ready to go back to work, and, perhaps as importantly, this kind of beauty is why I'm not ready to move back to the big city. Any big city.

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.