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.

against childhood

When established older writers get all cranky about kids who are self-publishing novels (a new trend, I hear), I remember when my younger brothers were allowed to see movies that, up until then, only L. and I had been able to watch because we were older (not because, as we assumed and argued, we alone deserved to watch them). I felt disinherited and debated like a member of Parliament arguing for continued colonial presence in angry foreign countries. So, in a similar pattern, the adult writers go on and on about how true publishing (through a publishing house, with agents and editors and titles you don't like or want slapped on your book) is a trial by fire, a study in adversity and perseverance, and you come out refined and burnished like gold. Which is why these traditionally published authors are such noble wonderful people. Self-publishing, especially by dewy and innocent children (has no one read "Lord of the Flies" recently or visited a school playground?), misses the point and is only for the lazy, the passive aggressive and the unsuccessful. Or something. I think the traditionally published authors are just jealous and don't want these upstarts mucking around "where they don't belong" so they do the older sibling thing and try to invalidate whatever the younger sibling is doing and hold tight to what they see as their exclusive domain.

You could argue (and the established authors do) that a kid hasn't done the sort of living you need to do to write a truly good book. Therefore what they write shouldn't be published. The characters and stories will likely be one-dimensional spin-offs with lots of cliches. Good thing that never happens in books written by adults and published through publishing houses. Only quality is allowed there.

Age-discrimination is making me angry apparently today.

And related: The lady who wrote "Tuck Everlasting" argues against talking down to children and writing insipid books for children. Children become people early in life, she said in an interview on NPR. We're always asking children what they want to be when they grow up, she said. We should ask them who they are right now.

I was reading a satirical article about writing the great American novel and the writer was begging future authors to stop writing children's books if they themselves are no longer children.

"You can follow them around and put their clothes on and roll around with their Transformers and I’m still pretty sure there’s just no way you’ll even begin to comprehend what it’s like to be a kid," he writes.