beautiful, funny, sad & true

. . .this is awesome, and beautiful.  I want a Stylophone like you cannot believe.

OneYearAgo

“Life has taught us that love does not consist in gazing at each other but in looking outward together in the same direction.”

–Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, “Wind, Sand, and Stars”

Meet the new me, same as the old me.

I’ve been feeling really good these last few days.  I feel excited and driven, and I feel lots of momentum pulling in good directions again.  Recently, I’ve felt like I’ve been just spinning my wheels lately, not doing some of the things that I should have been doing for a while now.

I have no doubt that part of the reason for these good feeling is that I’ve been riding my bike to and from work for a month or two now.  I’ve dropped about ten pounds in that time, and lost some of the schlubbiness (Did I just make up that word?) that I’d been carrying around for the last year.  The exercise has also started to improve my mood.  I feel much more outgoing and spontaneous again.  I’m even starting to feel slightly attractive and romantic again, after taking myself off of the market when my friend had her ‘incident’ a few months ago.  See, the woman I was kind of dating at the time had her own ideas about why my friend did what she did.  She was convinced that my friend was in secretly in love with me, and that her attempt was a way to reel me back in again.  She also had the idea that my friend saw her as a ‘threat’, and that I should think of my friend ‘more romantically.’  It was horrible.  I never talked to her again.

So I’ve spent the intervening months not dating, and not even trying to meet anyone either.  I had such a bad taste in my mouth from that last person, and I was so traumatized by what my friend had done that I just wasn’t up to any kind of reaching out.  I was pretty much operating on auto-pilot until I went on tour with Breanna and Justin at the end of June.  That was the jump-start I needed to get my life back on track again; to get away from all of the craziness and get out of town for a while.

Two months later, I think I’m back.  Finally.

The other night at the gig with IrishBand, I met a new person that I’m very interested in seeing more of.  She came to the show with a guy, and since I assume that every cute girl who arrives with a guy is WITH that guy, I didn’t try too hard to ‘chat her up’ when they sat at our table, but we had a great time talking for a while, before the band had to get up and play.  At the end of the night, she gave me the nicest hug ever.  I’m a hug fan, and it’s hard to find people who are good huggers, so when I meet someone who does it right, I always think, ‘This is my kind of person.’  I have a feeling I’ll be writing more about her before too long.  Too soon to know what will happen.  I don’t even know what her situation is, either, but I’m just excited to find out.

I feel particularly good about it because I’m so open right now.  It’s the perfect time to meet someone new, and just at the moment when I’ve been feeling that, here comes someone, as if by magic.

Keep your fingers crossed.

Every once in a while, there are days that are really great, and yesterday was certainly one of them.

I woke up at ten and met GuitaristDavid and FlutistSusan, so they could take me out to breakfast in exchange for the impromptu photo shoot I did for them yesterday afternoon (which was also fun, by the way) to promote the holiday-music group they’re forming.  And boy, did they choose an amazing place.  I think yesterday was quite possibly the best breakfast of my entire life.  If I had known what was in store for me, I would’ve brought my camera, for sure.

They took me to Roux, which is a French-by-way-of-New-Orleans style restaurant.  I had a sort of scramble, which consisted of smoked trout, potatoes, onions, creme fraiche, with poached eggs and dill leaves on top.  It was unbelievably good.  Susan had oyster and bacon benedict, and David had a chicken-and-biscuits with gravy.  We all exchanged samples, and each dish was amazing.  After we got home, I think we all collapsed in food coma for a while.

After coming out of said food coma, I was ready to go on a little day trip, so I called J to see if she was up for a trip.  She was, so I picked her up and we drove to Astoria for a few hours.  We went to the top of the hill that overlooks the entire peninsula, to check out the views and to see the Astoria Column.  Here are some pics:

We walked around for a long time, admiring the views and trying to pick some of the blackberries that were growing along the edge of the hill.  The good berries within reach had already been taken, so we stumbled down to try and pick some others, but it was to no avail; not to mention that the ones we found were bitter and unripened.  So we gave that up pretty quickly.  We left the Column behind and drove around in the hills, exploring the pretty little town.  Every turn brought a new exclamation of ‘oh my god. . .look at that!’ from at least one of us.  The views are breathtaking, and some of the houses are too.

By that time, we were ready for dinner, so we drove downtown to the waterfront to find something to eat.  One of the businesses had some murals painted on the back.  I love the way they’ve incorporated the actual windows and hinges into the murals.  It adds a nice touch of realism.

The first few places we tried to go were either closed for business or were too expensive, so we ended up at the Wet Dog brewery.  Not the greatest place in town, but it was decent enough, and the grilled albacore salad was really good.

We got in the car and went back to the hills to explore more of the town.  We came to a road that had a perfect view of the bridge, just in time to see a barge motoring underneath, presumably on its way out to sea.

We continued along the high road, and came to a wooded area with no houses, and saw a deer feasting on the leaves that were growing the side of the road.  We drove as slowly and quietly as we could, considering that we were in my noisy Honda, and he didn’t seem particularly fazed by our presence, so we were able to get a few pictures.

My right foot slipped just then, and I accidentally pushed the accelerator and revved the engine a little bit, which startled the deer and made him decide to slowly disappear into the bushes.  I apologized to him for startling him (I’m pretty sure he understood English) and we drove away.  We wanted to get back to Portland at a decent hour, so we wound our way back down the steep, curvy roads of Astoria and made our way back to the highway for the rest of the uneventful trip home.  We made really good time, too, and were home by 8:30.

It was just a great day.  Days like that are so fun and relaxing.  Susan and David are so great and so inspiring.  Roux is so amazing and delicious.  Astoria is so fun and so picturesque.  J is so fun and hilarious, in her low-key way.  And me?  I’m so looking forward to having many more days like that in the future.

On Sunday afternoon, I participated in Project X, a sort of time capsule event created by a theater group called Hand2Mouth.  I found out about it when I went to see a play last weekend, and I’ve been looking forward to it ever since.

The event was divided up into multiple stations.  There was a main station called ‘ground control’, which was where the lion’s share of the event took place.  For brevity’s sake, I will describe it as a place where you listen to other peoples’ stories in headphones, create your own stories, create a timeline of your own life and of events in the broader scope of human history, and choose how you would like to be remembered by future generations.  There were ample opportunities to speak, write, draw, or add whatever you felt like adding to the project.  There were also opportunities to converse with other random people, and to record those conversations via satellite for posterity.

It was an amazing experience, but it’s also a fairly daunting one.  The event asks a lot of its participants, and you have to be prepared to interact in a pretty demanding way.  I wasn’t prepared for that, quite frankly.  I made it through three of the five stations, in an hour and a half.  The two remaining stations were ones that took a bit of time, so I waited numerous times to get in, but each time I found myself turned away because the stations were occupied.  At a certain point, I decided to give up.  I had been told by my friend to allow about three hours to participate, but since I’d been so busy in the previous few days, I was starting to shut down and become anxious, so I decided to give the last two stations a miss, unfortunately.  This exhibit/performance/time capsule/event will also be conducted in Seattle next weekend, at the Bumbershoot festival, and I think that will be a tremendous experience.  I have a feeling that if I had done it up there, I’d have been much more likely to participate in all of the events, but since it was here in town, I felt my real life responsibilities creeping back in.  What’s more, I felt myself falling instantly in love with one of the women in the group, so I suddenly lost the ability to speak or think in my usual eloquent way.

If you live in the Northwest and are considering seeing the show, I definitely recommend it.  Be prepared to be there for quite a while, and know in advance that some of the stations are better equipped than others to handle more than one or two people at a time.  Perhaps this will change by the time it has its run in Seattle.

I’m very glad to have been a part of this time capsule, and my metaphorical hat goes off to Hand2Mouth for creating such an amazing event.  I hope I’m around in the future to see what becomes of it.