My trip to the DEQ

I shudder at the thought of taking passengers in my car. It’s not that I don’t believe in carpooling because I do—just not in my car. Allowing a stranger into my car oversteps a line of intimacy that I prefer not to cross with most acquaintances. Once seated in the car next to a new passenger my thoughts are comparable to those of someone who has just realized too late that the fly on her pants is down. “Oh, God. Please don’t look. Please don’t notice,” I think.

The car isn’t messy. In fact, the interior is pretty spotless compared to most of my friends’ cars. I even vacuum it sometimes and I’m not even a very clean person. The treatment my room receives doesn’t even come close to the daily purging my car undergoes. I keep my car clean because it is the only thing that I can do to disguise its other shortcomings, like a fresh coat of paint on a condemned house.

Almost the entire body of the car has been replaced more than once. Both the windshield and the rear-view mirror have spent extended, overlapping periods of time detached from the car. The sunroof hasn’t been opened since it broke on my sister when she first got the car her junior (my freshman) year of high school. The rear hubcap on the passenger side fell off and rolled away by the Shell station in Lake Oswego two summers ago. Last year the door latch stopped working and I spent the week awaiting repair driving with my right hand while my left handed clutched the door shut. It wasn’t just the thought of the door swinging open while driving that had me on edge. The car emits a sound not unlike the ring of the original Nokia cell phone, alerting the driver to the fact that the door is ajar and also that the car was built in 1995. Each time I weakened my grip on the door, it would queue the alarm.

One time the windshield wipers malfunctioned so that they were on constantly. (It was last summer, the only time it doesn’t rain in Portland.) This is just one example in a slough of electrical problems. The lights in the dash haven’t been illuminated since I’ve owned the car except for once when I gave the AC knob a hard turn and they flickered for a moment. When I left the country for five months, I left my car in a friend’s driveway. When I came back, the odometer and speedometer stopped working.

Airport runs are always fun. I chuckle a little bit anytime someone asks me to “pop the trunk.” It’s almost cute—how easy they assume it will be. To get the luggage out of the trunk, it is necessary that I turn of the engine. I prefer not to leave the car on in neutral with the e-brake set, because I don’t trust it to keep the car stopped on flat ground. Besides, I need the key to open the trunk. Maybe the button conveniently located in the center console once “popped the trunk” for the original owner, twelve years ago, but it surely hasn’t since.

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All deficiencies and hazards considered, one can imagine my lack of surprise when I left the house the other day and found a white strip of paper with the word “WARNING” printed on it in big, red letters tucked under my windshield wipers. I always thought that I would be the one to apply that label first.

The warning was twofold. First, I was parked the wrong way on the street. Second, I was parked with expired plates—this, it would seem, is illegal no matter which direction the car is facing. I recalled then that at some almost grotesquely premature time I received a notice in the mail that my plates would expire in something like three months. This notice was tucked into the stack of papers piled on top of my filing crate, the place where all the responsibilities I’m avoiding go to die.

Recently I’ve been on this kick to curb irresponsible habits like these, so I decided to deal with the registration situation immediately. I would take my car to the DEQ to have it smog-checked and when I came back, I would park it in the right direction. I checked the DEQ hours online and discovered that I had about a half hour to get out to the Clackamas center. This would be just enough time, maybe. So in spite of my campaign for greater responsibility, I set out for this errand like I do most errands: late and with a vague idea of where I was going.

I was feeling lucky because this trip fell into the twenty percent of the time that the speedometer and odometer function normally. This feeling, however, was negated when the car let out the most dreadful sound in its repertoire just as I was entering I-205. I recently had an oil leak fixed, but they were only certain to have fixed the majority of the problem. (This confuses me, because I didn’t realize there was a leaking spectrum. It seems to me a car either leaks or it doesn’t.) Consequently, the oil gets low and the car releases a harsh beeping sound to let me know. I keep a quart of oil in the trunk for just such occasions, but had used up the last one without replacing it.

“Will they even let you smog-check a car with your oil light on?” I wondered. Stopping to put oil in the car would cut into precious time, but so would blowing up on the freeway.

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A feeling of anxiety crept upon me as I pulled into the DEQ test station. I remembered my first visit two years prior.

“You know, your muffler’s been ripped off?” the man trying to affix a large hose to my absent muffler said to me.

“Yeah. I know.”

At the time I didn’t feel like explaining that on one of my famous exits, I emerged from my driveway late, with a vague idea of where I was going and with a trashcan that had somehow rolled under the car and attached itself to the muffler dragging behind me.

Confronting the state of disrepair that I have allowed my car to reach in front of the DEQ man, or anyone for that matter, is not a situation I enjoy being in because it forces me to recognize a side of myself that I often try to hide. It is the side where I keep all of the things that might not hold up against the standards of a realistic world or the standards imposed on me by the people who reside in it. Pulling into the test station, I couldn’t help but feel that the quality of my emissions wasn’t all that was being tested. My smog check was rapidly becoming a reality check.

This time, it was a woman who would perform the test. She said little to me—just scanned the barcode on the inside of my door and hooked my car up to the hose without mention of the muffler. She didn’t ask me any questions that would expose how little I knew about the status of the car or how to fix it. The roof of the cavernous warehouse didn’t open overhead and lightning didn’t strike me down, smiting me for my irresponsibility like I feared it would. We passed the test.

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My father has two expressions that he alternates using when discussing the car: “That car is a miracle vehicle” and “I don’t ever want to see that car again.” There is little chance of the latter happening, save for the times when my parents visit Portland. As for the former, it is absolutely true. I often wonder how a car that has received such little attention over its years serving two sisters throughout high school and college in three different states has managed to survive.

For explanation, I have to look to that hidden side of me mentioned earlier. The only reason my twelve-year old car with so many handicaps should still be running today is that it believes in magic, too. It knows that if I am supposed to go somewhere, it will take me there; that there is still plenty of going to be gone; and that we’re not there yet.

Letter to the Mercury

This is a letter I just wrote to the Portland Mercury in response to an article about the word "hipster" found at: http://www.portlandmercury.com/portland/Content?oid=339392&category=34029

The letter is too cerebral and lacking in profanity to be published, so I'm publishing it here.

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Chas Bowie’s article granting amnesty to the most overly used term in the Portland vocabulary—hipster—was long overdue. Bowie’s observation that “people are playing fast and loose with the term” could not be more astute. As a linguistics junkie and bearer of an English degree (read: barista), I appreciate the facility of our language to turn nouns into adjectives. But Portlanders are putting too great a burden on the overworked adjective “hipster;” which can now be used to modify, as Bowie points out, a bar, an intersection in North Portland, a cheap beer brand, a burrito joint or anywhere that one might walk in an hear Dolly Parton being played (ironically, of course) on vinyl.

Bowie posits a definition that lends a concrete image to a term that has been beaten into ambiguity: “By and large, the term ‘hipster’ is used to point to somebody who enjoys art, good films, and music that you won’t hear on most Clear Channel stations.” Bowie succeeds in painting an authentic portrait of the Portland hipster sans pejorative undertones. However, I believe that a straw man is being set up when this hipster is pitted against the frat boy or the rich man. These stereotypes, offensive as they may be, are not truly in competition with the Portland hipster. (Is the Mercury even distributed in Beaver-tron?)

The true dichotomy, as I have perceived it, exists between the hipster and the hipster-curious squares of Portland’s social fabric. This hostility towards hipster-ness stems from a combination of jealousy and self-consciousness; jealous slingers of the term can find no better way to cope with their own failure to acquire culture, while the self-conscious eschew a self-application of a term that suggests they are striving to be something, but might fail at it.

I would argue that, in addition to Bowie’s, a supplemental definition is necessary to describe the evolution of the word “hipster” from a type of person to the idea it represents, which might read: “Hipster (adj.) - a word used to describe the act of striving towards artistic self-expression and the backlash that this act incites.” Because this definition lends a perhaps too noble cause to hipsters, I should clarify, as Bowie does, that some people out are just assholes who deserve no defense. Cause come on man, it’s cool to be nice.

Lexicon: Banalogy

banalogy (n.): a figurative device employed to illustrate a point that requires no clarification; a dead metaphor used to compare one obvious phenomenon to another
DERIVATIVES: banalogist (n.), banalogical (adj.)

A recent email to my friend, Angela

Hey Ange,

Thanks for the Happy Birthday. I had a good one. Someone once told me that 22 sucked, but at 23 things started to make sense for them. The first part was definately true. As for the second, I definately have a better grasp on reality and where I want to take my life. I would even venture to say that I am happy. This is the first time I have been happy, not because of the people that I am around or the situation I am in, but because of the person that I am and what I want to do.

So that sort of answers your question about how I am doing, but only partially. I'm really happy because I left behind a lot of personal baggage in Europe and feel mentally and emotionally stable for the first time in a long time. I am also lonely. I think I achieved a good balance of alone time and not-alone time while away. Since I've been back, I've been happy to reunite with people, but not able to talk to anyone about my trip. It wouldn't be fair of me to say that nobody's asked about it; it's just that nobody's asked the right questions. It was really hard to see someone for the first time and have them say, "How was France?" We'd be standing there and all these images would come to my head and I would be thinking, "I've just walked into the room, we're standing here, and in two minutes we're going to be talking about something else." "Good" "Awesome." Sometimes I venture, "It sucked," with the right people. So for that reason I've kind of been alienating myself. Because I'm afraid I'm already forgetting about my trip and I'm not ready to. It's been a productive alienation. "I'm not fucking around this time" is my new motto.

In the bittersweet news department (extra-bittersweet, if you like your chocolate dark), I'm returning to my job at the chocolate store, but I'm not fucking around this time. It's not the step back that it might seem. At least, that is what I'm telling myself. The reason I came back was that my old boss made me an offer I couldn't refuse. So It's nice to feel like I'm a valuable asset to something. The raise will allow me to save money, which I really need to do. One of my closest friends at Moonstruck will be leaving just as I am returning. I think he's pretty pissed at me for returning and, though he hasn't talked to me about it, I can imagine why. I can imagine why because it is exactly the same reasoning I would have used before my trip. I tend to live my life in romanticized chapters. I closed the Moonstruck chapter with a lot of celebration and sincerely-written thank you cards and my friend and I solidified the fact that we were incredibly special people to eachother for an incredibly special period of time. My going back could be seen as invalidating that time because now I am turning it into just a job. From my end of things, I am secretly happy that it's going to be just a job and that I'm breaking my supersitious belief in romance for the moment. I
struggle with practicality and right now I need a strong dose of it to be able to accomplish what I want to accomplish. So yeah, I'm back to the chocolate for as little time as possible--no longer than the summer, but hopefully shorter. I want a real job and I'm not fucking around this time.

I am also lonely because I am not in love and there is a big part of me that will never lose sight of that romance. I function very differently when I am in love, which is part of the reason I have been avoiding it like the plague. But I'm also ready for something interesting to happen. I tell myself that I want a boyfriend, but really what I want is a captive listener. Is that wrong?

I did get your email about the dinner with comedy people a generation ahead of you. That is so awesome. If you meet Amy Sedaris, when you meet Amy Sedaris, tell her that my Party Log is growing. I am so happy that you have found that place in the world. You just have to keep immersing yourself in what you love. It sounds like it is really paying off and will continue to. (If I am not mistaken, that is the second time I have ended a sentence with a preposition.)

On Travel. An amazing thing happened while I was traveling. When I would stop and think about time (what time it was, how long until my next trip, how long I had been gone) I realized that I didn't want it to move any faster or any slower than it was. I wasn't homesick--I didn't want to speed up to get home. I felt like I had filled each amount of time that was given to me with the right amount of thinking, the right pace of walking. Time just moved at the speed time moves when you are not thinking about it. I wrote "Time=Time" in big letters in my journal (before I lost it). I wanted to write an essay about it and explain in some way (that was not too cliche, I hoped) that this must be what it means to actually live in the present--to be totally conscious of the moment that you are in and not any other moment. I still want to write that essay, but as I've lost track of the different thoughts to use as evidence, it's become a farther away dream. But I also realize that I don't need those thoughts, because the phenomenon I was trying to explain was so simple and not complicated at all: I was happy.

Do you mind if I post this on my blog? Because it is slowly approaching the most coherent thing I have written since my college entrance essay.

Oh, and in response to your last issue, which refers to the latter part of the subject line of this email: aren't we already?

Always,

Aud

P.S. Did I tell you that I read Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules? I loved a lot of the stories, but it was hard for me to get past how good Sedaris' introduction is and the line: "I did not question, as I believed, and still do, that stories can save you." Thanks for the recommendation.

Merry Christmas, Lame-o

When I checked the mail today, I found a Christmas card that I had sent to my friend Laura Herberg in Scotland. When I sent the card, I remember thinking that there was no way it was going to get to Glasgow before Christmas, but I did think that it would get there.

Instead, the card went to Scotland and back, just like me. It was stamped by the goodly clerks at the Royal Mail on December 12, 2006. So it did get there in time--and then it turned around. When I opened the card and read what I had written almost six months ago I was grateful for the international u-turn. Here is the interior of the card, verbatim:

Hey Laura,

Somehow I decided to send Christmas cards this year (something I haven’t done in hella long). I hope your Christmas is festive and fun and you have a good time with your Mom. I’m sure you’ll come up with something to top last New Years. I’m going to stay w/ my family in a beach house (which I’m stoked about) for the holidays. I love getting your emails so keep ‘em coming!

[heart] Aud

Thank God I don’t have semi-annual reunions with all of the greeting cards I have written or the intervals between my holiday correspondences would truly be “hella long.”

I’m not sure what troubles me the most about this composition, which at first seems so benign, but I think it’s the phrase “festive and fun.” This is the type of thing that I would normally say out loud in a mocking tone, probably marked by an affected Midwestern accent. Those around me would understand that this is purely a vehicle for the expression of my deeply rooted cynicism towards virtually everything. Equally troubling is the truncated “’em” that has here been employed to help conjure the desired dialect, but on paper characterizes the typical lameness that I recognize in most of what I do.

Up until today, I have avoided greeting cards with prewritten messages inside and opted for “blank inside” on the grounds that I didn’t want to send a card with something stupid written inside. I must forthwith renounce that judgment. And it’s not as though the absence of the Comic Sans “Merry Christmas” printed in the center of the white page robs me of space needed to communicate and elaborate upon important information, because none was (not) delivered in the greeting above. Perhaps the check in the box by the word “incomplete” on the sticker applied by the postal workers does not refer to the address, but the content of the piece of mail.

The truth is that I approach writing cards with the same dreadful question that I approach the work-day: how am I ever going to fill this void? I answer this question with whatever comes to my mind first. The “I’m sure you’ll come up with something fun to top last New Years” is the postal equivalent to facing all the bills the same way in the register. It gets me from the beginning to the end.

I don’t know how the return of the prodigal Christmas card will affect the choices I make about future Christmas cards, probably not at all. I suppose I have to think of it like the opening of a time capsule. No matter how much time has passed since a photo’s capture or a letter’s composition, people will always think that they look younger and sound dumber than they are today. How else would they get from the beginning to the end?

I wonder if this card was in Scotland at the same time as me. Somewhere in a pile of mail, this small white envelope covered in blue crayon scribble and Crops of America stamps sat containing the remains of someone I was half a year ago. And then it followed me home.

Six Degrees of Separation

While waiting in line to board my flight from Paris to Frankfurt, a mother explained to her child that, unlike their trip out to Europe, in their trip back to the States they would do the short flight first and the long flight second.

“Oh,” her daughter thought about it for a moment. “So it’s like the same thing, but backwards,” she concluded.

“Yes. The same thing, but backwards,” her mother affirmed.

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On my last day in Paris, my sister and I went to Sunday Brunch at the Charbon. We had been to the restaurant once before for dinner at the beginning of my trip and I had liked it. If the city of Berkeley was ever personified, it might travel to Paris and eat here.

At one point, my enjoyment of croissants and confiture was interrupted by my sister, who asked, “Dude, is that dude from Amelie?”

“Which dude? I asked. She pointed towards the sidewalk. I looked and recognized him immediately.

The dude in question was Dominique Pinon: the actor who plays the jealous ex-boyfriend of the waitress who works with Amelie at Le Deux Moulin. As soon as I caught sight of him, I realized how stupid I must have seemed to my sister for having to ask for clarification after she pointed him out to me. Because the thing about Dominique Pinon, is that he looks like only one person and that person is himself. That is to say, no one else looks like him and so the question “Is that the dude from Amelie” is actually rhetorical, for the answer is undeniably yes. Spotting him in a restaurant setting helped confirm his identity to us, as he looked exactly as he does seated at the café in the film.

My sister and I share a mutual appreciation for the actor Alan Rickman. Thus, our natural response to the celebrity sighting was to try to connect Pinon to Rickman. This task was particularly difficult because we were moving from a French actor to a British one.
We tried to venture forth from Pinon through Jean Reno, a famous French actor who has done some crossover films with American actors such as the recent Pink Panther remake. This path would open up the plethora of connections offered by Steve Martin and Kevin Kline.
“Kevin Kline was in Dave with Sigourney Weaver, who was in the fourth Alien movie with…!” exclaimed Emily, cutting herself off when she realized that the trail was leading back to Pinon.

The disappointment that followed was matched by our discouraging discovery that we could actually only name about four movies starring Steve Martin. Though Father of the Bride would figure prominently in our connection of Beyonce and Janeane Garofalo, it was not going to help us reach our current goal.

We made a few more circles back to Pinon before Audrey Tatou showed us a way out. Tatou was in The Da Vinci Code with Tom Hanks—finally, justification for the making of the movie. Tom Hanks was in Forrest Gump with Sally Fields, who was in Ms. Doubtfire with Robin Williams. Robin Williams was in Hook with Maggie Smith, who played Professor Mc Gonagal in Harry Potter with Alan Rickman. Mission accomplished—and in six degrees.

I have never been very good at playing six degrees of separation and found myself in a state of disbelief that we had actually done it. It was actually a very heightened emotional state as there had been several ups and downs on our way to victory. I was surprised by how easy it is to make a loop and wind up back at the same actor you started with. I thought of this the next day, when I overheard the little girl talking to her mother in line at the airport. You can always find your way back to the place that you started, but you may take a different way to get there.

Frisbee Shots: can you find the frisbee in front of these Paris monuments?