Archive for category An update
The fix
I meant to write here to say that I found my fix, my change-junkie fix. I switched up my career again, back to journalism, which given macro trends is pretty counter to, well, everything.
And the job is great. And I could, if I was noble enough, write an earnest post about how thankful I am to be back in journalism at this crucial time with an opportunity to take a run at a new business model. All that is great.
But what really motivated me to write is @fightingfinn. She wrote recently about her One and Only. It was heartfelt and lovely and I could so relate.
I am sitting next to my own One and Only right now. He’s watching the Charlie Brown Christmas Special for the second time this season and keeps laughing his head off.
My husband is going to come home from walking the dog and be mad at me for paying another the $2.99 to Comcast to view this very ’70s, vaguely religious show for the second time. But Judson is laughing so hard he can’t even sit still. Belly laughs. Repeating every line with his own spin.
And as much as I always say I don’t want to be a mommy blogger, it’s this kid that keeps rising to the top of my priority and interest list.
Now that I work downtown I have occasion to pick Judson up at school on foot and walk with him to the bus stop to catch the bus home. Both of us enjoy it more than the exercise warrants. (I’ve always liked public transportation. I know, it’s odd.)
Tonight we barely missed a bus and Judson cried real tears, inconsolable, taking it personally that the bus hadn’t waited for us. A few minutes later another bus showed up and he was squealing with delight. “IT’S A FOURTEEN!” he shouted. A weary commuter smiled and said, “I feel the same way.”
Experiencing the highs and lows of the everyday is probably more painful than it needs to be but I’d rather feel more than not at all.
Also: If I could make my ringtone the sound of my kid’s belly laugh? I’d totally do it.
Digging in
So maybe you saw, but I was super honored to be write a story for Back Fence PDX. After all, they inspired this blog, those beautiful women with their literary sensibilities.
The theme this time was Fish Out of Water and I asked Melissa if i could write because, really, I’ve spent pretty much all my adult life feeling like a fish out of water. I figured there had to be a story in there somewhere.
My not-so-secret secret is I like to shake things up (see: change junkie). I left Fairbanks Freaking Alaska to go to U.C. Santa Cruz. I showed up there, blinking, without a friend in the world, wearing ACID WASHED JEANS. Talk about a shell shock. It was exhilarating and, although I made fabulous friends in college, there was also anonymity and the ever-present possibility of reinvention. And I really liked that. So I kept moving.
So, as I’ve mentioned, Mike is looking for a job. And given that Portland is a small market and what he does is kind of specific, so there’s been all this talk about maybe moving. And as much as I love Portland (it’s home) I also love the idea of a shake-up. I have this idea that it takes strength of character to be able to pack up and move some unknown place.
But maybe we’re not moving after all. And I realized last night that not moving is more daunting than moving. And that digging in and putting down roots might even take more strength of character than moving every few years and starting over.
Small example: This blog. I haven’t decided what to do with it, really. And the whole domain might have changed if we packed up and moved, right? But the idea of being in limbo has made it easier to put off making any decisions or putting in much effort. See how it works?
The New Austerity
Here are the things I’ve given up since Mike was laid off:
1. The housekeeper was a luxury to begin with. I never really got comfortable saying “my housekeeper.” Mike would just call her “The Lady.” I would stumble over her name, Olia, which I never properly learned how to spell because I wrote the checks to her boss, the owner of Fresh Start Housekeeping. They were wonderful in every way and if you live in Portland, I’d recommend them. There is nothing quite like walking into your house after it’s been owned for three hours by a someone who knows what they’re doing with cleaning implements. For a good 24 hours, you can pad across the spotless floor in bare feet. And you didn’t have to nag or argue with anyone about how it got that way.
2. The lattes were another extravagance. I may not be a math wizard, but I know that $3 a day for fancy coffee is an indefensibly reckless expense. But! I work from home. And before I acquired a job-hunting officemate, those trips to Stumptown or Haven or Peet’s supplied what was sometimes my only face-to-face interaction of the day. I loved ambling through the neighborhood with Seeger, tying him up outside the door of a shop for all to admire while I chatted up baristas (or sullenly mumbled my order, depending on my mood) and procured my foamy, caffeinated delight. These days: The dog still needs to be walked, I still amble. But I miss the ceremony of those exchanges. I miss the first sip. I miss wrestling with my eco-guilt when I forgot my thermos mug at home. I miss the extravagance of it all.
3. We go to the library pretty much every week to get books for the boy. We have to. We read to him every night and without some new material, it’s pretty easy to lose your mind. So it occurred to me that instead of picking up a paperback at Powell’s I could just, you know, check out a book. Groundbreaking. The problem with this little brainstorm is that I go to the library with the boy. And I go utterly unprepared with a title or author of something I’d like to read. So I walk over to the adult fiction section with an armful of books about animals and trains and start scanning. The boy, meanwhile, starts running laps around the library. I linger to read the back of a novel they have propped up on top of the shelf. It sounds like crap. The boy does another lap and clips some guy working on the computer. I finally grab something that looks mildly interesting and wrestle the boy to the checkout desk. The first time I did all this, I got lucky. I grabbed Roddy Doyle’s Paula Spencer, which even though I haven’t read the prequel, The Woman Who Walked Into Doors, was a delight. Last night, though, I picked up some novel about a young woman in war-torn Iraq. It looked like it had potential, but it’s poorly written enough to be annoying. I’ll finish it, though, out of some retarded sense of duty. I’ll just be annoyed.
4. Okay, I can’t really blame the wine fast on The New Austerity. But it became evident that I was using it to self-medicate and going through bottles at an alarming rate. So I swore it off for lent and it’s been a helpful exercise. I haven’t given up beer or liquor, I’m no superhero. But those are easy to turn down, it’s wine that seduces me.
5. Having a nearly 3-year-old it’s not like we went out to eat a ton, but we did have our circuit of brewpubs with train tables and decent food that we frequented when I couldn’t be bothered to cook. Weekly pizza nights. Getaways without the boy to the bar at Higgins for pricey wine and unbelievably good food. A few weeks back we tried pizza night at home but the misshapen pies and odd toppings tasted like a budget. But sometimes we pull of a meal that wouldn’t look out of place on a parchment menu. Tonight it was rosemary lamb shoulder chops served with mashed sweet potatoes tinged with basil and topped with shaved parmigiano and perfect green beans. A glass of wine and I could have ignored the smeared food on the dining room table and the distinct stickiness of the floor.
But, yeah, nobody’s suffering unduly.
By the way, I have a little blog crush on Fighting Finn. You should check her out.
7 Things (I hate about memes … just kidding)
I guess this is one way to, ahem, put this blog in a bit more of a spotlight.
The fabulous JCloe tagged me for this 7 things thingie and I hemmed and hawed briefly about whether or not I want to play the game. I mean, really, haven’t we all grown out of the chain letter phase? But I didn’t want to let the diva of classic rock down.
So, here it goes. First, the obligatory listing of the rules, which are:
1. Link to your original tagger and list these rules in your post. (check)
2. Share seven facts about yourself in the post. (see below)
3. Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs. (see below below)
4. Let them know they’ve been tagged. (see Twitter)
Okay then. Now the hard part. My 7 things.
1. I am an aspiring geek. Here is a short list of the geekeries to which I most aspire: cheese geekery, social media geekery, WordPress geekery (stop laughing, I am just beginning this one), wine geekery and smart-grid technology geekery.
2. I hate The Gypsy Kings, chewing gum and lima beans. I know, hate is a strong word, but it applies in these cases. Except maybe The Gypsy Kings because I am sure they are nice people.
3. I grew up in Alaska but spent the better part of my formative years in denial of that fact (think mini skirts and tanning beds and teeny tiny little shoes with no socks – it was the ’80s!). I hate cold weather and I don’t know Sarah Palin.
4. I have written about open source software in one capacity or another since 1998. Yet I have never owned a machine, on purpose anyway, that runs open source. (This is not a fact of which I am proud.)
5. I like to bust out whenever possible. “Busting out” in my definition includes everything from packing up and moving to a new city (complicated currently by the fact that I’m not-so-secretly in love with Portland) to dressing the busting-out part for no particular reason.
6. I love going to movies by myself, going to bed with wet hair, and drinking pink wine in the summer, red wine in the winter and white wine all year round.
7. My son is going to be famous. My husband and I are banking on it. But he has all the traits: huge head, outgoing personality, a knack for charming large groups of people…
Tah-dah!
And here are my 7 tags:
1) Tyler Ashcraft of Spending Days (and, yes, I’ll fix the link on my blogroll) because he beat me to this blogging thing and I’m sure his New Year’s resolution is to update more often.
2) The inimitable Don G. Park who was also helped nudge me in the blog direction and who is sure to have an interesting seven.
3) Jay Parkhill of Startup Toolbox, a talented lawyer, my Twitter tutor and dear friend who is really bikey and belongs in Portland.
4) And of course Cory Frye of The Daily Wrazz, truly the most creative writer I know and the coolest cat in Albany, Ore.
5) Kathleen Mazzocco of kmazz, whose global savvy, PR smarts and approach to life in general I really admire. Plus she takes awesome food porn photos in France and then shares.
6) The lovely and talented Media Chick of I Heart Media because I’m a huge fan and she’s joining the Beer & Blog franchise and ’09 is going to be a BIG year for her, I can just tell.
7) And, finally, reaching randomly into my list of Twitter friends who blog, all of whom would generate interesting lists that I would surely enjoy reading, I tag Mara Collins, Oleoptene,who I had the pleasure of meeting at a recent BackFencePDX and whose writing I enjoy.
I give
I’ve been obsessing about story of late.
Mainly, I blame two things for this, although there are probably many more I could blame.
I don’t blame NaNoWriMo. I am too time-strapped and chicken to attempt to write a novel in 30 day’s time. I don’t blame the ever present stack of books beside my bed that I devour at varying speeds. I don’t blame the ritual of nightly stories with my 2-year-old son who is just becoming acquainted with his imagination. I don’t blame the fact that my days are spent tugging on the threads of business to find my clients’ stories and then trying to find the best audience to tell them to.
No, I blame my iPod and BackFencePDX.
A few months back I got one of the new iPods. Not the clippy one, the supersized postage stamp one. It was so much lighter and sleeker than the clunky old one that has become our home stereo. I became a podcast fiend. Suddenly every walk with the dog was the opportunity to listen. I started with the eat-your-veggie podcasts about technology and sustainability. Then I evolved to the voyeuristic pleasure of listening to interviews with local tech celebrities on StrangeLoveLive. But while I still enjoy learning-by-podcast, nothing transports me like a good story. I listen to This American Life while I toil up the hills to Mt. Tabor, I listen to The Moth while I shuffle to Stumptown for my morning coffee. I listen to writers talking about each other (in a good way) on the New Yorker Fiction podcast while I follow the dog around the neighborhood after dark. I can’t get enough.
Which brings me to my other scapegoat: BackFencePDX. The idea of standing up in front of people and telling them a story is terrifying and exhilarating. The experience of sitting in a crowd of rapt listeners and hanging on the words of someone I’ve never met and yet feel a random kinship with is transporting. It’s really just fun but it feels like something more. My brain works away, chewing on each story arc, reflecting on the pacing and intonation, noting the comic timing. My memory cycles back to something that happened last week, last year, when I was 20: What would my story be?
I want to get better at stories. I want to join the conversation. I want to have a voice that’s just mine. And yes, I’m impressed and inspired by Portland’s enormous blogging community — that includes you, Tyler — and ready to stop making excuses and join its ranks.
Let me say up front: I will make mistakes. I will go for long periods of time without updating. I will reveal the depth of my ignorance on any number of topics. But I will do my best to tell a good story or two. And I’d love it if you listened.