bye

So I don't think I'm going to continue this blog. I just don't have a lot to say publicly, I guess. I've moved back to a personal journal, something I kept almost religiously from age 10 until 19, then sporadically in college. Since then I've been too busy to slow myself down to write on paper with a pen, organizing my thoughts as I go. A blog made more sense. I could vomit up a day. But the messiness has been bothering me for a while. Time to go back to a new (or rather, old) format.

Writing has always served multiple purposes for me. It is a way to express my "artistic vision" (or something), a way to earn money and keep myself and the kittens fed, a way to keep track of things and a way to find out what I actually think. My brain tends to operate in overdrive, slowing down and feeling at peace only around very specific people and in equally specific situations -- I realized this with a start yesterday when M. and I settled down to watch a documentary about Europe's "Dark Ages" (do not....I repeat, do not!.... look up "the bloody eagle" unless you want to be completely horrified. How anyone made it out of the middle ages alive is beyond me. If it wasn't plague, it was pillaging tribes and rape-happy knights). I don't know why a history documentary would bring this home to me, especially since the narrator was in the middle of detailing Clovis's more loathsome personality traits. I've learned not to question my brain too closely sometimes. It just shuts up like a tupperware or starts muttering gibberish.

Anyway. I think you're all up on the important things:

1. New job, new town. All going spectacular so far. I think there have been two murders, a suicide threat standoff, several major car accidents, a handful of asaults and a body in the marina. All within the last two weeks. And this is the slow season, according to a police lieutenant I talked to.

2. I have two cats. Yes, two. I'm not a crazy cat lady and have no plans of ever becoming one. It's stressful enough to have two animals relying on me. I don't want any more. They are pretty adorable though and like to push each other off the couch and then the aggressor will go up and lick the fallen kitten's face like "Oh, whoops, I didn't even see you were sitting up there. Sorry to bump into you like that. Clumsy me." At which point the kitten boxes the other kitten in the face and they tear around the apartment screaming obscenities for about five minutes before deciding to find me and turn me into their personal nap pillow.

3. I'm still in love with Astoria and will probably move back in about twenty years to retire and die. I miss the river being in my front yard. I miss the ocean being a short car ride away. I even miss that stupid stupid wind.

4. However, I don't miss the howling lack of purpose I felt after I quit the paper but continued to live in Astoria. I'm realizing now what a big identity crisis that was. It was a good thing for me to go through but I'm grateful it only lasted nine months. And really those nine months were pretty fantastic and I had a lot of fun and got some short story writing off my chest and spent a lot of time outdoors and with friends especially Marta and M.

5. That's all.

Maybe I'll see you around on the internet world. If not, give me a call and I'll lock the cats in the bedroom so you can come over and drink tea with me in peace and quiet.

 

new town

Oh not much happened this week except I moved to a new town and will be starting a new newspaper job tomorrow. That's all. M and I moved the bulk of my junk down on Saturday and then I moved with the cats and sundry other stuffs yesterday evening after multiple goodbye coffee dates with Astoria friends. Within the first five minutes of arriving at my new home, I'd locked myself out of the apartment. One cat was yowling from the kitchen, the other cat was yowling out in the car and I had to ask my downstairs neighbor's eldest son to call the landlord for me. Meanwhile, two great danes across the street casually started humping each other.

My landlord arrived 15 minutes later and unlocked the apartment. Half an hour later, one of the cats had squirmed through an impossibly small space of open window and was prowling the roof, meowing and carrying on.

What next? Oh yes and then spiders appeared everywhere and I committed a terrifying number of murders.  Then the cats started fighting while I was trying to fall asleep on my mattress on the floor and I was so overheated from pre-summer weird weather, stressed from the moving and packing and strange smells of strange new places, and ever oh so homesick that I stayed up until midnight unpacking and organizing my books because that always makes me feel better.

Then this morning I woke up and I was till in this new town and I don't think I get to go back to Astoria yet and that was vaguely depressing but I'll deal.

Meanwhile, I'm going to spend this evening unpacking my clothes and psyching myself up about the job.

2 gatos

Marta's sister and niece and nephew slept in the living room. So I had to closet the cats with me lest they prowl and fight all night and keep everyone awake. I wasn't expecting to sleep at all, but the instant I laid myself down, I had two passed out cats with me: Oscar curled up like a gentleman next to my face (as opposed to ON my face... a typical Bruno move) and Bruno, twisted into a pretzel in the cubbyhole made by my bent knees.

Of course, they were yowling and leaping and scrapping at 4:30, but I got more sleep than expected. And then, after breakfast at 5 (when I'd given up on sleeping any longer into the morning), Oscar crashed next to my legs and Bruno kind of collapsed into a disheveled cat pile on top of my back. Must be something in the water.

I'm pretty proud of both of them. They haven't destroyed the apartment yet and Oscar even let himself be manhandled for hours by a four-year-old girl who just wanted to hug him and squeeeeeeeze him forever. 

beat goes on

The problem with house-hunting is that you see all these beautiful houses with spacious green yards and gazebos and ponies and you start to wonder why the people who live there are so selfish. Why haven't they built a mother-in-law cottage and why aren't they renting it out for... say... $300 a month with access to all the ponies ALL THE TIME? And then you go to the places that are advertised and within your price range and not only are the neighbors probably cooking meth but there isn't a door to the bathroom... in fact, there isn't even a wall separating the bathroom from the bedroom. Maybe you can hang up a curtain between them? Meanwhile, the heaters will likely explode in the winter and the landlord is hassling you about owning a cat. Because one little 9 lb kitten will bring this whole place down, decrease the property value and probably destroy every carpet everywhere, even carpets that have not yet been born. Evil kitten.

(While typing that paragraph I got a call back from a guy about an apartment. Yayz)

House hunting is a soul-less activity

8:15 a.m. - Left Astoria

9:30 a.m. - Reached St. Helens. Drove through "Old Towne." Didn't look that old. Lots of Klassy Korner type shops, or Olde Tyme Antiques. Aren't there enough yet? Are the gods still not satisfied? "BUILD US ANTIQUE STORES, UNWORTHY MORTAL."

9:50 a.m. - Ill-advised turn onto country road.

10:00 a.m. - Lots of driving.

 10:45 a.m. - Lots more driving. Logging lands? Vernonia? OK, not quite yet.

10:46 a.m. - The road lost its center line, dropping all pretense of being a legitimate highway that could possibly lead to the house I was supposed to look at at 10 a.m. "No Trespassing" signs abound. Clearly everyone is cooking meth. One yard has a million year stash of discarded/stolen traffic control signs including a fully operational, though moss-covered, stoplight.

11 a.m. - Back in civilization. Futile, prolonged search for apartment.

11:10 a.m. - Drawn by huge orange and yellow banners proclaiming "APARTMENTS FOR RENT!" and "YOU'RE ALREADY HOME!", I pulled into one complex to inquire. Turned out there's nothing to rent. Deception hurts.

 11:54 a.m. - Now. In a Starbucks drinking rather low grade coffee served to me by a woman who called me "honey" -- usually wins me over right away. Didn't in this case.

11:55 a.m. - People really need to stop pretending that spandex leggings are pants.

 11:57 a.m. - Striving for a more positive attitude.

  (image courtesy of the National Archive or something)

monday morning is a restless feeling

I slept 12 hours last night and feel... not so great actually. My hip gave an almighty POP when I got up to feed the cat (he'd been sobbing like an abandoned child outside the bedroom door for 20 minutes or so. He probably thought I'd died and believed that now no one would feed him since Marta works so much and then he too would die, alone, in his cat-climby-structure while the crows mocked him from the telephone wires). Michal said he slept 5 hours last night and feels fantastic (albeit, at work for the next millions of hours for the next millions of days until he gets to lounge around in San Diego for a brewers convention... which I think sounds like work but really means he gets to lay around in the sun, drinking beer and talking shop with other brewers who are also lying in the sun and drinking beer and using words like "hoppy" and "aroma" and "craft beer". Snobs.) It's a busy week this week. I have a couple of job interviews (one, for a job I've already been offered but ever since my last newspaper stint -- a job I accepted outright and never had an interview for -- I've been nervous about blithely accepting job offers. So I'm being troublesome and insisting we all sit down in person and discuss the job first.) and a lot of work at the current jobs. Probably my 12 hours of sleep will be put to good use in the next couple of days. I'll keep everyone (by which I mean the two ((possibly 3)) readers of this blog: my mom and Amy) posted. I might be moving. (I hate moving). Today's fun fact: I was re-reading the diary I kept when I was 9 and apparently I couldn't spell. There were a lot of "Write now we are eating supper" entries and at least one where, in a fit of sisterly hate, I wrote "I have had onoff of Laura!"

2 in 1 day?

This is just to tell the world that I'm going to the grocery store to buy chocolate chips so I can make cookies and that I might go to the movie store and rent "Amelie" although it would be better to just cowboy up and watch "The Business of Being Born" because I already have that one rented out. I'm just really scared that some of the opening sequences will be of a live birth and that doesn't feel like something I want to include in my evening.

I also plan to listen to the dirty rap music mated with Tom Waits that I started listening to this morning. It is fantastic. It is wonderful. It is the only reason I get out of bed most mornings (and because Bruno usually lands with a thud on my chest and peers intently and creepily at my face until I can't ignore him any longer. Also, sometimes my alarm goes off at the right time and I wake up because of noise... from the alarm.)

Anyway, that's all.