You're Doing It Wrong

Just so you know, I saw it this morning at the 9:30 show and it was AWESOME.

FOODday is the food section of the Oregonian and comes out on Tuesday. It used to be my favorite part of the paper but a couple of months ago they hired a new editor who comes from Connecticut.

I’m not sure why they felt the need to hire someone from back east. Don’t we have lots of talented and interesting locals with a unique regional insight?

Instead we get a lady from Connecticut who can’t stop telling us how she just moved here and is just figuring it all out: “I’ve been in Portland for only six weeks and haven’t yet traveled around the state, but it’s quite apparent that there’s something different about this region … .” Your journey of discovery is more interesting to you than it is to us, Martha.

This week she tells us that when her friends call they all want to know: Is she happy? Does it really rain all the time? How’s the shopping. Turns out: Martha says our food shopping is “as good or better than anywhere I’ve ever lived.” I hope she tells her friends we have paved roads and ATM machines, too!

Or maybe not. If people from back east realize there’s civilization out here they might all want to come.

The cover of this Sunday’s New York Times magazine talks about modernism — more specifically about preserving modernist architecture. I have no idea what any of this means, I’m just mentioning it because I was relieved that I wasn’t interested in reading most of the magazine: more found time!

My favorite part of the magazine is the Domains column which only runs once a month and features various people in their homes and asks them questions about their stuff. This month the person was Terence Riley, the chief architecture and design curator at MOMA. He talks about living space: “I like having a small apartment … I like really simple spaces you can inhabit.”

I’m not sure there’s a clear connecting line here but this inspired me to think what my ideal living space would be and I decided I would like one big rectangle with walls lined with shelves, cupboards and cabinets and everything put away. I would get a big zamboni ride-on vacuum cleaner and there wouldn’t be a bunch of crap piled around.

I read something recently that said that a slim man was more likely to cheat than an overweight man.

Isn’t that like saying a tall man is more likely to bump his head?

There’s another one going around that good looking kids are favored by their parents. Is it a major newsflash that good looking people are favored by the planet?

Or attractive anything. I picked up a dented carton of milk at Trader Joes earlier in the week (because I feel sorry for the broken stuff) instead of a more attractive non-dented carton and I got leaky milk all over everything as thanks for my open mind and compassion.

I read an article about getting stuff done that talked about “found time” meaning little bits of time you shave off here and there until you have a whole extra lump of it. I don’t think I’m explaining it very well, but I know what it means in my head.

For example, you’re waiting for your tea water to boil and while you wait, you put away the dishes from last night. Or like just now while I was downloading the 52 mb Chronicles of Narnia trailer, I picked up all the little papers I had sitting around on my desk and made a pile of things that need to go to the office on Monday. [And then I watched the trailer and it looks REALLY good. Yay, and I was so concerned that after my 2 hr and 20 minutes on Thursday morning that I would have no more movie events to look forward to.]

A major found time exercise for me is skipping reading things that don’t interest me or are stupid. And I don’t know why I feel obligated to read everything anyway. Somebody wrote it. Why am I personally responsible for making their time and energy worthwhile? I guess I worry I might miss something. Some fact that will become critical in a work or social situation.

But then look at how much worthless information is in the paper like an article about people lying about talking on their cellphones to avoid having to deal with what’s around them. That’s an article? And today the Oregonian had an article about men who use products (like skincare) which already has a name: metrosexuals and is about 2 years ago. Yay Oregonian, consistently behind the times again.

My sister accused me of being a suck-up after that last post. Hey girl: get a blog and you can suck up, too.

A number of years ago I read some sort of writers article. The kind where some old guy who’s been writing and/or editing for eons tells you all his writing pet peeves. Everybody has those. My current one is the misuse of “myself.” If I read one more memo that starts off, “Josephine, Heinrich and myself attended a meeting last week … ” I’m going to brain someone with a copy of Strunk and White. And that’s not a big book so it’ll take awhile.

One of this guy’s peeves was use of the word: coffer. “No one has coffers anymore,” he railed. “It’s antiquated and a silly cliche.”

Now this has become my pet peeve. I don’t want it to be my pet peeve. At no time did “coffer” even blip the radar and now every time I see it I think: stupid cliche. Last week I read all these stories about city coffers, county coffers, state coffers — newspapers reporters writing about government entities seem convinced there are coffers that are either being filled or, more often, woefully empty.

I checked to see if I could buy a coffer online. Here’s a whole Coffer Corp company that manufactures a range of flanges.

What’s a flange?

This is a Mothers Day post.

A week or two ago I did a workshop with Lynda Barry and the gist of the writing exercise is that you take a random prompt, say “cars,” and you write a list of 10 cars that you remember. Then you pick one on a new piece of paper write little notes of concrete details about that car, then you get a new piece of paper and start with “I am … ” and write a little story about the car. This is the simplified version but it’s a great exercise. You should try it.

For our main class exercise the prompt was: other people’s moms when you were a kid.

We did several versions of this exercise and at the end a few people read. Two of the people that read wrote stories about how they wished the mom they were writing about was their mom and how their moms were somehow, not ideal. (In their kid voice, not like now.)

I thought about that later. I never wished someone else’s mom was my Mom. I thought my Mom was better than the other kids Moms. (I’m going to give up on proper punctuation of the possessive. My head hurts {see yesterday’s post} and I don’t like apostrophes anyway. Live with it.)

I remember I didn’t like to eat at other kids houses when their mom cooked because other moms weren’t good cooks. And we always had good birthday parties. And we had pet rats. And we read lots of books.

You did good Mom. Happy Mothers Day.

I’m fighting off a cold or flu or something. I feel just yucky enough to be annoyed but not enough to call myself sick. But the most troubling symptom is weariness. I had a fairly slow-paced morning. But around 1pm I could barely sit at my desk so I decided to go to bed and read and after about 15 minutes I had to take a nap.

I felt a million times better when I woke up and had a normal day except that I got in bed at 7:50pm and clicked the light off at exactly 9:00pm (and it was a struggle to make it to 9:00).

In the late afternoon I thought I might watch a movie and The Core was on one of our channels. We just got DVR (digital recording) and Bob got highspeed Internet and then the cable company gave us a free upgrade to all the channels again. So at present we have 500 channels (or however many the max is) plus 5 netflix at a time. If there were ever a recipe for expanding butt syndrome, this is it.

But my point here, is that I felt crappy and thought I’d indulge in a TV movie on a Saturday afternoon and I started The Core which is the one with Hillary Swank and Aaron Eckhardt and it’s a sort of Armageddon only under the earth’s crust. If you’re thinking this sounds like the stupiest movie ever, you are correct. I lasted about 15 minutes– while organizing my recipe file — and I couldn’t do it.

A move that is not stupid is About Schmidt (it gets bold because it was good) which Bob and I finally saw for the first time and we loved it. As we were getting to the end we were saying, “I don’t want this movie to end.” Excellent writing. Excellent acting. Not ha ha funny, but the other kind of funny.

Also I see that another Elvis show is coming on, this one with the dreamy soccer coach from Bend it Like Beckham, which would be reason enough to watch anything BUT I am SO OVER Elvis. I was over Elvis about 15 years ago. I don’t think I was ever under Elvis. I don’t care. I don’t understand the endless fascination. Not even the dreamy soccer coach will get me to view.

Now that we’re at the new law firm the retirement plan is changing and I’ve been doing a bunch of homework to figure out what I want to do and where I’m at now.

The bummer about financial advice for retirement is that they always give you this scenario:

Trixie is 20 years old. Every year she puts $2000 into her retirement and invests it wisely and then when she’s 65 she has $3 billion dollars.

Good for frickin Trixie but (a) I didn’t have $2000 to spare when I was 20 years old and (b) that was a long time ago so hard cheese I can’t go back in time and change that. Why depress me now?

The other bummer with all these start-early scenarios is that they factor in completely optimistic returns based on some parallel reality of financial good fortune that doesn’t exist in the real world.

I didn’t start at 20 but I did start early, squirreling away a little bit at a time and I am dismayed to report that I do not even have what I would have had if I’d stuffed it in a mattress.

Seriously, how am I supposed to get excited about saving?

I’m doing it anyway. I’m in the process of changing all my accounts and I’m being a bit more aggressive about saving more. We don’t have to put any kids through college, so we’d better put ourselves into a nice comfortable old age. I’ll have the cash and Bob will have the entire String Cheese Incident disc collection.

Today we had some excitement on the train on the way home. A tractor trailer rig broke down and managed to block the northbound side of the tracks. I will give this to Trimet. They were on it and quick.

We had to wait about 10 minutes and then we crossed to the southbound tracks to get around it.

The driver explained all this as we went along but I didn’t realize how long we were going to be on the southbound tracks and as we zipped along I was a wee bit worried about what all the trains headed southbound were doing.

Those of us on the train, of course, knew what was going on but we drove through 3 stations on the wrong side and the people waiting gave us curious looks. A couple people wondered how they got it so mixed up and tried to board the train. Some others were pointing and laughing at us mockingly, as if we were unaware of the mixup.

I was relieved when we finally crossed back over to the northbound tracks.

I’ve only been doing this train thing for about 10 weeks and already a lot of adventures. I hope they all work out as well as this one.