beautiful, funny, sad & true

I just got tagged by Carolina to reveal six random things about myself.  You may be surprised to find out that I’ve never been tagged in one of these things before, so I’m rapidly trying to think of what I can write about, since I usually have something in mind before I ever start writing.

Okay, here goes.

NUMBER ONE:

I love Bach’s organ music.  I mean LOVE IT love it.  If I could marry it, I would.  I love it so much that if it’s playing, I can’t do anything else because I get absolutely sucked in by its perfect structure and beauty. Here’s an example of what I’m talking about.  E. Power Biggs playing “The Jig.”

One of my favorite memories of my dad (How many times do you hear me say THAT?) is when the two of us were attempting to play this particular piece on a beautiful pipe organ in Ellensburg, Washington. I was sitting on the bench, playing the manuals (that’s organ terminology for keyboards) and my dad was on his hands and knees underneath the bench, playing the pedals with his fists. It was hilarious and touching, even moreso when I think about it now. I’ll never forget that moment.

NUMBER TWO:

Speaking of Number Two, I find it absolutely repulsive to have to listen to someone go Number Two in the bathroom (I’m thinking of the bathroom at work, by the way), especially since most guys are notoriously disgusting and loud when it comes to this particular activity.  I’m so disgusted by it that if there’s someone else already in the bathroom when I walk in, I’ve been known to go downstairs so that I don’t have to listen to that happening.  I mean, really.  The sound, the smell, everything.  Ewww.  And if they’re sitting there tapping away on their cell phones, that grosses me out even more, because I imagine them wiping their asses and then grabbing their phones before they get the chance to wash their hands again.  NASTY.  I hope no one ever has to borrow their phones for any reason.

NUMBER THREE:

I used to have two mullets.  No, not at the same time, but consecutively.  I liked them so much that I grew one out until it got all scraggly, and then I cut it off and grew another one, which was only a slight improvement over the previous one.  Here’s a picture of the first one, in progress, in 1988. . .

. . .and here’s a picture of the second one, in full effect, not long before it got cut (THANK GOD) in 1995:

I know; I was hot.

NUMBER FOUR:

The longest time that I’ve ever dated someone was five years (on again/off again).  The shortest time was three days.  Does that count as two things?  I don’t know, but I’m counting it as one two-part answer to one two-part question.

NUMBER FIVE:

I have no tattoos or piercings of any kind.  I used to have my left ear pierced, around the time of Mullet Number One, but I only wore an earring in it for about a year, and I haven’t worn one since then, so the hole has long since closed up.  No, I don’t have any pictures of that.

NUMBER SIX:

I’ve made more money playing the accordion than any of the other instruments I play.  It’s paid for itself many times over.  The cello is in second place, then probably the electric guitar.

NUMBER SEVEN:

There is NO Number Seven.  Thank you.

So, which six people would I like to tag and to see respond to this in kind on their own blogs?

Andrea

Josh

Emily

Sarah

Jo(e)

BoringFish

Thank you to Carolina for including me in this, thank you to YOU for reading, and thank you six participants (or anyone else who wishes to) for lending your metaphorical voices to this endeavor.

OneYearAgo

“Life has taught us that love does not consist in gazing at each other but in looking outward together in the same direction.”

–Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, “Wind, Sand, and Stars”

Meet the new me, same as the old me.

I’ve been feeling really good these last few days.  I feel excited and driven, and I feel lots of momentum pulling in good directions again.  Recently, I’ve felt like I’ve been just spinning my wheels lately, not doing some of the things that I should have been doing for a while now.

I have no doubt that part of the reason for these good feeling is that I’ve been riding my bike to and from work for a month or two now.  I’ve dropped about ten pounds in that time, and lost some of the schlubbiness (Did I just make up that word?) that I’d been carrying around for the last year.  The exercise has also started to improve my mood.  I feel much more outgoing and spontaneous again.  I’m even starting to feel slightly attractive and romantic again, after taking myself off of the market when my friend had her ‘incident’ a few months ago.  See, the woman I was kind of dating at the time had her own ideas about why my friend did what she did.  She was convinced that my friend was in secretly in love with me, and that her attempt was a way to reel me back in again.  She also had the idea that my friend saw her as a ‘threat’, and that I should think of my friend ‘more romantically.’  It was horrible.  I never talked to her again.

So I’ve spent the intervening months not dating, and not even trying to meet anyone either.  I had such a bad taste in my mouth from that last person, and I was so traumatized by what my friend had done that I just wasn’t up to any kind of reaching out.  I was pretty much operating on auto-pilot until I went on tour with Breanna and Justin at the end of June.  That was the jump-start I needed to get my life back on track again; to get away from all of the craziness and get out of town for a while.

Two months later, I think I’m back.  Finally.

The other night at the gig with IrishBand, I met a new person that I’m very interested in seeing more of.  She came to the show with a guy, and since I assume that every cute girl who arrives with a guy is WITH that guy, I didn’t try too hard to ‘chat her up’ when they sat at our table, but we had a great time talking for a while, before the band had to get up and play.  At the end of the night, she gave me the nicest hug ever.  I’m a hug fan, and it’s hard to find people who are good huggers, so when I meet someone who does it right, I always think, ‘This is my kind of person.’  I have a feeling I’ll be writing more about her before too long.  Too soon to know what will happen.  I don’t even know what her situation is, either, but I’m just excited to find out.

I feel particularly good about it because I’m so open right now.  It’s the perfect time to meet someone new, and just at the moment when I’ve been feeling that, here comes someone, as if by magic.

Keep your fingers crossed.

Just the other day, I got the invitation from my high school for my graduating class’s twentieth anniversary reunion, which is happening a month from now.  A month?  You’ve got to be kidding me.  I need much longer than that to prepare myself for that kind of trauma.  I laughed like a hyena as I crumpled up the invitation and threw it in the recycling bin.  I immediately posted a message on Twitter saying, “Got my high school reunion invitation today. Is there a polite way to say, ‘F Off, I Hated High School?’ “

The next day, I e-mailed one of my friends from back then who lives down in Newport (Oregon) now, and who tracked me down on MySpace last summer after seeing one of my gigs on TV.  I asked if he’ll be going to the reunion.  The short answer is that he will not be.  He mentioned a few people who he’d been in contact with lately, and who he wasn’t excited to see, and they were all names of people who had either bullied, ignored, or insulted me back in the day.  You see, in high school, I was a quiet, shy, kinda nerdy guy (I know, it’s hard to believe) and most people didn’t talk to me.  The ones who did talk to me usually did so in a mocking way.  The precious few who were my actual friends are some of the people I’m still in contact with today.  A handful of them I’m very close to.  There are about ten people I’d like to see, out of my graduating class of four hundred, but the rest I couldn’t care less about.  I’m not nostalgic for high school at all.  College had its moments, and its close friendships (some of which I still maintain), but I have to admit that I’m really enjoying life now much more than ever before.  Even with the extremely painful things that have happened recently, I feel alive now in a way that I never used to.  I was a shell of a person back then, and I feel like I had nothing to offer anyone.  If I were to go to a reunion now, it would just be too freakin’ weird, with people trying to talk to me as if we were friends, or trying to feign interest in my life in the interim.

Not to mention the fact that I don’t go by my middle name anymore, like I did back then, so I’d have to tell THAT story about four hundred times.  No thank you; I’ll pass.

I remember one person who I ran into when I still lived in Yakima and worked at the video store.  She walked in the door and instantly recognized me.  “Oh my gosh!  Hey [my middle name], how are you?”  She told me her name, which I recognized too.  She looked great, and had been a cheerleader all through high school, but she also played the flute, which is how I had known her.  We talked for a few minutes about the usual pleasantries, and then she said, “What’s your last name again?  I want to say [my last name], but you’d kill me.”  The hair on the back of my neck stood up, and I replied, “Well it IS [my last name], and why would I want to kill you for that?”  She sputtered, “Uhhh . .ababah. . .I gotta go.  Good to see you!” waved over her shoulder, and ran out the door.  I just stood there, dumbstruck and fuming.

In other news, this trip down Memory Lane has got me thinking about someone completely different; my girlfriend from my college years.  She comes up in conversation every once in a while, and every time she does, the people who knew me then say things like, “You sure loved her a lot.”   And it’s true.  Ours was a complicated relationship that lasted for about five years, and we split up for good when I moved to Portland and she moved to Seattle.  We talked on the phone a few times after that, but then the trajectories of our lives took over, and we haven’t talked since.  She’s the one I’ve wondered about more than any other, and I’ve even looked her up occasionally online.  I’ve had the feeling that her life hasn’t gone in the way that she expected it would, and that she’s not happy about it.  What I’ve found recently is that she’s not married, she’s still living in the Seattle metropolitan area, she’s still singing both jazz and classical music, and she’s still working for a video game company.  She was doing all of those things the last time I talked to her.  I haven’t tried to e-mail her or contact her in any way.  I wouldn’t know where to begin, really, other than to say that I’ve thought about her a lot over the years, and that I really hope she’s well, and that I would love to talk to her sometime and see what she’s done with herself.

Man, life is weird, but I suppose I wouldn’t have it any other way.

June 29th was homecoming day. We slept at Breanna’s uncle and aunt’s house in Meridian, Idaho, but we had arrived so late the night before that everyone was either already in bed or pretty much comatose in front of the television. The morning was when we actually got to socialize.

Say hello to Breanna’s nephew and two nieces.

Kids kinda freak me out, especially when they’re either little, or if there are lots of ’em. Doesn’t matter how cute they are (and these kids are VERY cute), they still make me feel really anxious and weird. So I kinda kept to myself for a while, reading and then coming back in and out, or talking with Breanna’s uncle and aunt. Their house was great; it’s a shame we didn’t get any pictures of that too. Her uncle cooked Swedish pancakes and bacon and sliced some cantaloupe for breakfast, which was all completely amazing. They were very open and generous people, and I hope our paths cross again.

The drive back was beautiful and remote. Idaho and Eastern Oregon are sort of interchangeable in my mind. Every once in a while we’d pass a lovely ravine. . .

. . .or mountain (I THINK that’s Mount Hood). . .

. . .but for the most part, it looks like this.

The landscape went from greenish yellow to brownish yellow, and we went from the high desert down into the rolling hills. There are actually signs stating things like ‘now entering the Pacific Time Zone’ and ‘now crossing the 45th Parallel.’ We stopped to eat in Pendleton, at a great little 1950’s restaurant called the Main Street Diner. The way we found out about the diner was priceless. We stopped in at a convenience store to buy some water, and I asked the young guy behind the counter, “Is there a good cafe here in town?” The guy’s response was, “Uhhhh. . .for food?” Justin turned away and tried not to laugh.

After our lunch, ‘we continued on’ (Lewis and Clark’s phrase), and the temperature climbed and climbed all through eastern Oregon. I tried to take a picture of the thermometer when it read 108 degrees, but my camera’s battery was completely dead by then, so I wasn’t able to. By the time we thought to try with Breanna’s camera, the temperature had fallen to a mere 105.

The windows of the van were unpleasantly hot to the touch. We would roll them down if we wanted to take a a picture, but other than that, we kept the air conditioner turned on full blast that day. We passed what appeared to be a tree farm, in which all of the trees looked exactly the same, and were planted the exact same distance from each other, and were in plots of land that were perfectly square. On each side of those plots was normal Oregon desert. It was like, yellow desert/LUSH FOREST/yellow desert/LUSH FOREST/yellow desert. How’s that for a verbal visual aid?

Interesting.

Finally we got to the Columbia River, which is when we really started to feel like we were close to home. If you’ve ever lived in or spent much time in Portland or northern Oregon, then you know that the Columbia is the lifeline for this part of the world, and there’s something comforting about looking over and seeing that huge river beside you after you’ve been away from it for a while.

The last couple of hours we spent listening to Kathleen Edwards. If you haven’t heard her music before, you owe it to yourself. I now completely associate her music with road trips, because the first time I heard her was on last year’s trip to Nevada. Her songwriting is strong and catchy, and brutally honest. She’s really one to watch for. And her music is perfect for long, open roads.

True to form, it also started to get cloudy as we got nearer to the city, and by the time we pulled up to Breanna’s place, there was thunder and lightning, and big, threatening raindrops.

We took some end-of-the-trip pictures. . .

. . .and then I packed my stuff from the van into my own car and raced home before the rain really started. I just barely made it, too.

A trip is never really over until the rental car has been returned. This van served us so well, and was the perfect road trip vehicle. It was flawless, and quiet, and comfortable in all the heat, and it even got good gas mileage, even though it was pretty crammed full of people and their stuff.

Parting thoughts about the trip:

1) Justin and Breanna are amazing, and sweet, and talented, and genuine, and I’m very proud to call them my friends.

2) I can’t wait to hit the road again. This country has some breathtaking landscapes.

3) I want a better camera, dang it.

4) I need to work on my gangsta pouts and poses.

So that’s it. Trip’s over. Hope you enjoyed reading about it. We now return you to your regularly-scheduled witty and insightful blog, already in progress. . .

OneYearAgo