morning commute chronicles: signs of.

There's a difference between year-round bike commuters and the fair weather variety, and it's not just the self-righteousness, although that's certainly the most strident feature of Portland's rainy cyclists. The faded raincoats and worn panniers belie the sunglasses and shorty-shorts. We've been eroded for months; our rust and mildew, resistant to scraping, is starting to dry and fall away with the sun. Our bikes stay clean longer, and look shinier and newer than the garage-protected sleeping beauties that took five months off. Looks of confusion - when did the Broadway Bridge get so crowded? why are there so many cruisers? I didn't know they made saddles that wide! It's like a surfboard! - pass over our faces (which, I'm certain, are slightly more aged due to weather-beating) on sunny days like the ones we're having now. Timid riders who have forgotten the fearlessness with which bikers can own the roads look askance at the bikers who juke in and around traffic with ease. The bike racks of Portland will soon be over capacity, so I'm enjoying this shoulder season with all the human signs of spring. Welcome back, prodigal bikers!

morning commute chronicles, part 19

Me to a POWER RIDER of the first degree on a really fancy, decked-out bike, who was totally spaced out: "Hey Spandex Ballet! The light's green!" (Russell, I thought of you.)

Yuppie dude on Surly as he passes me: "On your left, bro."
Me as I pass him a couple minutes later on the bridge: "I'm not a bro. I have tits."

Dee 'sgusting

That was your warning.

I snot-rocketed so fantastically, the business-suited motorist next to me, with an astonished (perhaps admiring?) smile, mouthed, "WOW." As if to say, "That was an achievement. I will arrange for a plaque." People are strange, particularly when it comes to non-verbal commentary.

Verbal commentary, unfortunately has yielded crappier results of late. Biking mid-afternoon the other day, a guy in the passenger seat of what looked to be his 20-something son's car. He opened his window and shouted to me as they pulled away, nodding at the woman on a bike in front of me, "I wish I were riding a bike behind HER, too!" He threw in a lecherous grin for good measure. Initially stunned into stutters, I didn't want the woman (who didn't acknowledge this exchange at all, or at least didn't turn around) to interpret my silence as complicity, so I shouted "ASSHOLE!" at the parting car.

Something about the range of communication on the streets between cars and bikes intrigues me. It's intrinsically combative, I think, as both cyclists and motorists feel entitled to the road. But it's also a little bit intimate, as the commuter sphere is a personal space - think of all the things you do in your car, think of how it's your own traveling bubble. Most bikers I know have a certain biking face, a certain biking mentality they enter, which I think is comparable. I'm more apt to talk to a stranger when I'm biking than walking or grocery shopping or whatever. Still, the latter example shows that being revealing is a two-way street, if you'll pardon the pun/cliche.

a plea on behalf of my fave bookstore

In Other Words, an absolutely rad non-profit, collectively-owned, volunteer-run, feminist, queer-friendly bookstore is going under and needs $11K to stay afloat. I've already chipped in, and, if you're a fan of them and their rad gatherings and radder community, you should too. I love this place. You can find all the activist and feminist reading you could want, plus great cookbooks, nature books, and gifty trinkets that aren't appallingly kitschy. They host Dirty Queer, a notorious monthly erotica reading. It's a great place to spend a few hours and more than a few dollars. They're taking donations in any amount, so kick 'em a few bucks and help keep one of the places I adore most in Portland up and running.

They're at 8 NE Killingsworth, if you feel like stopping in.

ha!

Bill Sizemore, local anti-teacher author of tremendously moronic ballot initiatives, was jailed for contempt of court. His above-linked "non-profit" has been suspected of and investigated for fraudulent practices, and Sizemore blew his fourth chance to file required state and federal tax documents. As such, the judge tossed him in jail. This man, I might add, is a convicted racketeer. Pardon my glee, but I do enjoy watching corrupt folks go down.

a pleasant thought for cyclists/talking about the weather

It turns out Portland averages as many days over 65 degrees (F) as it does rainy days - round about 150 each. To be precise, PDXers get 156 warm days, and 151 wet ones. Not bad for a reputedly damp, depressing and gray city. (If you follow the link, you will also see the rather unfortunate statistics on how many cloudy days we get. But it's still better than Anchorage!)

Vegan Mofo Day 20: Posted today for your pleasure

Posting at work is risky business, and not just on account of the "hey, you shouldn't be doing that" factor. My computer sucks on ice, so posting by email is actually not a bad way to go, minus the formatting disasters and inability to create links. So I've been saving mad drafts. Case in point.

Portland's small business friendliness enables tons of crafty, homegrown, quirky, kitschy, or just plain strange entrepreneurial ventures. If you could afford it, you could eat, wear, listen to, and ride entirely local. Pretty rad, no?

As such, PDX, being the super-liberal, local-pride type town that it is, hosts a host of vegan bakeries. My two favorites are the two heavy-hitters in town. Both Black Sheep and Sweetpea have storefronts and wholesaling enterprises, and are utterly, utterly bomb. Black Sheep's blueberry cornmeal muffins are truly inspirational, as are their peanut butter brownie bars. Slabs of heaven. Sweetpea, also often gluten-free, does these g-free brownies that are to die for. I don't know what kind of mad genius makes them so rad, but they are, friends. They are.

Sift is also gluten-free on top of being vegan, and distributes their cookies widely, notably through grocery stores like People's and New Seasons. New Seasons, by the way, carries a fair selection of vegan goodies and even makes some of their own.

Monkey Wrench owns my heart in terms of cookies. I have yet to try the lemon poppy seed or the espresso chocolate chip because I usually breakdown and reliably go for peanut butter chocolate chip. These cookies are my solution to a bad day and have been since I moved to Portland - well before Operation: Vegan Month.

Cherry Bomb Bakery appears to be an all-order type operation that does wedding cakes and other things of that nature. Her pictures are gorgeous. Check it!

Piece of Cake in Sellwood has a decent range of vegan cakes and cookies. Their storefront is truly strange, if you're ever in the neighborhood. The owner is quite friendly, but don't get her started on politics.

Word is that Sweet Masterpiece in the super-yuppie Pearl District has many vegan options. I have yet to confirm this. anyone have the scoop?

Close encounter of the fratty kind

So I was running last night, headphones on, and a subaru wagon rolls up next to me with three or four dude-bros in it. They didn't seem drunk (it was maybe 7:30), but they were certainly yelling gleefully and having a merry old time. The dude sitting shotty sees me and yells out the window, "YEAH! Running for OBAMA!" Not knowing what else to do, I grinned at them and pumped my fist in the air in time with my stride. They all cheered and drove off. Ahh, Portland: Where even the dude-bros lean left.

misc. wtfs

ITunes went nuts! Chances are, I'm way late to this news, but what on earth is the genius bar? The only bars I want to do with that have no liquor involve either salads or attorneys. (Pause for requisite dirty joke.) I suppose I've been ignoring those "update iTunes?" pop-ups for too long.

Portlanders: Ignore the Mercury's voter guide and vote NO on 60. NONONO. Imposing "quality" based standards on teachers ensures only one thing: that teachers will teach to standardized tests out of fear of losing their jobs or their schools' funding. It's as bad an idea as 58, Sizemore's other idiotic education reform brainchild.

Recovering or former sex offenders in Maryland are being asked to not celebrate Halloween (via Feministing). It's this sort of mentality, this "criminals are a different breed" mode of thought that keeps offenders and ex-offenders segregated from greater society, and thus inhibits reintegration after prison. Don't get me started - this is foolish in the extreme. Why not just tattoo "child molester" on their foreheads and get it over with? Why not just send them to Australia? Honestly, if we don't start treating our offenders better as a nation, we'll never find our way off the Amnesty International watch lists.

Go Phillies!

holla!

check it.

Vegan MoFo Day 9: My Co-op Owns My Heart. Collectively.

The vegan food emporium closest to my house is People's. I adore this place. It's like the best candy store in the world, but instead of jawbreakers, there are three different kinds of lentil. In bulk. One lovely thing about supporting a grocery store that shops as locally as possible is the freshness of the produce. My potatoes smell like dirt and taste rich and buttery. It's almost impossible not to eat with the seasons, as the surplus produce goes on sale with the harvest cycles. Oh, did I mention the weekly farmer's market that runs all year long? Yep, ALL YEAR LONG. Hells yes, I eat fresh in February. Hells yes, that's possible.

All of that is fantastic in and of itself, but I also own a share of this beauteous creation. The collective ownership notion appeals to me in a big way. The sense of locale, the sense of community is very strong there; the faces are becoming familiar as my neighbors and I bump into each other while foraging for damaged avocados and agave nectar. I'll see the gal who works at the video rental place, a friend from Eugene, or just someone whose face I recognize from shopping regularly. It's not quite the neighborhood bar, but it's just as warm and fuzzy.

Vegan MoFo Days 4-6: I heart cruelty-free lists

Cravings for cheese: Abundant. But I'm still not whining.
Weekly food budget: $7 tops. This is not a good month to get all crazy creative with the culinaria.
The number of soy products in my life has: Drastically increased. I'm not sure how okay I am with this. More on this later.

THE TOP TEN THINGS NO ONE TOLD ME ABOUT VEGANISM:
10. Living off of chips and salsa, oatmeal, and/or PB&J gets the job done. Not that I'd want to or have been, but those two items have saved me in a pinch more than once already. And I'm sure they will again. Guac, too. Mmm.
9. I don't really feel like I'm better, smarter or more ethical than anyone else. I just think about food constantly. So much for the "smug vegan" trope.
8. Earth Balance is damn expensive! Granted that I'm on a serious budget* but come on!
7. Soy yogurt should never, EVER be eaten at any temperature other than straight-outta-the-fridge cold. The tapioca associations are too much for this girl.
6. Rennet. Why don't people tell me these things when I am eating cheese? That's filthy!
5. Evidently it's common for most vegans to graze all day AND eat major meals.
4. Veganism isn't always a sure-fire weight loss plan, but the golden triad of veganism, biking as a sole form of transportation, and having no money seem to do the trick. Explains why Portland is full of skinny-skinnies (in skinny jeans).
3. Gluten-free vegans who opt not to eat soy are the most hardcore people alive, dietarily speaking.
2. Animal rights is really not an issue that politicians ever talk about, unless it's the city counsel going on about pit bulls. And that's crap.
1. Absolutely NO ONE told me that - how to put this? - my GI tract would kick into high gear. I kept a pretty high fiber diet before, but now!

TOP TEN THINGS ABOUT VEGANISM THAT I'D BEEN TOLD AND THIS WEEK CONFIRMED:
10. Nutritional yeast makes damn near everything taste better.
9. It's just a dietary choice. It's only an identity if you make it one.
8. Soup is the simplest thing ever to make vegan. I have big plans to alter a matzoh ball soup recipe. Mmmm. Seitan dumplings.
7. Coffee is universal, amazing and essential no matter what your breakfast looks like.
6. Being more attentive about what and how you eat is immensely rewarding. Why would anyone want something unidentifiable in their meals? That's silly and gross.
5. Vegans are not necessarily picky eaters. There are worlds of foods omnis would never touch that vegans embrace. Most omnis in my circle are tofu-tolerant or even pro-, but other synthetic proteins scare the hell out of 'em. To say nothing of exploring the full extent of the bulk section or anything with "sprouted" in it's name. Really, there are more edible plants, grains and legumes on this planet than are dreamt of in omnivory.
4. Portland is a ridiculously easy place to go vegan.
3. It's not horrendously rude or out of line to ask what the french fries were fried in.
2. Tofu scrambles are best served frequently.
1. Nutritional yeast. Again. Seriously.

*I'm saving money pretty aggressively so I can move out. My rent is too damn high, and I don't want to pay to heat this big, under-used house (our landlord won't let us add more people despite the extra room, so we're locked into way too much rent mo-nay) all winter. Plus, everyone I know lives in a different part of town. Granted that I'd be further from the vegan mini-mall, but closer to just about everything else. So that's that news. I haven't informed my roommates, but this will likely go down around January.

the morning peloton

Every day, I bike across the Hawthorne bridge - arguably the most iconic of Portland's 12 river spans. It's certainly the most crowded, as literally thousands pedal over it every day; the bulk of these riders, like me, travel east to west to get downtown, to the med school, or to the West Hills. As such, depending on when I get my start in the morning, I tend to be in a crush of about thirty other cyclists. This peloton contains casual commuters like myself, bespandexed muscle-cases, scrawny bike messenger-types, middle-aged power-riders with bikes far more expensive than necessary, cruisers on cruisers, and so on. There's a bit of reshuffling, cries of "on your left!", before we all drop into the chute, the downslope that raises Madison street above the Southeast industrial district. Once we're speeding down that course, it's single file for a quarter mile because of heavy foot traffic. The pedestrians merge onto the bridge and skitter like mice while biker after biker zips by. Only assholes try to pass on the bridge itself during morning rush hour.

I used to bike into the heart of downtown (which admittedly is not at all far from the Hawthorne bridge), but now I turn off earlier and cruise down Naito parkway. Most bikers opt for riding along the waterfront, but I can't stand all the traffic (foot, bike, recumbent and rent-a-cop) and there's no easy way to get to my turn from that path. Natio has a straight-shot bike lane and very few northbound cars. I'm going half a mile to a mile further everyday now, but it doesn't take me any longer than it did to wend and wind between cars in the thick of downtown's morning riots used to.

The peloton will thin out when the rains begin. Don't think that I'm sad about it, either. The camaraderie of dozens of speeding bikers wears thin, just like a pack of Toyotas caught in the 7:45 jam. The wet makes it harder to stop quickly, and less experienced bikers will often eat shit because their brakes aren't reacting "normally" in a downpour. The rain itself is an obvious deterrent, too. The familiar faces in the pack are the folks I've seen day after day for months, folks I've commiserated with during storms and heat alike. Still, the crowd becomes more of a trickle. For the here and now, though, my morning peloton gives me such a fucking rush. It's my own personal Tour, contracted into a fifteen minute bridge sprint.

various.

The mistranslations in some of these documents I review at work can be pretty thought-provoking. Usually, the intent is preserved, but the wording is at a strange nexus of clarity and cumbersome-ness. For example, a mechanical device won't be quieter or reduce noise, it will endeavor to "improve silence." The idea of silence as a sliding scale, something that can be optimized, appeals to me in a weird way.

In more exciting, less navel-gazerly news, my roomies and I found a house and we'll hopefully move in this weekend. It's in southeast, right around the corner (literally -- less than a block) from where I'm staying now. My commute to work remains 10-15 minutes. The bars I like (and the E-room) are still comfortably close. Ahhh. Damn, it feels good to be a resident.

It occurred to me today that this is the first September 11th that has fallen on a Tuesday since the towers fell. This is not insignificant, at least not to me. That Tuesday, I worked at the Anchorage Daily News after school and saw a frenzied newsroom that I can't forget. That Tuesday was one of many tuesdays of my junior year of high school -- Tuesday was my favorite day of my favorite year of an otherwise middling-to-shitty episode of life.

This Tuesday is one of what will be one of many like others. I'm working my way toward a schedule again, and Tuesdays herald staff meetings instead of the best block schedule of the week (periods 1,2,4 and 5 -- human anatomy, pottery, drawing and AP European history -- sad that the only reason I remember this is because of the attacks.) At any rate, watching the protesters in Pioneer Courthouse Square while munching my leftovers got me thinking about watching that terrifying footage over and over in school, until I asked my history teacher to let me leave.

blogging is self-indulgent and that's why i do it.

-INTENSE WHINING ALERT-

Job searching sucks. House hunting sucks. I'm sick of being blown off.

On the plus side, the biking lifestyle is already making some changes to the shape of my calves.

Mother keeps hinting that I could go back to Anchorage. That feels like quitting, and be damned if I'm going to quit one more Big Thing because the going got tough.

Adam arrives on the 17th, and we leave for Montana early on the 20th. I'm looking forward to getting out of my pocket of SE for a little bit and spending some time with Boy.

Bad news from a good friend. Bought smokes, couldn't bring myself to finish a one.

House-sit ends today. I'm losing the beautiful garden and house I'd had all to myself.

Schmoozed with two Mercury writers and a couple of bloggers last night. Not especially fun, although I think I faked it well. Free drinks and food from L helped. Just seeing L helped.

And I am incredibly depressed. The days are long and full of nothing, and I'm too impatient to enjoy them. Wondering vaguely why I ever leave comfortable places.

SWL ISO job

I hope my present unemployment (no word from the temp agency, which is irritating beyond measure) doesn't start to reflect poorly on these applications for houses I'm trying to fill out. New Seasons is hiring. Hell, I could telemarket. Another damn tyranny of options situation over here.

The move was more or less smooth, the last nights in Eugene festive. I'm excited to settle into independence up here, but getting there is not exactly going to be a breeze. Unemployment and homelessness are still uncomfortable and unresolved.

Although I suppose I could be a little easier on myself considering I've been here for all of two days now.

Also: read the latest Harry Potter. My only comment until anti-spoiler fury dies down: favorite passage is on page 644. You'll know which one I mean. I giggled for about ten minutes picturing Maggie Smith in there.