Don't look at me

I came to a coffee shop because I need to focus but then two really loud women sat down next to me, but I don’t mind.

They’re sitting within arms reach - so close I could easily touch them - but I didn’t look up when they sat down so I don’t know what they look like, and I do mind that. Not looking up at theses two women is one of my greatest regrets.

“Well she’s having a lot of luck lately.” says the woman closest to me. Close enough for a very loose hug, even, the kind of hug you might give someone at the gym. “What she does now is go to ComicCon and cosplay conventions and gives out stacks of cards that say I saw you looking at me, and that’s not ok, I’m a person.”

“That. Is. So. Great.” her friend exhales slowly.

“Right? It can be hard to say out loud but people need to know, that even though we look this way, the way we look, it’s not ok to look at us."

I have never wanted to look at two people more.

I wonder if I look up at them if they will notice. And if they notice, will they give me a card.

They kept talking, in plain sight but completely unviewable.

“That’s so empowering. And important, because looking is harassment. The occult circle in Seattle had harassment problems years ago and it was terrible. It ripped the witchcraft community apart.

As they pause for a moment of silence for the Seattle witchcraft community I use every muscle in my face to hold my gaze down. I wonder if people will be able to tell later, if my face will be incredibly toned or even sculpted from the self-restraint. I wonder if people will look at me, and I will wish I had cards I could give them that say I’m a person.

I've almost found a new thing to obsess about when one of their friends walks up behind me to meet them. She reaches for a chair at my table and practically screams: “Oh my goodness, look at you two!”

I wish I could, ma'am. That's all I want to do right now.

Later, when they seemed distracted, I looked at them quickly and they look like every other person I've ever seen in my life.

Reasons I shouldn't go running today

Please choose three of the four excuses.
○ It's snowing.
○ My knees feel sort of loose. Is that a thing?
○ Maybe I should stay home and watch tv so I know more about pop culture.
○ My hair looks too good to mess up.

No spoilers please

Things I think about when I’m washing my hands in a coffee shop bathroom and notice a $1,000,000 bill sitting next to the sink:

I bet it’s an ad for something.

Once at a street fair someone scattered ads shaped like $100 bills. They looked so realistic that I put four in my pockets. I'm not sure what I was planning on doing with them, but when I dropped one later a stranger ran through four lanes of busy traffic to return it. I pretended to be as happy as I would be if someone handed me $100 I'd dropped on the ground, instead of as happy as I would be if someone handed me an ad I'd dropped on the ground. I did a great job.

This bill looks way more realistic.

Is that what a million dollar bill really looks like?

If million dollar bills really existed, people wouldn’t carry suitcases full of money. Why would you carry a suitcase full of money when you could fold a million dollar bill into your wallet with your ice cream scoops punch card?

Maybe they carry suitcases full of money because there aren’t many million dollar bills in circulation.

I’m not touching it.

Maybe I should touch it. Just with a paper towel.

Maybe God left it here for me. Because I've been so good lately. It seems like a weird thing to do, but it seems like the sort of thing you’d expect from someone who invented scabs, bananas, sex, and those fish that just look like bummed-out piles of fat.

Or maybe it’s some sort of promotion the coffee shop is running, where if I turn it in to the front desk they’ll give me a year's supply of coffee and all the internet I want. What a strange promotion, and what a strange choice of bill to use. A twenty would have made a lot more sense.

Maybe a million dollar bill is normal. Maybe most people who come to this coffee shop are super rich, obscenely rich. Maybe they had this in their pocket to buy a Mazarati for the ride home. If they did they would have more than a suitcase worth of money left over.

I have been washing my hands for a really long time.

Here are pictures of a few things. A blobfish, a very strange photo of the cast of Ocean's 11 at an air base in Turkey, and the treehouse I would build if I had picked up the money. I'm not looking up if a million dollar bill exists because I want to it to stay a surprise.

A short list for my landlord

My landlord is super great but emailing him about problems in my apartment always makes me nervous for some reason. So I’m hoping he’ll just find this here and save me the trouble.

1. The wall in the bathroom is falling. Does that make sense? I don't know how else to describe it, but it would be definitely be great if you could come look at it.

2. Also the faucet water sprays sideways instead of down. I know this seems more in the realm of a physicist than a landlord but I thought I’d tell you about it to see if there’s anything you can do.

3. One of the heaters doesn't turn on. This barely made the list because

4. the other heater won't turn off. So that sort of evens things out. Ignore this part of the list please.

5. There’s something horribly wrong with my freezer - I’ll put an entire brand-new container of ice cream in there and it's gone within hours.

6. I still notice the same number of spiders, and that’s great, but lately they seem - less spidery. Like they're not making webs with the same zeal they used to. 

7. This one involves the windows. They used to stay light until at least eight, sometimes even nine, and lately they’re not working at all. Yesterday it was completely dark by six, which seems insane and obviously extremely urgent.

8. I got new dark-wash jeans and they stained the tops of my white tennis shoes blue.

9. Sometimes, at the bus stop or in the elevator or line at the grocery store I’ll say something to a stranger but a bit too quietly, and I think my voice blends into the air around us and they don’t respond. I don’t know if they’re ignoring me or if I need to say it again louder. I think I just need to say it again louder, but I wish I knew for sure.

10. There is a cat in the neighborhood with thumbs. Have you ever seen a cat like that? It’s beautiful, I’m obsessed with it. I don’t have any photos because it’s so blurry (not in real life, just in photos) but here are some other cat thumbs.

Casting list: Portland airport

Girl in a mouse shirt and a black leather jacket.
That's me, but it's not really leather, just black plastic.

Woman at bag check.
The one who says "There are mice on your shirt" using the same tone of voice you'd use to tell someone your name.

Man who calls for backup when you set off the metal detector.
"Attention! We've got a woman in a leather jacket!" is probably some sort of airport code for "Look how cool this girl is!" but it's not really leather, just black plastic.

Woman who wipes your hands with a wet wipe after you set off the metal detector.
You set off the metal detector? No problem. Now that your hands are wet you're good to go.

Portland safari

When I left work the other day there was a tour bus driving by - for some reason our street is a must-see if you want to spot Portland landmarks like rain, a handful of coffee shops, a grocery store, and

"...here is a place that makes advertisements you know about." a tour guide minutes away from boring herself to sleep said over a loudspeaker.



Growing up my siblings and I shared an obsession with animal facts and a morbid fascination with the zoo. We went as often as possible. Summer was zoo season and if you observed any animal in captivity in the Twin Cities between 1996 and 2006, we were there, and you heard us.

"In the wild a lion this size would cover 65 miles of the Sahara a day, chasing gazelles and wildebeest." we'd tell strangers watching a lion napping next to a bowl of hamburger patties in an enclosure the size of an office cubicle.

"Look at his fur, it would kill his mother to see him like this. Good thing he's never seen his family."

"Rhythmic swimming like that is the first sign of dementia."

"Let's get an ice cream and then look at that depressed giraffe with the curved neck."



The other day in Portland the tour bus passengers looked at me with the same expression: the way you look at a polar bear in the corner of a cement room, slowly chewing on his arm.

"In the wild a writer this size would get up to eight hours of sleep."

"See how she hunches like that? Another ten years and she'll be lucky if she can stand."

"What's that in her hand? Is that just a fistful of bread? I can't watch this anymore."

a few of the things we want

Last week my friend Alanna and I went to see a singer-who-will-not-be-named. I was feeling like doing laundry and going to bed early, but we are party animals so we went. I brought an apple to eat while we waited for the concert to start. That sentence is both a fact AND a hint at who the concert was. I'm trying to eat five fruits and vegetables a day lately.

Fast-forward through the normal parts of a concert that involve singing and clapping to the part where someone in the audience yelled something not very nice, and everything immediately went off the rails. The guy doing lighting saw an opportunity and started shining spotlights on people yelling in the audience, and on the singer, who was yelling back. Pretty soon the only people who weren't yelling were me, Alanna, and the sweet older couple sitting next to us.

It was definitely the most uncomfortable I've been at a concert, and once at a concert in college the man next to me kept grabbing my butt because he thought it was his girlfriend's.

I wanted to leave and get started on my laundry and not have to deal with the spotlights and the fighting but we were worried someone would see us leaving and scream at us.

Finally the singer announced that she was too upset to sing anymore. It seemed like a weak excuse, the other day I did a conference call for two hours even though I had to go to the bathroom the entire time, which seems like a bigger deal than being upset. I guess that is one way I know I am not famous. That and the only people who recognize me consistently are a cashier at Whole Foods and the bus driver who saw me jaywalk once.

"So ___ all of you, this show is ___ing over I never wanted to do it anyway!" said the singer.

"Oh dear, now that's really a shame." said the sweet older lady next to me.

"You again." said the bus driver who saw me jaywalk once. I really need to start taking a different bus.

fool me once

When I walked across Spain for a week I met a lot of people who had never heard of Portland, which at first I thought was fair. Not everyone needs to know about Portland. "Is it near New York City?" they always asked.

It's literally as far away from New York City as you can possibly get in the continental US.

"I really want to go to New York City." said everyone on earth.

Then three South African girls invited me to walk with them for the rest of my trip. Five days of walking with me means I slowly provide more and more facts about the city I live in, and the facts get stranger and stranger, less and less possible, until you realize the city must be imaginary, and I am most likely a compulsive liar, and I am probably going to murder you and your friends in the Spanish countryside.



Here are true but made-up-sounding things I will tell you about "Portland" as we walk:

Forests remind me of Portland! Cats remind me of Portland! So does sun. So do clouds, and mountains. My favorite thing in Portland is probably the ocean.

In Portland people don't eat meat, or anything from animals.

In Portland people ONLY eat meat, it's a diet inspired by cavemen.

In Portland I lived in a high-rise building full of professional basketball players. There are no street performers, only people selling a homelessness newspaper for a dollar. There are chickens everywhere. I get free shoes, yogurt costs a fortune. There's a giant birds' nest with bad air circulation. If you want breakfast you have to wait in lines three hours long. Most food is served in trucks. There are hazelnuts everywhere.



The more I told them true stories that sounded like poorly-crafted lies the more I realized how unbelievably great Portland is - we have the ocean and chickens and cereal-flavored ice cream and everyone needs to know about it. Because you can go to Spain or South Africa or outer space and there probably aren't very many cities as good. I will go, and I will look for them, and I will let you know.

In Portland my friend Boaz hosts a talk show attached to a bicycle and if you believe that then you are the most gullible person on earth, and you should sign this petition for it to be on the television show Portlandia.



And then visit Portland! After you go to New York City.

especially if the cheetah also had leather pants

What did you do this weekend? I ran a relay. It was 216 miles, plus some decimal.

I am not the best runner but the other people on my team were. One had their pelvis crushed by a truck but it somehow healed and they are still running marathons. The other runners were all equally impressive but did you read that part about the truck?

In a relay you all take turns so when you're not running, you're driving in a van full of runners to the next exchange so you can swap runners. While you're driving you can eat whatever snack foods you want. Here's how it went down:

When it was my turn to run (I was last) I ran six miles. Super fast because I was so excited!

Then, while the other half of our team was running, we drove to a high school gym where hundreds of us were taking 90-minute naps on cots in semi-darkness and I thought "I am in a dark room with hundreds of insane people" over and over and I hardly slept at all. 

Then we got back in the van and I ran another six miles in the dark with a flashlight and the stars were so beautiful there were veins of galaxies swirling around them. 

Then we drove to a campsite and while the other van was running I slept for 90 minutes in the front seat of the van sweating even though I was cold. 

We woke up and it was so beautiful and all of us were vomiting from exhaustion and we got back on the road.

When it was noon I ran another six miles, promising to myself that when this was done I would buy a Rascal and never move again. And then we were done and it was so amazing and I got a ton of free quercetin samples and I wish I could do a relay every weekend.

The roads we ran on were unmarked so there was no way to know if you'd run ten feet or ten miles. It felt like running in the middle of the ocean until you got to the "One Mile Left" sign at the end of every leg, and the "One Mile Left" sign was the Best Sign Ever. 

Because, as people on my team kept saying, "You can do anything for a mile." And that felt pretty true. Even if I were tired or wearing leather pants, I could probably run a mile from a cheetah. I could walk a mile barefoot to a pharmacy to get bandaids if I had cut my hand while slicing an apple again, because I always put my thumb under the apple and hope for the best. I could skateboard a mile, even though skateboarding is something I've never done but always assumed I'm a natural at. You can do anything for a mile.

But then my friends in the van started getting a bit more generous with what "you" can do. When one of us was feeling exhausted but had a 3-mile leg coming up things suddenly escalated to "You can do anything for three miles." And then later, completely unprovoked, I heard a "You can do anything for six miles." Stop right there.

There are only a few things I can do for six miles and running is barely one of them. I can't even look at Instagram on my phone on the bus for six miles. Six miles is a really long distance, and I ran that distance three times in two days on very little sleep. I love sleep. I did a crazy thing this weekend and it was the best weekend ever.

Things I can eat for 216 miles:
trail mix made entirely of seven different kinds of chocolate
chia bars
strange and delicious hummus that made us all sick
two thousand carrots
antioxidants dipped in chocolate
an island's worth of bananas with very fancy peanut butter
Greek yogurt chips
handfuls of turkey slices
more of that hummus

here comes an airplane

Apartments in Portland don't have screens because supposedly they don't have bugs but they do. I've killed spiders, millipedes, decided to let spiders live so they could kill the millipedes, and found spiders dying slow and painful deaths after millipedes ate their legs off. 

Come visit?

Anyway none of this prepared me for finding a moth the size of a small bird flying around the apartment, blocking all light as it swooped past the ceiling lamp, landing on curtains and almost pulling them off the wall with its weight, humming as loudly as a quiet plane or fighter jet.

I knew I either needed to get brave enough to fight him, get brave enough to co-habitate with him, or get brave enough to change my name, burn everything I owned, and move to another country. I chose co-habitate.

Just a few days later my heart was only skipping about five beats when I saw him in corners, and I was already choosing what actress would play me in the movie about our friendship that overcame all odds. Tina Fey? Zooey Deschanel? Should I just play myself? The mothbird was not faring so well. He stopped flying and started slithering and jerking around the floor, creaking and wrapping his wings around himself like some sort of tiny elderly Dracula looking for tea.

Seeing him in pain should have brought me immense pleasure, and it did, but it's also a new sort of scary. The best news is that now that he's flightless its only a matter of time before the millipedes get to him and this is all just another horrible, horrible memory.

Things I would run 120 miles for

The gym I joined a while ago so people would stop complaining about me running at night (I’m training to outrun murderers) is so amazing I can’t believe I didn’t invent it myself: the exercise machines power the building, finally, and for every 20 hours you work out you get a free grilled cheese sandwich.

Here it is in its own paragraph: for every 20 hours you work out you get a free grilled cheese sandwich.


(They have gluten-free sandwiches)

Even though it should be the most popular place in the world, the gym is usually pretty empty except for me and a blonde girl that is literally always there with a hot pink Spacemaker case filled with exercise secrets. A few people make occasional appearances: a middle-aged woman that tries every day to do a pull-up but has never been successful, a couple doing something that looks like yoga-dance, and that sweaty woman riding the elliptical backwards with no hands.

Obviously for the first few weeks I was a member I tried to maximize my returns and work out enough hours that my grilled cheese would pay for my membership in a world where gym memberships are paid with sandwiches. When I wasn’t running I was leaning against walls, sleeping 14 hours a night, and eating entire bags of cashews I found in a drawer and I hate cashews.

Do you tie your shoes the regular way? There are so many ways to tie them it’s like hiring a shoe tailor, if that metaphor is applicable to you. How much would you pay me for a grilled cheese sandwich? If there were a little sweat on it would it be worth more or less?

goat with beautiful eyes

Today a woman came up to me and stood really really close to me then even closer and said "I love that one of your eyes has a blue square in it!" so I wrote her off as insane, along with the man with a blanket at the crosswalk who told me "Today is a beautiful day to die!" and the taxi driver who told me that every time I sneeze my life is shortened by one heartbeat. And I hoped for her well-being until I remembered her in the bathroom hours later and looked in the mirror and realized she was right.

I need you to answer all these questions but you can answer them in any order you want.

1. Do eyes go blue the way hair goes gray?
2. Can I see the color blue better now? I hadn't noticed, but I also haven't looked at many blue things recently.
3. Do your eyes have blue squares in them? They might now, or they might tomorrow.



If you search "goat with beautiful eyes" that is the first photo that comes up. And this is the fifth:

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'm glowing so much I can see in the dark.

Before you get a facial the person (spa person? spatrician?) sits with a clipboard and asks you loads of questions. Questions like "What skin products do you use?" and "What's your favorite part of the facial?"

"Probably when it's over," I answered, and regretted it immediately because it made me sound like a teenager describing a nosebleed. But I'd rather be the one with the clipboard asking loads of questions. Questions like "By skin products, do you mean products for my skin or products made of skin?"

You're not supposed to ask questions during a facial. Once I asked "What color is my face right now?" and the spatrician just laughed. So I had plenty of time to think about the answers to her clipboard questions, with time left over to think about what umbrellas would look like if wind went up instead of sideways, and what comebacks I would make to hypothetical insults, and what animals mixed together would create the perfect animal. Here are my answers.

I hardly use any products made of skin. I have one jacket that looks like leather, but it's actually black plastic. In fact, it doesn't even look like leather.

My favorite part of a facial is when it's over because there are some things I like best before and after they happen. Also on this list are square dancing, baking, and looking at a photo of a blue whale on the internet. I look forward to these activities, and I talk about them for days afterward. Sometimes I even blog about them. But during them, you have no idea what color your face is. And that's the worst.

The world's cutest animal would be a combination of a loris, panda, meerkat, and otter. It's really complicated and I don't have time to draw it right now, and when I do it will be so cute you may cry. This photo of a blue whale will give you CHILLS. If you send me a photo of you sitting down to prove you are sitting down, I will send it to you.

Your heart pumps 48 Diet Cokes of blood a minute

Once I asked a friend if he was good at css and he responded with “I don’t know, I’ve never tried it!” This was my attitude I approached my first yoga class last week.

And I told the teacher that I had never done yoga before but it was sort of a lie. I had done it twice - once my sister and I tried going to a yoga class and left a few scary seconds in, and once I saw a yoga position printed on the back of a cereal box and tried it, while eating cereal, which is pretty advanced. I felt like these two brushes with yoga would be my secret weapon. Oh sure I’ve never done yoga before, BAM, dog posse. I mean dog pose. Things were going to go great.

Class started with us all sitting cross-legged on the floor, silently, I can only assume everyone was remembering funny things that happened in middle school or thinking about different food pairings (peanut butter and greek yogurt?)(tried it when I got home, don’t recommend it). I hadn’t even made it to lunch food thoughts before the teacher came over and whispered that sitting cross-legged seemed to be too advanced for me. She suggested a modified pose that I would call “just sitting normally on the ground” and she called “Hero’s Pose.” 

Assuming she made that up on the spot to make me feel better about failing at sitting, I mentally already awarded her an A for Friendliness. And we were only a minute in.

“If you get overwhelmed, just go back to Hero’s Pose.” she recommended.

Then she told us to put our hands together, and then grab our minds and put them in between our palms. I stayed in Hero's Pose and kept my mind wherever it normally stays.

Holding our brains was the first of many bizarre feats of flexibility asked of us. The most common was to move our hearts. “Lift your heart as high as you can.” “Float your heart behind your shoulders.” I just moved my boobs whenever she said this. I don’t know what everyone else did, I thought looking at people might be bad yoga etiquette.

Things I did look at: the window where I could see the restaurant chefs making breakfast. The ceiling lights - one of them had a face in it. Or I may have been having yoga-induced hallucinations.

Toward what I assumed was the end, the teacher congratulated us on “A great warm-up!” and then things kept going, as people often do after warm-ups. And we powered through lots and lots more heart waving and Hero’s Pose and listening to a sound that I thought was a broken fan but halfway through class realized was a relaxation tape.

And then it turns out the last 15 minutes of yoga are a nap, so, being a hero really wasn’t that difficult after all.

Full disclosure I wrote this months ago and have not been back to yoga since. Sun salutations, suckers. Just kidding it really was fun.

10 million things in Portland: the great outdoors edition

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


Two different people who do not know each other told me that they’ve found a naked man following them around Forest Park but I’ve been there many times and this has never happened to me. I have seen a wedding, and a picnic, and once there was a weird smell and someone said it was sulphur. Maybe those people were talking about sulphur. Maybe it was a metaphor.



Are you incredibly excited by roses? Neither am I. Neither is anyone. But, Portland has a rose garden. Possibly because Portland’s nickname is “City of Roses” or possibly it’s a front for a black-market fertilizer operation.



Just a city block covered in cement with a giant fountain in the center, and a few inches of collected slush from human/fountain residue. One of my friends says Jamison Square Park is “the best birth control ever” but he isn’t a doctor. If you asked a doctor about Jamison Square park they would probably take your blood pressure. Doctors love doing that.



The river might be my favorite great outdoors area. Not the river in the center of Portland, another one. This river is just infested with trees and nature and you can go swimming in it and get carried off in the current and lose your sunglasses and cut your feet but who cares, because swimming in a river is amazing. My friend was in a movie once that was shot at this river and all the actors were naked the entire time. Lots of nudity in this post. I guess that’s a common theme in the great outdoors.



Laurelhurst park has an off-leash dog park, and often men in dresses dance around in the open areas, holding small pieces of wood. Once when I walked through it there was a businessman standing in the middle of a patch of grass, holding a push-broom and staring at me. The leaves are amazing right now.

Koalas are in season

When I was five, my family lived in Australia, which isn't important at all. What is important is that my mother purchased the most legendary sweater ever to grace that continent: an over-sized navy blue number soaked in white koalas. Here is a picture:

(Facebombed with my face to protect their privacy, and because it makes them look like energetic show dogs.)



Like any good sweater, the koala sweater has caused twenty years of emotional turmoil: at five I loved the softness and beauty of the koalas, at fifteen I pretended not to know her when she wore it in public, and at twenty five I have to convince her not to donate it on a daily basis. Never get rid of the koala sweater, Mom. I can't think of an article of clothing that better represents my mother, or the great country of Australia.

Imagine my shock and sheer joy when I saw this girl on the street the other day, and she said I could take her picture. (Face cropped because her face looked like an energetic show dog and it was creeping me out.)



THAT IS DEFINITELY THE SAME SWEATER.

The world is like one awesome Australian department store littered with marsupials. Just when you think you may have to go the entire day without seeing a stranger dressed in your mom's favorite sweater, a tender mercy like a sweater miracle comes along and proves you wrong. Thank you Mom, for teaching me that koalas will always come back in style.

Sandwich Math, and the other best things about night

If you like confusing feelings that remind you of being a teenager or thinking about the number infinity or wondering what would happen if you mixed nail polish and nail polish remover and if you can do that experiment in your apartment without losing your deposit, you should go to Whole Foods for lunch and order a half-sandwich.

Because a "half-sandwich" at Whole Foods is made with two slices of regular bread, and getting an entire sandwich for the price of half seems like a great deal. But a half sandwich costs $4.50 which seems like not a great deal. Great deal or not a great deal? Confusing feelings like this can lead to indigestion and there's only one cure for indigestion: sandwich math.

My parents are mathematicians and my sister owns an abacus. I wanted to find out if it was cheaper to make a sandwich at home.

Step One: solve for cost of sandwich.

Here is a drawing of the equation, because food is my fourth-favorite thing to draw:

Here are my top five favorite things to draw:

Step Two: go to Fred Meyer at night and find the price of all the ingredients, which happens to be my fifth-favorite PG thing to do at night.

While I was traveling from bread to cheese I noticed that a loaf of regular bread costs about a dollar and has twice as many slices as gluten-free bread. Gluten-free bread is really expensive. That kind of bummed me out but I cheered up fast because hey, I'm price checking food at the grocery store.

At this point I was pretty confident that the Whole Foods sandwich would be cheaper. But I wasn't sure! Is the suspense killing you?! I bought some eggs.

Then I went home and added it all up while listening to Oh Yoko and playing a complicated kind of scrabble with a stranger on my phone. I hate scrabble. I lost badly. But that was the only bad news because look at this:

Making your own sandwiches is TWO TIMES CHEAPER (capitalization for emphasis). This is insane. At this price I could eat two sandwiches (is this why it's called a half-sandwich?), or one sandwich wrapped in origami paper and covered in stickers from Powell's. 

If times get tough or I need to save money to buy an electric keyboard, I might start making sandwiches with tortillas instead of bread, which will lover the price of a sandwich to $1.60, the same price as the same sandwich made on regular bread. If you can eat regular bread you're getting an amazing deal when you make a sandwich. 

Brooke's favorite food age 7-9: cold hot dog wrapped in a tortilla.

Five least favorite things to draw. (it's a matching game!)

Five least-favorite things at night. (it's scary!)

I didn't include the price of mustard. Has anyone ever heard a funny cut the mustard joke? Besides "Has anyone ever heard a 'cut the mustard' joke that cut the mustard?" That one is hilarious.

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.

I've never seen free kombucha

Flu shots were free at work today, which is an exciting first sentence because apparently flu shots are very polarizing. Everyone I talked to told me flu shots make you sick. I've never turned down anything free so I was in. 

The best part was my flu shot didn't hurt at all, but as soon it was over the nurse told me she needed to re-do it. The worst part was what she said after that:

"Sorry - that was my first time!" 

I quickly shielded myself as she gently shook a cardboard box full of needles. 

"That was my first time I ever messed up, is what I meant to say. Ever."

I wasn't convinced but I let her give me a second flu shot. It hurt. 

At least now if I get sick I'll know it isn't because of western medicine, but because my office hired the local middles school librarian to inject us with a mixture of Kool Aid and ground-up tylenol. That stuff will make you sick. Flu shots are perfectly safe.