So Long to the Beaver State

New Year's Eve in PDX was very fun, as was a long afternoon of bloody marys the next day. This morning it's raining buckets and I've got a few hours left at the House of Pants before I'm off to the airport.

It's been a reflective trip for me, not least because I did a terrible job sleeping every night except last night so I had plenty of time to think. It was wonderful, of course, to see my family and friends. After being cooped-up in SC for months, the open spaces, the big cheap apartments, and the all-purpose elbow room was a visceral relief. The strongest impression I'm coming away with, though, just has to do with the space itself, of Oregon and of Portland. People are really, truly happy to live here, even while they deal with the usual laundry list of problems in their respective lives. I know lots (most?) of people feel the equivalent for either their home towns or the places they adopted after they moved away from home, but I also know that all of my roots are put down here in the Willamette Valley.

I also know that I completely fucked up in planning this trip. I really miss B and it was only because of my confusion and negligence in the middle of last term that she isn't here. Living-and-learning is a cold, unsatisfying recompense for mistakes, but I'll make the best use of it I can so that something like this won't happen again.

So it's back to the Cali central coast, just in time to dodge the big storm system that's apparently coming in. Expect the return of lots of whiny blog posts about me teaching + QE-prepping + second MA paper writing in the very immediate future.

Bacon Fries and Tech Support

Yes, while here in E-town, I had a chance to hit up Rennie's and enjoy a SEVEN DOLLAR AND FIFTY CENTS PITCHER and a big plate of their famous bacon cheesy fries. Which are served with ranch. Fear the wrath! The lovely and talented E was kind enough to accompany me, as was my brother. I'm sad that I'm leaving today, but I'm looking forward to checking in with an elite cadre of the PDX kids.

A note about my week here in the Emerald City: I am the tech-supportinist of sons. Here's what I did:

1. Hooked up the wireless to my mom's/stepdad's new cable connection using a handy hack I found online.
2. Hooked up all of the A/V stuff for their big-ass new tv. Cable + Tivo + DVD + VHS...total remotes: five (including the one that came with the TV itself.)
3. My stepdad's laptop spontaneously died, hard, so I had to reinstall the whole thing from scratch, after trying the nonsense detailed in this Microsoft support article. That kept me busy yesterday morning.

Happily, I'm staying in P-town at the headquarters of the rackm0unter, and that guy knows how to do his own tech support like Bon Jovi knows how to hair-spray, so I expect to have a few days off from computering.

Anyway, happy new year's everyone. Stay out of trouble.

Completely Rad

On We Go

For a good time combine:

1. A chilly, rainy town.
2. Lots of red wine.
3. Pizzas and other tasty stuff.
4. Good-lookin' kids.

The last 24 hours have been great. I had lunch with some of the extended family, hooked up yet more electronics for my mom and stepdad, then had dinner and vino and games with an elite cadre of fun kids. This morning my mom and I went for one of our patented long walks and I was again reminded of how lucky I was to grow up in a town full of trees and paths and moss instead of strip malls and parking lots.

I Hates Me Some Flying

Planes: they are illogical. They're huge and made of metal, and they have these engines that are very small compared to the mass of the thing they're supposed to lift. Whenever I do the mental math, I come up with a twisted pile of burning wreckage to-be and an image of me plummeting to earth screaming "I told you sooooooooooooo!!!"

Anyway, despite my skepticism, my flight went off like clockwork yesterday. I want to give a shout out to my homies* at Horizon Air** for sucking so very much less than, say, United. Because man, United sucks. And Horizon provides complimentary microbrew and wine; this is an in-flight service that I appreciate.

So, I'm now back at the homestead in Eugene. My mom got me a rad argyle sweater for Xmas and my brother got me a rad Amazon gift card and a rad funny mug with a D+D parody on it. It's snowing and cold here and, naturally, we're planning on going out for a walk in a bit. I've already attended to my son duties and hooked up the wireless router to my mom's/stepdad's new cable modem, so I feel like I'm pulling my weight so far.

* "A shout out to my homies" is the most early-90s hip-hop phrase I could come up with.
** Alaska owns and operates Horizon. I'm not sure why they bother to maintain the separate name, considering they don't even have a distinct website for Horizon. But, uh, who the hell cares, now that I think of it.

Holiday Reasons

I like Xmas and the related hoo-ha. I like it because it means I have a week off with my family and/or B's family, and I like hanging around with both. I like breakfast drinks followed by lazy day-long couch-sittings followed by evening drinks. I like the present exchange for the sake of the whole ritual of it and the wee surprises that no one anticipates that are nice to get. I think all of the (logically valid) reasons people don't like Xmas (i.e. the rampant commercialism, family tension, built-up expectations) don't phase me because they don't apply to me. I'm an atheist, so the "true meaning" of Xmas doesn't matter to me, I'm lucky enough to have families I get along with, and my expectations involve drinking and eating, which are achievable.

So: happy Xmas, everyone. Drink up.

So Much For Capitalism / Let's Talk About the Weather

One of the books on my QE list is The Golden Age of Capitalism, a kind of economic history retrospective of Europe's trente glorieuses from 1945-1975. Along the same lines, Eric Hobsbawm's Age of Extremes, a history of the European twentieth century, starts with a discussion of the unprecedented changes that happened in the same period, which he sees as being ultimately more consequential than the world wars. The point in both cases is that about 1970 was the best time to be an average schmuck in a first-world Atlantic nation. And it's gone downhill for average schumucks ever since (on the other hand, it's a totally kickass time to be a CEO or a Chinese industrial magnate.) My generation is the first in America in the twentieth century that will not do as well as its parents did.

What horrifies me the most is that, as this this smart guy often points out, the American economy has been running on credit for the last twenty-something years. As long as housing prices kept going up, people could sort of sustain borrowing against their houses and not go under. Between that and the nigh-universal phenomenon of credit card debt, Americans were able to sustain lifestyles they couldn't actually "afford" in the traditional sense. And now, with the collapse of the sleazy, despicable sub-prime mortgage practices, the whole house of cards is teetering.

There's no right answer for this shit (except that it started with Reagan.) And the more I read, the more I'm reminded of some good advice I got from this one girl recently, that to a certain extent all you can do is take care of yourself and try to keep your head above water.*

Then there's the weather. I'm not going to harp on about the rain again, just note something I noticed recently. Part of America's European cultural inheritance is its love of sunlight and heat. "Our" ancestors (apologies to non-European descendants) starved and froze when the winters were too long. Sunlight meant the crops would grow, while too much rain meant that they'd rot in the fields. Likewise, until the massive demographic shift after WWII from the rust belt to the sun belt (think: family from Detroit moves to Phoenix), most Americans lived in areas of the country that more-or-less corresponded to northern European climatic conditions.

I guess part of my sourness every time I hear people talking about how it's a "nice" day when it's day 200 of a drought or it's 80 degrees in October is that the conditions that our cultural perception of weather were based on are gone. In other words: I am objectively right to love rain and cold, because it's both necessary for life and endangered. (Insert tongue-sticking out emoticon.)

To sum up: lucky us, we get to live through the decline of American prosperity and the acceleration of climate change. And as usual, I'm pretty sure Dick Cheney is behind it all.

* A position made more difficult when you're ostensibly a socially-engaged would-be academic, not that being one makes much of a difference.

Bunnies at Xmas

B discovered the SC Rabbit Haven shortly after we moved here. They take care of abused/abandoned bunnies and get them adopted. Despite the ongoing financial predicaments of a grad student/part-time state university employee household in one of the most expensive towns in the US, we donated 30 bucks to them as our official holiday charity. The bunny picture is of one of their new ones who was abused so badly her teeth were knocked out. She looks almost exactly like Pesto. People who hurt animals make me wish I was wrong about hell not existing.

Our pro-bunny agenda has to do with the following:

• Litter-box trained!
• Never get sick!
• Cost next to nothing to own!
• So fuzzy you can barely handle it!
• They like to watch movies on the couch!
• Bunny sprints around the apartment are friggin' adorable!

In non-bunny news, I went out yesterday after a fun-filled lunch with the M clan, featuring a girl her mom calls "Doodle", and bought a bunch of booze. Last night I made my first few lemon drops, which were quite successful. * For Saturday morning, we're having bellinis, but with mango instead of peach: chilled Prosecco and mango juice, much tastier than a mimosa.

These supplies will be essential once B's brother A arrives tomorrow evening. In the meantime, I have two more books to try to get through, and in doing so I must try to resist the siren call of a certain addictive video game.

* Naturally, I would never drink a drink so girly as a lemon drop. I just had to have one as an experiment. In the name of science.