The Flying Machine

Happy Halloween, y'all. Anybody doin' anything fun and awesome?

My housemates and I are going to carve a pumpkin. And possibly an overripe watermelon. I'm kind of sad that I didn't get to wear my super sweet fabulous costume this year. BUT NOBODY HAD A HALLOWEEN PARTY. And all my Eug peeps are going to an Architecture in Helsinki costume show tonight which should be super rad but I've blown my concert budget already, what with The Weakerthans and Rogue Wave and Tom Brosseau and Talkdemonic and Mum already this month... and Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova (aka The Swell Season) next week.

Speaking of, anybody want to go see Glen and Marketa with me? I have an extra ticket.

Posted by Sarah at 10:35 AM | Permalink

I'd like to say that this is uncharted territory - that we're bravely marching forward into challenges and uncertainty with open eyes and brave grins. You know, living the questions, like Rilke said.

This is not the case. This is charted territory, crisscrossed all over with trails that dead-ended. Lovely journeys that ended too soon. Don't think I don't know better than to hope for a destination. I'm not looking for a destination, I'm looking for a path that will take me as far as I want to go.

And I think I've become gun-shy. Enough failures, enough balks, you get kinda frustrated, especially when things start to look depressingly familiar. We've been here before and we need to either push through it or give up and go home.

PDX this weekend for a wedding with J, plus Powells and Stumptown and Beulahland and Tao of Tea and maybe Screen Door. J is still on the mend after post-op complications so it's super chill super low pressure. I guess we'll see what happens. I'm holding out hope that there's no dead-end around the corner.

Posted by Sarah at 9:16 AM | Permalink

Jen came to visit and it was awesome. I will post pictures soon! What up, East Coast?!

Unrelated thoughts on life:

I have yet to perfect my scone recipe but I'm getting closer.

Gala apples are totally rad if you can get 'em fresh. >>> most others, in my opinion.

I feel oddly disconnected from the American electorate, living in this new town - and I can't get a bead on the latest political winds. Hillary? Barack? Rudy couldn't really win, could he?

Introverts living extroverted lifestyles and having extroverted-behavior-requiring jobs need to find ways to get alone time. You'd think I'd have this figured out by now, but no.

Why does the cliche when it rains it pours have to be so true when it applies to one's social life or work commitments?

Posted by Sarah at 6:29 PM | Permalink

So I'm busier than I even expected. This job takes a lot of time. This job takes a lot of energy. This lifestyle I've got takes a lot of time. It takes a lot of energy too. I love it anyway.

Other things in life are good - home, friends, food, exercise, etc. If I just made a bit more time for art and music I'd really be doing things Right.

I think I might have to get the internet at home after the holidays. I would like waking up at 5 or 6 AM to answer work emails from my cozy room in my cozy down booties. I don't like waking up at 5 or 6 am to get to the office at 7 AM to answer work emails.

Jen's in town this weekend! Jen from K-town, Jen who I've known forever! Yay for old friends, for long weekends, for an excuse to hit up Portland and the coast! Yay for going out with my old friend and my new roommate and 2 newly-met neighbors for Mexican food and ending up chatting for hours. Yay for having another neighbor over who brought his dog and wonderful warm Minnesota personality to dinner. Yay for good people and a good life.

Frustrating: haven't been able to prioritize / make the time for real writing here in a long time. Don't know when/if I will, but I want to. We'll see. Don't give up on me yet.

Posted by Sarah at 12:14 PM | Permalink

My job.

Hood River.

The bartenders and the beer in Hood River.

Pretty much all of the people I've been meeting.

Jogging in the mornings with my housemates.
Cooking with my housemates.
In general liking the living situation.

Bags and bags of free pears and apples to eat and cook with.

Talking on the phone while huffing it up the many many stairs at night. Puffy jackets and moon boots.

Posted by Sarah at 12:44 PM | Permalink

Life without the internet at home - kind of challenging, to be honest. I'm gonna try to make it until Christmas and if I can then maybe I will have kicked the addiction enough to make it all year. I might break down in winter, though. Let's see how cold it gets, eh?

I don't have an office yet. I'm working from coffeeshops. This is not at fun as it sounds. Do you like carrying heavy binders around? I don't. Working from home is pretty mediocre too. Turns out I like office space.

Tonight: THE WEAKERTHANS! Dinner & drinks with my friend Erika in Portland, then the show. Y'all, I've wanted to see them live since high school. Since Bea (then Ben) played them for me in a hodgepodge mix of radical anarcho-indie sounds during a week of bicycling and berry-eating and boating and wild limb-swinging dives off the dam - Propagandhi, Saul Williams, Greg MacPherson, Dead Kennedys, David Bowie. Not that The Weakerthans are so radical anymore. But I still love 'em.

To be honest, most of this month is a countdown to November.
November means J.
J means the wedding in Portland and camping and hiking and The Swell Season live at Crystal Ballroom and maybe getting a little closer to sorting things out. Or maybe just making things more complicated. It's hard to say.

Posted by Sarah at 12:46 PM | Permalink

Neither of my roommates is interested in helping to pay for internet access. Neither of them uses it outside of work and only one even owns a computer. This means I have to either cough up $40/mo for it or live without.

People, I have not lived without internet access at home since grade school.* And that was only because the internet didn't EXIST back then. I'm tempted to go without just to see if I can - after all, there's a public library that's open 'til 8:30 every day, coffeeshops 'til 7, and my office after hours if I get really desperate. And I'll be on it all day at work. And it'll free up shit tons of free time in my evenings. Yesterday I got home, had a beer with my roommate, watched her cut up some pears for the food dehydrator, puttered a bit, did some music-organizing, copied a scone recipe from Atlantic Monthly, watched The Science of Sleep, and started reading The God of Small Things. (I know, I know, I'm like 5 years behind the curve on that one, but it happens to be one of someone's favorites and I've had it on my shelf since freshman fall at D [Thanks, English Dept!])

But.
Still.
No internet at home? Not even a pirated neighbor's signal? Nothing?
Whoa, dude. Whoa.

This means I might be a little slower to, say, reply to emails. Or post photos. Or post blog entries. We'll see. You can always call.

* Actually, I did live without it at home for 3 months in Dublin. I was so busy that it worked out ok. Also, I had internet access daily at the university.

Posted by Sarah at 4:30 PM | Permalink

Day One on the job: sit in hip coffeeshop all morning, read through pile of binders left by previous sole employee. Nurse tasty but slightly over-watered americano as long as possible. Walk down 438 stairs to get to downtown lunch with boss, talk vaguely about projects, get alternately excited and terrified. Acquire an additional binder. Walk down with boss to see downtown office, into beautiful LEED building, past beautiful couches and tall windows, past other nifty office spaces, up to dark, windowless cubicle. Still - better than last year's 'office' aka desk with back to the door and daily operations of a tax office going on all around. Determine that someone else (who?) has colonized my desk. Have to wait 'til other person clears out before I can move in. Shift operations to library. Shift to the other hip coffeeshop. Snobbily avoid touristy faux-Italian coffeeshop. Wonder if work will pay my coffee bills. Walk home up 438 stairs.

All is well! I've put up some kinda belated photos on Flickr:

Moving Out; Last Shots in Malheur County

Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness with Josh

Posted by Sarah at 4:15 PM | Permalink

The latest essay up at n+1, on why some ex-rocker doesn't much like rock, doesn't actually say much of anything new or innovative. But it's pretty funny nonetheless:

File under Dionysus the feelings a rock concert aims to induce: careless ecstasy and careless unity, dissolving in the careless crowd. Is Dionysus all-embracing, or is he instead all-consuming, all-digesting, reducing all to homogenous shit-stink? Why has no one mentioned that John Lennon’s “I hope someday you’ll join us and the world will live as one” is a sentiment suitable for chanting at a Nuremberg rally?The solution to mass-market Dionysianism is the obvious corrective tilt toward the Apollonian. Apollo is the contrary principle of form, clarity, precision, and individuation. Sculpture is the art of saying No to the rest of the mountain.

Apollo and Dionysus need one another, but only Apollo seems to understand this; Dionysus is busy vomiting into the toilet.

Posted by Sarah at 4:09 PM | Permalink

I definitely need to read this book:

The concerns of food production companies have ramifications far beyond what appears on supermarket shelves. Their concerns are the rot at the core of the modern food system. To show thesystemic ability of a few to impact the health of the many demands a global investigation, travelling from the ‘green deserts’ of Brazil to the architecture of the modern city, and moving through history from the time of the first domesticated plants to the Battle of Seattle. It’s an enquiry that uncovers the real reasons for famine in Asia and Africa, why there is a worldwide epidemic of farmer suicides, why we don’t know what’s in our food any more, why black people in the United States are more likely to be overweight than white, why there are cowboys in South Central Los Angeles, and how the world’s largest social movement is discovering ways, large and small, for us to think about, and live differently with, food.

From the intro to Stuffed and Starved, by Raj Patel. (via Critical Mass, thanks Pam)

Posted by Sarah at 3:37 PM | Permalink