goin' out west where they appreciate me
It's official: back to Seattle with my furry ass. I've given my month's notice at my apartment building, and I'll be temporarily crashing in a friend's basement guest room by March 3rd, if not sooner. I just need to slog my way through the last two weeks of my externship and I'm done. I doubt I'll be moving immediately after the 18th, since I'll still need to get packed and tie up things in Portland, but I'm hoping to be there maybe the last week of February.
I've been turning this over in my head for a while, and finally made the decision for when I realized that the only remaining factor keeping me from re-joining my urban family in Seattle was the fact that I hate the act of packing up and moving. I hate disrupting my personal space and having to re-establish the neighborhood touchstones of coffee shop, grocery store, video store, and so on. Money's tight, but that's nothing new. Just about the time my money anxiety began to peak, things began to fall into place like they usually do. My friend Donna made the basement offer out of the blue, my friend DiTolvo is finally back in Seattle from Germany (and her sleazy landlord illegally evicted her and her roommate the day she got back), and the job market seems to be opening up. The apartment market looks surprisingly reasonable, too. I'm hoping for a place either in Ballard, which I have long been in love with, or West Seattle. After I get established, I'm planning on getting a second job to knock out some personal debt and save up for a cheap car. Seattle's public transportation is decent but can't touch Portland's, and I won't be able to rely on the streetcar and the MAX like I have in Portland. But even that's not a bad thing, since this will force me back on my bike, and Seattle's hills should have me back in fighting shape in no time.
Yesterday at the bakery, I completely spaced out and put the miche bread rounds into the oven still in their baskets. Fortunately, one of my supervisors caught it before the baskets or the ridiculously expensive wood-fired stone oven caught fire. I was properly contrite, I got a hand-patting instead of a wrist-slap, no harm, no foul, and the baskets were only mildly toasted and perfectly good after I scraped the remains of the miche off the canvas. For the remaining two weeks I'll be back on the 5 AM schedule, which is a shame. The afternoon shift gets to do their shaping duties at the open bench where the customers sit, and I really liked being able to watch the fog roll into the hills outside and talk to the lunch crowd. And the last half of the 8:30 shift is nice and mellow after the hyper-stressed morning production crew leaves about 1 PM. I found out that my trainer this week was from Nashville, and that broke the ice and made for a nicer environment.
About halfway through the week, I realized that I was getting quizzed subtly and extensively about my dating history, and after that the Portland Barbie Dolls on the front of the house staff seemed to be coincidentally handy whenever I turned around. I love it when the hidden machinery of office crushes starts up. The one that looks like a younger, smaller version of the girl I was dating in Seattle just before I moved away sat at the bench yesterday and chatted me up for the length of her break, and made some offhand comment about "being the Romeo and Juliet of the bakery" before she took her dishes to the back. I'm pretty dense when it comes to flirting machinations but even I can't miss that one. And Thursday night at my cousin's boyfriend's art opening at the Portland Art Center in Chinatown, this one little artfag bear attached himself to me and stayed within a few feet for the rest of the night. It's actually nice, in a weird kind of way, to get hit on by people you have no intention of following through with: you know you still got it but you don't have to dedicate any time or effort. And then there was the big leather daddy bear at the comic book shop that I ran into on Monday, and the brunette in glasses that stayed at the bench the entire time I was there on Tuesday and kept starting to say something but never followed through. (Mmm, brunettes in glasses.) My pheromones must be particularly smelly these days. Spring comes to Andy Hardy ....
Thursday night, I went to a gallery opening for Portland Modern, featuring several artists including my cousin's boyfriend Marc. I really like his stuff. I'd seen a couple of his canvases before when I visited Portland in December of '05, and liked his sparse, scratched-over style and kind of hunter-gatherer motifs: hard to put it in to words, so look here and here for examples. That's also his volcano on the cover of the latest issue of Portland Modern. None of these links do him justice; he has a big catalog of work, but almost all of the online links to his stuff are old and no longer work. He likes doing bare, bleak, elemental scenes like deserts or forest fires, features a lot of supernatural/mythological symbols like ghosts and flying animal heads, and scratches over his paintings and pencils in things like toothmarks, banners, and phrases. He used to be a freelance photographer for American Bear, and he's a singer/songwriter and plays gigs around Portland, and he likes good comic books. We got to talk for what was really the first time at the gallery, and we clicked. The biggest drawback about leaving Portland is leaving Stephen behind and not having had the chance to get to know Marc better. (Stephen's other partner, Robert, is kind of an aloof professional type - he's a Social Security lawyer - and I think has never been particularly comfortable with me.) After the gallery show Marc and Stephen and I and a bunch of their friends went to Old Town Pizza, an old pizza pub which still has a door leading to Portland's underground tunnels and is supposedly haunted. Damn good pizza, that's for sure. Their friends were mostly guys about my age and I had a great time. It was funny to see them trickle in at the gallery and watch the exhibit slowly get overrun with bears. I did have a weird moment or four of being in a community, but not really a part of it, and not being visible - I avoided saying anything about my preference for women - but it wasn't that uncomfortable, shut-out feeling I so often get in an unfamiliar crowd.
Maybe it's the sudden stop in Portland's downpour that's bringing me up out of my winter funk, or the coming move to Seattle, or the relief of finally making a decision, all three, or none of the above? Anyway, to recap, here's the telegram:
dear yourname stop
nothing is nearly as much fun without you stop
coming home soon stop
please have beer ready stop
much love stop
jason stop
I've been turning this over in my head for a while, and finally made the decision for when I realized that the only remaining factor keeping me from re-joining my urban family in Seattle was the fact that I hate the act of packing up and moving. I hate disrupting my personal space and having to re-establish the neighborhood touchstones of coffee shop, grocery store, video store, and so on. Money's tight, but that's nothing new. Just about the time my money anxiety began to peak, things began to fall into place like they usually do. My friend Donna made the basement offer out of the blue, my friend DiTolvo is finally back in Seattle from Germany (and her sleazy landlord illegally evicted her and her roommate the day she got back), and the job market seems to be opening up. The apartment market looks surprisingly reasonable, too. I'm hoping for a place either in Ballard, which I have long been in love with, or West Seattle. After I get established, I'm planning on getting a second job to knock out some personal debt and save up for a cheap car. Seattle's public transportation is decent but can't touch Portland's, and I won't be able to rely on the streetcar and the MAX like I have in Portland. But even that's not a bad thing, since this will force me back on my bike, and Seattle's hills should have me back in fighting shape in no time.
Yesterday at the bakery, I completely spaced out and put the miche bread rounds into the oven still in their baskets. Fortunately, one of my supervisors caught it before the baskets or the ridiculously expensive wood-fired stone oven caught fire. I was properly contrite, I got a hand-patting instead of a wrist-slap, no harm, no foul, and the baskets were only mildly toasted and perfectly good after I scraped the remains of the miche off the canvas. For the remaining two weeks I'll be back on the 5 AM schedule, which is a shame. The afternoon shift gets to do their shaping duties at the open bench where the customers sit, and I really liked being able to watch the fog roll into the hills outside and talk to the lunch crowd. And the last half of the 8:30 shift is nice and mellow after the hyper-stressed morning production crew leaves about 1 PM. I found out that my trainer this week was from Nashville, and that broke the ice and made for a nicer environment.
About halfway through the week, I realized that I was getting quizzed subtly and extensively about my dating history, and after that the Portland Barbie Dolls on the front of the house staff seemed to be coincidentally handy whenever I turned around. I love it when the hidden machinery of office crushes starts up. The one that looks like a younger, smaller version of the girl I was dating in Seattle just before I moved away sat at the bench yesterday and chatted me up for the length of her break, and made some offhand comment about "being the Romeo and Juliet of the bakery" before she took her dishes to the back. I'm pretty dense when it comes to flirting machinations but even I can't miss that one. And Thursday night at my cousin's boyfriend's art opening at the Portland Art Center in Chinatown, this one little artfag bear attached himself to me and stayed within a few feet for the rest of the night. It's actually nice, in a weird kind of way, to get hit on by people you have no intention of following through with: you know you still got it but you don't have to dedicate any time or effort. And then there was the big leather daddy bear at the comic book shop that I ran into on Monday, and the brunette in glasses that stayed at the bench the entire time I was there on Tuesday and kept starting to say something but never followed through. (Mmm, brunettes in glasses.) My pheromones must be particularly smelly these days. Spring comes to Andy Hardy ....
Thursday night, I went to a gallery opening for Portland Modern, featuring several artists including my cousin's boyfriend Marc. I really like his stuff. I'd seen a couple of his canvases before when I visited Portland in December of '05, and liked his sparse, scratched-over style and kind of hunter-gatherer motifs: hard to put it in to words, so look here and here for examples. That's also his volcano on the cover of the latest issue of Portland Modern. None of these links do him justice; he has a big catalog of work, but almost all of the online links to his stuff are old and no longer work. He likes doing bare, bleak, elemental scenes like deserts or forest fires, features a lot of supernatural/mythological symbols like ghosts and flying animal heads, and scratches over his paintings and pencils in things like toothmarks, banners, and phrases. He used to be a freelance photographer for American Bear, and he's a singer/songwriter and plays gigs around Portland, and he likes good comic books. We got to talk for what was really the first time at the gallery, and we clicked. The biggest drawback about leaving Portland is leaving Stephen behind and not having had the chance to get to know Marc better. (Stephen's other partner, Robert, is kind of an aloof professional type - he's a Social Security lawyer - and I think has never been particularly comfortable with me.) After the gallery show Marc and Stephen and I and a bunch of their friends went to Old Town Pizza, an old pizza pub which still has a door leading to Portland's underground tunnels and is supposedly haunted. Damn good pizza, that's for sure. Their friends were mostly guys about my age and I had a great time. It was funny to see them trickle in at the gallery and watch the exhibit slowly get overrun with bears. I did have a weird moment or four of being in a community, but not really a part of it, and not being visible - I avoided saying anything about my preference for women - but it wasn't that uncomfortable, shut-out feeling I so often get in an unfamiliar crowd.
Maybe it's the sudden stop in Portland's downpour that's bringing me up out of my winter funk, or the coming move to Seattle, or the relief of finally making a decision, all three, or none of the above? Anyway, to recap, here's the telegram:
dear yourname stop
nothing is nearly as much fun without you stop
coming home soon stop
please have beer ready stop
much love stop
jason stop