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.

***********************************************

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?

Tagh, l'explorateur

At a special hour of the day in Paris—in the late spring it comes when barefoot people in parks are enjoying sunlight that wasn’t there a month ago and the warm feeling against the arms of city walkers is still a surprise—those who have made it to the Place Contrascarpe for an evening glass of Voignier witness something special. This is the hour that Tagh, the explorer, arrives at the place on his camouflaged scooter to put on a show before them.

As his epithet suggests, Tagh is an urban explorer. Though the dried palm branches adorning his yellow scooter lend the vehicle a disguise more appropriate for a desert safari, Tagh continually returns to Place Contrascarpe to pursue his explorations. The steady flow of patrons in and out of the busy cafes provides Tagh with a constant influx of new species to discover. Tagh slowly approaches the seated guests, holding a pair of binoculars to his eyes with one hand and a notebook in the other—Tagh takes copious notes on his surroundings. Occasionally Tagh returns to his scooter, steps up onto the seat and peering off into the horizon through a telescope, surveys the terrain ahead.

Tagh, the explorer, is more than the average street performer. Unlike the accordion player in the metro performing next to an upturned hat that passively awaits loose change, Tagh holds a fake pistol to the backs of the café customers, demanding his payment. Those who comply toss their coins into a cigar box in Tagh’s outstretched hand.

Still, there is something other than the audacity to hold a crowded café at gunpoint that makes Tagh remarkable. Tagh’s service to the city of Paris extends beyond the careful gathering of foreign specimens; he instructs those who visit its sights in the art of observation.

Observation can be easily dismissed as the default activity following the opening of the eyes. Sitting by the fountain at Luxembourg Gardens, however, I realized that to refine the skills of observation actually takes a great deal of discipline and practice. I watched the children playing with their boats in the water and watched the parents that watched over them. (Or, to revise, I’ll say I looked at them, because for some reason the word “look,” to me, implies that the action begins at me and moves toward the subjects of my gaze, whereas “watch” begins with them and approaches me. I make this distinction because, from my seat in the garden with my journal propped open over my knee, I caught myself trying to project my interpretation of what was going on before me with the aim of pulling together some touchingly meaningful piece of writing like Adam Gopnick does so beautifully in Paris to the Moon.) The nascent journalist in me, concerned with writing the truth, quickly put an end to my temptation to jump to meaningful, yet false, conclusions.

Instead, I set out to describe the scenes as they were actually playing out in front of me. My journal from this read something like “little girl in a yellow dress prods at red and white boat with a stick” or “priest walks with a young girl wearing translucent black plants.” I tried to be as objective as possible, omitting that I thought the girl with the priest was quite attractive—it is a fact that one could see through her pants. As a constant seeker of the significance of things—one who interprets a cold as not just a lapse in the immune system, but also the shifting of fate and a haircut as a metaphor for personal evolution—it is hard for me to extract pure reality from my interpretation of it. After a few rounds of jotting down verbs and nouns accompanied by only the most necessary adjective, observations came more easily. And, at risk of making my experiment sound more important that it really was, other things came more easily as well.

The moment in which you dismiss yourself from the task of evaluating another culture and allow yourself to just look at it—no, watch it—is itself a special hour of the day. It results in a kind of openness that is at first as uncomfortable as having your mouth propped open at the dentist. You fight it at first but then submit, discovering that it requires almost no effort at all to stay open and allow the necessary improvements to transpire.

At no point in his show does Tagh present a hypothesis or draw a conclusion. He is forever operating in the data-gathering phase of the scientific method. And he does this so skillfully as to almost slip under the radar of the audience, who are lost in their own observations of him. “I didn’t realize until later,” my sister, Emily, said during a conversation we were having about our mutual appreciation for Tagh and his performance. “I’m not watching Tagh,” she announced. “Tagh is watching me.”

I left my journal in a cab

I left my joural in a cab. I'm not sure what's more upsetting: the fact that I lost loads of material for my blog or the fact that someone else found loads of material for my blog. Due to this (and also due to the fact that I'm moving around a lot and this is the first chance I've had to sit by myself in two weeks), it's going to be a bit before I can update this. Sorry!

Bathroom Humor

There is a little game I play with myself every time I am confronted with a new bathroom in Paris. It is not a game I have elected to play, rather one that I have been enlisted in against my will like a captive babysitter. I call this game “Find the light switch” and its objective should be easily deduced. “Find the light switch” is a game of few rules. In fact, there are only two: be alert and don’t panic.

It is in strategy where the intricacies and complications of the game lie. When approaching a foreign bathroom, one must always have a plan. (A spontaneous descent upon the bathroom will surely result in failure or, even worse, embarrassment.) I have found that it is best to feign confidence when making my initial approach, so as to discourage rubbernecking. “There is nothing to see here,” says my casual gait.

When greeted by a dark interior, anticipation is key. I am ready for any possible incarnation of the idea of “light switch.” It may be something that I flip, turn, pull or step on. (The same is true for the door latch, the toilet flush and the water faucet, but I don’t even want to go there.)
Opening the door to an already lit bathroom does not relieve you from the responsibility of ascertaining the whereabouts of the light switch. It was not the act of a well-wishing do-gooder that has left the bathroom is this brilliant state, but a mechanism of deceit. In this case, the light switch probably operates on a timer and if you let it go undiscovered, moments later you may find yourself beneath the shadow of an ignorant darkness in a most vulnerable position. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

I begin my quest for light switch by checking all the places where one would traditionally find a light switch in a bathroom in the States. This is purely a formality just to get the ball rolling. I look to the wall adjacent to the door, for example. If my search ends here I call it a “freebie.”
In most cases the light switch will be too elusive to occupy such an obvious location beside the door and I turn my gaze elsewhere. I look to the ceiling and then to the floor. I scan all exposed surfaces. It is not a bad idea to check the wall outside the bathroom, but this should be done using the peripheral vision with limited body movement so as not to call attention to the farce I am carrying on.

If by this point, I still haven’t managed to illuminate the bathroom I examine the light fixture itself, hoping to find a chain to pull or a something to toggle. The most important thing is to observe the second rule of the game and stay calm.

Following these steps has helped me find even the most nefarious of light switches—the ones disguised beneath mirrors or behind soap dispensers. When the light goes on, I have beaten the game and like a video game addict who has just liberated the princess from the castle, I revel in my victory in solitary relief.

It's the end of the week as we know it

Just before the dawn of the millennium, Americans prepared themselves for the end of the world that would surely accompany the crash of the almighty computer. The most paranoid of Americans hoarded precious resources into makeshift shelters in anticipation of the post-Y2K apocalypse they were certain would strike.

I’m not sure what the French were doing at this time--at worst they probably feared their systems would become more efficient. What I do know is that the temporary pandemonium Americans endured in the months before everyone partied like it was 1999 for the last time was like an exaggerated version of what the French have traditionally experienced every Saturday. I say this because every Sunday something unheard of in America happens here in France; stores close. The fear of total deprivation of resources that never materialized in America is, in fact, and institutionalized reality in France.

This reality requires constant vigilance. By Saturday night, if you haven’t already shopped for your Sunday rations, then you’d better get over to the Monoprix before closing time. Easter added an extra challenge to last weekend's shopping because the French observe the holiday on Monday as well.

Jean Philippe and I found ourselves in the precarious position of having put off shopping until the last minute on the Saturday before Easter. There is always the temptation to assume (wrongfully) that you can make it through Sunday on the food already in the house. This is a decision most come to regret when they are spreading butter on the boiled remnants of two different kinds of pasta or tossing a salad of wilted lettuce and cocktail olives.

“Do you think we should maybe go grocery shopping and get some things?” Jean Philippe directed the question to me, laying down on my bed with my head propped on my elbow , reading my book. I was tired and didn’t feel like getting up, not to mention my long-harbored aversion to grocery shopping.
“I don’t know, should we?” I asked, my tone suggesting that I had already thought of my answer.
“Well, we have to be prepared to get through tomorrow.”

Then a look spread across Jean Philippe's face that I recognized from the many other times he had acted as voice of reason for me. A light had gone on somewhere in his mind and he remembered the Easter holiday. The situation quickly escalated to an emergency when we realized that it was 8:40 in the evening and the Monoprix would close in twenty minutes, leaving us bereft of groceries for the next two days. Both simultaneously sensing the urgency of the situation, Jean Philippe and I swung into action, grabbing tote bags and rushing out the door.

We managed to slip into the store with time to spare. The Monoprix was crowded with people on similar missions. We traversed the aisles, grabbing at random like contestants on Supermarket Sweep. We filled an entire basket with vegetables, cheese, milk and potato chips. We carried wine and beer in our arms. When we left the Monoprix 20 minutes later, our shoulders slung down from the weight of grocery bags, it was clear we had made the right decision in coming shopping.

The fact that in France, I can’t walk out the door and buy what I need at any hour of the day is not a concept that I have grown up with. As an American, I beleive that anything is possible. Behind every need is an inherent optimism leading me to instinctively pick up my keys, get into my car and drive to the place that will satisfy my need--and quickly. To not be able to go to the grocery store and buy toilet paper on a Sunday afternoon would be greeted by an American with sheer incredulity.

In the many discussions about Europe that I held in the months leading up to my trip, hours of operation always made it into the conversation. "What if American stores closed earlier?" is always a hot topic, often followed by an exultation of the 24-hour convenience store.

To inculcate a shop culture equal to that of France in the States would require much more than adjusting our hours of operation. The 24-hour culture is uncompromising. The French have never been introduced to the philosophy that convenience should reign supreme. The American who finds comfort knowing that the nearly-empty roll of TP on Saturday will no doubt be replaced tomorrow, maybe by hitting the store on the way home from church and picking up a 24 pack. The Frenchman finds comfort in a tradition of mutually assured inconvenience. Or at least, that tradition has taught him to be prepared; to stock his home for the day of rest and remain home on Sunday with no reason to go out.

I still don't know how to settle the debate between the 24-hour establishment and French business hours. It is easy to idealize France, when the reality is that there are some people who would prefer to be able to open their stores on Sunday and make more business. It's also hard to keep up a cynical view of American efficiency when it really is quite nice to be able to complete a successful beer run after midnight. Sitting in the Champs du Mars on a sunny Sunday afternoon drinking wine in the grass while families picnic together does sway my mind in one direction, though.

Joke

The following is a joke that my sister told me:

Q: How many French people does it take to screw in a light bulb?
A: One. One to hold the light bulb and then wait for the world to revolve around him.

Update

I am trying to avoid this kind of "Today I did... It was so amazing" style. But some times you just have to. So here are some of the things I've been up to that have kept me from posting.

Jean Philippe helped me buy month pass for the Metro. I was going to try to do it myself, but he volunteered to come with me. If I had gone by myself, I’m sure I would have gotten the pass, but it would not have gone nearly as smoothly. After helping me buy the pass and take my picture for it, Jean Philippe even got scissors from the guy so that I could cut my photo out and put it on the pass. There’s no way I would have gotten that kind of treatment on my own. Turns out the French are really nice…to each other.

Emily and I went to the Cimitaire Pere Lechaise. It’s the cemetery where you can find the graves of Oscar Wilde, Jim Morrison, Edith Piaf, Moliere, and Parmentier (he brought the potato to France—see photo). It’s the cemetery where you can’t find Gertrude Stein’s grave (or at least we couldn’t), but supposedly she’s there.

Emily and I went to the Grande Epicerie at the Bon Marche. It’s a fancy, expensive international food market. The French label anything that comes from the States as “Tex Mex.” It’s awesome. We found wine in juice boxes, good pastries, and water for 30 Euros. Great!







Yesterday, Emily and I went to the Centre Pompidou. It’s the modern art museum people often refer to as being turned inside out.

(I think some people also refer to it as an eyesore, but I don’t agree. I think it’s pretty rad. See above.) The museum hosts the most bizarre collection of modern art that I have ever seen. I don’t mean that in a pejorative sense. It’s just true. Most of it was really awesome. Em and I got sucked into a crazy marionette film I can’t even begin to describe. We also liked the work of a Californian artist who had taken a series of about 50 black and white post cards of 100 black boots doing different things (like climbing the hills or crossing the street) in Southern California. There were two exhibitions going on. One featured different artists who specialized in cartoons/sketches who had created travel journals that were more like comic strips. There was also an exhibition about Samuel Beckett. I felt lame for having never read Waiting for Godot, but now it’s on my imaginary list of things to read. Original manuscripts and video recordings of original performances of the plays were on display. I think some Notre Dame Alumni Alan Rickman fan club members will be pleased to hear that Alan Rickman played a role in the exhibit. (Am I still in the club even though I deleted my Myspace account?)

Beckett exhibit...

Before the museum, Em and I bought ourselves vintage dresses. After, we bought ourselves Margaritas and nachos.

Today Em and I had a picnic in Luxembourg Gardens. It was really warm today and the French responded by dressing as they normally do, completely covered up by many layers. The picnic was awesome because the grass finally woke up. During the off-season, they fence off the grass so that no one will rest themselves on it while the grass itself is resting.

The Metro

In a station at the Metro
"The apparition of these faces in the crowd
Petals on a wet, black bough.”
--Ezra Pound

No matter how pretentious this may sound, this poem really does keep popping into my head when I step onto the platform of the Metro. I have read this poem in at least two English classes. Each time the professors introduced the poem in the same way, by reading the two lines aloud over and over again to the class.

I remember one evening when my sister and I still shared a bedroom. We stayed awake picking different words to say over and over again until they were no longer recognizable as English words. It wasn’t really that the words lost their meaning; we had just never examined the words in that way or been so forced to think about their meanings—to convince ourselves that what sounded like gibberish truly had meaning.

“In a station at the metro” requires the same thing of its reader and this is what my professors were trying to teach us. I think the point of the poem that we were supposed to question, as its meaning grew cloudier with each reading, was the “wet, black bough.” It took a few times through the poem to realize that my mind didn’t want to allow the word “black” entrance into what I wanted to be a poem about petals and light. It was even hard for me to accept that “wet” wasn’t “white.” Sparing the English lesson, my class eventually arrived at something that we thought was close to the intended meaning of the poem. We got there by straying as far as possible from one meaning to allow space for new ones to creep in.

In Paris, if I want to get anywhere, I take the Metro. I can’t help but love it. This romance, I imagine, eventually fades with time. My sister affirmed that at first she loved the Metro, too. Sometimes she still does. I would guess that many Parisians have conflicted feelings about the Metro. Sometimes you just want to get home and you don’t want to nudge your way through a crowd of shopping bags and big coats. Other times, you meander casually through an empty tunnel, down some stairs, onto a train and sit passively as the train whizzes through magic darkness.

The Metro operates like Pound’s poem. It seems to mean one thing at first, but standing in a station staring at the faces plastered against the walls, the “petals on a wet, black bough,” one starts to understand that ineffable, dynamic element of life that Pound captured somewhere in between two lines of verse. Some of the petals are weary. Some of them are lively. Some are laughing. Some are talking on the phone. Some are checking their watches, scrutinizing their route, strategically planning which car to board. Some are running to catch the train that emerges from the dark tunnel to carry them away.

Ernest Hemingway

Yesterday I went on a walking tour that took me to important historical sites pertaining to Ernest Hemingway. I followed this walk outlined in a guidebook (something I’m kind of embarrassed about). I had the whole day to myself, though, and wanted to give it some kind of structure. As it turns out, the map in this book kind of sucked. Though it told me which Metro stop to start at, it didn’t really tell me how to get from the stop to the first point of interest. I think I made about three circles around the Metro stop before finding Marche Mouffetard, an open-air street market Hemingway described in his autobiography.

The best part of the tour was seeing the different apartments that Hemingway lived in during his times of expatriation. Standing in the rainy street, I could only see the windows of the upper-floor apartments, but still I imagined the great American writer coming in and out of the building. Ernest Hemingway had to eat somewhere. Ernest Hemingway had to hang his clothes somewhere. The cuffs of Ernest Hemingway’s pants soaked up rain just as mine were doing then.

Random thoughts and facts about Hemingway made their way to the front of my mind. In a Farewell to Arms, Catherine hates the rain because she sees herself dead in it. When writing, Hemingway would be sure not to exhaust an idea; he would stop work with a few things left to say so that he would be guaranteed to have material to start with in the morning. When explaining how he began work on a new story, Hemingway said, “I try to write one true sentence.”

I walked along in the rain following roughly the path laid out for me for the rest of the afternoon. I wished that I could transport myself to that time when so many American writers came to Paris. I wanted to see what they saw and feel that same feeling, but I didn’t really know where to begin imagining.

The Louvre

Every Friday evening after six the museum is free to patrons under twenty-six. I am determined to conquer the Louvre over the course of several Friday evenings. Last Friday I made my first attempt.

The museum was busy at first, but by around seven people started to clear out, leaving behind them a totally chill atmosphere in which I would observe famous works of art.

My favorite section of the museum is the Greek Antiquities floor. Here you find Classical and Hellenistic sculpture and some of my favorite statues. What I appreciate most about these sculptures (aside from the things that anyone who’s taken basic art history can tell you about the idealization of the human form and depictions of mythological tales, etc.) is a quality of newness I can’t help but feel is being expressed in spite of their ancient origins. My imagination is directed to the time when Aristotle was first defining drama, Plato was creating democracy and Socrates was designing education.

My favorite sculpture of all is the Victory of Samothrace. I think it’s everyone’s favorite statue, but I don’t care. The statue is not with the rest of Greek sculpture; it’s displayed by itself at the top of a long stairway. There is no way to do it justice in words.

The Italian paintings floor inevitably leads you to the Mona Lisa. The problem with the Mona Lisa is not that bit about her mouth; it’s that it’s really hard to have an original thought while looking at the Mona Lisa. I found myself thinking things like, “Wow, that painting is really…famous.” I mean, what are you supposed to think?

I felt a great deal of pressure to have the proper reaction to the famous works of art in the Louvre. The only solution that I could find to this problem was to stand and stare at them until my mind went completely blank. At that point I could begin to see the piece for what it was then and what it was when it was first created. Then I thought about how amazing it was that someone could make a thing so unique and that over hundreds of years that thing can inspire people to make pilgrimages just to stand before it and take it in. Then I thought about how happy I was to be one of those pilgrims.

After the Italian paintings, I explored the French floor. I’m not sure if it’s because I’m in France, but the French paintings were incredibly intriguing. It’s like the guilty pleasure of looking at a map and seeing where you are in relationship to everything else, but with history instead of a map.

Then I went for something completely different, the really old stuff on the bottom floor of the museum.

I’m not going to lie—the Egyptians really freak me out. If I stumbled into ancient Greece, I could see myself hanging out and throwing a Frisbee and drinking some wine. Or if I landed in Mesopotamia I think it’d be chill to garden for a while with those people. But Egyptians are like the hipsters of the ancient world—not even just the fashionable ones, but the hard-core, coke-snorting ones. If an Egyptian came my way, I’d probably stay quiet and look at my feet. When the Egyptian spoke, I’d pretend I knew what the Egyptian was talking about. I’d act like I was so over the Pyramids. Egyptians probably didn’t dance at shows, they just stood they’re really stiff like the statues of the Pharoahs suggest. After standing in awe of the Sphinx and statues of Ramses II, there really wasn’t any where for me to go. Also, the museum was closing.

Departure

I. Terminal D

Terminal D at the Portland airport lends itself to the suspicion that someone took the word “terminal” too seriously. It is here that the shops end, the patterns in the carpet end and white courtesy phones end. Someone began the project of installing self-flushing toilets in the bathrooms of the Portland airport, but that project ended before it reached Terminal D. Terminal D ends bluntly where a flat, beige wall divides the ceiling and floor. Embedded in the wall are gates D14 and D15.

Light shines through the translucent skylights of Terminal D, suggesting to those gathered beneath them the world just behind them. The light is like the fake, green cartoon hills that line the perimeter of Disneynland’s Toon Town. The hills suggest an extension of the world found within. They represent a place that the children who visit the park will never see and a place that adults know is Los Angeles.

Unlike these children dreaming of the land behind the hills, the ticketed passengers of Lufthansa flight 469 will penetrate Gate D14 and see the world beyond.

II. Rolf

Sitting next to me on my flight to Frankfurt was a German student named Rolf. No, I shouldn’t start that way because that is not where the story begins.

“It’s the funniest thing,” the European-looking boy said to me with a slightly panicked tone of voice. One hand was digging deeply in the pocket of his denim jacket, while the other was grabbing at his hair. “Have you seen an iPod Shuffle? It’s the funniest thing. I just had it.” He kept saying that. It’s the funniest thing.

I leapt up to help him look for it, checking the same seats over and over again. Where on a plane is there to lose something? Eventually, Rolf found it and an air of calm settled over him as we each settled into our neighboring seats.

“What are you doing in Frankfurt?” Rolf asked.
“Well, I’m transferring to my flight to Paris,” I said. “So, not much.” We both laughed.

You are taking a risk when you forge a relationship with the person sitting next to you on a plane. The risk is not that you will be rejected, rather that you will be accepted and be that person’s conversation buddy for the duration of the flight. Thus, I was wary of Rolf’s friendly advances, answering his questions without asking any of my own.

My reticence did not discourage Rolf from divulging information about himself. I learned that he had taken an internship in aerodynamic design and had been living in Southeast Portland for the last six months. During that time he had fixed up an old Audi with some friends. During that time he had also fallen in love with the Seattle Seahawks. (Later, when he showed me pictures of the car on his computer, he made sure to point out the Seahawks decal that spanned the hood.) Rolf had taken a road trip throughout the West coast in his fixed-up car. He loved San Francisco. I told him that I was from San Jose and that it was near San Francisco. Because of his penchant for aerodynamics, I asked if he had been through Sunnyvalve to visit NASA. He said no and that he was sorry he missed it. “It’s not really the type of place that you miss," I thought.

In addition to picture of his car, Rolf showed me photo documentation of an evening in which a friend who was a plane mechanic took him on along while he opened up and fixed planes. He showed me the mechanism responsible for the brakes on the landing gear, the cargo hold, the cockpit. One picture was of bundles and bundles of wires. “Just one broken wire and you have to undo all of these,” Rolf said, as if to convince me of the importance and intricacy of a plane's interior. As a current passenger, I needed no convincing.

Rolf spoke English fluently, but his accent bore the cadences of his native German. Everything seemed to pour out as one word. He tried to teach me some German expressions and laughed as what came out sounded more like a cough than a language.

Frankfort was not Rolf's final destination either. He was to transfer to a different flight to Stutgart. When he asked me what time my flight to Paris departed was when I realized that I would have only twenty minutes between landing and boarding. He looked at me and said plainly, “You’re fucked.”

The plane's landing marked the ostensible end of our brief friendship. We joined the rest of the passengers in the frenzy to gather carry on luggage. I realized that I was at the point that most discourages me from reaching out to strangers. How, when it comes time, do you take that reach back? At the time I needed not have an answer because soon as Rolf pointed out that the way to the back exit was all clear, I dashed out without so much as a goodbye..

III. First Law of Travel

You will either have an excess of time to endure before boarding your flight, watching others with less time panic, or you will be the one panicking.

I disembarked from the plane to discover that I wouldn’t just have to find my way through the foreign airport to my next flight in twenty minutes. First, I would have to take a bus there. The bus took me to the labyrinth that is the Frankfurt airport. As soon as my feet hit the ground, they were running. They carried me past the first row of ticket counters, up stairs, through a crowd. I ran on one of those moving, flat escalator platforms that I had until recently thought to be useless technology. I ran down more stairs to find myself at the end of a security line. As I caught my breath in line a feeling of helplessness descended upon me. After five or ten minutes in line my bags came out of the X-ray and tears poured down my face unselfconsciously. A guard asked me about something in my bag and I showed her my water bottle. “Ok?” I asked. Before she nodded I was already running again. I followed the signs to A-24 through a hallway and around a corner. A 1-42 this way. Is 24 between 1 and 42? I asked myself. I ran down five flights of stairs only to come to a landing where I would have to take an elevator up two levels. Then came the long black-lit tunnel. By the time I got to then end of the tunnel I wasn’t running anymore. I was sprinting. I went past A 30, A 28, A 26, to get to A 24 where I was the last passenger to board the flight.

By the time I got aboard the flight I was exhausted and breathing heavily. The other passengers on the flight were German businessmen in crisp suits. I was sweaty and wrinkled in comparison and also pissed. I felt like I should have gotten better service. I felt American.

On Faith

The current circumstances of my life have placed me in a prime position to begin understanding what faith really is. I'm not talking about religious faith, because I'm definately not in a place to understand that yet. I'm talking about faith in general, which is a kind that I hadn't really acknowledged the existence of until now.

I have just left a job so that I can take a trip. The trip is a leap of faith in itself, but even that is not what I mean to talk about.

I'm talking about faith that is not in God or luck, but in things--and eventually people. I guess I never realized that you still need to put faith in things that surround you every day. I didn't realize that part of a thing's existence is me believing that it is there. And now that I'm thinking about it, maybe putting faith in things actually involves the bigger risk than faith in ideas (God, luck, etc.) because the farther you reach out into the cosmos, the more difficult it is to prove that something does not exist. Putting faith in a person or thing incurs the risk that that person or thing might fail you, even if that person is yourself. Yesterday, the rear view mirror of your car was attached to the windshield, your computer worked, your friend said he cared about you and meant it, your grandfather was alive. You went to bed believing that these things would still be true in the morning, but when you woke up they were not.

I guess you could say that having faith in people and things is something that I have struggled with and only the recognition that I'm allowing myself to have faith again recently has led me to these musings on the topic.

Faith is a necessity for change and progress. I think that a little bit every day in little ways you are given the choice to believe that you are alone or to believe that the people that you love are with you even though you can't see them, supporting the same ideals even though they've never shared them with you. You can believe that your friends are thinking about you even though you haven't spoken in a week; that even though your ex-boyfriend hasn't spoken to you yet he might someday; that an old friend who maybe ruined your life and broke your heart a little bit, but you still can't help missing him a little bit might miss you a little bit, too; that a trip will change your life; that your roommates will still love you even though you are moody and unreliable; that there is something behind every relationship that you can feel but can never explain. You can beleive in the significance of friendships formed in chocolate stores; in strangers and magazine editors; in the possibility of changing people's lives. Or you can not.

Maybe it is because it is spring. Maybe it is because daylight savings time is doing its thing and the moon is slowly giving way to the sun making the light shining through my window a little brighter. Maybe it is because I quit my job and think it is impossible to consider an ending without thinking of the pursuant beginning. Or maybe it is because the alternative to not believing is stagnancy and I've had enough of that. For whatever reason, faith looks pretty good to me right now.

Good advice

If the opportunity to drink whiskey and ginger brew with your housemates while dancing in your living room to Elton John, breaking in your new shoes and waiting for the pizza dough to rise ever presents itself to you, take it.

Casablanca is one of the best movies I have ever seen

Last night I watched Casablanca for the first time. I had always heard that it was good, one of the best movies of all time even. But I assumed it was good in that way that all old movies are: they make women cry; the men are charming and wear fedoras; there is a noble cause to fight for (usually involving the Germans or Communism); and the black and white makes everyone look attractive. When I watch these movies, I feel nostalgia tugging at my heart. But, afterwards I am glad to live in an era where calling women the "the gentler sex" is not acceptable, modern-day bras don't make their breasts look like something off a Madonna album; not all men smoke cigars; and the Nazis aren't occupying France.

Casablanca is a good movie for all the reasons I've mentioned above, but without the afterthoughts. If I had the choice, I would spend the rest of my days with my face tucked beneath Humphrey Bogart's chin, riding in a convertible through Paris. I'd live in the time where "the problems of three people don't amount to a hill of beans." I'd even stand up and sing the French national anthem in Rick's Cafe Americain if I knew the words.

I'm sure that I am not the first person to say this, but it's worth saying again. Casablanca is one of the best movies I have ever seen because it uses love as an allegory for war. Rick's statement that he "sticks his neck out for no one" mirrors American nuetrality. When we learn of his past with Ilsa, we see that Rick's indifference was the result of losing what it was that had to fight for. Ilsa's return restores him and forces him to combat the Germans and save the hero.

I suppose that you could say that Rick is a self-interested isolationist and Ilsa is his Pearl Harbor. But you said that, not me. Is that the difference between a realist and romanticist?

Casablanca need not inspire a false (or true) sense of American pride to be an excellent movie. To me, it only needs to demonstrate that apathy leads one nowhere and that love and war need eachother.

Tom Shane Controls Minds

Tom Shane controls minds in a way that makes Donald Rumsfeld wet himself from jealousy.

Since 1971, Tom Shane has been gaining the trust of loyal, involuntary listeners via radio commercials for the Shane Company. We have grown accustomed to the monotonous voice describing the latest trends in the diamond industry between radio-edited songs. We expect to hear the same narration of the Shane Company's locations and hours at the tail end of each commercial break.

Each of us has unknowingly memorized some detail about the Shane Company. Maybe you know that the Shane Company is "open weekdays 'till eight and weekends 'till five." Perhaps you can recall the location of a local branch that you have never visited. I have never even seen a Shane Company, but know that there is one at the "corner of Market and Willow Pass Road" somewhere near my hometown.

Tom Shane is Pavlov and we are all his dogs. When we hear Tom Shane coming to the end of his soliloquoy, we turn up the volume on our dash because we know that the radio station will return to its normal programming.

How long will Tom Shane continue selling corporate diamonds before he realizes that the real gem is his power to control minds? It's only a matter of time before our friend in the diamond business becomes our foe in the world domination business.

Tom Shane, you can take my mind, but you'll never have my heart.

French Lessons

I am taking a trip to Europe to visit my sister in Paris at the end of March. In order to alleviate some of the humiliation of being American among the French, I have enrolled in a class called "French for Travelers." Prior to this class, my French vocabulary has consisted only of words already adopted into the English language (milieu, tete-a-tete, hors d'oeuvres, repertoire...).

In high school we had weekly vocabulary lists, which occasionally contained a word of French origin. Of these, the one I remember most is "ennui." It is a noun describing a feeling of dissatisfaction, boredom, listlessness, disillusionment. Why this word stuck out to me in high school should require no explanation. Since then, periods of my life have certainly been characterized by pervasive ennui.

Last week I felt a bout of ennui coming on and remedied it by moving around the furniture in my room. Even when the stakes are low, it can be difficult for me to break with a system that I am certain works. It actually took a fair amount of courage to pull the bed away from the wall and switch the dresser with the bookshelf. Now my clothes are all in the same place and I am actually using my record player because it is in a more convenient location. It is remarkable how a simple gesture can reopen old possibilities.

The new arrangement of my room temporarily assuaged my looming fear of complacency. Every now and again, you have to stir the pot. Remind yourself that you are still alive.

To revise my initial statement, I am taking a trip to Europe to exersize the notion of change--to prove to myself that life can change if I make it. I am quitting my job and leaving the country for a month and I have no idea what I'll be doing when I get back. In recent months, the most valuable and fulfilling moments have been the ones involving risk and change. These moments have not always been the happiest, but have taught me loads about cause and effect. Sometimes I forget that I am a cause and not simply a recipient of effects.

Today in French class we learned about taking Taxis. Because I have difficulty limiting my thoughts to one subject and often extrapolate meaning into an unrelated sitaution, I'll leave you with an expression which I think has more than one application.

"Gardez la monnaie" or "keep the change."

Thank Goodness its MY Friday

Portland Barista Tina Faucet reported yesterday that the majority of her regular customers opt to celebrate Friday on one of the other six days of the week. "Sometimes on a Tuesday I'll ask someone how they're doing and they'll respond, 'Great! Today's my Friday so I just have to get through one more day,'" disclosed Faucet.

The customers in question come from neighboring restaurants and typically begin their five-day work binges on the traditional Friday. "I guess they think that because they have two days off in a row they get to rearrange the days of the week," Faucet surmised. "Sometimes I want to tell them, 'No you idiot, it's still Tuesday.'"

Faucet is not the only one perterbed by the trend of calendar deviation. Banks, post offices and corporate restaurant chains are also feeling threatened by the movement those of the non-traditional work week are calling "Thank Goodness its MY Friday" (T.G.I.M.F.).

"Here at US Bank we reward our employees with casual Friday," explained Southeast branch manager, Tod Emblem. "If everyone gets their own Friday, how am I supposed to know who's out of dress code and who's having their Friday?"

Faucet disagrees that the T.G.I.M.F. movement is a reason for great concern, confiding that mostly the deviants "just sound like tools."

Belated Valentine's Sentiments

Every once and a while a peer or older person gives you a piece of advice that sticks with you for several years afterwards. Sometimes they don't know that they are saying something profound at all.

One of my favorite English professors once said, "never use the preposition 'through' in your writing unless you are talking about walking through a door." It was the kind of advice that I could apply instantly to improve my writing. It also taught me that there are things in this world that are concrete--that words mean certain things. Often in my mind words and ideas give way to one another and come out meaning the same nothing. This advice saved me from the throes of linguistic despair.

A religion teacher at my high school gave me a different kind of advice as he addressed my senior class on a retreat. The speech itself escapes me, but I retained the most valuable part, I think. "Whatever you do," he said, "always, always, be in love." He verbalized something that I had always noticed in myself, but thought nobody else knew about. It struck me most of all because the previous evening we were asked to make resolutions and I made the very resolution he was calling us to make. I think that I have been true to this vow, though the portrait of love in my life is blemished and weathered.

So two days late (even though Valentine's Day is pretty meaningless, right?) I'm making a beverageless and partnerless toast to that which makes my heart tingle and skin go warm.

Late night drives home through silent nights with infinite intentions.
Deep red wine rolling around in my mouth beside romance languages.
Floral metaphors tucked into lines of Shakespeare.
Croissants at sunrise and falling back in bed.
Garlic crackling in a pool of olive oil on my stove.
Flying down Everett on the Peugot in the summer.
Friends' laughter after finding the right word.
Black coffee in a mug held in both hands as the rain starts to fall on my scarf.
The brown hills of California underneath the sunset after soccer practice.
American poets and the smell of their old pages.
The swirl of chocolate in the morning before anyone's said a word.
Running over dirt through trees to catch my imagination.
The people I have loved and have loved me back.

Thanks.

Chili?!

This weekend, April and I packed her car full of chocolate and drove down to the outskirts of Salem for a Pinot Noir and chocolate tasting at a local vineyard. I was excited to get out of the cafe and away from the onslought of morons that has recently plagued my life there. It's not that I thought that there wouldn't be morons in Salem, but at least they wouldn't be asking me to make them peanut butter milkshakes.
The main building at the vineyard resembled a Catholic church rectory office. Other than that, the property was quite unoffensive, beautiful even. "I love grapevines. They are so organic looking," April said as we pulled up to the property. There once was a time when organic existed as a concept by itself. It meant something living and natural--a preservation of the original form as it emerged from the earth. Today organic exists in opposition to the adulterated and generic products we find in the grocery store. It means something other than the norm. Pretentious and expensive.
After unloading the chocolate, we entered the building and descended the stairs to the wine cellar. The musty smell of oak and wine invaded the dank space. I was instantly cold, a sensation that accompanied me for the rest of the day.
People slowly began to creep up to our table before we were finished setting up the display. Most of them had heard of our chocolate and were eager to take small, sophisticated bites of it between swishes of wine. They swirled the deep red liquid around in their complementary glasses between index finger and thumb, systematically drawing the glass towards their nose every couple of rotations.
There is something about seeing an action repeated that I find unsettling to the point of despair. As I watched hand after hand reach for the samples laid out on the table before me, I felt my own stomach swell. April had packed a cooler of healthy food for us, but I found that my attempts to eat throughout the day were confused by the overstimulation of the aromas and voices, the mass consumption taking place all around me.
What I witnessed I did not perceive as gluttony, rather it was the vanity of the affair that had my stomach churning. There is a fine line betweening tasting fine wine and chocolate for their own sake and tasting them for the sake of one's own image. Maybe I am jaded from my life in Portland--which has introduced me to some self-proclaimed connoiseurs of everything--but, sometimes I wonder whether the majority of people want to truly know something or just be perceived as knowing it.
The guests at the tasting were not the only ones comitting the same act repeatedly. According to my calculations, I said, "This is a sample of our solid dark chocolate with a chile blend" up to 1,200 times in the two-day event. I would not have dreaded the line so much had I not possessed the dreadful anticipation of the the alarmed expression that lurked behind the face of each suppliant. "Chile?!" they would exclaim in disbelief.
I forced out a desperate "uh huh" while feigning patience.
"Who on earth thought of that?"
Somewhere around 2,000 years ago, the ancient Mayan civilizations began mixing cacao beans with their blend of chili spices and consuming it in liquid form. True, a significant portion of my young life has passed without knowledge of this piece of trivia. This fact lends me a certain obligation to be sympathetic towards others as they face the harsh, bright light of chocolate's true history. Unfortunately, that sympathy wears off around person number five hundred.
"The Mayans," April would curtly reply to those affronted by our inappropriate ingredients. I thought that maybe we might sway people if we mentioned that this particular aspect of chocolate's biography traced back to circa the birth of Christ. Maybe it was not so much the combination of chocolate and spice, but the idea that it was consumed by a savage race in South America that people found so disturbing.
In truth, not everyone twisted their faces at the notion of spicy chocolate. Many were quite amused and open to trying new things, as that was the name of the game that day. Still, there is something about two days of dodging strange looks that eventually leads you to question yourself and what it is that you stand for. I started to understand the plight of Renaissance philosophers. Perhaps I should have amended my spiel. "Here is a sample of our dark chocolate with chili. And did you know that the Earth is round?"

How can we be wrong?; A Bias-cycling Argument

I've just returned from an evening of biking and discussion. The event was the first Master Plan Ride, led by the commissioner of biking for the Portland Department of Transportation. After riding around Southeast to evaluate the existing conditions of bike boulevards, lanes and other traffic controllers, we met at the Lucky Lab to discuss possible improvements. People were cordial and listened to one another. When disagreements arose, people handled them politely and acknowledged one another's point before stating their own opinion. There is something reassuring and hopeful about sitting in a room watching civil discourse take place. On my bike ride home, although I was tired from the 20 miles I had logged that day, I was driven by the empowering scene I had just witnessed. "How can we be wrong?" I thought to myself. By "we" I meant environmentally conscious, progressive, cooperative and liberally-minded people.

There are some debates which indeed have two sides. For example, I recently had argument over which was the better Indiana Jones movie: Raiders of the Lost Ark or The Last Crusade (Temple of Doom obviously not deserving consideration in this competetion). The issue of the Indiana Jones trilogy hierarchy allows for, I feel, more subjectivity than the red and blue schism that divides our nation. I just don't think I'll ever be convinced that protecting the environment and seeking methods of transportation beyond the automobile are inferior causes. Who are these people who think that we should fight to protect our oil interests in the Middle East and why are they controlling the world? Worse, why do so many people agree with them and why don't they know that WE are right? They probably like the Temple of Doom even.