I have crawdad earrings

So it's been about half a week. Let me summarize: work, sleep, work, sleep, freezer not working?!, work, sleep, attempts at meetings end in failure with a promise for next week, head out to Portland for the weekend.

Portland meant:

1. Piano - I've found out that it's hard for me to go longer than a week without a piano. I have managed three weeks and I think that's my limit.

2. Family - Best moment was Saturday morning when I was wasting some time after breakfast seeing if SpongeBob was on. Two brothers were playing computer games. Another brother was tilting back in a rocking chair. They all sang the entire SpongeBob opening song. This was soon followed by a psychic moment between Daniel and me when we were singing to mom in our loudest off-key singing voices and we both launched into an unrehearsed and truly terrifying impersonation of Annie Lennox singing that song from the end of the Lord of the Rings movie. We astounded even ourselves.

3. Friends - Even though it's always a little overwhelming to go back to RCC, especially after spending the last few weeks in relative solitude, I hope I move back to the area sometime again. To die by your side is such a heavenly way to die, etc.

4. Markers - I made drawings.

5. Sophie - I fed her.

6. Mom food

7. Central heating and the bedroom of my youth (after kicking a brother out of it). I didn't set an alarm for Saturday morning. I woke up when my body was done sleeping. I don't think any noise from downstairs woke me up. It was beautiful. I had another lovely night of sleep last night despite a few nightmares, one of which actually woke me up and got me hyperventilating a bit.

---

Now I'm back. And I have crawdad earrings.

news items

Coffee shop. Hour and a half before the evening meeting I must cover. Death Cab for Cutie playing. I hate Death Cab for Cutie. They make me want to beat myself with the nearest available chair, repeatedly forever. They make me want to drown myself in cheap coffee and contaminated water. I have despaired. I am angered. I am ready to deny all truth--oh, good, some righteous upright-in-heart soul has put on the Pixies. We are appeased.

A few items from the Oregonian:

- They are putting poems on mass transit machines: buses, or the MAX I think. I can't find the story now. I wonder if this is actually an act of culture or rather an act of frantic guilt that we aren't cultured. Or maybe...man, I don't even know. Yay for poems on buses!

- Man sets himself on fire. For fur. Surely there are more constructive ways to protest, but maybe not.

New York Times

- Haiti. I feel like we're all going to forget about this very quickly, which is horrible.

What else...

Hmmm.

I think that's it.

broccoli is beautiful

Today's story, obtained between the hours of 12 p.m. and 5 p.m. Monday. Finalized at 9 a.m. today.

He 'might as well have used a gun'

Mostly I think I'm okay with how the story turned out. I regret the decision made by someone to split up the third paragraph and make "It changed her life" its own stand-alone drama queen. I also regret that a period was not then put at the end of the third paragraph after this decision was made. Mrrrr.

Anyway.

I've felt a little off all day. I didn't get a whole lot of sleep last night, but also NO ONE I NEED TO INTERVIEW IS CALLING ME BACK. Yesterday everything was a smoothly oiled machine, falling in place perfectly when and where it needed to. "You need to look at this document and you don't want to go through the lengthy public records request process? Okay. Come by at 2. We'll set you up with a table and chair. Oh, you need to ask me one tiny question out of the blue, of course! Here, let me introduce you to the exact person you need to talk to. Let me make a copy of these documents for you. Is there anything else you need?" It was lovely. Today, however, nothing is being what I need it to be, which makes me feel lazy and unproductive. Well, okay, not entirely. I was able to catch up on a few other projects and organize and assemble. Not a total waste. And I did get two interviews in so I'm going to spend this evening typing up my notes and rearranging the story. Perhaps an early bed time? One can only hope.

Excuse me while I go listen to "Skinny Love" a few hundred more times. Also, I require broccoli. I shall take myself down the hill and buy some before I settle down to work.

court court court

This is me after a 13 hour or so workday. Little do you know it, but two hours before this photo was taken I was wearing a skirt and shoes with heels, my hair nicely pulled back. To whit, I looked competent. Now I am in full moccasin/baggy pants/fishing-vest-hastily-zipped-over-a-button-up-shirt-and-a-brown-sweater + the scarf I left at my desk this morning regalia, my brain buzzing with caffeine and I'm at the tired point where I don't think I'll actually fall asleep.

This, however, is Gary Terranova, who is infinitely more better as a human being than I am. Read all about it.

---

Currently reading:

1. "Androcles and the Lion" Bernard Shaw
2. Some text book about modern art
3. "A Book of Scripts" by Alfred Fairbanks. Not movie scripts: handwriting scripts and their history. Alfred hates (HATES) the Gothic script. It offends him mind and soul. It has brought down civilization. It has demeaned language. It vomits on beauty and truth. Poor Alfred. This is what keeps him up at night.

Meanwhile: what keeps me up at night

...the heavy drip of rainwater runoff plunking outside my window. So loud. So invasive. So detrimental to sleep. I bury my head in pillows. I have many pillows.

...my first spider dream in the new place. Everywhere I live I must have The Spider Dream. It was only a matter of time.

...American judiciary systems.

...a weird yodeling animal (human?) call that happens every once in a while of a night. My first thought, upon being jolted out of sleep, is always "COUGARS ATTACKING CHILDREN!" I don't know why.

dear bob dylan

Dear Bob Dylan,

I feel like you probably pretended to crash your motorcycle way back when and that's okay. I understand why, under duress and stress and the strain of being God, one might get destructive urges and want to misrepresent reality. But did you think that maybe you're encouraging lies/slander/deceit +thedeclineofwesterncivilizationasweknowitohmy?

Just wondering.

Love,

KW

Ps. The picture of you was found on a blog. Someone named Dana has decided to put you on her list of top 10 attractive men. However, since she groups you with Syd Barrett who looked okay in the 1970s (thank you, LSD) but has aged poorly (you at least look like you could be a sheriff in a John Wayne movie now) and Jack Nicholson (who has the forehead crease of the curse of Cain), perhaps you shouldn't take this as a compliment.

food

Hmmmm. I knocked off a bit early today because of a weekend assignment

So...

In our lonely and barren youth in the cold world of college, my roommate Tiffany and I made comfort food, it always involved eggs and butter and the oven. She introduced me to the Puffy German Pancake (it has other names, Puffy Oven Pancake being one). I still bake it occasionally as comfort food. Now that I'm in my studio, I make it so that I have an excuse to turn my oven on. It heats up my kitchen and I get to bask in front of the open oven when I'm done baking.

Here's what the puffy pancakes tend to look like, redolent in puffiness and fluffiness and usually exploding out of the pan.



I hunted around on the internet, and it's not just me afflicted with enormous, misshapen pancakes. However some people have these lovely, perfectly-puffed things that they can cut into like a pie or a quiche. I hate those people.

Anyway. Here's how to make it. It's very simple.

You will need:

2 tbsp. butter
2 eggs
1/2 c. flour
1/2 c. milk
1/4 tsp. salt

Oven, 400 degrees.

Mix the eggs, milk, flour, and salt together in a bowl.

Melt the butter in a pie pan once the oven has hit 400 degrees. Tilt the pan around a few times to make sure the melted butter is evenly distributed then pour the mixture into the pie pan.

Bake for about 25-30 minutes. Usually 25 is enough unless your oven is stupid.

When it's done, you can sprinkle powdered sugar along the cavernous interior. I usually do that, but now I'm wondering with the way mine turn out if you couldn't just use the whole thing as a shell and heap sausage and eggs and herbs inside. That might be good.

---

Speaking of the days of my youth, Tiffany and I also ate Jiffy blueberry muffins (yes, made from box mixes). So cheap and so good and I made some today. Not very cultured, I know, but I also don't care.

mouse story

So speaking of perishing, I almost ran over a mouse on my way home. I don't know how I see these things while I'm driving, but I usually do and it usually complicates my life. I saw the dark mouse in the middle of the dark road and decided I had to save it or I wouldn't be able to sleep tonight.

In the time it took to park my car at the house and grab a paper towel out of the kitchen, the thought entered my mind that I shouldn't save it. Things I save tend to die. Also, I've been watching "Planet Earth" a lot the last few days and wondered if I'd be thwarting nature, or even God, to save something so obviously infantile and destined for destruction.

This is how the thought process always goes in these situations so I knew I'd still head down the hill, wannabe savior of feral doomed things.


Upon reaching the mouse, I wavered again. There was something wrong with it. It looked dopey, diseased, ill, and somewhat bigger than I expected. The streets weren't busy and the mouse was edging towards a better part of the road in a sort of beery haze and I figured it might be safe a while longer. I took a little jaunt to prepare myself for the impending salvation and was lured into a store by the promise of acrylic paint FOR SALE and momentarily forgot about the mouse.

Remembrance brought rushing, but, alas, too late. It was all road pancake mouse all across the intersection, his little spine spiraled and flattened into the unforgiving pavement, his long nose now just a long two-dimensional triangle.

And the curtains close on tragedy. Cue the nocturne in G minor.

Somewhere David Attenborough is narrating: "The rules that govern the cold and wet landscape of the north coast are harsh, the survivors few. With two more months of winter, it is unlikely that this small rodent would have survived anyway. We are left only with sympathy for the victim and respect for the predator."

---

Today's story: Auctions & apartments & the county & yay

---

Tonight's goals are very simple: edit, write, eat soup, sleep.

tulips again

A confession: "The Best Day Ever" by SpongeBob SquarePants is playing. And it's bringing me joy like a cloud brings rain or a womb, babies.

I'm hideously tired and there are dark marks smudged up over my cheekbones.

But on a high note:

1. Discovered a letter from the mysterious, illusive and lovely S.Dahlin in my mail box slot today.

2. Tulips are thriving like weeds late released from the earth amid a gaudy, seeded field. I've started talking about them like some people talk about their cats or their children. Unsettling. There was sun briefly on monday and the tulips and I almost died with happiness.

3. More library books. Including some pretentious drawing book wherein the author goes on about the NATURAL and RIGHT way to draw and how no other way exists and if another way did exist, he'd eat his own liver. Anyway, he's dead now so who can argue with him? Also, checked out the "Infinite Jest" which might be the dumbest thing I've ever done. It's huge. Massive. Writhing full of DFW's sly smartness.

4. Stories abound newspaper-wise and I run after them with a net and try not to screw up or trip over things or catch the wrong insect.

5. Road trip? Not anytime soon of course, but a weekend jaunt is mulling around in the background.

6. Decemberist songs practiced upon the guitar (apologies to neighbors)

7. What are you doing for Haiti? Because for, God's sake, do something.

---

I'm learning about LAW stuff and COURT SYSTEMS. So exciting and disturbing (people are awful wretched beings and do murky unspeakable things to each other). I might get completely obsessed. In the meantime and back at the ranch, I haven't made anything in weeks. Well...I made a German Puffy Pancake of magnificent buttery, eggy proportions (I'll post the recipe sometime. Maybe tomorrow)...but no acts of textile-type or drawing. Night is not my time to work on art, but it's the only time I have except weekend (during which I want to write). Someday when I'm old and retired, I'll have my mornings again and my soul will sing.

Until then I'll be dancing with myself. When there's nothing to lose and nothing to prove.

Whhhhhhhhha-ho.

---

The cold is creeping bone-wards. I need to make more tea. The tea never ends. All I ever do anymore is try to keep up my body temperature using showers and tea.

experiments in light and dark

I left the house with two letters and my camera in my backpack. I walked west to coffee and sat writing letters all late morning.

But first: my tulips:



And now, back to letters:


I love letters. I don't think we see enough of each other's handwriting anymore. There's a warmth to ball-point pen ink staggered out with human hands and formed into sentences. Your wrist pressed down and your fingers cramped and you misspelled things, crossed them out, spelled them again. You pressed hard enough into the shapes, embossing them on the next page. Your handwriting tilts to the left, to the right, tumbles unaccountably to one corner, widens as you swing into what you want to say, narrows as you think about what to write after an ominous "Although..." You chose to write on both sides of the paper; you chose to write on one side; you chose to fold the pages in half, in thirds, in quarters. Then you wrote out destinations and cities on an envelope, stamped it with a stamp, and entrusted all your effort and all your words to a mechanism made of strangers. Somehow your letter passed through a hundred hands and traveled a hundred (or two hundred) miles by truck, was sorted at different stations, and landed in my mail slot this morning. Miracles!



It was date day with the camera: day pictures and night pictures. I wanted to get my tulips and the gray day, but also the rain on the branches and the city at night.

laundry

Last summer I washed clothes in a bathtub. This time Astoria, there's a washing machine in the basement. I've been hoarding up quarters and finally found enough to wash a load, but not enough to dry it so a drying rack is set up in my bathroom and clothes, sheets and towels are draped everywhere. I've locked them up with the space heater and hopefully they'll get along all right and be dry by morning.

I think that's it for today.

space heater joy

"We see people on their worst day," the district attorney said to me today as we meandered through the tight halls of the DA office, surrounded by color codes, thick files, filing cabinets full of more files. I wondered where I had seen that phrase before.

Walking down the wide courthouse stairs, I remembered I had seen those words in the mouths of journalism texts, journalism professors, journalists, police cars, cops on beat, nurses, caregivers, and receptionists in hospital emergency rooms. And I'm sure next I'll hear it from somewhere obscure and wonder why I didn't expect to hear it from there as well. It's all true, too. So it makes me wonder, does humanity ever have a good day if, in all our professions and preoccupations, we all manage to see each other on the worst day.

---

Here's today's story: Rohne boycotts pipeline briefings.

In so many ways the story isn't that important. At least, from where I stand now, it isn't. By important I mean: it's not changing, moving, breaking, making, shaking anything. It just is and it Is because it came up in public meeting and it was about LNG pipelines, the Satan/Savior of this area. It's a piece of the huge shifting mess and so by virtue of being another brick on the building, it's important.

I was nervous about it because it is just a piece of a much larger issue, an issue that has been raging for some time now and the most illiterate person in town is more knowledgeable than I am.

---

BIGGEST NEWS (I can't believe I didn't post this first...I held back...Go me).

Anyway.

BIGGEST NEWS: I have a library card! I've been anxiously dancing up and down in front of my little iron mail slot for days now waiting for DEQ to send me my change of address label for my driver's license and they finally did yesterday. It was beautiful timing after all the disappointment surrounding dinner and I could hardly wait for my lunch break today. 11:30 struck and I flurried out the door, down across the street to the library--it's oh so conveniently located kitty corner from the newsroom. The quiet-faced, straight-haired, sensible-shoes-wearing librarian was maybe a little confused, but she took my crazy grinning face in stride. Probably because I was so appropriately dressed--I had a meeting with the DA later and was striving to look professional.

I have this stack of books now, by which I mean I have contentment.

---

My sister, kindly child, brought me "Howard's End" by EMF. I'm on an EMF kick. I think I finished "A Room With A View" in about a night and an afternoon and I need more.

More reading on the docket and in progress (thank you library, you sweet thing):

a) "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek" by Annie Dillard, which, I suspect, will put me into some sort of coma sensory overload.

b) "Essays Presented to Charles Williams" containing essays by Sayers, Lewis, Tolkien, Barfield, Mathew, and some other Lewis (the W.H. variety as opposed to the C.S.). I'm especially excited about Sayer's "A Note on The Divine Comedy" and Mathew's "Marriage and Amour Courtois in Late-Fourteenth Century England".

c) "Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer" by C.S. Lewis. His way of writing is a little obnoxious sometimes but the man is amazingly clear, which I like. I think it will be good.

---

Also, you may observe, I love my space heater.

library cards, postcards, and family love tries very hard to meet for dinner

Today began at 5:36 a.m. when I dragged myself out of bed to check the time on my phone and figure out why I'd even woken up. From there, I stumbled into a shower and ate oatmeal and addressed the outside of letter-bearing envelopes. I was in the newsroom a little after 7:30.

9 a.m. - Meeting involving county people

12 p.m. - Meeting ended, I jogged up the hill to the newsroom and worked on the story I thought might need to run tomorrow.

12:30 - Another meeting

1:40 - Meeting ended. Another meeting.

3 p.m. - Meeting ended. Back to the newsroom. Worked on story.

3:20ish - 4:30ish - Mom calls. Her and Laura were coming up to have dinner, hang out, and bring me stuff I forgot in Portland and a space heater (merciful heavens, bringers of joy). But alas! The car, she is not working. They're in Seaside. They're taking a tow truck back to Portland, but the tow truck isn't there yet so I should come down to the pub they're stopped in front of.

4:30ish - Of course, there were more back and forth phone calls while we figured out what needed to happen, car-wise. But eventually, I closed up shop at the newsroom and headed out to Seaside. Got to hang out with them for not quite 15 minutes, during which time I was handed the soup we were going to eat together, a tulip plant, and, among other things, my piano books.

Also my sister gave me a mix CD. My sister makes the best mix CDs. She made me one for graduation last year and I listened to it all summer, almost every evening in Astoria. That CD echoed our traditional drive to camp: the fast, up beat songs for the opening highways...the more depressing, strum-strum-strumming songs for when we hit the coastal highways...then all those glad-happy, reminds you of nostalgia songs for when we reached camp.

This new one is titled "ASTORIA High Seas Adventure!" It is chiastic and represents my recent move. It begins with Beyonce's "All the Single Ladies," middles with Elliott (one "t" or two?) Smith's "Miss Misery" and ends with...I don't know what yet--I'm only at track 10, slave song from "The Prince of Egypt" ("God on high, can't you hear your people cry?")--but L. said it goes happy-->sad-->happy.

Anyway, saw them off in the tow truck. Misery.

Now I'm home and am inclined to maudlin displays, clutching dinner dishes to my heart, sobbing over the soup while it warms on the stove and, generally, being ridiculous. I'll get over it soon; I have to walk back to the newsroom anyway and edit up what I wrote so that it can be in line for tomorrow.

Two other things I'm happy about:

1. Postcard from Claire!!!!!!!!!!!!! (see above picture)

2. DEQ sent the change of address label for my driver's license so now I can get a library card. Happiness is a library card and all the books you can check out all the time.

meetings abound like baby rabbits

"Do not let me hear
Of the wisdom of old men, but rather of their folly,
Their fear of fear and frenzy, their fear of possession,
Of belonging to another, or to others, or to God." The Four Quartets, T.S.
Eliot

That's the other half of my house. And here, you frenzied stalkers, is a rough floor plan:



I am here. Here being a coffee shop on one edge of town near the river, because everything is near the river, and the coffee is weak, but that's my mistake for saying, "Yes, the light blend" by which it could be construed I did not want the dark unless all else failed in the world and God let me down. It's my first coffee in two weeks. Whoo hoo. I haven't really missed it. I'm more of a water person anyway. Water and whiskey. What more does one need? Toast! That's the answer: toast.

Today I earnestly Did Things. I went to meetings. I clambered around the county building. I drove to other county buildings. I met People. I obtained documents, made phone calls, scheduled interviews. I even tackled the office phone and changed my mailbox message to reflect my name. Obviously I am not "Joe" and all the people who were calling or calling back kept leaving confused messages, "They told me at the front desk that this is your extension, but your voice mailbox says Joe...so I'm going to leave this message...I hope you get it..."

Much number punching and pounding of the pound button later and I'm all set. "You've reached Katie Wilson, please leave your name and number and I'll get back to you as soon as I can."

But I began with the T.S. Eliot for a reason. Public meetings are crazy things where people sit in a small, low-ceiling series of rooms and discuss the finer points of provision such and such laid out under measure x with the will to pass the motion or discuss it with the mysterious sub-committee of another department that may or may not exist but might now be a commission and not a department at all if, in fact, it ever was one. Citizens who come to these meetings (if they come often enough) are versed in the language and they use it recklessly, cunningly, blindly, often. And this is how our country runs along its merry way, through thousands and thousands of small government departments and committees folding into each other like Russian nesting dolls.

The astounding point of it all is that despite the slander and scandal and lies and law-breaking and good men and bad men the system eventually works. Not always, of course, but more often than you would think. It's a mad machine that keeps us all on paved roads.

It raises a few concerns:

Such as, being the idealist I have discovered I am on good days, how can anything ever be changed for the better?

Never can the stupidity (the general, plodding, herding stupidity) of people be so focused, obvious, and given weight and time to waste as at a public meeting. Thus, in my idealistic state, I acknowledge often how much I can't stand other people. Thus, why would I want to change anything even if I could?

Ponder ponder.

Thankfully, I'm usually too busy to ponder, but better to ponder the outside than the inside. Too much introspection makes me unhappy. Better to be busy and working with my hands what is good so I may give to them that needeth, etc. I wonder about introspection, crafty devil that it is, bringer of despair, sorrow and other meddlesome emotions.

feel free to not read this

With the cigarette burning in the back of my throat I have come to several conclusions. However these conclusions must be prefaced by:

That's a picture of one half of my studio. I will show you the other half tomorrow. It is less visually exciting, containing only a table and chairs.

And...

Yes, Mom. I'm sorry. I smoked a cigarette tonight. But I had to pace and think on my porch in the rain and the best way I thought I could accomplish that without looking like a crazy pacer on a porch at night in the rain (what would the neighbors think) was to smoke a cigarette. They're wonderful mind clearing devices. But it will probably not happen again because of threat of lung cancer and besides it was dumb of me what with this hacking cough and all.

Second, the conclusions were framed by the movie "The Brothers Bloom"--as so many conclusions in my life have been since I saw it--with the bookends of the books All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McArthy, which I finished yesterday having bought it for $1.50 the day before, and A Room With A View by E.M.Forster, which I will finish tonight and which I wish I were finishing right now.

But my conclusions (I am horribly misusing the word) are something like: What is the story we tell about ourselves and who are we within the many stories we blabber and dither on and around? There is a presence or an absence of courage in who we decide we are: victim, betrayer, betrothed, tragedy, victor, happy, cyclical, circular, dying, waiting, young, old, growing older.

The last few days have not necessarily been triumphant. Well, I've been sick. Most logic leaves me when I'm sick. And I'm alone. More rationalization departs. So combine them and I will endure, but I won't be productive or very hopeful. I'll make a lot of tea and be efficient about time. Habits run deep. I don't like how sickness and loneliness will do that to me every time, especially loneliness, and how I allow behaviors.

I don't finish many things and most of whatever I've started was started by accident and then, lacking courage, I don't finish what has been put in motion, or I finish in a way I never wanted to, more of a train wreck toward the end than a conscious effort. Never being satisfied with such a mode of existing, each new attempt was a way to vow off repetition of the old. Yet here I am, wallowing again.

So working our way back to the beginning: The Brothers Bloom, in which a character says (paraphrase), "I decided this wasn't a story about a sad girl, it was about a girl who could find beauty in any little thing." Over all, such a good attitude and still living within the bounds of honesty and reality and faithfulness to who and where one finds oneself. It's ridiculous to feel burnt out at 22 years old. It's probably the greatest boast in ignorance I could ever make, to say, weary, "I'm tired and the world isn't what it was going to be and neither am I." As though it's all made of stone, waiting to be eroded or built by Lord knows what hands.

What am I getting at?

I want to be happy in my job. I am all of three working days into it. I have to remember this. I do every twenty minutes or so. Mostly, I dwell on all the ways I'm not suited, or I don't want to exert, or bend, or work. So is this a story about someone who is tired or someone who needs to rest, who needs to allow time to pass under the bridges and around the days and trust that in a month it will have been a month and I will be farther and further along than I could ever understand right now? Probably.

In the meantime:

"It had to be a quality that could not change. No matter what. Long before morning I knew that what I was seeking to discover was a thing I'd always known. That all courage was a form of constancy." - Cormac McArthy

visitors

It was the perfect kind of wet, cold day where you could crawl into a military bunker and feel at home, which is what we did more or less. Walter and Elizabeth came to visit. Brave souls, they climbed the Astoria Column despite a fear of heights then we took the bridge to Fort Columbia and I remembered my flashlight. They were officially my first visitors and now they have to drive all the way back to Eugene tonight. Sad.

Meanwhile the Fort George Brewery is hiring so you know what that means. Job opportunities! Perfect time to move to Astoria. You can sleep in my walk-in closet/storage space area. I'll move the instruments and sewing machine and there's still plenty of space in the fridge for your food.

day four: morning

Woke up to sunlight. Disorienting due to gale rains all last night. But there it is, stretching through the windows and blinding me. I decided to drive to the beach, pulled on a sweatshirt and jeans, two hats and shoes and left without eating breakfast or combing my hair...not that I ever do: comb my hair.



I like living on the edge of the continent. It's like living at the end of the world, which makes me think of the first section of "The Waves" by Virginia Woolf, which makes me think about how I forgot my copy of "Mrs.Dalloway" back in Portland.

---

Now I'm home, settling in for a day of cleaning, unpacking, organizing, and orienting. Also, reading and napping. Tea is brewing, oven is cooking. I might even be getting over my recent sickness, or the herbal tea is kicking in.

A word about my oven: when you open the door it touches the cupboard opposite which means the person operating the oven must stand to one side and lean across the open oven door area. My fear of horribly burning off my face has returned and increased by about 20 percent. It's also damnably difficult to get things in and out, but that might be because I don't have pot holders. Add that to my fridge list (held up by a Eugene Public Library magnet). The German pancake, however, smells amazing and I don't care if I burn my hands off at the wrist trying to get it out.

day two: new job

I have acquired a knife. I like the word "acquired" because whenever I use it it makes me think of some barren woman in the Bible who has just given birth ("Behold! I have acquired a son for the Lord") and then she sends her child/son off to be a priest or a prophet and he in turn utters dire commandments against the reprobate children of Israel. So, lo! I have acquired a knife for the Lord. Also, I acquired two utterly white coffee mugs after Mom pointed out that I don't own any or the ones I used to own have disappeared.

The new job is overwhelming and exciting. I've already run about 100 complete scenarios where I a) fail spectacularly due to mistakes I will probably never make or b) succeed spectacularly by being someone I'm not nor will ever be, i.e. a hard nosed, intense-eyed, not-afraid-of-authority-figures journalist. Today I felt very young. To ground myself, I'm going to read the copy of the Constitution that I found in my desk. It's a better way of falling asleep than drinking a shot of whiskey and hitting myself over the head with a chair.

The morning was spent in paperwork and the afternoon in going through my predecessor's desk. I have inherited 80+ manila folders full of official looking papers, handwritten notes and all sorts of documents. I trotted some of them home so I can read them whenever I want. And I will.

I have one assignment so far and it's not at all connected to my beat, but it will get me started.

In the meantime, in preparation for a second assignment at the end of this month, I've reconnected with a summer source. I've decided to name her the Best Source of All Time. Because she is, indeed, the best source of all time.

Meanwhile, tomorrow is another day. I haven't wandered around Astoria very much yet, been too busy, been too tired and it is dark by 4 pm. Plenty of time for wandering later.

day one: move in + photos

Signed the papers, paid the money and now I live in a studio in a massive and cold old house full of spiders and beauty. It's a house I walked past a few times this summer and wondered what it would be like to live in. I will find out.

This is my kitchen:



These are my 12 foot ceilings:



This is a light fixture:



This is on the wall as you enter. Hooray for the 1800s:



My books are lined according to subject on my book shelves. My bed is made and mom put the kitchen in order before she left. Tomorrow I will be excited again, but right now I'm cold and tired and headachy. Mostly I'm glad everything about moving is over for (we hope) a good long while.

resolutions

Fitter, happier, more productive,
comfortable,
not drinking too much,
regular exercise at the gym
(3 days a week),
getting on better with your associate employee contemporaries,
at ease,
eating well
(no more microwave dinners and saturated fats),
a patient better driver,
a safer car
(baby smiling in back seat),
sleeping well
(no bad dreams),
no paranoia,
careful to all animals
(never washing spiders down the plughole),
keep in contact with old friends
(enjoy a drink now and then)

In this year of our Lord two thousand + ten, I hereby resolve to...

1. Write letters/Send postcards -- Decent communication is going a grotesque and dreary dog way down the sink so I resolve to write lots of letters. It will take time, organization, love, and energy. Nothing worth doing is done in a second though and it's good practice anyway, a break from news writing. I love mail and so do most other people.

2. Read -- I have a list somewhere. It begins with Hannah Arendt, middles with social justice/God/color theory and probably ends with some novel I've been avoiding, like "The Brothers Karamazov" or "The House of Mirth"

3. Make art on a consistent basis & Commit to finishing pieces -- It might be a good idea to set up some sort of process blog or facebook album so that I have a visual map of what I'm doing. Or maybe that will kill my soul. I don't know. Might as well try.

3a. Keep in touch with last year's art teachers, art mentors, and art friends.

4. Simplify -- I've spent the last few months paring down what I actually need. I've recycled clothes, given away shoes, stopped wearing makeup, and figured out other ways to store/build/buy/use/reuse things. I'm sure there's more I could do. We don't really need so much stuff, she said, surrounded by books and art supplies.

5. Draw up a budget and stick to it -- I'm careful with my money, but I really should lay out a budget for myself. Now that I'm entering this new phase of adulthood, I want to start saving and I want to stop worrying. Money has been a general nasty obsession in the back of my mind for several years and I'm sick of that. If I have a budget, I have pinned money down. I win I win I win.

So we'll see now. New Year is mostly an illusion of a second start, but it's nice to mark the time.

I did survive info hell

Goodbyes are wretched: the pause between opened and closed doors, before one car drives away or a person disappears down a sidewalk, the awkward/heartfelt/unhappy/loving/gracious-God-and-merciful-deliver-us/Alas Egypt/when-will-we-three-meet-again? hugs, the rounded out conversations that keep tangling over an inevitable parting, standing around, waiting for an excuse to keep talking. Goodbyes leave me with a tight spine and a dizzy stomach.

If I know you, I've been saying goodbye to you all week. You may not have realized.

I've been especially gruesome about it. With each tap on somebody's shoulder or glass passed to another person's reaching hand, I've added to myself: "I wonder if that's for the last time." You know: "Shall I ever look down into this valley again? Run on sweet rivers of the land of my youth, may others enjoy your rest for I must go away. Fill to me the parting glass, goodnight and joy be with you." Perfectly morbid and ridiculous, I am aware. The move north has taken on the dimensions and panic of an apocalypse.

Tonight here I am, box-surrounded, and feeling (let's be honest) miserable and alone in all the wide world, shuffling the mortal coil along like a good sinner. There are times when one simply wants one's mommy. One instead must come to terms with an existence wherein one must solider on using one's own feet and stop being such a fool. One must grow up sometime this side of death. It might as well be now while one is still nine parts elastic, adaptable to change and the random scattering of emotions. It's a hard rain's a-gonna fall. Or something.