east west

heat

Lord have mercy.

posted by jessica @ 9:25 PM 3 Comments

healthy narcissism

avoiding the semi-weekly poker game, kimberly & i found ourselves at palio last night. the girl is an angel. she talked about natural talents and possibilities and opportunities and story as narrative - the way she spoke about the future made it seem so open. dog and house and husband and age don't need to hold me back. what do i feel that i'm good at, that i would pursue no matter what? what keeps me back? i'm a little hesitant to actually name natural talents and abilities - as if acknowledging them is a form of pride. and pursuing them would also be prideful and selfish. we're back to this healthy narcissism thing again.

posted by jessica @ 2:47 PM 0 Comments

the day i forgot

this is a difficult time in age - sometimes i want to be more mature and talk about wine and interest rates. other times i just want to throw rolls of toilet paper at my friends and show people the food in my mouth while i'm chewing. sigh.

peter called from seattle this morning and left a message: he is on the top deck of a ferry, heading across the puget sound - the seattle skyline is behind him, and mt. rainier behind that. ahead of him lay the olympic peninsula and the olympic range, highlighted by the morning sun. i, on the other hand, am in front of my computer, staring at a brick wall on the 2nd story of an old warehouse, listening to a diesel truck make its way down burnside.

posted by jessica @ 11:36 AM 0 Comments

the new appalachia

lulled to that almost sleep by mr. johnny cash, I found myself following the new river north, along that crooked line upon which roads were never meant to be built. remembering the fledgling neo-appalachian groups, putting the Pal in Appalachia. Holding onto the unassuming land, a one McAfee's Knob holds no one destination, nothing alarming, volatile, and snow-capped to demand your attention. Blue mountains, nothing else. Missing the honeysuckle, mimosa, cicada, lightning bugs that make the ridge explode post-midnight....and i think that's as far as I can allow myself to go tonight.

posted by jessica @ 7:16 PM 0 Comments

particulars

two interesting statistics that i've heard recently:

- a kit-kat bar is consumed every 47 seconds in the UK.

- starbucks is on track to have 10,000 stores in the US by the year 2010. If they meet this goal, then one in five workers in america will be employed by starbucks. (mathematically, i can't get this one to work out, but i'm going to choose to believe it because it's just that scary.)

one interesting story that i can't get out of my head, and i know i'm going to use it in various conversations from here on out:

my friends jodie & adam live in southeast, and somehow got hooked up with this couple visiting from Cedarville, Ohio. they were recently married, still in school - and they had heard about portland from their online science fiction community and wanted to check it out, so they stayed with jodie & adam. um, apparently this girl from cedarville eats only five things. i'm not saying she ate five things while she was here, nor is she on some kind of five basic food group diet. all of her twenty-some years, she has only eaten the following:

1) beans from a can
2) corn from a can
3) french fries
4) ravioli
5) i don't remember what the fifth one was - so i'm going to pretend that it is meat from a can.

apparently her parents didn't force her to eat things that she didn't want to eat as a child - and now this is all that she eats. is that even possible? does anything happen to your body, biologically, if you only eat certain foods? if peter suddenly declared that he only ate food that was the color yellow or some such thing, i wonder how that would affect our relationship....

posted by jessica @ 10:36 AM 0 Comments

today, we will be suburban

posted by jessica @ 6:52 AM 0 Comments

socks

in junior high, there was no bus to pick us up from school and take us home. therefore, our parents would have to come get us. oftentimes, i would leave 7th grade life science, trying to impress luke jones by telling him that i threw my dissected frog intestines under the desk rather than in the disposal container, and would see my dad waiting for me. he would be sitting on the tailgate of his truck, wearing only socks - no shoes. obviously trying to destroy my life.

unfortunately, i'm starting to see these tendencies in myself. and at this point, i'm starting to feel more annoyed at these socially unacceptable things. oddly enough, most of my frustration deals with not being allowed to fall asleep in public places.

posted by jessica @ 10:59 AM 0 Comments

nebraska = the good life

as much as i would mock michiganites (michiganders? michiganians?) for thinking they are the center of the world, i'm seeing that my world is rather portland-centric. nebraska gives a sense of wholesomeness (people who drink lots of milk with their meat), vastness (where do the streets end?) and political loyalty (i had almost forgotten that american flags existed) not found in the northwest. my frame of reference has been shifted - no longer comparing the present locale to virginia, but rather to oregon. no longer thinking up and west, but over and east. trying not to follow every statement with a sentence that begins, "well in portland...."

it's been quiet. we've been well loved. it's been slow. you'd think all this given time would force me to make it through graham greene and rilke. to fill the pages in my journal.

speaking of which, while nervous on the flight over here, i simply wrote for four hours straight. after i could think of nothing else to write about, i named all 50 states and placed them in geographical order. then i listed them in alphabetical order along with their capitals. what's the capital of maine? i'm thinking it's bangor....

posted by jessica @ 2:18 PM 1 Comments