slow glowing

varieties of experience

etched into the mirror outside the photobooth in the lobby of the ace hotel downtown are the words “you are beautiful.” the same words, backwards, are painted on the wall behind the mirror in the women’s bathroom at hopworks urban brewery on powell. i like it, i really like it, trite as it may be. i took this photobooth strip at the ace hotel during my dinner break today. i wish i had seen this entry by my friend kati before i did. actually, the woman who used the booth after me took photos of her beautiful pregnant belly.

tech week is letting up–our last preview was tonight, we open tomorrow, i got to sleep in this morning!–and i am starting to feel capable of more than working, sleeping, and eating (fairly badly). i did have a day off on monday. i could have slept and run errands, but instead i spent the whole day with a (relatively) new friend exploring southeast portland and rediscovering its beauty and all that good warm-fuzzy stuff. we walked through residential neighborhoods and in the reed canyon and listened to the sounds the plants made, counted their colors. green pines, purple bushes, red and pink plants with orange thorns, and of course the changing, falling and fallen leaves, a whole fiery rainbow of autumn. i said, “i think this portland neighborhood has more colors than the hawaiian jungle.” maybe, maybe not, but either way there is a lot of beauty everywhere. in the variety. see also above. you’re beautiful because you are a human amongst humans. yes.

sometimes i feel like an Explorer, even just walking down familiar streets i have walked down a hundred times. i think this and i laugh at myself. then i think some more and wonder if perhaps i am an explorer. exploring–or at least eager to explore–the unknown frontiers of my own life. it’s a choice i can make or not, you know? my refrain: there’s so many possibilities. a lot of exploring to be done. i think i will have been so many things by the time i’m through. maybe i will not be the best at any of them, but i think that’s okay.

this entry is too quick–still busy–a midnight picnic to get to soon, and there’s howling at the moon to be done, maybe, metaphorical or not, who can say?–but also this: today i finished an excellent book, an astonishing, consuming book about everything, the kind of book you bring up in conversation and the kind of book you ignore other conversations in order to read. and what a joy that is!

and what a joy the sun is, when it shines! and other times, the morning fog:

and yes, this too: