beautiful, funny, sad & true

First of all, let me say Happy Halloween.

Second of all, I’ll spare you the details, but Joan and I are in the process of working things out. Some of our old ‘stuff’ came up recently, and that brought both of our defenses up a little bit. But we’ll work it out.

Third of all, there was a photographer at the event who took a bunch of amazing pictures at the most recent Breanna show. I’m going to get some digital copies, but they’re expensive enough that I can only afford two or three. Please take a look and help me choose? Thank you!
There are a bunch of stellar ones of each of us, but I think my personal favorites are 7 and 24.

This week is about to get crazy. Tonight’s Halloween–no, I didn’t dress up–and Joan and I are getting together for a while. I might meet up with Todd Sabel later on. Tomorrow is rehearsal with Stephanie’s band for the big Voices For Silent Disasters show on Friday night, and Saturday is a full-band Breanna Paletta show. Sunday we’re having a Breanna recording session in the studio. And speaking of V4SD, the artist appreciation party was on Monday, and it was a who’s-who of the Portland music scene. I’m looking for pictures from that night, and I’ll post some if I get ’em.

I’d say my wish from earlier in the week–you know, for the week to get better quickly–came true.

What a weekend.

Friday night I had rehearsal with Breanna and the band. BassPlayerChris was really sick, so he left kinda early, but I stayed around for a while to play through songs with Breanna and NewBandMemberJon. It was 11:30 p.m. by the time we finished. As I was loading my instruments into the back of my car, the hatch started to fall, and the corner of it hit me in the side of the head. Not a fun night. I went home and laid down on the sofa with a bag of frozen peas pressed to my temple.

Saturday J and I went out and about during the day, but we were both exhausted and groggy for some reason, so naps were in order. I laid down at 5:30ish, got up once or twice for a little while, but then went back down until 10:30, got up and dinked around on the computer for an hour or so, then went to bed for real and slept in until 10:30 the next day.

Yesterday, I sorta teased J about something I didn’t realize she was sensitive about, so I inadvertently hurt her feelings. Last night we e-mailed back and forth, trying to work it out, but as of this moment it’s still hanging there in the air between us. I’m sure we’ll be fine; we have a great track record of working things out.

There are a couple of other things happening that I’m not going to write about here, but they’ve been bouncing around in my head for the last few days too.

This morning, waking up was brutally hard after being up so late the night before. I didn’t even have time to take a shower, and I still dragged into work ten minutes late. Went to the deli downstairs to get an egg-and-cheese croissant, but it tasted stale and chewy. I ate about two-thirds of it and threw the rest in the garbage, then went to get some apple cider to wash the taste out of my mouth. Apparently my workplace has ‘secretly replaced their usual brand’ of apple cider with a crappy-tasting impostor.

I’m home for lunch now, hoping that the rest of this week improves really quickly.

Tonight is the performers-and-volunteers party for the Voices For Silent Disasters show that starts this weekend. It’s in a nice venue downtown, where we can all meet each other, catch up with friends, and also find out more about the cause and the events. So that should be fun.

In other news, I finally got a toy piano. I’ve been looking for one for years.

This video just totally brought tears to my eyes and put a smile on my face.

Here’s the story.

Don’t forget to watch Part 2 also!

Hope it moves you as much as it did me. Thank you, Crystin, for sharing this.

As soon as I finished that last entry, I grabbed my bass, jumped in my car, and headed to Sarah Castro’s for rehearsal. Or so I thought.

You see, she lives just off Capitol Highway in Beaverton. For some reason, though, I had it in my head that I needed to go to SUNSET Highway instead. These are very different freeways, in completely opposite parts of town. I was through the tunnel and heading up the hill on the Sunset Highway when I realized, ‘Shit. What am I doing?’ It never really got any better after that.

I instantly thought, ‘Okay, I’ll just turn around at the next exit and come back up the Sunset Highway’ but there must have been a wreck or something in the tunnel, because traffic was at a dead stop for a couple of miles. I decided to go the only other way I knew, which was to take Highway 217 clear around Beaverton and meet up with I-5, where I could come back north and hit Capitol Highway from there. Wrong again.

Turns out that I-5 North doesn’t have an exit for Capitol Highway. Not only that, but that area of town is very confusing, so if you’re not very familiar with the area, it’s hard to tell which exit will get you where you need to go until you get downtown, by which time you’re in the thick of ugly traffic and construction. But I looked over in the direction of I-5 South anyway, only to find that there was an ambulance, a police car, and another two-mile, dead-stop traffic jam.

At that point I called Sarah. “I don’t think I’m gonna make it, unfortunately.” I told her about my 45-minute circle of the metropolitan area, to which she responded, “That’s okay; it happens. No biggie.” I apologized and told her I’d see her for sure on Sunday.

On the way back up I-5 toward my exit, the city lights were particularly bright, and the Willamette River particularly calm, so the lights of downtown were reflecting beautifully. I always have my camera with me, so I thought I would pull over somewhere and take some pictures. The exit I took put me right near the Coliseum, which was fine, but then the road split and wouldn’t let me go straight where I needed to go straight in order to get to the park I had in mind. In fact, the road put me on the Steel Bridge headed over the river and toward downtown. I cursed under my breath and drove over the bridge.

Once I was in downtown, I went around the block and back over the bridge, only to find all the parking spaces full and a bunch of ne’er-do-wells milling around underneath the overpass. I decided to give it a miss.

So the best-laid schemes of mice and men went awry on this sorry excuse for an eve, and I have neither rehearsal nor pictures to show for my fruitless travels.

Still thou art blest, compar’d wi’ me
The present only toucheth thee:
But, Och! I backward cast my e’e.
On prospects drear!
An’ forward, tho’ I canna see,
I guess an’ fear!

Or something like that.

Yesterday I was still feeling the effects of the cold or whatever that I had on the weekend, and my head still felt all spacy, so I called in sick to work and went back to sleep for a few more hours. When I awoke, the weather was so warm and beautiful that I decided that I needed to get out of the house, no matter what. Saturday had been really rainy and beautiful, so I’d stayed in bed most of the day and started reading “Catcher in the Rye.” I threw the book in my bag, went and ate miso soup and a little bit of sushi at Sushiland, then drove to Mt. Tabor to read for a while.

Maija came and met me up there after her yoga class was over, and we sat and talked and walked and talked and swang (swung? swinged?) and talked and then got hungry, so we went to Thanh Thao. It was too stuffy in there, and we still wanted to enjoy the day outside, so we drove over to Laurelhurst Park and talked while we ate by the duck pond. By this time, the sun was starting to go down, so when a particularly ‘glowy’ tree caught our eyes, we went over and took about a million pictures of it. Most of mine were terrible, but here are a couple of okay ones of the tree, and also one of a good-sized spider we saw when we first entered the park.

When the sun went down, it started to get a little chilly, and after three days cooped up in my apartment, I started to feel a little bit run down after all that walking. So we said good night and headed home.

I got home just in time for a phone call from Joan, who was on her way over to bring back the “Jesus Camp” DVD. We ended up watching the whole thing, with the director’s commentary turned on. What a great movie. Joan comes from a conservative Christian family–in Kansas, no less!–so it hit especially close to home for her.

After it was over, Joan went home, while I folded my laundry and started to settle in for the night, when I got a phone call from my friend Madeleine up in Seattle. We talked about relationships and our generation and commitment (or lack thereof) that we’ve experienced in our own lives and our friends’ lives. It was fantastic, and completely invigorating. It was also 11:45 at night by then, so I started to fade out. As soon as I hung up the phone, I saw that there was a text message from Joan saying, “Still up?” so I called her back and we ended up talking for over an hour.

What a long and amazing day it was. Here’s to many more like that.