Better than fruit salad

I took a load of stuff down to the dumpster a few nights back, and when I came back I noticed: oh! It’s starting to look like home. Yes it is.

THINGS THAT ARE GOOD AND THINGS THAT ARE LESS GOOD

GOOD: I went to the zoo last Friday! In part to get away from the nightmarish situation looming at home*, but also to enjoy the new SUNLIGHT that we hadn’t seen for six days. Many exhibits were closed or being remodeled, and I didn’t get to walk through the bird building, but I saw many other wonderful things. Such as a giraffe eating leaves out of a tree! This may not seem like a big deal to you, but most of the giraffes I have ever seen have been housed on vast plains of grass or, less admirably, in a kind of sandy pit with a big fence around it. If there were trees in these environments they were fake trees, or they had been dead for years due to too much love. Tough love. Tough giraffe love.

So it was neat to watch a giraffe stretch his big giraffey neck up and sticking his tongue out to pluck leaves out of the tree. I don’t think he was supposed to be plucking leaves out of the tree, these trees aren’t native African trees or anything, so hopefully he doesn’t get sick or in trouble. Maybe a leaf is a leaf though. It would be rather stupid to plant a toxic tree in the giraffe exhibit. Who knows.

Also, sea lions. “Steller” sea lions are aptly named — I don’t know I had ever seen any swimming mammal so large up close before. Gus and his friend (whose name I cannot remember) were ‘only’ weighing in at ~900 and ~1040 lbs., so they weren’t as giant as that little blurb wants them to be, but they were so large that I thought they were walruses when I first came into the exhibit. They have a view from above and below the water. The below-the-water view is a 20+ foot window, floor to ceiling, where Gus and his friend swim mellow circles up and down the tank. They were frighteningly large. Easily over 11 feet. His head was as big — bigger — than a tiger’s.

None of those pictures came out, which is a pity. The zoo has other neat things, like a fantastic fruit bat viewing spot. No tapir unfortunately. It’s a wonderful transit ride out, and located near some other nice outdoorsy stuff that I will undoubtedly need to explore.

LESS GOOD: Having an allergy festival at the zoo. Can allergies happen on alternate days? It seems like every other day I am apple cheeked, feisty, the poster-woman for respiratory wellness, walking through my neighborhood and all the plants in it saying, ha ha pollen! Do your worst! I will even do something foolish like call Anthony and say look! All better! And he will say really? Are you sure? Because the very next day I am pale, limp-wristed, stuffy nosed and riddled with sinus-headaches, sneezing eight times in a row (not joking) and worrying parents on the MAX. I wanted to go price baking stones on the way home but instead did not pass go, did not collect $200, and went right home for pj’s, tea and honey bread.

*LESS GOOD: Comcast charging you for a month of service, even though you canceled your service five weeks prior. Or you made motions to cancel, just called in to the 1-800 number and hung out on hold on three separate occasions for nothing, because apparently nothing was written in your account. Lots of phone conversations with helpless CSRs (not their fault, I know,) and lots of cell phone calls to people who were supposed to take care of this. Lots of wailing and gnashing of teeth. There was nothing I could do about it, since the equipment they needed was in the hands of my peeps in Colorado, so I can’t say “yes I will go return it THIS MOMENT,” but instead I have to say “Well, I’ll call them and wait.” And then I did a lot of waiting, because apparently several cell phone messages at much-earlier-than-normal saying URGENT URGENT PLEASE TAKE ACTION NOW also apparently have no real meaning. People will hear this and go ho hum, what? They’re asking you for money on an account you closed? Huh. Bummer, dude. The bill is overdue? Meh.

I must have a subliminal message on my cell phone that says PLEASE IGNORE EVERYTHING I SAY. That is the only logical explanation I have for this.

GOOD: Anthony went and fixed it, albeit three days later: returns the stuff, talks the bill down from $$$ to $, and paid the balance. Good man.

GOOD: I finally caved and bought my $20 worth of unlimited yoga classes for a week. For a long time I have said I need to start doing yoga, as I am rather young yet not very limber and kind of brittle. As I work towards better health in the food area, it would do my body well to bend around a little bit. I also like things that make you calm, because mellow is my favorite emotion. As Portland slowly does its delivish work and as my shoulders sink farther and farther from my ears, I figured yoga would be the perfect thing to put me right over the top. The top of mellowness.

I went first thing Saturday morning, showing up before they had even unlocked the door. The classes are drop-in type of things. One gets the impression that one can attend any class at any time; do-ability is addressed by suggestion. “If you need a more intense stretch, try bending your leg and pushing in with your stomach. If this is a hard pose for you, try spreading your feet a little more.” The Saturday AM class was filled with older people, which I was actually comforted by. Some of them were fantastically better than me at things, but it was also nice to hear the gentleman in the back struggling with some of the poses that I also struggled with.

I went to a different class Monday night that was waaay more intense, lots of sweating and shaking limbs. That would be a good diffuser of anger waves, but on a relatively calm evening right before bedtime it instead sort of wound me up and I had trouble sleeping that night. So I think I am a gentle morning yoga person. For now, or until I have a job that stresses me out sometimes.

GOOD: My neighborhood. I keep leaving the immediate area I live in to run errands or to just see what there is to see, and I keep thinking no, I like my area better. This is good since while I still am in that kind of prospective house-hunter mode (less of that is happening now that I’m getting settled in, but when you do it for months on end it takes awhile to shake out.) I don’t for one second want to leave my gorgeous little place. And even if I did it’s nice to know that I would want something in my immediate neighborhood. It frightens me a little how well my craigslist-roulette worked out for me on this one. There are so many other SE PDX areas I’ve looked through now, recalling various prospective addresses, and I keep coming to the same conclusion: I am exactly where I want to be. I don’t know how that happened, but I am so grateful that it did.

Furthermore: it is amazing to me that although I’ve been here almost a month now, I really haven’t left Portland much. This is not a big deal to normal city dwellers, but for someone who came from Nowhere, Northern Colorado, this is a wonderful, magical new thing. In Greeley almost every weekend saw us in a different town than where we lived. If we needed to do anything one had to be very creative to swing it close by; even the nearest fast food joint was a good 8 minute drive. Here I just haven’t needed to go anywhere far, because everything I’ve needed has been right here. I’ve only left Portland’s city limits twice: once for the farm adventure (see last entry,) and once on a whim a few nights ago, thinking I would go catch the Rushdie reading at the Powell’s in Beaverton, but chickened out when I thought about how tired I was. And how lame Beaverton is. (Comparatively! I’m sure it’s a fantastic area, it looks gorgeous — reminds me of the neighborhood Mom lives in down in the Springs. Which um, says plenty. I am not into that neighborhood. I fit in here, where the buildings are stacked and where the men clank up the streets pushing shopping carts filled with cans come and root around in the recycle bins, their radios blasting salsa music up into the air. Where the roads go places. Etc.) While I haven’t really left Portland — I’ve hardly left my neighborhood, really — I keep seeing stuff! New stuff! Every day! When it doesn’t have me grinning like a maniac on the street (to myself. Mostly.) it has me relaxing happily in the green chair in the evenings with a cup of tea or a glass of wine, listening to Charles Mingus and positively humming with delight.

One last caveat and then I will let up: in my neighborhood, there are flowers of every color. And I don’t mean there are some red things, a couple blue things, some yellow. I mean every spectrum of the wheel is visible. They are almost visible in just the roses alone. There are so many different shades of, say, red: pinky-red, deep blood red, orangey red, red-red, and the different lights and darks within that. It boggles the mind, to think this is possible.

GOOD: I leave for Denver and then Ireland here in two days.

WOEFULLY SCANT TIDBITS FROM MY RECENT VIEWING OF THE SHINING

1. Kubrick looks (looked) a lot like Peter Jackson. We watched documentary footage about the Shining today in class, and I saw him in action. Note to self: directors need a.) big bushy hair (like philosophers and composers) b.) Large unstylish glasses, c.) Beards.

2. The parental dynamic, up until the actual psychosis crops up, was erily familiar. My father was (and still is, often) that guy. Mom is less of a passive stem of a crocus now and instead chooses to kind of ignore him, usually. The whole time I was watching it* I was saying to Anthony THIS IS THE STUPIDEST RELATIONSHIP EVER**.

3. Really liked it, actually. I would never own it in a million years, but it was wonderful to finally see a horror film that actually had narrative structure and did something artful with a slasher scene (i.e., displacing the violence on a door instead of a body) and had a somewhat reasonable ending. I think some of that is: I can appreciate Kubrick for Kubrick, and knowing him made the film easier. I knew it would be way more intense then it looked, and I knew that there would be agro- and claustrophobic elements. Weirdly, I also knew there would be a furry scene, but I only “knew” that because I’d seen Eyes Wide Shut. Whenever a character was wandering around looking confused, I kept saying “and then they open the door, and there’s a furry orgy!” and uh, there was kind of. At one point.

*Which I must say: we timed this one poorly and to make a long story short I had to watch it at 6am before classes so I could make a discussion board post in time. Anthony was going to Denver the night before, but because he is the awesomest he had Dani drop him off here when they got back at about 3am. Then he crawled into bed with me, slept for about two hours, and then was the one to gently nudge me out of bed so I could make coffee and watch the thing. I don’t know that most people would do that for their sissy counterparts, but what a guy.

**It’s strange, but I’m starting to evaluate parental-units not in terms of their parenting, but in terms of their relationship with one another. And I mean my own parents, other people’s parents, film parents, and so on. Suddenly I am comparing them to myself like peers, not regarding them as “other” any more. I think this is mostly because so many of my friends are either married, getting married, or are having babies. And as the “college undergrad” (and indeed, “school”) chapter of my life comes to a close my brain is realizing this is a convention of my new chapter. Not necessarily my story, but a very pertinent story all around me. I was having a discussion with Mom a few months ago about when she first met Dad. It was the first time I had approached them conceptually as “a couple”, rather than “my parents”.

But I think it goes a little further than that. Because I am at the age I am I have been acutely aware of my place in my life. That I am now entering a new part of the bell curve, leaving the one side of “cared for” and entering the vast “taking care of myself” spot. I have become a “twenty something”. I am at adulthood. So long as I keep myself in good health I will be roughly this age until I am “old”, and then I will enter the other side of the “cared for” bell curve. So my life situation is fundamentally changing. It’s weird to watch people kind of traipse into that thoughtlessly. For me, it kind of makes all the changes I was talking about a few entries back mean a lot less — of course everything’s changing because, in fact, everything is changing.

The other thing too is: I am going to one city, and Anthony is going to another. Most people who have been dating for four years get married, particularly if there is grad school or a big move on the horizon. At least this is what I have come to assume, judging by the reactions of people when I tell them what we are doing. I have mostly just ignored bone-headed assumptions from people, but of course the whole marriage question does get kicked around sometimes, particularly when we discuss it in queer history. Most of my thoughts on the subject are in the entry, and I’m a little too lazy and tipsy to move that over here. For me it really boils down to: I think we transcend your stupid boundaries. I’m never saying never, and I leave it at that. Not because of fear or uncertainty, but because now is really not the time.

OTHER STUFF

1. Hey! Yesterday I saw a chicken in a front yard! It was a big red, all poufed out and doing its chickeny thing.

2. I was putting the tea roses I bought today away and I thought: oh. This could be the same plant that my brother’s grandchildren will consider in a picture years from now, when looking at my graduation celebrations, and they’ll think: huh. I wonder about that.

3. There isn’t a good children’s story or cartoon series where a character moves. Like seriously up and moves, new cast of friends and so on. If there’s any moving, they either come right back, or there is a total lack of episode continuity, because favorite characters would have to be dropped, etc. No one thinks letters and phone calls would be enough, so instead people deal with “missing someone” or “being in a new place” with vacations. And that’s problematic, because:

a. On vacation, you are too busy doing non-normal things to realize you are in a different place, and you just don’t really let it sink in.

b. You come back from vacation. No matter what happens, there is the familiar waiting for you.

Moving is a big upheaval, particularly a far-away move. There’s some shot-in-the-dark kind of stories, but never anyone with an established cast, unless the voice talent needs to be “written out”. What’s up with that? I feel like there is a big need here.