I suppose it’s a sign of how fantastically, beyond-my-wildest-dreams awesome this trip has been that the little bit of rain I got sprinkled with today so thoroughly dampened my spirits.

Truth be told, I didn’t have too many dreams coming up here. Expectations, either. I suspected that this would be a trip that would give me some perspective, and it has. I suspected that it would force me out of the rut I’d gotten into, and it has: in a thousand tiny ways, I’ve been forced out of my comfort zone.

In a thousand other ways, though, I’ve felt myself slipping back in.

Witness the red* card in the picture above.

I’ve been here, in Seattle, for 18 days now. Hawk-eyed viewers will note there are 12 punches on the card; I turned it in today for my 13th cup, free. That’s 13 cups of coffee at the same place 18 days.

Yes, I’ve sampled coffee in lots of other Seattle establishments. A couple of Portland ones, too. That’s still 13** cups of coffee in one place, in a town that’s lousy with exceptional coffee.

I’ve eaten at proportionally more places, but have still managed to eat the same (fantastic) Greek salad topped with gyros from the same neighborhood restaurant three times now***.

The forces of habit are, shall we say, exceptionally forceful. You can run from them, but you cannot hide; they run faster, and I’m pretty sure they all have GPS. So it was with a sick sense of recognition that I felt fury rise in me this afternoon when confronted with what is, in the face of all the horrific shit going down in the world today, a ridiculously small disappointment: The BF has to cancel his trip up here.

It means no BF until I get back, and very little of him before he heads to the Midwest for his selfless volunteer tour of duty as Driver-of-Early-Voters-to-the-Polls-in-a-Swing-State (plus seeing his kids who, let’s face it, really need to see him much more than we need to see each other.)

It means the happy pictures I’d painted of us tromping around Seattle for a couple of days are melting away like so many (fairly elaborate, but still) chalk paintings on the sidewalk. It means being apart on his birthday. It means driving the 1,100 miles back home alone.

It means things changed, just like things change all the time. Just like things have changed moment to moment, day to day on my entire trip. Only instead of rolling with the changes like I’ve been doing so far, turning into them to see what new fabulosity lies around the corner, I have, for some reason, clung stubbornly to my vision of how things were supposed to be.

Supposed to be? Nothing on this trip so far has unfolded like it was supposed to: that is what’s made it so fantastic.

The good news here (among much other good news received today, including the speedier-than-expected recovery of a dear friend from a serious surgery, while we’re putting things into perspective) is that I was able to deploy my ninja skillz of bullshit-dispelling to great effect, with relative ease. I leaned into the disappointment hard, then took my sorry, self-pitying ass for a vigorous, uphill walk. By the time I’d reached the top of the hill and headed back, I had things back in their proper perspective. Well, pretty much.

I still don’t know what will happen next, but I know I will not cling to what I believed might happen before.

It is harder to be in flow than you think.

It is easier to get back in than you give yourself credit for.

It’s good to remember both of those things.

xxx
c

*Which, shot as it was with the world’s greatest handheld computational device, admittedly looks more orange than red. The iPhone makes a much better computational device than it does a camera.

**Maybe more. I had a several cups at this place before I discovered they had punch cards, and while I did ask for a few retroactive punches, I was too embarrassed to ask for all of them. Junkies get defensive and shit.

***And have the ill-fitting pants to prove it.

You know you have made yourself at home when…

…the coffee people start making your order as you walk in.

…people on the street ask you for directions.

…you finally coax a Los Angeles omelet from your friend’s Seattle stovetop.

Two weeks down; one week to go.

Here.

And then?

The rest of my life, just like here.

“Here” being “wherever it takes me”…

xxx
c

The whole of the Pacific Northwest is pretty beautiful, and the bits around Seattle especially so, but there’s something about Portland that says “home” to me.

It may be because of its size: Seattle is smaller than New York, Chicago or Los Angeles, but it still feels like a big city.

It’s also a little fancier than its sister to the South. Okay—a lot fancier. It’s not formal, by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s a little more decked out, a little less grubby. Fancy.

Portland, on the other hand, reminds a great deal of Chicago—specifically, the tiny, homey Chicago of my childhood. 1960s Chicago, when we had three good restaurants and the Loop and a big, fat chip on our collective Big Shoulder because we weren’t New York. Only Portland doesn’t feel like it has a chip. It feels a little working class, a little crunchy, a little fanatical (hello, foodies! hello, bikers! I’m talkin’ to you!) and okay with it. My pal, Robert, who’s lived there for some time now, says it’s really just a grimy old port town that got classed up. So is Seattle, for that matter, but I guess there’s a lot more money up here, because there’s a lot more visible class.

Anyway, if it felt incredibly wrong to blow by Portland on my way up the I-5, it felt truly thrilling to take a little side trip back down there in the middle of my stay up here.

First, there’s the middling-longish drive there: three hours each way. Yeah, I’m a lousy citizen, burning extra dinosaur bones rather than hitting it on the way up or back, but I haven’t found the thing yet that jogs stuff loose in my brain like a middling-longish drive.

And after a couple of weeks of doing new stuff here, believe it or not, I’d fallen into a groove. It felt good to jump out of it, and really good to jump back into PDX to change it up. I stayed in the same hotel, walked the same streets, went to the same restaurant (sweet baby jeebus, that place is good), shopped in the same bookstore. I did meet one new former imaginary Internet friend, but hung out with two old ones, including my first shrink/astrologer. I talked change with my shrink, who has known me over 20 years now; I talked shop with Havi, whom I’ve known for about 20 weeks, I think. (I talked about everything from sex to writing to money with Robert, but we are weird.)

More than anything, I’m realizing this an idea-collecting trip. Or maybe an idea-coalescing trip. Or maybe both. I needed this distance from my L.A. surroundings and routine to start seeing how all these pieces of things I’ve been toying with for the past 12 months fit together. I’ll be heading back in about a week, but it will be a back that’s forward.

New business plan. New project order. New excitement for life in general.

Backwards to go forwards. Or just stopping, so you can go, period.

Remind me of this when I’m home, would you?

xxx
c

I’m an extreme creature of habit—part of the reason for my current Shake Things Up in ‘08 Tour. so when I decided to take a side trip to Portland, I pretty much resigned myself to staying where The BF and I stayed last year, the ultra-groovy Jupiter Hotel, with its Hipster Seal of Approval™.

I say “resigned” because as a certified Cranky Old Lady, I had a few problems with the Jupiter the first time we stayed there. Like the room that was so small, I could touch the door and the window/wall from the bed by pointing my toes and stretching. Like the party vibe, college dorm fraternizing vibe and noise levels. To be fair, they warn that it’s a “high energy” hotel, but until you have to be peeled off the ceiling at 3am by your boyfriend because a drunk, albeit friendly hipster with a 12-pack of PBRs who doesn’t realize that the party is not, in fact, in your room or that his very loud knock mere millimeters from your head sounded like a home invasion, you have no idea. Really.

Still, in true Adult Child of an Alcoholic fashion, the devil you know is better than the devil you don’t. Plus, I was going to be having dinner with my former shrink/astrologer at the awesome Le Pigeon (foie gras profiteroles! lamb heart flatbread!), right across the street. Plus, I knew how to get there from the freeway. Er, sort of.

So I logged onto their website and booked me an expensive, fancy motel room. And then, stung a bit by sticker shock (it was definitely cheaper when we booked last year—by a lot), I made the fatal mistake of searching for better rates on a few travel sites, and discovered one for NINE DOLLARS LESS!

I do not take these things lying down anymore, so I immediately dashed off a sweet plea to Whom It May Concern at Jupiter:

I just booked through your site and then saw on Kayak.com that I could have saved a whopping NINE BUCKS on the room. Which ain’t the end of the world and you’re nice and all, but really, these are hard times and nine bucks is nine bucks.

So do you think you could just throw in parking for that one night, and we’ll call it even? (Happy to give you the extra buck.) Seems much easier than cancelling the reso and rebooking.

Thanks!

xxx
c

P.S. Stayed here last year, if that gets me anything. Probably not, but what the hell.

Imagine my surprise when, just a few minutes later, I received this lovely, accommodating email from on Al Munguia, the Actual General Manager of the Joint!

you got it.. free parking.. and i’ll throw in a bottle of voss water as well.

Figuring I might as well go for the Full Monty and leverage my incredible popularity as a Blogger of Creative Nonfiction, I fired off one more email:

Upgrade this old bag to a room that the drunk hipsters will steer clear of and there’s a sweet blog post in it for you. (We had an, um, interesting 3am visitor last time. It was like getting the EMT paddles, boy howdy.)

Unfortunately, I did not hear back from my pal, Al, so I started girding my loins for the inevitable 3am visit from one of my Higher Energy fellow hotel guests, figuring that was that.

How delighted was I, then, upon my arrival to find that not only had my parking been comped, but that I’d been upgraded to a bigger room! This one had a desk, a closet area and a sleeping area all in different quadrants, and there was an actual walk from the bed to the door. SCORE!

I’d never had an issue with the taste level of the place or the niceness level of the employees. They are all super-great, and the place is about ninety times cooler than any home of mine will ever be. They have groovy amenities like free apples and coffee, if you are old and cranky, and the ultra-fab Doug Fir Lounge, host to many hipster musical acts, if you are not. The beds are extra-comfy with good mattresses and nice bedding: I slept like a log in my Bed that Was A Walk From the Door, although I took the preventive measure of (free) earplugs this time, too; you can see them, here, in the desk drawer, alongside the in-room copy of The Four Agreements, which I call the world’s most genius hipster replacement for the Gideon bible.

For all I like to knock the noise, the Jupiter puts the same level of care and attention to detail into your experience as the Four Seasons does, albeit with funkier style and at a (much) lower price point. Eco-cool toiletries, great copy on everything from the website to the guest feedback card, Muppet-skin slipcover on the bolster.

So it’s kind of baffling when they hand you your impeccably designed Windshield Parking Pass that they don’t explain the tiny garage will most likely be full, and that you can park in an overflow lot across the street from it. (The nice girl explained that part to me when I checked out.) Or that, since there were no spots, you tell them, and you parked on the street, they offered to take the parking charge off your bill which had been comped when you checked in. (Huh?)

Or, for that matter, the lack of a TV remote. Looked up and down for that sucker; maybe hipsters like their TV old skool.

But I quibble. If you’re 30 or under and aren’t from the Bible Belt (on purpose, anyway), you’ll probably love it. A young 30 to 40? Ditto.

40+? Well, The BF loved it. He is a young almost-46. I was an old 26, so I’m probably not the best judge.

I am, despite all signs that I might not be, a fan. Al, I’ll be back.

Although next time, I really, really want one of those parking spaces…

xxx
c

After a morning’s worth of work that was weak by any yardstick, I threw my hands in the air (like I just didn’t care) and trundled myself down to yet another fabulous eatery* to meet Cuz, my benefactrix for this stay.

During said lunch (and an unplanned stop afterward for not-to-be-missed Honey-Lavender ice cream), the real work of the day began.

Surprise, surprise.

I will not knock hard work. Hard, focused work. Because without stretches of Hard, Focused Work, nothing of real importance gets made: books; buildings; the perfect recipe for Honey-Lavender ice cream.

Maybe, though, we could ease up on ourselves for the times when we’re not working hard. (At least, those of us in the Overachiever Club.) (Of course, the rest of you don’t read this blog.)

Cuz and I, as it turns out, work the same way. (Work-work, I mean—the kind where, at the end of a stretch of it, you can point to a bunch of stuff and say “I made this!”, just like the boy at the end of the show.) Like hell on wheels, then barely at all.

Only as it turns out, during the not-Work time I’m still working. When I go for a long walk to give my brain a break and my body some exercise, I’m working, because I’m processing. When I spend time with people—old friends, new acquaintances, my shrink (ahem)—I’m working, because I’m getting feedback, exchanging information. When I step back and muse, reviewing my past week or planning my next one, I’m working, because I’m giving myself better lenses through which to view, so I can make sure I’m working efficiently.

Part of what I’m beginning to get is my Whack Job Savant Freak Superpower is to see stuff. Where things are broken, where things could be clarified, where things can be tossed. I can see what needs to change so people can communicate their messages more clearly—well, really well, with other people; not quite as clearly with myself.

But I’m getting there. Day by “unproductive” day, week by not-as-planned week.

And soon, I hope, I’ll be able to tell you how you can get there, too.

xxx
c

*Seriously—do you Seattleites have any bad restaurants?