10 million things in Portland: reading edition

I like Portland. Some people have never been. Visit Portland! Here are four of the ten million reasons you should.

Powell’s
I feel like most bookstores just have Moleskine notebooks. Powells is actually filled with books. It’s like a giant library where you can keep anything forever, you just have to pay a few dollars. AND they have Moleskine notebooks!

Reading Frenzy
Reading Frenzy is a supposedly great "zine" shop that I have been told to visit about thirty times. Then a few weeks ago someone told me they were out of business and then last week someone told me there was a Kickstarter to get them back in business. I'm sure they will go back in then out of business thirty times until one day my grandchildren are too busy teleporting and feeding asteroid bits to feral space cats to ever find out what a zine is. I hear they are amazing.

Central Library
My Multnomah County library card was the fifth library card I’d registered for in three years, and the process gets so much easier each time that I’m probably going start signing up for library cards on accident. I literally can’t find any books in this library. I don’t mean I can’t find the books I want, I meant I can’t find any objects that have a lot of printed pages bound together. There are several bathrooms and staircases. The library card was free.

The Bus
Reading on the bus seems like a great idea, but I usually ride the bus for such a short amount of time that I can only read about a page, and it takes a quarter of a page to remember what was going on when I was last reading. If you want to read on the bus for that length of time I recommend haikus, or one page of words you really love reading. Most people’s favorite word is their own name so my advice is the next time you wear a name tag, save it, and read it whenever you have a spare minute on the bus.

I ruined three notebooks this afternoon.

It rained really hard in Portland today.

The sort of rain where when you come inside you need to change your shoes and your pants, and also your socks, and also your underwear.

I took it as a challenge to get as soaked as possible, and walked around for an hour in the sort of rain where after a while the raindrops aren't making you any wetter, you're just spinning your rain wheels and you might as well be swimming.

And when I came inside I took my gray Converses off and they were so dark I thought they were my black ones.

Some deep thoughts here.

Other thoughts include thoughts about small warm places, like forts, and caves with deers in them, and the Borrowers, and why all of the places I like that are small and warm are things I liked when I was small. When I was small my family would get extremely competitive about snow fort building, we saw a documentary on people living in Antarctica and used their technique of blowing up a dozen garbage bags and piling snow over them, then popping the bags to make a fort more fit for survivalists than suburbists. The forts never collapsed on me, but I have memories of one collapsing on me because I've seen so many movies where forts collapse. Sometimes I wonder how many of my memories are real and how many are made up and whether I've ever seen snow in my life.

Last year in LA the rain was a special occasion and people put on Bean Boots at any sign of moisture, and in this sentence a sign of moisture includes an especially good lotion. Here in Portland, fall asleep during the rain and you won't miss anything - it's going to rain again tomorrow, they say. How great is that. I want to high-five everyone else walking around in wet underwear because WE ARE SO LUCKY GUYS.

I'm going to write this down and put it in a waterproof container and look at it in six months to remind me, when it's still raining, that it rained really hard in Portland today, and I loved it.

how I manage to embarrass myself before seven am

Last night one of the girls I babysit (a lot of people have been asking if it's cool or not cool for 24-year-old college graduates to babysit so I'll clear this up right now: it's very cool.) asked if I would read her a bedtime story. Since I love reading and since I was pretty exhausted from an hour pretending to be a money-laundering vegetarian FBI agent who worked at a five-star restaurant, I said I would read any book she wanted.

So she she pulled out the big guns and grabbed High School Musical: Our Yearbook!. Usually when asked to read a book this terrible to a child, I'll make up my own improved story that loosely follows the pictures. But there was something so train-wreck fascinating about a multiple-chapter book that followed a Disney movie so religiously that I read every single word to her. With voices. This isn't the embarrassing part yet.


This is not the cover but it looks just as bad.

Then last night I dreamed the entire plot of High School Musical: Our Yearbook!. For those of you who haven't read the fabulous book or seen the movie it's supposedly based on, Troy (played by Zack Efron) couldn't decide whether or not he wanted to try out for the musical, because theater rehearsal would really cramp his style when he should be practicing basketball (Go Wildcats!) and it would really be such a devastating loss to the world of theater and the world of sports if he quit either, and if you're wondering if I'm at the embarrassing part yet, I'm not.

When my alarm went off, I HIT SNOOZE just so I could go back to sleep and see if Troy would follow his heart and try out for the musical.

And that's how you embarrass yourself before seven am.

also I can't stop using my library voice

I've been devouring books lately.

I use devouring almost-literally because my style of reading is disgustingly similar to my style of eating this 12-ounce box of Junior Mints I bought tonight. It's just shy of a pound but it's just as well it isn't because the size of the box, and the contents of it if we're going to be perfectly honest, are irrelevant. I will eat through the entire package, and when my fingers touch cardboard I will say, with a mouth full of rotten teeth, "Where am I? What time is it? What's going on?" and I will rate it two stars on goodreads, and pick up the next book in the stack.



If anyone has any delicious book recommendations I am all ears. My two favorite genres are murder and humor, and if you know a book that has both I will read it over and over until the day my chocolate-clogged lungs take their last breath.

choose your own adventure

Talking with people, in any language, is a lot like reading a choose your own adventure book. Because if someone asks if you like cabbage you can say "It reminds me of my mother" or "It gives me a rash." And depending on which you choose will determine whether the conversation is about childhood memories or skin ailments. Maybe their mother was a professional wind-surfer. Maybe they think people who talk about rashes are disgusting. There's no way of knowing what's going to happen next. Wild!

The worst thing about choose your own adventure is that you can only choose one adventure. Which is why the best thing about conversations is when someone mishears you. You say "I'm going out of town this weekend" and they hear "Do you want to write a screenplay together this weekend?" And then you get a sneak peek at how they would have responded. Maybe they've been dying to write a screenplay and you never would have known.

It's like accidentally looking at page 156 instead of 165 and seeing what would have happened if you had investigated that scraping noise. You would have died. When people mishear you everyone gets twice as many adventures. Now let's introduce a foreign language.

Tonight during dinner the woman I live with asked how my day was, and I said it was pretty good. She responded with "Yeah, I don't like thinking about what's in hot dogs either. But at least it isn't dogs!"

And now I know what would have happened if I had randomly brought up the content of hot dogs. It would have gone over surprisingly well. No luck yet on getting her to write a screenplay with me.

shredded head

I woke up this morning with a shredded head. At least that's how one of my friends described it. It's just a cold, but since my job consists mostly of dancing and being kissed, I decided to call in sick.

I'm a little annoyed that I'm sick, because I have the lifestyle of an 80-year-old woman - I sleep nine hours a night and obsessively take vitamins. Capsule vitamins, like any normal adult. My liquid-loving French friends think my taking capsule vitamins is like licking the bottom of my shoes each morning. "It's about time you got sick," they all say "what with those capsule vitamins." The last time I took liquid medicine my mom kept me home from kindergarten and I got to spend the day watching Mister Rodgers. What I'm trying to say is, liquid medicine is for children.

After everyone had said "I told you so" and made me drink eleven glasses of herbal tea, they sent me to the doctor's. I thought it was kind of ridiculous, but my head was too shredded to argue.

The doctor ended up being in the same building as me. And his office looked the same as my apartment, with a dozen chairs crammed into what would be the kitchen. There was no sign-in or anything. But there was a poster advertising the Utah National Parks. Not a valid substitution for a sign-in, but thought it was worth mentioning. One woman was appropriately knitting a scarf. I was reading a Hunger Games in French and writing down new words on a Kleenex. Everyone else was just staring into space - including a three-year-old boy, who did not make a sound for the entire two hours I was there.

When people meet me for the first time they do some quick math to figure out where I'm from, and doctors are no exception. It goes something like this:

   she has an accent
+ she weighs less than 500 lbs and isn't wearing a cowboy hat
= she must be British

At one point during the visit the doctor said "I don't know how they do things in England!" and I wanted to add "Neither do I!!" but I decided to just roll with it. Why? Because some people know what nationality I am and some people know what color my mucus is, and above all I like to keep those two groups separate. This seems like a good time to mention that the doctor was wearing what looked like a sheep costume. I am not well today, guys.

The doctor gave me the whole week off work. And four boxes of medicine, all liquid. None of them are flavored, and one of them is "effervescent." But then I realized - I get to stay home from kindergarten tomorrow. If I can find some Mister Rodgers on youtube maybe this will be fine after all.

Every half hour someone calls to see how I'm doing. "Are you eating enough oranges, Brooke? Drinking orange juice? Taking liquid vitamins? I don't know how they do things in England, Brooke..."

We'll probably never know how things are done in England.


Mandatory x-ray I received after arriving in France. And a wooden cat that probably thinks I'm not eating enough oranges.

idleness and chocolate

If you're looking for a good Sunday afternoon activity I recommend sitting down with a huge bag of M&Ms and reading Essays in Idleness, by Yoshida Kenko.

"The pleasantest of all diversions is to sit alone under the lamp, a book spread out before you, and to make friends with people of a distant past you have never known."

I think half of why I love Yoshida Kenko so much is because I can't even get my brain around the fact that he lived 700 years ago. That's when Chrétien de Troyes was writing (and he's awesome too).

"A certain recluse, I know not who, once said that no bonds attached him to this life, and the only thing he would regret leaving was the sky."

And I think the other half is that even though he lived 700 years ago on the other side of the world everything he says is pretty dead-on, and he just tells it how it is. I feel like he could write for a magazine. Maybe not the technology section, but still.

One should never make a show of having a deep knowledge of any subject. Well-bred people do not talk in a superior way even about things they have a good knowledge of.

And I think he would have liked M&Ms. He'd be crazy not to.

Tina Fey

I've been home a lot this week, and between fever-induced hallucinations and nightmares, I've been thinking about one of my favorite daydreams : the one where I'm a cast member on SNL. This daydream usually starts right in the middle, because even with painkillers my mind can't think of a plausible explanation for how I end up on SNL. But it feels really good to be famous.

In real life, when people ask me if I have any acting experience, or when they don't, I like to tell them I played Mary from The Secret Garden when I was twelve. And what makes this foolproof is that no one has ever asked what the play was. They always assume it was The Secret Garden.

The fact is, it wasn't The Secret Garden - it was a one-act musical about ghostbusters investigating a haunted library where book characters (like me) appear out of nowhere. I wasn't supposed to have any lines, but they wrote one for me because if I didn't have anything to say I stared awkwardly into the audience. And my stare really creeps people out. My line was "What are you doing here?" to Colin, the sick boy, who then had a monologue about being locked up and not being able to walk. The boy who played Colin loved Cool Ranch Doritos.

I mention this fact because if the story ever made it this far, I would change the topic from acting to Doritos, a subject I know much more about.

"It is easy to see," replied Don Quixote, "that you are not used not used to this
business of adventures."

Gee, You're so Beautiful That It's Starting to Rain

by Richard Brautigan

Oh, Marcia,
I want your long blonde beauty
to be taught in high school,
so kids will learn that God
lives like music in the skin
and sounds like a sunshine harpsicord.
I want high school report cards
to look like this:

Playing with Gentle Glass Things
A

Computer Magic
A

Writing Letters to Those You Love
A

Finding out about Fish
A

Marcia's Long Blonde Beauty
A+!

For extra credit

by Brian Doyle

A train going 700 miles an hour encounters a vole. Why exactly is the train going that fast? Does being in such a hurry mean that you are important?

Advice to writers

by Billy Collins

Even if it keeps you up all night,
wash down the walls and scrub the floor
of your study before composing a syllable.

Clean the place as if the Pope were on his way.
Spotlessness is the niece of inspiration.

The more you clean, the more brilliant
your writing will be, so do not hesitate to take
to the open fields to scour the undersides
of rocks or swab in the dark forest
upper branches, nests full of eggs.

When you fiind your way back home
and stow the sponges and brushes under the sink,
you will behold in the light of dawn
the immaculate altar of your desk,
a clean surface in the middle of a clean world.

From a small vase, sparkling blue, lift
a yellow pencil, the sharpest of the bouquet,
and cover pages with tiny sentences
like long rows of devoted ants
that followed you in from the woods.

Life of Pi

"But it was the meerkats that impressed themselves most indelibly on my mind."

"Even though it was an incredibly sad day, she looked so, so beautiful. I kept trying to figure out a way to tell her that, but all of the ways I thought of were weird and wrong. She was wearing the bracelet that I made for her, and that made me feel like one hundred dollars. I love making jewelry for her, because it makes her happy, and making her happy is another one of my raisons d'etre."

-Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

best website ever

"I thought of all the pie I had eaten in my life and wondered how different things might be if only I had wished upon the points. Had I gotten my wish at the age of eight I would still be rounding up mummies in Egypt, luring them from their tombs and trapping them in heavy iron cages. All subsequent wishes would have been based on the life I had already established: a new set of boots, a finer whip, greater command of the mummy language. That’s the problem with wishes; they ensnare you.”

–David Sedaris

Simon Rich - A Conversation at the Grownup Table, as Imagined at the Kids’ Table

MOM: Let’s talk about which kid I like the best.
DAD: (laughing) You know, but you won’t tell.
MOM: If they ask me again, I might tell.
FRIEND FROM WORK: Hey, guess what! My voice is pretty loud!
DAD: (laughing) There are actual monsters in the world, but when my kids ask I pretend like there aren’t.
MOM: I’m angry! I’m angry all of a sudden!
DAD: I’m angry, too! We’re angry at each other!
MOM: Now everything is fine.
DAD: We just saw the PG-13 movie. It was so good.
FRIEND FROM WORK: I am the loudest! I am the loudest!
(Everybody laughs.)
GRANDFATHER: Hey, do you guys know what God looks like?
ALL: Yes.
GRANDFATHER: Don’t tell the kids.

King John
Put up a notice,
“LOST or STOLEN or STRAYED!
JAMES JAMES MORRISON’S MOTHER
SEEMS TO HAVE BEEN MISLAID.
LAST SEEN
WANDERING VAGUELY:
QUITE OF HER OWN ACCORD,
SHE TRIED TO GET DOWN
TO THE END OF THE TOWN -
FORTY SHILLINGS REWARD!”

Tension

Billy Collins

“Never use the word suddenly just to
create tension.”
—Writing Fiction

Suddenly, you were planting some yellow petunias
outside in the garden,
and suddenly I was in the study
looking up the word oligarchy for the thirty-seventh time.

When suddenly, without warning,
you planted the last petunia in the flat,
and I suddenly closed the dictionary
now that I was reminded of that vile form of governance.

A moment later, we found ourselves
standing suddenly in the kitchen
where you suddenly opened a can of cat food
and I just as suddenly watched you doing that.

I observed a window of leafy activity
and, beyond that, a bird perched on the edge
of the stone birdbath
when suddenly you announced you were leaving

to pick up a few things at the market
and I stunned you by impulsively
pointing out that we were getting low on butter
and another case of wine would not be a bad idea.

Who could tell what the next moment would hold?
Another drip from the faucet?
Another little spasm of the second hand?
Would the painting of a bowl of pears continue

to hang on the wall from that nail?
Would the heavy anthologies remain on their shelves?
Would the stove hold its position?
Suddenly, it was anyone’s guess.

The sun rose ever higher.
The state capitals remained motionless on the wall map
when suddenly I found myself lying on a couch
where I closed my eyes and without any warning

began to picture the Andes, of all places,
and a path that led over the mountain to another country
with strange customs and eye-catching hats
suddenly fringed with little colorful, dangling balls.

It seems clear to me, that thou art not well-versed in the matter of adventures.

-Don Quixote