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:
art bikes hawaii india june 12th lit photo quoted theatre
by stacia
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looking up in looking down
i’m trying this again. my blog at log.whyiamnotdying.net gets about a bazillion spam comments a day lately, and i never felt totally myself writing there, which is probably why i mostly just posted a whole lot of photographs. plus, this seemed like the easiest way to upgrade to the new version of wordpress. i think i can write some stuff that’s suitable for public consumption without feeling stilted and weird if i just stop, i dunno, thinking about it too much. and i really would like to have a “travel” log ’cause life really is one hell of a journey these days. so here we go.
physically, i am pretty much healed from my june 12th injuries (when i was hit by a pick-up truck on my bike, resulting in a broken collarbone and some muscle damage in my right knee), though i’m still working on my strength and flexibility, and sleeping on my left side and carrying weight over my left shoulder are still uncomfortable. i also have a pretty ridiculous lump where the break was. emotionally… this too shall pass.
i’m not going to india as planned this fall/winter. i cancelled my plane tickets a couple of weeks ago. it’s not the right time for me, for several reasons, and i know it.
instead, i’m going to the big island of hawaii for a month to live and volunteer at an eco-hostel i found through the wwoof hawaii directory. for ages i’ve had this idea that wwoofing in hawaii is my “plan b” for when everything else went wrong. everything went a little bit wrong this summer, and so. i think it’s going to be pretty low-key for wwoofing, but that’s just as well for my healing body and mind. i am looking forward to being salty and sweaty. the place is called hedonisia and it’s about 4 miles from pahoa. i’m still trying to decide whether it’s worth the hassle and the extra cost to try to bring my bike with me.
in the meantime, i’m stage managing a show (2 weekends left in the run) and have some real employment lined up for when i get home from hawaii. i mean theatre employment–i mean they’re paying me! a more-than-symbolic amount! i am stagehanding during the holidays and then stage managing a show at a children’s theatre, which i am pretty excited about, most of the time. sometime last month i started getting all these indications that my efforts to establish myself in the theatre community here have begun to pay off… at the same time that i started to think about whether this kind of theatre work is really what i want to do with myself. i am so interested in running (or pedaling) off out of town all the time and sometimes i feel so very, very young and sometimes i feel like i oughta just grow up already.
too many tough goodbyes.
at least i am back on my beautiful bike.
there is a lot of hope in here somewhere.
lastly:
“The Man in Bogotá”
by Amy Hempel
The police and emergency service people fail to make a dent. The voice of the pleading spouse does not have the hoped-for effect. The woman remains on the ledge–though not, she threatens, for long.
I imagine that I am the one who must talk the woman down. I see it, and it happens like this.
I tell the woman about a man in Bogotá. He was a wealthy man, an industrialist who was kidnapped and held for ransom. It was not a TV drama; his wife could not call the bank and, in twenty-four hours, have one million dollars. It took months. The man had a heart condition, and the kidnappers had to keep the man alive.
Listen to this, I tell the woman on the ledge. His captors made him quit smoking. They changed his diet and made him exercise every day. They held him that way for three months.
When the ransom was paid and the man was released, his doctor looked him over. He found the man to be in excellent health. I tell the woman what the doctor said then–that the kidnap was the best thing to happen to that man.
* * *
Maybe this is not a come-down-from-the-ledge story. But I tell it with the thought that the woman on the ledge will ask herself a question, the question that occurred to that man in Bogotá. He wondered how we know that what happens to us isn’t good.