Sensitivity Training: Part One

The good news: While I have not yet found a partner to run with me the levels of the great Parking Structure of Life, I have found a companion.

The bad news: The companion looks like this for about twenty hours out of every day. Bo-ring.

The other bad news: she is a rescue cat that came with the name Precious (Based on the novel Push by Sapphire--ha). It is not, to be frank, the name that I would choose. But I can't quite bring myself to change it either--it's been her identity for ten years. Who am I to sweep in and name her Lucinda, or Jo, or any other name I would maybe give a cat? So, when she is being charming and nuzzling me, I call her Cat. And when she is doing things I find less charming, I call her Cat.

The other bad news: she's a cat. Which means fur balls, stinky litter box, and after only one week, my apartment now rests under a thin layer of cat hair. Each day, I become a little more of a cat lady. There was also the digestive incident that I will just call "The Bath Mat Event of 2010."

The good news: I am learning sensitivity. The whole idea is that I give the Cat a nice home, and she gives me a major dose of what my mom calls "responsibility for another living being's happiness." Which I have been told I need. Responsibility, sensitivity, awareness, blah, blah, blah.

Because there is a weird myopia that happens when you're twenty-seven and accustomed to living alone: every other living, breathing creature becomes an imposition on your life. For instance, when birds wake me in the morning, I feel irrational rage at their intrusion upon MY LIFE and MY BEDROOM. I hate them, because they're clearly on earth just trying to keep me from getting a full eight hours.

But now, I've got a cat, and I'm sensitive, so I think, "How nice that the birds have trees to be in, and their trees were here before my apartment, so we'll just have to share the universe. Lah-di-dah." Then I check in with the cat, and see to her needs (cat food) before my own (coffee). This, apparently, is what grown-ups do.

I've been working to adjust to this responsibility--and YES, I do realize that cats are ridiculously independent and need very little and this particular cat would probably attempt to eat my face if I fell asleep for too long and she got hungry enough--but it is still a first step in my life! I am her person. She doesn't eat if I'm not around. That's something!

The cat, this cat that is teaching me "responsibility for another living creature's happiness" is weird. She snores. Like human snores. We take lots of naps together, on the futon. And on more than one occasion, I've woken up, which has woken her up, and I wander into the kitchen for a snack because that is what I always do after a nap, and she wanders into the kitchen to pick at the leftovers in her food bowl, and I'm at the cabinet eating chips, and she's at her food bowl, and she looks up at me, and I look down at her, and we both seem to say: "Hey! This is alright."

And on Saturday morning, while I was in bed working on a short story (congratulatory pat on the back for working on a short story!), she curled up at my side and put her head on my chest, and kept me company while I worked. And I'm not saying I've gone totally soft, over-the-moon, my-cat-is-a-real-person, crazy. I'm just saying it was nice.

With enduring sensitivity and a grown-up sense of responsibility,

Kendall

After two nights of watching singer-songwriters...

I want to MARRY a singer-songwriter.

Seriously.

I understand that they are just people, with all the indignities and imperfections of regular people. They put their pants on one leg at a time just like the rest of us. But they also play instruments, and write artful, intelligent song lyrics, and then sing them. And they've got such nice forearms that they show off while strumming their guitars. Many of them have tattoos. And history. I love tattoos and history.

While watching Joe Pug, Ciara said, "I just want to take him home and feed him." I was like, "Get in line." (Hopefully, Joe Pug likes cold cereal.)

This weekend, Birds on a Wire came to Pullman, and I discovered some new musicians that I'd never heard before. Now I want to tell my slog! Here are two videos that will do a little to recreate the magic of Joe Pug and Justin Townes Earle. But if these men ever come to your town, go see them! Please?

Here's Your Misshaped, Lumpy Heart

Two things about me: I don't get too excited about Valentine's Day, and I don't bake. I mean, I've done both before (getting excited about Valentine's Day, and baking), but never together, and either one on its own doesn't bring me all that much joy.

So imagine my surprise today, when I found myself baking cookies for Valentine's Day, with Ciara. She made the dough (thank god, because me and "measuring" are not friends), and then I rolled it out, and helped make heart shapes with the cookie cutters, and drizzled chocolate on the sugar cookies at the very end (Did I drizzle chocolate on some of the cookies in such a way as to suggest a broken heart with a crack down the middle? Why, yes. Yes I did. That's the honest truth about hearts). It was mostly lovely, until the very end, when we were both sweaty, tired, and we made four GIANT cookies just to be done with all the damn dough. Happy frickin' Valentine's Day.

But before that, as I finished rolling out and cutting the sugar-cookie dough, I would collect the scraps and smush them together again and again, making a smaller and smaller ball until it was too little for a cookie cutter. I showed Ciara the tiny remainder of scraps.

"Just make your own heart with it," Ciara said. So I did. I used my fat, flour-covered, non-baking fingers to mold my own little heart, and I put it on the cookie sheet with the rest. Then, I went about my business, trying to make chocolate-chip cookies shaped like hearts (it doesn't really work, FYI, they mostly look like butts).

At one point, Ciara turned to me. "Here's your heart," she said, and held out the sad, misshaped, burnt-to-a-crisp heart I'd made from scraps. I thought to myself, "Yeah, that seems about right." And I ate my heart in a single bite. It was tasty!

Here's the best news of all. When you bake cookies at Ciara's, it starts like this:

(no, the recipe doesn't call for whisky. but the bakers do.)

Weird Science

Wow! Did you miss me?!? It's like I got to Portland, and I was so busy talking to everybody all about my blog, that I forgot to write the stupid blog! But now, I'm back.

If the next few entries look or smell weird, it's because I'm writing them from Portland. It's different here. Portland is weird. I've come home to celebrate Christmas, but mostly to watch hilarious interactions between my mother's cats (the bulimic one versus the one with cacne, "cat acne"); to do a bunch of laundry for free; and to try to eat more than my brothers. It seems only natural that I blogtalk, for a hot minute, about Portland (though, who are we kidding, I live in Beaverton, which is a whole different ballgame. An altogether boring one).

A classic Portland bumper sticker says, "Keep Portland Weird." (This sticker may have originated in Austin TX, then P-town just changed the name of the city to suit our weird needs.) The slogan is meant to call attention to the fact that Portland is proudly, determinedly weird. Just a few examples: there is a velvet painting museum (I think there might actually be two velvet painting museums). Female strippers here get totally, totally naked. It rains all the time but you hardly ever see an umbrella. We've built a whole city for books. There is a forest in the middle of town. Etc, etc.

But what makes one place weirder than any other? One could argue that Moscow is weird. Is it not weird to live in a city that smells like a sewage treatment facility? A city that has cows with glass windows built into their stomachs? And a billboard outside a gun store that reads, "Your wife said it's okay, Buy a new gun today!"?

Still, I've compiled a list of events that have happened to me here in Portland in the past few days, and have never happened in Idaho.

*Hottest Bod in the USA. I met several friends out on Friday, where we drank fancy drinks, talked about online dating (good), online stalkers (bad), the inevitability that we will all accidentally bonk our future, hypothetical babies' heads on things based on our tendency to bonk our own heads on things (we decided they will turn out fine anyway), and of course, discussed who to vote for in the Hottest Bod in the World contest. This is something that happens when your friend is a public relations guru. JLG represents Bodman fragrance (we've all seen the "Hot bod!" commercials, right?), and she told us to tell the world--I was like, I'm bringing it to my blog, so don't worry, the world will know--to vote. Everyone, vote for Jordy! Not convinced, yet? Watch this video--and be warned, not totally SFW, since it features some awesome objectification of the male body. It is important to be an educated voter. But I think we can all agree that Jordy is the hottest bod.

*Singing Christmas Trees, and Progressive Political Carols. Notorious KMW suggested we go to a bar called the Slammer, because, as she said, "They kind of go all out with the Christmas decorations." She was not lying. I didn't get a photo, but it sort of looked like this, except a dive bar:

While we were there, guess who came in? Some progressive political carolers! They sang a song that went something like this (sung to the tune of "12 Days of Christmas"): "In the first year of Presidency, Obama promised me..." then, there were twelve things that included (I can't remember them all, but I think you'll get the gist): closing Gitmo, repealing the Patriot Act, reforming schools, no home foreclosures, and, instead of "a partridge in a pear tree," they sang, "open gays in the military." I said, "Toto, we're not in Idaho anymore."

Then, the owner of the bar gave the carolers twenty dollars, and the head caroler said, "Alright, now let's go to my Dad's!" And they were gone.

All that Christmas activism made me have to go the bathroom, where in the stall, right next to the toilet, I found a singing, gyrating Christmas tree! The song was an obvious one, "Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree," though of course, in the bathroom I had to change the words to "Squattin' Around the Christmas Tree." There was a woman putting on makeup at the sink and I said, "It's weird that this tree is singing to me right now." She said, "Just be thankful you're not really messed up. I was in here last week, and that tree totally freaked me out." I was like, "Keep Portland Weird!"

*Inappropriate karaoke ballads. The progressive political carolers, and the singing Christmas tree in the toilet, got me in the mood to sing, too. So, we went to a karaoke bar where I decided that probably, in honor of Weird Portland, I ought to sing this song to a room full of strangers, with much love and deference paid to Wanya, Nathan, Shawn, and to Michael, above all others:

*POUTINE. Singing that totally seductive karoake ballad made me hungry, and KW said not to worry, that "the carts" were just down the street. I was like, "What are 'the carts'?" And she said, "You know, just a bunch of food carts." I was all, "No, I do not know. Where I live, there is only sometimes a single hot-dog cart that sometimes runs out of hot dogs before you can even place your order." So, we went to The Carts, which was, as she described, a whole wagon train of food carts, circled up, with Christmas lights all around the outside signaling "Come, Eat, Be Merry." So we did.

We ordered poutine from the Potato Champion. Do you know what poutine is? It's french fries, with cheese curds and gravy! It's apparently a French Canadien snack, and it is delicious. To the great dismay of my friends, I took some pictures of the cart, because I think it is the best idea ever that these little food villages are popping up late at night, for people who have gotten really hungry singing all FOUR parts of a Boys II Men song.



Do you notice that the Potato Champion is also the "Department of High Fives"? They were getting high fives right and left (literally, get it, left-handed and right-handed high-fives). I was like, "Weird. Portland is weird."

But synonyms for weird, according to thesaurus.com, include "awe-inspiring," "funky," "kinky," and "magical." Yes, yes, yes and yes.

I can try again.

Confession. I abandoned the blog. I am a bit of a quitter. I left "I can do lots of things," and I went off to do lots of things. I started a new job, found a new apartment, and had eighteen new boyfriends. One of those things is a lie. I got into a (minor) car accident and went to two strip clubs. I took several plane rides by myself.

But now, the weather is getting bad. And I am trying to watch less TV. So, the blog reasserts itself. I wonder: can I go back? Is it too late? There are problems, with the blog. It's not about anything, for starters. Another problem is that I don't want anyone to read it (No one does read it, of course, but I'm speaking more philosophically about the concept of writing a blog to have it NOT read. "If a tree falls in a forest, does anyone hear it?" Who gives a shit? That's my point. I think).

But my friend Natalie says to take time, find my voice, and not tell another living soul about the blog until I'm good and ready. Okay. She also says that good photos make or break a blog. So, I include this photo of me and my father, because one thing I can do is play "Heart and Soul" on the piano.