Two weeks in the Pac Northwest

So I'll be floating around the Pacific Northwest for the next two weeks. No plans, except to see good friends, explore, and relax. This is going to be a beautiful thing. Here's a little about Day One.
I'm sitting at an ancient iMac, using my free internet privilege in the Green Tortoise hostel on First and Pike in downtown Seattle, hearing at least three different types of music at once. There's a capella gospel, traditional Irish/rock meld, and some (I'm guessing) local rap. I think I hear some NPR too. This morning I went for a 2ish-mile run around downtown, down Western & First along the waterfront, right on Broad past a science museum, the Space Needle, scattered sculptures, and a huge, gold, blue, and red metal building with bulbous curves and domes that has to have been designed by Frank Gehry. I don't know what it houses, I couldn't make it out from the signs, but my guess is some kind of art museum. I took my time this morning, because I'm still on Eastern time, and what was 8 a.m. for Seattlites was 11 a.m. for me. I felt strangely like an early riser putting on my running shoes at 8:30, it was pretty fun. I could get used to this using the time-change to my advantage thing. As soon as I got back from my run (which was nice, but the city was still pretty deserted--at first I thought, Boston isn't this dead on Sunday morning! But really I'm kidding myself, there's no way I'd know that...), complimentary breakfast was still in full swing. Actually, now that I think of it, I think it was only so glorious because it's Sunday. Lucky me! During the week I bet it's just toast and cereal. This was a nice surprise, because I swear that last night the check-in girl told me free breakfast from 6-7:45 (to which I promptly thought, right, screw that!). So I jumped in the waffle line and poured out some gooey batter onto a steaming iron. Then I wandered into the adjacent kitchen and found that there was a range full of pans and people cooking eggs! So once I finished my yummy waffle, I fired up some scrambled. Pretty awesome for my first 12 hours in Seattle. Now the plan is to, now that I've dutifully checked out by 10:57 and turned in my bed linens, find some good coffee (still haven't had any, it's about time) before I schlep over to the Greyhound station on 8th and Stewart. Portland here I come!

The windchimes on Cherry Street

People in puffy coats coming up Summer cringed at the wind that blew into their faces, as I crossed their paths and thought about coincidences. The dried out tiny flowers danging from a nearby tree behind a fence reminded me of the loose-leaf, whole-flower chamomile tea that I had found in the kitchen at work earlier today. The sound of a plastic bottle rolling around at the back of the bus mimicked perfectly the one that had bobbled all the way down an Orange line car just a little while before. Earlier in the week, a few days after re-watching I Heart Huckabees for the first time, I realized that I, also, had an African guy coincidence. Two days in a row I had passed him on the first floor hallway at work; one time he had held the door for me, and said hello to someone that was coming in behind me. A thin, young girl that always wears the same black head scarf and waits for the same 5:52 bus as me most days suddenly didn't seem lonely anymore when a smiling, tan-skinned young man came up to her and gave her a hug before getting on a different bus. And then I heard the windchimes on Cherry Street again, after forgetting they were there all winter. The clouds were large and multi-hued--the sun today was only lighting up half the sky--and pin-prick raindrops sprinkled down through the rays. I looked at a little brick path in someone's front yard, remembering the evening when I saw a nonchalant little long-haired cat hop down the porch steps of (what I think must be) his house, prance down the sidewalk a few yards ahead of me, then turn into a gateway a few doors down and follow said narrow, decorative path through the yard and around back. I guessed that he was probably paying a friend a visit.
(Photo from the IslandWood grad program blog: my new favorite dream. They offer a Residency in Environment, Education, and Community, on Bainbridge Island, near Seattle. I plan on visiting in April).

Little ole lonely elevator girl

This photo, "Elevator- Miami Beach", published in Robert Frank's 1959 book The Americans (which I'd love to check out) is introduced by Jack Kerouac, who described this photograph as his favorite in the volume. He says: "And I say: That little ole lonely elevator girl looking up sighing in an elevator full of blurred demons, what's her name & address?"

Michael Bierut of Design Observer uses this example as the best representation of bershon, a word for girl's, predominantly teen-aged, rolled-eyes, hate-the-world facial expressions in photographs like this and those found in any family's photo heap stuffed in the basement. He says, "So keep trying, girls. Right now you're surrounded by jerks. But somewhere there's a Jack Kerouac who's desperately trying to find you."

Sometimes I feel like putting on this face myself. When did I ever grow to discontinue the rolled-eyes look? I think it needs to be brought back. People don't mess with you when you give them this look. It's a perfect manifestation of utter exhaustion with the world combined with sullen hatred for both everyone and no one, while not knowing how to vent this frustration. So you brood. I finally vented to Erin recently in a very long e-mail. I started out saying, yeah, I had fun at the show at the Middle East last night, threw in words like feeling "extra single" and "karma coming back" to "we are told over and over again we should be strong single women, but after awhile that all feels like a ruse..." and escalated to:

is that so wrong? i actually found myself feeling comforted by an article in the boston globe recently about how women should spend their 20s looking for a mate (gah! that just sounds horrible on hearing it!) but when you look at the science of it, it actually makes a lot of sense. biology only lets you have children for a finite time, and you can have a career anytime. (and i also despise the pressure to "establish a career" in your 20s; that's just bullshit. no one establishes a career in their 20s! all you do is entry level gruntwork because frankly, people think you're too young to do important things. i want to wait to be famous (haha) until i'm smarter anyway! i think it's good to know your limits and not freak about them--i think we'll all get there, we should just give it more time and get the chance to live more). three of the top guys in my company's management admitted at a recent meeting that they were all hippies before they got serious about work. one said he didn't get a job till he was 30! so enough of this wasting our youth on career prospects- it's a big conspiracy to turn us into the clueless hamsters that fuel the big corporate machines. and that definitely does not mean i think we should husband-hunt instead, but i'm starting to think that people are so blinded by the pursuit of success that they forget about looking for happiness in friends and relationships first. that must be why i am so fed up with the impersonality of young people where we live, they are too focussed on success to connect and make real friendships and form caring communities, and i think that is a shame! if only there were some way to wake people up to re-evaluate their values and priorities, which seems to be made extra difficult by the fact that no one listens to anyone else since they're too obsessed with vociferating and screeching about their own opinions in their crazed effort to get noticed.

OK-- please refrain from thinking I'm a backwards stay-at-home mom wannabe, because I'm not in any way. I have lots of goals (too many, which may be my problem), and I intend to accomplish most of them, someday. And I don't mean to offend anyone who happens to love their job and wants to dedicate themselves to it; I actually think that's great, as well as lucky. I'm merely disappointed in people my age's ability to form meaningful relationships and communities, and how we just put up with life in a fractured world of sporadic communication with old friends from high school and college instead of looking after your neighbors and feeling looked after yourself. We've been taught to find ourselves. But how do we find our people?

Trying to look good limits my life

I watched the documentary Helvetica today, and it was pretty interesting, even if I got nothing from it but to the chance to pick the brains of some well known contemporary and historic designers. Stefan Saggmeister is just one of a few neat ones (Michael Bierut's spoke with particular vividness about the transformation from 50s goofy script to the eponymous clean, bold typeface of the 60s), and I really like his billboard installation "Trying to look good limits my life." He's totally right. He says: "The title of this work (and its content) is among the few things I have learned in my life so far." Some of the others are "Having guts always works out for me", and "Everything I do always comes back to me." Cool images + food for thought = at least one happy moment in the day.

Fighting doldrums and loving prisons

Yesterday I thought about milkshakes bringin' boys to the yard and other people's milkshakes being drunk "up" through a straw and avalanches falling on Mars and how writers and literary people might be the best judges of character as well as, historically, the best neuroscientists.

Today I thought a lot less. I was too busy festering a hatred for the MBTA for a full freezing 40 minutes, waiting for the Davis-bound 90 that never came. Two Wellington 90s breezed through, and at the second one's driver I demanded in a loud, quivery voice "Where is the Davis bus??" (To which he shrugged, "Iowwknow"). This was anger I couldn't control, I hadn't felt anything like this in any recent memory. I thudded my head against the pane-glass of the bus shelter. I audibly sighed and whined. I kicked the ground, I shuffled around on the sandy pavement. And I stared narrowly at the tiny corner where the buses swing around and got angrier by the second. I started to shake a little, and my eyes were trying to fill up with tears. The harder I stared, the more I wanted to cry. "I'll cry!" I told myself. I'll just let myself cry, and have a mini-tantrum, because this bus is never going to come. Never. I know it. I'm stranded. I don't know what to do. I can't stay here anymore, I will freak out. I cannot handle this one second longer. Every bus that flung around the cement entryway said some other number: 101, 104, 91, 93, finally 89. I got on the 89, sat down, and then let the tears stream down my face.

Dan Grabiewskus and his nice cover-up of the T's random and malicious bus cancellation policy. Even after he admitted to it (which lets him off the hook none at all), they're still blatantly proceeding with its insidiousness.

Anyway. I did think about something else today. I was e-mailing with my friend Maura, who had just told me about her experience leading an improvisational dance class at a prison, and I was trying to remember this statistic I read: it was that 1 in 100 Americans are in prison, the highest rate ever (and, unsurprisingly, the highest in the world). Not only that, but the rate of increase in government prison-spending (now $49 billion) over the last twenty years is SIX times higher than the rate of increase in education spending in the same period. What? Does that make sense? Kentucky had the highest rate of prison population growth: 600% over the last 3o years, even though its crime rate has creeped up just 3% in that time.

That made me appreciate how amazing Maura's service to the community really is. There is clearly something broken in our system when we spend six times more money on punishing people than on educating them to begin with. Maura said that after leaving she kept pondering how much she takes her freedom for granted. This was a good reminder to me too; I've been rejoicing in my ability to finally escape from Boston for a couple weeks in April on a trip around the Pacific Northwest to visit friends and breathe fresh air and be outside with trees and rivers. But I haven't stopped to think how lucky I am to be able to just high-tail it out of here whenever the going gets tough. Some people are pretty much stuck where they are. However, I think the great thing about America is that, it is so big and diverse and relatively cheap to travel around by car or bus, Kerouac style or however you can do it, I think exploration and adventure is essentially within reach of everyone. You just have to step out your front door.

Finally, my ranting is dwindling down. I'll close with this excerpt I found on kottke.org from Kim Chinquee's new book Oh Baby, a compilation of "flash fiction" and prose poetry. During my fighting thoughts today its closing quieted my emotions a bit.

She sent me pictures of the cake. They had a flaming onion, whisky sours, steak and fried potatoes. They gambled at the Soaring Eagle, losing hundreds and then thousands. "You got married to my mom," I said to him on my end. I got married at the Justice of the Peace, picking up two people, offering to pay them. The first said no thanks and the second said he was too injured. We found another couple who seemed angelic, their voices a team, an echo. "She's a catch," he said, kind of laughing. I heard him on the exhale. He smoked on the back porch that faced a lake, where we'd once gone fishing, catching nothing worth keeping.