Octo(ber)pus: eight legs and four weeks of recap.

10/19-10/26

Uh.  Hi.

I’ve been thinking about writing for a while now.  I just can’t seem to make the words come.  I can almost always depend on these stories I fabricate – layers and layers of metaphor between my actual experiences and my memories.  The shapes and sounds I use to articulate, hone, and polish reality into the plot I want – usually I can always beat something into place with a wrench; sand it into a smooth curve, break it in two, paint it, and stick it back together again.  Then can I sit back and say, “There.  A story worth telling, remembered exactly the way I want.”

But recently I can’t find the threads to weave my life into a coherent narrative.  The life itself seems to have too much for that.  Too much.  Of something: clarity?  Weight?  Vivid color, without a dreamlike saturation.  It’s just there, and undeniable, whether or not my pretty words follow.  Nonfiction, here I come.

So, what has been going on with me?  Well, crap, when did I last talk to you?  I moved out of my Burnside house.  It was time – our summertime arrangement was up, and the Alaskans kept telling me how cold it would get in my uninsulated attic room.  So I drank the last of the liquor, said my goodbyes to the West-facing porch view, and moved by carloads back into my parents’ cozy, thick-walled home.  To free food, unlimited internet access to research new apartments, and solicitous parental care. 

I like: a kitty that occasionally sleeps in the crook of my arm in the dead of night (causing the arm to go a bit dead, too).  

I like: the creative and collaborative cooking of three people sharing fresh food and a pantry full of ingredients I’m almost sure haven’t expired.  

I like: debating decorating decisions as my parents furnish their new beach place.

I don’t like: traffic over the West Hills.  How snippy I get after just a few weeks of that solicitous parental care.  Being 26, employed, relatively stable, and living with my parents.  It’s past the time for that.  So October (now grading into November, if we are to be realistic about it) plans principally include a high-priority search for new housing.  Ideal world: close-in Eastside, bikeable to OMSI, heat included, cheap, with lovely clean dish-doing people.  Same old song.  Real world: East, North, whatever; not too expensive; with responsible semi-clean people.  Here’s hoping.  Again.

In September I biked to work all of three times before I moved to suburbia and that became unfeasible (for novice-level me, at least).  I rode on a brave steed named Lola, The Lavender Menace.  

The Lavender Menace.  Lola, for short.

I love her, and I feel bad having now shut her up in the garage.  We rode to the library together the other day, through hilly neighborhoods where my elementary-school friends used to live.  Going there was a fun challenge.  Coming back was a grueling drudgery.  So goes nearly all my attempts at exercise for exercise’s sake – I get bored far before I get tired, and my mind saps remaining motivation from my body, which (having no mind of its own) never puts up much of a fight.  But the important thing is I tried, right?

How Portland am I?  Point me to the nearest local organic charcuterie/waffle/doughnut/mircrobrew foodcart, please.

I’ve moved on from Trapeze class to Rope and Silks class, which is fun but challenging.  It’s a bit more intimidating having nothing to sit on way up in the air – the only positions you can really “rest” in involve having a length of fabric wrapped around one or both feet or ankles.  An untenable position to hold for very long.  But it’s damn fun.  On my business trip last week, after cramped airplane seats, lots of walking in inappropriate shoes, not getting enough sleep, etc.  all I could think was, “Oh, I wish I was upside down.”

OMSI opened a new exhibit, about brains and society and genetics called Identity.  It’s been way fun to remind myself of all the weird brain stuff I studied in college, and how endlessly fascinating it all is.  I’m trying to make the process of opening a new exhibit easier on myself, and I can tell that I’m improving with the process the more I do it.  Lost Egypt, next on the bill, is set to open at the end of January.  I have hopes to start that process relatively soon so I can have it mostly done by opening day.  A novel thought, but I’d like to see what it’s like - meeting a deadline.

Earlier in October, I went to Arizona.  In early November, Arizona is scheduled to come here.  Time travel, a system of tubes, winning the lottery – all these things would make my life easier.  Scientists, get on that.  Phoenix was warm, I felt the sun on my skin, and I spent something like 14 hours at museums and zoos.  Nerd!  It was a great time, but I still didn’t take any pictures.

Last week I was in DC for a conference – baby’s first business trip.  (Aww.)  More on that later, because I did take lots of pictures for that, and it deserves its own post, but it was full of such insular education-talk and science jargon that I got all know-it-all-y and briefly imagined a world where everyone knows what the fusiform gyrus does, and I can casually ask, “So how’s that chladni plate working out for you?” like it ain’t no big thing.

So here we are: October winding down, Halloween(!) fast approaching, laundry to be done, big fancy museum-work to be organized, apartments to be rented.  I’ve regained a bit of my metaphor skeelz and am feeling a bit better about describing the flow and plot of My Life (But not "My So-Called Life."  I could never get into that show).  Leaves are changing, wind is blowing, the ground is shifting under me faster than the strides of my steps.  But I’m pretty confidence in my balance, and mostly confident in my confidence.  And the world spins madly on.

When I say "go"...

...at least part of me means "come back."


Wild Goose Chase 

Oh! September...

where did you go?*

Holy bananas, it's September!**

The mornings are getting cooler, the rain is getting less refreshing and more drizzling.  OMSI is transitioning back to fall hours, and I-- I am getting That Feeling again.

You know That Feeling?  It used to be it was the pit in my stomach when I thought about going back to school, and all I had wanted to accomplish during my three months off but didn't, somehow.  And all the supplemental "this is really a good idea if you read these" books uncracked, shunted behind young adult fantasy fluff that is so much easier to cart to campgrounds.  And - oh god - calculus!

But since transitioning (nominally) from The Taught to The Teacher, summer has been my busy time.  Museums - they ramp it up when it seems everyone else is cooling their heels.  I haven't consistently had a normal human weekend in a long time.  Sometimes that grates on me, but it's the nature of the beast, and I get it.  It can be flattering, though pressure-filled, that I am someone else's vacation destination.

Anyway, since all I truly have looming over me this fall is a change in my work schedule from my precious, precious Four Tens of Freedom to a Frankensteinian schedule alternating a week of five eight-hour days and four ten-hour days (retaining the occasional three-day weekend - huzzah!), where's This Feeling coming from?  Is it the yellow leaves that come to rest on my car every morning?  Is it the progressively grayer sky?  Is it that I haven't had my windows open in a week, and the lack of oxygen is slowly stifling me?

I can't put my finger on it, but I definitely have the feeling that the wind has died down considerably, and now my sails are hanging limp and expectant.  I know the answer is paddle, me hearties! but where to point my prow?  Where did it come from, all of a sudden, this feeling that I'm killing time in this place - just waiting for... whatever it is that comes next?  This summer I was writing my own story, so feverishly that whole chapters lay strewn about me, cryptic jotted notes and outlines like "wedding, falling through glacier, food poisoning."  I never got to tell you folks about everything that happened.  There are whole adventures that haven't been memorialized either in cyberspace or (regretfully) in my own journals.  I don't want to lose them, or the melody I put them to when I write them in my head as they're happening, but the current of living was moving so swiftly on that I've been getting swept away before I could commit them to lasting forms outside of my own neurochemical sparks and memories.

It was a damn good summer.  I have the bruises and the scars to prove it.  Sore newly-discovered trapezius muscles, scrapes from resentful unused bicycles, swiftly-fading suntan lines... the physicality of the past few months now seems very important to me.  I move so much easier in the warmth, and I'm scared I'll lose the motivation and momentum in the suffusing gray fallwinterspring here.  Last time I was at a loss, I actually listened to my body and went South for warmth and movement.  Almost exactly one year ago.  I'm so tempted.  But my awesome job is here, and my awesome family, and challenges I can certainly eke out of life if I make the slightest effort.  I need a push.  A pull.  A running start.  A change?  Perhaps.  I feel things changing around me, so I may as well hitch up my warm socks and get to it.


Just Go.

*Please don't be distracted by the hamburger ad.  Mmm, hamburgers...  
**Thanks, Peyton - excellent phraseology.

All my eggs in one basket

Stork.  Family: Ciconiidae

Ah ha ha.  Heh heh... ahh.


That was fun, wasn't it?  Thanks, everybody, for the kind words and confused emails; and for your patience - I hadn't intended to let the rumor mill churn on for quite so long, but wouldn't you know it?  Not ten minutes after I posted my little mystery, the wi-fi my house has been stealing for the past three months (named after the Pope, and with just as much unilateral discretion) mysteriously disappeared.  So sorry to leave you hanging.


I'm not pregnant.


Though I think if I took a pregnancy test in the next week or so it might tell me that I am.
Let me 'splain:


Remember January?  It was kind of a downer.  OMSI rejected me, chemo started, the generous state of Arizona kicked me out of its welfare system.  Briefly grasping at any and all crazystraws (the circus, the census, etc.) I decided to look more seriously into egg donation.

As a girl on a college campus, I’d of course seen advertisements (some of which could use some extra punctuation) on the back page of the local free weeklys: “WOMEN HELPING WOMEN BE AN EGG DONOR  Pay off bills while helping others”  Strategically and reassuringly placed between the ads for hypnotherapy and usable glass art, these piqued my curiosity, but always seemed juuust sketchy enough that I never looked into it.  However, a year or more ago I learned that one of my good friends from high school was donating with a reputable organization in Portland.  She's a scientist, so I respect her healthy skepticism, and her opinion of a clinic's professionalism and the safety of all the required meds.  So when January rolled around and I felt so at sea, I decided to go for it.

What followed was a very slow process.  A lengthy written application plumbing my views on life, sports, religion, my favorite color, favorite foods, art, and my family's health histories sat half-done in my backpack for quite a while.  It wasn't daunting, as long as I did it in fits and starts, but it did lead to a very ill-timed interview where I grilled Dad on whether anyone in his family had suffered or died from a number of maladies that may or may not have a genetic component -- all while he lay feverish in his Intensive Care bed.  Not my most sensitive move, but hey - we both had the free time, and damn I had to do something to feel productive.

After the extensive internet-dating-esque paperwork came the swimsuit portion of our program!  Not really, but they wanted baby photos.  Then a perfunctory blood test and psychological screening designed to weed out only the most patently obvious crazies. ("I feel that my thoughts are sometimes controlled by nefarious forces.  Always/Sometimes/Never")

Then, someone (a lady) somewhere (presumably in the Portland Metro area) picked me.  Me!  Anonymous donor #whatever.  Maybe her favorite food is also sandwiches.  Or maybe she doesn't mind that all of us Goldmans wear glasses.  Whatever the reason, I got picked, and spent the next couple months being synced up with someone else's menstrual cycle.  Odd.  To be fair, that only involved me taking birth control pills, but for a 26-year-old queer woman, that was novelty enough.  Legal documents were signed stating that I wouldn't try to sue for custody at the end of the process (Yeah right.  Only if these kids turn out really, really cute.) and then some more hurry up and wait.

Then August: the grit and grind of the whole process.  Now that some lady (The Recipient) and me (The Donor) had synchronized biological watches, I was to take a variety of hormones.  Some that repressed my body's natural intentions to single-mindedly produce an egg every month, and some that really really encouraged this intention, much more so than usual.

You see, the thing about Assisted Reproductive Technologies (ART) is that they're kind of precarious.  They're expensive, they're involved, and they don't always work.  Unassisted reproduction doesn't have the best statistical success rate in itself, but when you're monitoring and coaxing and throwing money at every step of a "natural" process, the stakes get a little higher.  So to increase the chances of a successful cycle, my body was to be encouraged to produce a bunch of eggs instead of the usual one.  The reproductive equivalent of tipping the vending machine.

I learned how to give myself tiny injections in my belly fat, to take prenatal vitamins and baby aspirin at very precise times.  No matter where I was.  In the past month, I shot up: in a hotel room, in the front seat of my car, in an airport restroom, on an airplane, in a National Parks visitor's center, outside of a dance hall, at my dining room table.  It wasn't that bad, though I did still have to count to myself before I pushed the thin needle in, the same way I psyche myself up to dive into cold water.

I spent last month "half-pregnant," as my good friend's husband calls it.  And, therefore, was told to act as such.  Sigh.  As the classic song goes, "No sex, no drugs, no wine, no women, no fun, no sin, no you, no wonder it's dark."  Being pregnant's a drag.  Except, I assume, for that whole bundle of joy thing at the end.  I don't consider myself a big drinker, but it never seemed more of a temptation than when I couldn't do it.  They also ask you to restrict your exercise - keep your heart rate down and not jostle around too much.  I've never wanted to be upside down more in my life than I have this past month.  Completely genuine, and completely irrational.  Sure, I did miss a trapeze class, but I couldn't even do Downward Dog!  I'd be walking through the empty Featured Exhibits Hall and get the sudden urge to do a handstand.  I can't even really do a handstand!  Yep, the limitations were more of a struggle for me than the additions (shots, pills, blood draws, early-morning ultrasounds).  I'm not a girl who likes to be told what she can't do.

My egg-laying date was less than a week ago.  The days leading up to the outpatient procedure, I felt very full, and couldn't wait to get the damn things out of me.  That morning, my parents (my designated ride home post-anesthesia) surprised me by showing up at the beginning of the check-in procedure.  For a change, I got to be the one lying in bed in the scratchy gown that ties in the back, and Dad got to sit in the nearby spartan chair and politely avoid telling me how dumb I looked in my blue poofy paper hat.  What an interesting reversal of fortune.  Mom, of course, filled her usual role: watching like a hawk as the nurse administered the IV, asking clarifying questions for post-op care.  

My only job was to shuffle in paper booties into a dimly lit room, with a radio playing bouncy music on a faraway counter; lie down on the gurney, have my IV tubes arranged carefully around me and then watch as the doctor-shaped blurs in the room grew jumpier and more jumbled as the anesthesia hit me.  

(Somewhere during this lost time, very steady hands poked yet another thin needle into me, and sucked out all of 14 precious ova.  The dim light, I assume, was to make the screen of the ultrasound-guided needle easier to see.  Also, I was told not to wear any scents stronger than deodorant - apparently eggs and sperm don't like it.  How about that?  The radio, I assume, was just for fun.)

I woke moments later in the recovery room and promptly started crying. Apparently this is just what happens to me with anesthesia.  It happened when I got my wisdom teeth taken out, too.  Feeling fine, not in pain.  Just havin' a good cry.  Then I was really glad that Mom was there.  The rest of that day I felt really Benedryl-ed out, and napped in at least three different places around the house.  Next day felt better, next day less full, and by now I'm almost back to normalish.

So, that's the nuts and bolts of the thing.  I want to give the whys and wherefores their due, so maybe I'll wait until next time, dear readers.  I have a feeling there might be some anxious to hear a fuller explanation than "Don't panic - things aren't life-changing."  Sorry again, family!  Please believe that when and if I ever do have a bun in the oven, you'll learn about it by better means than an internet post and a quote from Swamp Thing.

A Different Perspective

"Maybe it would be simpler to say that anything that is made with love and imbued with hope is an inspiration that should not be taken for granted."

- Jaimie Delano, introduction to Swamp Thing: Love and Death

Editor's Note:

Boy, that was some writing back there, huh?  I’d been reading some Haruki Murakami, whose writing has this semi-opacity like half-cooked egg, and flows just as well.  (But somehow also has this flexible structure like bamboo.  I don’t know.)  Then I started some Douglas Adams, so there went logic out the window.  Also, I was relatively exhausted.  But thanks for coming along on my experiment – It’s the first time in a long time I’ve written in kind of a different voice…  I’m curious to know what you think.  Literary friends, I’m looking at you.  Friends who think my literary friends are full of it – I’m looking at you, too.  

You’re welcome to send me an email (actually, if you’re reading this, wouldn’t it be an awesome thing to send me an email?  I promise I’ll send one back.) or comment here, but could we try leaving it off facebook?  I love it when folks respond here, and I like to keep all our brainpower in one place.  Also, only a chosen facebook few know about ye olde blogge, so I’d hate for them to feel left out.  This isn’t super-important this time, but in the future, I may choose to bare my soul here and then wouldn’t be all awkward?  You know we don’t want that.  

You know, come to think of it, I don't even know who all is reading this thingie.  Occasionally, I'll see someone after a long absence, and they'll mention the Explorer's Notebook, and that's always really flattering and heartening, but surprising.  (Gee, you actually read what I write?  More than once?  Wow... thanks.)  So:

Who's here?  Show of hands!

You Can't Go Back Now

(This is a re-imagining of my last two long-distance trips - trip perhaps being the operative word.  To skip the narrative experimenting, you can listen to this excellent song, (With puppets!  For some reason.) and feel some echoes of the whole thing.  Or dive in.  Delve.  Up to you, really.)

I did promise a story, didn’t I?  It may not be the one you expect.  It certainly hasn’t been turning out the way I expected.  But those stories that take us by surprise, that don’t follow the pattern of Story, those are useful too, right?  I digress.  Ready?  
 Once upon a time…

-----

-----

Departing.  She stepped off the sleek white train onto the textured stone of the platform.  The train was a new way to the aero-port for her, and it carried a bit of romance and surprise.  She walked with one arm taut behind her, pulling a square bright orange bag – pretending that she looked to those around her like she had every idea where she was going.  She hoped she was carrying it off.

-----

Flying.  Motorized winging from the city of tall evergreens to the desert was to take only a few hours; the shortest, most luxurious flight she had taken in quite a while.   Still, the gray canvas satchel at her feet bulged with a book, a soft leatherbound journal, and a small silver music box connected by a long snaking cord to an enormous pair of headphones, which she mistakenly believed blocked some of the growlings and rumblings of the engine.

----

Landing.  Satchel bouncing at her hip, pulling at the shoulder of her shirt (other bag trailing expectantly behind her), she followed the flow of fellow travelers up a ramp, past signs indicating that one Must Exit after them.  Hopefully this was where she wanted to exit.  Her eyes searched the sparse crowd waiting for arrivers, swept past the exuberant group holding paper masks attached to tongue depressors, and finally found the man in the green hat she was looking for.  He laughed out loud when he saw her.

----

Driving North as the sun was setting, curtains of rain showed gray against a thunderous yellow sky.  She saw no less than three rainbows of varying angles and intensities.  Looming cacti cast tall dark shadows against the skyline – that more than anything kept reminding her that she was in dry country.  The pattering drops that streaked the windshield weren’t helpful in that regard.

----

The next two mornings, she dreamt that she looked out the window and noticed the sky was clearing.  Then she would wake, roll over optimistically but catch no sight of blue.  One of these sleepy late mornings, she pulled on her shoes and went for a walk.  The soft slap of soles on dark macadam was nearly the only sound, but for an occasional wind rustling low brush and clacking a few seed pods in short, sprawling trees.  She hadn’t gotten very far, but was high enough to see some distance across the rough country – to other thirsty-looking houses and faraway mountains, also wreathed by clouds.  The whole place had the look of a cat fallen into a pond, or a manuscript newly drenched by a cup of tea.  It looked like it wasn’t used to being wet, and didn’t quite know what to think of it.

----

Eventually she visited a place she knew well.  A small channel of clear water springing from a rock, meandering through sturdy, well-groomed stone banks along a path only she and a few others knew.  The river on the other side of the path rushed and churned, the color of weak hot chocolate.  She’d never seen the river so high, and it disturbed her, taking away from the calm she had always felt in this place.  A place that another culture considered the sacred navel of the world.  She touched the familiar fossilized imprint of a leaf in the orange-brown rock.  She stood in the channel and let the tepid water eddy around her knees.  She crouched at the navel of the world and took pictures, pointing her camera lens up, up, up into the canopy of a sheltering sycamore.  Anything to feel less disconnected from this place where not so long ago, she had felt so many things in herself just beginning.  It made her bereaved to think of that cord being cut.

----

To gain her bearings again, she slipped away from the easy smiles of people she knew and down her favorite solitary path.  But the water was high here, too, and her shoes got muddy.  She met vines across her path that seemed entirely jungle-y and out of place.  The air didn’t feel right on her skin.  And maybe then she thought, “It’s not the same.  It might never be what it was again.”  And this, too, made her mourn for that time gone.  But at the other end of the path was a sturdy car, a friend, a destination, and plans to make for another day.

----

She began her return voyage in the gold light of a sunrise that held the promise of a clear, scorching hot day she would not stick around to see.   There was more subdued laughter as he saw her off, barely enough to sustain her all the way back to the close air of her attic room in the city of the tall evergreen trees.  But in between pulling her orange bag down from the compartment above her cramped seat and flopping it down again on the soft springs of her bed was a whole procedural day of times and steps and appointments, so she tried not to notice. 

----

----

Barely three days later, and she was off again – the bag restuffed, the train reboarded.  A larger satchel at her feet (toes growing colder in the altitude) again fit to burst with distractions, though she only had energy to doze, and then only fitfully – dreaming of trail mix, and odd forms of transportation, and too-distant friends.

----

Many more hours later, she stepped into a tight hug she had missed and humidity she had been warned about, but had been expecting.  This was the skinfeel that had stuck out so oddly along that desert stream.  No wonder it had been so disconcerting.  These worlds overlapping; linking arms and exchanging places was a dance too dizzying for her.  She changed into a skirt and let the warm air ruffle the hair on her arm as the car sped North (always North, it seems) on the highway. 

----

Passing towns she could pronounce and restaurants whose food she could taste in her memory, she tried to feel that ache of familiarity, but it was a mental exercise.  “I know I know this place,” she thought, “but it doesn’t know me anymore.  I’m too much changed, and it is too much the same.”

----

It was a reunion of experiences: meals remembered fondly were ordered again; white, flat smells that held inside them narratives of whole days were caught on the gust of a door opening.  If she had been able to work the manual transmission, she, herself, could have navigated through the streets and landmarks. 

----

Enfolded in warm laughter and cool hardwood floors, she was surprised at how quickly she fell into a feeling of home – even forgetting sometimes that she wasn’t in the city of tall evergreen trees.  There were showers to be taken, and dishes to be washed, and work to be done at the kitchen table, the tapping of keys and creak of chairs harmonizing with the crickety nightnoises coming in the window and an occasional thoughtful sigh.  It was the people that made this place home, the gentle current of conversation that flowed under the music, and through the car-rides and late into the night.  It still wasn’t her home, but it was someone’s, and deservedly a good one.

-----

-----

Her journey home was complicated, in a much more literal sense than she had been repeatedly taught over the previous weeks.  From her usual window wing seat, she watched as a rust-colored sky burst forth with white-purple lightning bolts.  Dark Olympian cloudscapes were suddenly lit from behind, below, within by bright flashes.  She gasped, bent over her seatbelt, face pressed to the plastic porthole.  She was surprised at her unconcern, but there was really nothing she could do, even when her craft circled higher and lower – the storms now farther off, now in the thick of things – waiting, apparently, for an opening on the ground.  Eventually the small band of passengers landed in a town she’d never known about, waiting in the rain for their intended destination to clear.  Killing time on the shining tarmac some way off from the sodium lights of the buildings never entered felt a little lonely; but it was nothing to the deserted carpeted hallways and motorized sidewalks when she finally disembarked into friendly St. Paul.  A much-delayed backup plan was laid out for her, with little choice, and she floated through these hours like a dream, toting the folding mattress lent to her and other stranded travelers on yet another strap across her back.  Procuring the corner of a quiet administrative hallway, she set up a much-abbreviated camp and rested. 

-----

When it was time, she got herself up.  She bought food, cleaned up as best she could, made her way to her next point of waiting.  By this point, she had come to recognize the stage of her own exhaustion when her thoughts would blur and glow and streak into dreams like paint melting on canvas.  She tried to close her eyes and focus on images she wouldn’t mind taking on their own shapes and personalities, but her logic slipped like a fish through bare hands, and she would inevitably wander away from the conversation or locale to distorted mundane thoughts, and jerk awake again with her neck aching.

-----

“Adventure is unexpected,” she had thought to herself.  “That is the crux and the joy of the thing.”  And true enough.  “I have always thought my life more like an ocean than a river.”  Paths and routes seemed too small a thing to contain both her and all the options and unpredictable occurrences of life.  Not that there was a need to give up on navigation, but observation, experimentation, narration – these things, too, were useful tools.  They were packed somewhere within her shoes and journals and headphones, slung securely at her back.  After every unpacking, every return home, every journey back out into the sweet unknown, there they would remain.