Of the 20 million things that annoy me on a daily basis (I just discovered that the sound of a spoon rapidly scraping the remaining bits of yogurt from a plastic container makes me violent—hmm…no, not true; I’ve been repressing my first encounter with this sound that surfaced in 2004 when a coworker ate flax oatmeal daily from a reusable plastic dish. For the record, I like both of these offenders as people, but that sound is excruciating) I’ve discovered that “vocal fry” is not one of them.
It took me forever to even find an audio example where I could detect the linguistic tic and once I understood what it was, it didn’t bother me in the least. I barely even notice the creaky voice or that it's taken over the younger female population. (I'm still stuck on how pubic hair waxing so rapidly became the norm. Also, the other story I read this week on the topic--only a writer in her 20s, who I happen to like, would call pubic hair "70s bush" when the shift didn't happen until the '90s. This is not ancient history.) I’m definitely of the up-talking Valley Girl persuasion, an affliction I’m aware of and consciously trying to rid myself of now that I conduct a lot of interviews with marketers and brands at work and want to come across as authoritative. (I now have a sore throat from trying to speak with vocal fry last night and meowing to the cats using that lower register to see if they liked it.)
While trying to get to the bottom of what vocal fry sounds like, I came across this article about Northwest dialects (you can go on all day about there being no such thing as accentlessness, but I remain unconvinced that anyone in Oregon or Washington speaks differently than what’s commonly accepted as neutral, i.e. TV speaking). I’m still completely WTF over one of the comments:
“I have long understood that the voice of the Northwest was the voice of Goofy, the Walt Disney character. Pinto Colvig, the creator of Goofy's voice, was once asked where he got the accent, and he said he was just speaking the way people did in his hometown of Gresham, Ore.”
The only late 20th century Gresham weirdness, which isn’t that weird, was calling hazelnuts filberts, and crayfish crawdads (weirder because no one associates those Gulf Coast crustaceans with the NW) and not wanting to catch them down at the creek (not crick, I don’t think) with other kids.
I’m not sure which is more Portland: chastising someone ran over by a cab (driven by a female—very un-NYC) while sleeping in their motel room for still being in bed at 11am (my family all gets up at like 5am for shits and giggles) or that the original comment was removed. Aren’t most news comment sections like 85% offensive anyway?
Now that my limit of New York Times articles had been set to beginning-of-month zero, I’m strategizing how to make September’s twenty last.
After only clicking into the Fashion & Style section, I’m already torn. Is it Generation Limbo: Waiting It Out? where “The college graduates who entered the job market after the economic downturn, take dead-end jobs while waiting to start their real careers. And waiting. And waiting.” Welcome to Portland, Oregon, bane of stuck locals fifteen years ago/Portland, Oregon, the choice of non-struggling transplanted kids today having fun selling coffee and doughnuts. I didn’t get a “real” job until well until my 30s. And now I’m loving life! Hold tight...nay, lower your expectations, youngsters.
OR
Are You as Fertile as You Look? “There is a widening disconnect between what youthful-looking women see in the mirror and what’s happening to their reproductive organs.” OMG, could this be the dementia I was speaking of yesterday? But I’m still young and pretty! And so is my uterus, right? Please tell me yes…love me even though my vagina is atrophied and rotted, ok?
On the AirBART shuttle from the Coliseum station to the Oakland airport I spied a Carrow’s and a Red Lion, two chains I thought had ceased to exist just because I hadn’t encountered one in years, in close proximity to each other. West Coast, sometimes I miss you. I always associate Shari’s and Carrows (and recently discovered East Coast brethren, Perkins, which is going bankrupt anyway) with each other since they’re both regional third-tiers that serve pie in addition to burgers and omelets. Shari’s is open 24 hours, which is no small feat in Oregon. Though when I recently mentioned Carrows, my sister Melissa had no idea what I was talking about. I’m certain we had them in Oregon in the ‘80s (can anyone vouch?) though now they do appear to be focused in California.
My friend in Portland, Adam, has a birthday the same week as mine and was celebrating it at the sixth-floor lounge on top of the Lloyd Center Red Lion (six floors is tall for the area, ok?). Too bad I was heading back to NYC the night before. He and his boyfriend will be arriving in Brooklyn this evening and staying with me for a few nights. I wish I had a Red Lion equivalent for them.
Right before we broke up and I graduated college, my boyfriend at the time (last name Roth, followed by a Robinson, followed by a fixation on a Roberts, now in the trenches with a Robb. Go ROs!) got a job as a bellboy at the Lloyd Center Red Lion. As a new hire, we got to test out the Red Lion experience and stayed one night free with dinner and room service breakfast. That was the first time I’d ever eaten Coquilles St. Jacques. It was also the last time, if only because I’ve never encountered the cheese-topped scallop dish in the ensuing 17 years. I am 99% sure that this boyfriend told me that as a treat all new staffers were taken to see The Concierge, a new Michael J. Fox flick. Now I am seeing there is no such movie and feeling odd. What a strange lie that would be. Around this period, he began paling around with a new coworker, smoking pot and climbing on bridges so who knows the truth.
Last month in Portland, we had no place to stay on Friday, our final night. Everything in my acceptable, stylish enough but under $200 (preferably under $160) range was booked weeks before we had even left, so I figured we’d just wing it, even though it goes against my plan-crazed grain, stay at a Marriott if need be or at my mom’s if we had to. While scouring travel sites days before getting the boot from the Hotel DeLuxe, James mentioned the Red Lion in Vancouver, Washington. It was only $81.
Hell no. I would party in their bar, but I wouldn’t stay there. Plus,Vancouver? My only experience the nearby suburb was occasionally hanging out with Adam our freshman year of college when he still lived at home. It was pretty much just like Gresham where I grew up but north rather than east. Not a place for 18-year-olds in art school. But maybe perfect for a newly minted 39-year-old who works in an office?
When I saw the straight ‘70s northwest wood beam architecture, I softened a bit. Faded, yet originally trying so hard. I can appreciate those spires and angles. Frankly, after four days I had burnt out on Portland’s incessant indie-ness. My memory is so false (maybe I imagined The Concierge, after all). In my gritty, mom-and-pop NYC perch, I had developed false notions about my hometown as if it were simply a west coast New Jersey, packed densely with chains stores, restaurants and highways. It is not. I needed a break from the cocktails enlivened by tinctures, artisanal maple bars and bicycle-friendly streets. Vancouver it was.
I felt at ease the second we crossed the bridge. Who-Song & Larry’s?! That’s still there? Very occasionally we’d get to go eat chimichangas while the parents ordered frozen margaritas and combo platters. I think the draw was the view of the Columbia River. I’m pretty sure there were mariachis. Unlike Carrow’s, Melissa did remember this Mexican semi-chain (it’s now owned by Real Mex, the same as Chevy’s) and said, “It seemed like a fun place to go if you were a grown-up.” Indeed, it did. And she encapsulated much about my chain fixation. They are the kind of places that seemed more for adults when we were younger (never mind that Olive Garden and its ilk didn’t exist when I was a kid) like you could cut loose and have a few drinks and eat as much food as you’d like and you could do it whenever you felt like it. The last time I recall going to Who-Song and Larry’s it was a late ‘80s Easter and afterwards, Melissa and I drove downtown and shoulder-tapped a homeless guy to buy us 40s of malt liquor and we drank them in the Rose Garden and no one said anything when they stumbled upon us, I guess because it was Portland.
When I stepped into the Red Lion’s lobby, AM gold was trickling through the speakers as if they could only play music from the era the hotel was built. Even the stifling caked-in cigarette smoke not even close to being masked by pine-scented spray that assaulted us on the way to the elevator felt right. Before heading to a family bbq, we had a drink in The Quay Bar to take in the crustacean-themed stained glass, porthole windows and interior boat mast. A little pirate, a little coastal. We were the only ones in the bar at 3pm other than a band sound-checking, providing a small taste of what was to come.
And it came with the $5 price of admission that evening. The entire parking lot was packed when we showed up around 10pm. The band, not Gina K., as advertised out front, was playing covers from Prince to Wild Cherry. People were dancing. Hard. Ladies were drinking shots. Screaming. Everyone knew each other, including our waitress, the same one we’d had seven hours earlier. The women dolled-up in the shortest, tightest, stretchy low-cut dresses like you might buy at Rainbow if they had Rainbow in Oregon, all radiated cougar-ness, even the young ladies (28 is old in the suburbs if you’re single). I was surprised women in their 20s would take part in such an oldies, motel bar scene. The men were all sloppy, not trying half as hard as the women. And I guess they don’t need to. One young knobby dude with a moustache that would appear intentional across the Columbia River was flanked by two women, one tiny, one plump, and he was rubbing up against both of them, arm over one’s shoulder, then the other. Threesome, Washington state-style. I tried to take a cameraphone picture of the 50-ish gentleman with long blonde hair styled into crunchy ringlets, aviator shades and a fitted glittery t-shirt tucked into jeans in a way that might’ve made sense in Germany.
We stepped out for a cigarette and a frantic woman stormed out, quizzing all the people outside (not us) about whether they’d seen a red sports car. They had, but it had left. This woman’s friend took off with the driver and had been gone for too long. She wasn’t answering her phone. As we were about to head back to our room, the car pulled up, the quizzer ran over and started screaming at both the friend and the driver, a clean-cut blonde man, younger and more attractive than both women. The friend ran inside of the bar while a screaming match ensued in the parking lot. As we walked past, the guy was pulling down his pants and bending over. I have never seen a mooning in my 13 years in NYC! Combined with the bare ass SF outdoor pooper, it was the week for butts.
When it comes down to it, there was nothing novel about any of this. This scene plays out Friday nights in small towns around the nation. And I love it. One of my many projects that I don’t have the skills (technical or social) or wherewithal to produce that I came up with when I first moved to NYC was a photo essay “T.G.I. Friday” that would document how people do their thing on Fridays around the city. I swear what I had envisioned is far less lame than that sounds. I think now I would call it “Everybody’s Working for the Weekend” and focus on small dance clubs, bars and restaurants around the country. I would start with Dallas BBQ. I want to celebrate Friday nights forever giant frozen blue cocktails.
Last week while in Portland, Oregon I reluctantly read an article titled A Twee Grows in Brooklyn (and the twee keeps growing) about the Portlandification of said borough. I also turned 39 while in the city of roses (the moniker that no one outside of the city recognizes).
Thirty-eight-year-old me would get riled up over how it’s impossible to compare a town, barely a city, of 600,000 mostly middle-income, white people with a borough of 2.6 million full of a zillion ethnicities both wildly wealthy and relentlessly poor. And that I can’t take anyone in their 20s with parents who live in Manhattan (a recent nearly irrational bugaboo of mine—I can’t think of any circumstance where I would ever truly get along with anyone who grew up in Manhattan or who has the kind of parents who currently live in Manhattan [or Brooklyn Heights or Park Slope]) seriously. There is the experience of a young East Coast-educated person who has never heard of zines and works multiple part time jobs, thrifts furniture and hangs out and smokes pot and drinks a lot and can return to NYC at any time to declare Brooklyn bourgeois and then there are many unemployed or working multiple part time jobs people who aren’t doing so by choice. In a city-town where jobs, especially non-service jobs, are hard to come by, if you’re a young native who would like to leave it takes a lot of planning and saving, assuming you have the motivation or ambition to even try. Brooklyn is still NYC and that means competitive and expensive. No one here is supporting themselves making kombucha or pillows shaped like owls. Either parents are involved or they have savings from the corporate job (funded by an education and rent they didn’t pay for) they threw all away to pursue their simpler life dreams. In turn, the market for $400 vintage typewriters in Portland would be quite small.
Thirty-nine-year-old me has no time for this shit. When you are this close to death there is no time to become consumed by the foibles of strangers.
Sturgeon can live to be 100 years old. Herman, the 70-year-old, 10-foot-long, 450-pound centerpiece of the Bonneville Fish Hatchery is barely a senior. Maybe I’d call him middle-aged and he wouldn’t be offended. These prehistoric slow-movers creep me out as much now as they did when I was a child. It doesn’t seem possible that a massive creature even exists and has for millions of years, chugging along the bottom of silty riverbeds. The murky water and moss-encrusted logs don’t help matters. My grandma told me that someone had gone up and stabbed a bunch of these fish. I don’t want to look it up and see if that’s true because it kind of makes me feel like throwing up.
Salmon returning to where they were born, spawning and dying also does not put me at ease either. I was born in the Bay Area, not Oregon and I don’t intend to get pregnant, but keeling over on your home turf is depressing not noble. Legacies, ugh. I began feeling choked up in a cool bathroom stall at the hatchery while thinking about the salmon. I ate three ounces of local sockeye salmon with saffron aioli that night for dinner, and it was pretty good.
At Char Burger, afterward, The Sundays jangled nearly imperceptibly through the room plastered with wild west tchotkes while I ate stiff marionberry pie and sipped a black iced tea in a tall paper cup. When I heard that 1990 modern rock classic on New Year’s Eve/Y2K/Millennium in an Atlantic City casino café well after midnight, I started tearing up. 1990 was the year I went from high school to college. At 28 the future seemed irrevocably bleak and I had nothing to show for my past. The song drew upon a false teenage nostalgia because what kind of true regrets or even wistful memories can you have at 18? Harriet Wheeler seemed so grown up and sensible in the video (she was 27) with a vaguely ‘60s, messy updo, jeans and cardigan, not flashy but still cool and cute. I hoped that’s what I would mature into as an adult.
So, my 39 looked a little puffy and tired but not abysmal. Must’ve been all that staying out late and eating and drinking anything I liked. I’m fine with my skin, it’s not terribly liney or wrinkled (though it re-broke out the second I set foot back in NYC. My chin zits only temporarily cleared up in the dry, unseasonably crisp Bay Area weather. I was also able to wear liquid foundation, which I prefer, rather than the mineral makeup I futiley apply here each morning only to melt off before reaching the office. Also, I could wear my bangs straight. Today was the first day I’d commuted to work since being back and my forehead was pure sweat, I literally had trickles running down my bare legs like I'd peed myself, and those nicely blown-dried bangs were clumped and wet like seaweed within minutes of reaching the subway platform) but I’m starting to become concerned with under-eye hollows, not dark circles, just a sunken look that concealer doesn’t help. I can’t understand how an otherwise plump face could be sprouting sinkholes. Does one inject ass fat below one's eyes? I guess that’s how I will age.
This is my grandma at 77, mom at 61, me on Friday and my sister at 36. Who knows what direction I’ll go.
True confessions: only recently did I figure out what <3 meant. That symbol has confounded me since the day I first saw it who knows when. Love? I always thought it looked like testicles and assumed it was an insult. Not recognizing ASCII art is shameful (almost as much as calling my iPod a Walkman every so often). I’m quite certain I have more people who see (or at least rapidly skim past) what I say on Twitter than here, so this is safe. I couldn't admit it there. You won’t tell anyone, right?
The word troll is funny to me because it’s a shared nickname I have with a friend (weirdly, I have a different shared nickname with another friend I’m barely in touch with anymore: Seaver. We both called each other, and a third friend, Seaver). I’m Troll, he’s Troll.
I was about to say that these nicknames pre-date internet trolling, but that’s not exactly true. At work, we, rather a number of coworkers would totally post horrible messages regarding children’s photos on strangers’ guestbooks. Putting your kids’ photos on the internet seemed so absurd at the time that the parents needed to be harassed. If I only could’ve foreseen Facebook where all grownups’ avatars are actually their offspring. Children truly were the future.
The Troll nickname started because we were both non-needy, loner types and felt weird about asking normal things like “Where are you going for lunch? Can I come?” without feeling like an ugly unlovable creature who lives under a bridge. Showing interest, admitting you wanted to hang out with someone and tagging along was trolly behavior in our eyes. Trolls are solitary but they get lonely too.
When I moved to NYC in ’98, we had to abort our plan to eat lunch at every restaurant in the food court at Pioneer Place Mall, the compact, upscale shopping center downtown that doesn't really seem upscale now. We only made it as far as Cajun Grill. Regrets, I have a few. Now they have a Yucatan Grill, Romano’s Macaroni Grill and Gyros N’ Grill. So many grills!
I happen to own the world's scariest book about trolls. Read a story here and tell me I'm wrong. Or just look at that cover, jeez (I left the camera phone pic--too lazy to scan on a Friday night--really large so you can click on it and scare yourself).
What I learned about Portland Timbers fans from the only sports story I’ll likely read all year:
“stadium vendors hawk barbecued-tofu sandwiches, spinach salads and chocolate-covered bacon.”
"The Timbers are all about helping out their fellow man.”
“kilts are ‘considered quite masculine’ in Scotland and Ireland and evoke Portland's identity: ‘underdogs and kinda blue collar, but also fringe, artistic.’”
“Timbers fans ‘are not the brightest bunch,’ thanks, he said, to their being ‘meth-headed’ and ‘jobless.’
"Portland fans are icky, they're the trailer trash of the Pacific Northwest.”
"’They're angry.’ The Portland supporters are so angry, she added, that they remind her of the kinds of fans that follow American football, a species she considers ‘more angry.’”
Right around the same time I found “springfield oregon how to tell if a beggar really needs money” in my search log, I spoke to my sister (who is now house-hunting in Eugene, but not so long ago was dwelling in an RV off a gravel road in Springfield) and she mentioned a busted shopping center called the Gateway Mall. Her description intrigued me.
It sounded like Eastport Plaza (for Portland old-timers) the kind of place in the ‘80s that had a Spencer’s, Doo Da’s (a crappier Spencer’s), Frederick’s of Hollywood, Mervyn’s, and at one time the Hydrotube, a scary water park that I was forced to try once with Girl Scouts. By the ‘90s, the place was half-empty and housed military recruiters, Weight Watcher meetings and functioned as polling precinct. When Newberry’s went out of business, well, that was it.
Once again, I’m bemoaning the analog photo-era because I took a bunch of Eastport Plaza pics in the mid-90s for a zine about malls with a name I can’t even remember, and I have no idea what I did with them. I also bemoan the analog self-publishing era because so much stuff is hidden away/thrown away while tumblrs will last forever. Which isn’t to say the internet is evil; it’s been a good friend to me. In my rss reader (which, fuck me, I refuse to believe is a dying format) I keep tabs on That Mall’s Sick And That Store’s Dead!, Labelscar and Deadmalls.
A quick skim of the Gateway Mall’s Yelp reviews (sure, I deride the site for dining, but I believe these people know their malls) tells you all you need to know. Only one woman out of 19 reviewers seems to be defending the place. Here are some highlights from her compelling argument:
We have kids. So perhaps that's why I can overlook the bad neighborhood, vacant spaces where stores used to be, and the once in a blue moon probably stoned wierdo you encounter while there.
The kids love the bumper car place (I think the guy who runs it is creepy, but whatever...)...
The kids also love that Dragon's Alley shop... it does have fun stuff in it. Like a Steampunk dress-up kit. That was a funny find... I guess steampunk has gone all mainstream now?
Let's talk when they start selling steampunk cupcakes. Other uses aren’t so sure:
Everyone keeps saying Ghetto GHETTO Ghetto about this place. And they are right. It's bad! Some guy asked me the other day if it was snowing outside... it took me 30min to figure out he was trying to sell me coke.
This is not a mall people. This is some other creepy thing all in one building, and I don't know what it should be called.
I hate this crap-hole of a mall. Anyplace that has a Ross and a Christian Supply Store is definitely not any place I want to be.
We ate lunch at the mall's food court. Sbarro's is a chain restaurant usually so good that it was a big success in New York City where folks know good Italian food. But this Sbarro's was the absolute worst; the lasagna was so overcooked it had the consistancy [sic] of Campbell's soup but was completely inedible.
more like a 90's Kids Movie
Like the ‘90s movie called Kids or something like Andre or Baby Geniuses? Who cares? All I know is that I really, really want to see Gateway Mall in person. And I won’t give beggars any money.
"Portlandia incorporates a series of absurdist short films featuring Armisen and Brownstein playing different characters, such as the owners of a feminist bookstore, a militant bike messenger and a punk rock couple negotiating a 'safe word' to help govern their love life."
Sometimes I feel very New York. Or maybe I just mean impatient. Thursday, for no reason whatsoever I was getting steamed while steamrolling pedestrians on my walk from subway to office thinking about how Portlanders wait for the light to change before crossing the street even when there is no car in sight and that I probably did the same thing for years even though I can't remember it because I didn't know better. Does it make you a rube to follow the rules? I mean, you can and will get ticketed for jaywalking in Portland.
And then when I get all ruffled over Whole Foods giving employee discounts based on BMIs, I realize I still have some Portland Libertarian in me. I don't even shop at Whole Foods so who gives a shit. But I do. With the exception of feminist and non-fat-apologist blogs, the reaction has been more, "fuck you, fatties, lose weight and shut up,” which surprised me because weight is not really the issue.
Whether you're morbidly obese with perfect blood pressure and cholesterol (I'm always surprised on You Are What You Eat that the subjects almost never have health problems—they're just fat and eat crappy food) or a chain smoker on Lipitor who weighs 110 pounds, it's not your employer's business.
I would qualify for a silver-level discount, though I smoked a cigarette last night (who would ever know?) and keep my blood pressure in check with medication (again, who would know?) A 25-pound weight loss and regular exercise has had zero effect on my blood pressure. My doctor says that even if I lost another 20 pounds, it’s likely that I would still need to take medication. Genetics, they are real. I know a slim vegetarian with high cholesterol and another (my gynecologist) with high blood pressure. It does happen.
Then again, this program isn’t mandatory. If you voluntarily waive your right to privacy for an extra 10% off a bag of Pirate's Booty, then you get what you deserve. Cheaper tasty faux-healthy popcorn, I guess?
