So…many….memes…crashing into one another…
I will say this mashup acts as a bit of a primer for current internet memes (a bit Iike Weezer’s Pork and Beans), but I love the idea that the conquest for world domination has been put on hold to make time for pranks.
I have been thinking a lot lately, which anyone who knows me will testify is no big surprise. But now that I’ve up and moved halfway across the country to pursue a new career in a town where I don’t know anyone: I’ve been thinking. A. Lot. Partly because I now get paid (!) in part to think and read (!), a fact that I find ceaselessly amazing and not a little absurd. And partly because this move has precipitated a bit of introspection and wandering that is probably long overdue.
Of course, this is also combined with a good deal of (both real and self-created) stress, as I try and find my feet about me again, searching for a vantage point in what feels like a pretty foreign place. I’ve described this to my colleagues in the English program as a “fight or flight, hair-on-back-of-neck bristling twenty-four hours a day” feeling and all of them agreed - the defamiliarization is both thrilling and terrifying, in equal parts, as you try to answer questions of: “where am I going? how do I get there? what do I need to do? and what’s your name again?”
And now, or maybe more than usual, I find myself looking for signs. Hard to tell if they appear now because I want to see them, or if I just wasn’t looking before. Maybe it’s the rain in Eugene and its blessing of all things abundance, but I find myself with a bounty of signs, piling up like pears from the tree in the front yard as I waited to write this down. (A pear tree out front! How delightfully Augustinian, no?)
Tonight, as I sat to do the NYT crossword from today’s paper, my first real “leisure activity” since I’ve arrived, I the puzzle looked different than normal - a long rectangle instead of the traditional square - but I have become so inured to difference over the past couple of weeks that I didn’t pay much attention. Then as I slowly filled in the blanks, one clue dominoing to the other, I came to #23 across, “City in Oregon.” “Certainly not,” I told myself, “couldn’t be” - but of course it was, this odd little textual clue to tell me I am doing the right thing, somehow, for reasons I can’t quite understand, two lines above the clue “In God we trust.”
This feels sometimes like an utterly crazy thing to do, to have done, to move away from friends and family and a community that are so important to me. It may be, actually, just that. But after a couple of weeks in my cave figuring it all out, I think there’s something true out here, though I can’t say just what. Now that I have the time and inclination to muse, I hope you’ll check back with me. This site has been fledgling, to be sure, and I’m looking forward to using it as a connection point to friends far and, soon, near.
Enough serrrrious stuff. Want to hear about Eugene? The trip here? Read on, dear friends. The story is just beginning.
“THE TRIP THERE” (to borrow a phrase…:)
I have a lot of stuff. And a lot of wonderful people who helped me pack it up and get it moved 1200 miles away. My dad, for one, the 22-ft-Penske rockstar, and Andrea, Jenga-packing-master extraordinaire, who helped me load the messa stuff into the van in four short (but long-feeling) hours:
We packed it up and left with a car attached on a trailer, but not before JONAH got to come over and tag my car with a little jewish love for the journey. (Still on the car and getting smiles, by the way.)
We got on the road just in time to stop for icing-laden cinnamon rolls on the way out of Colorado.
And time to gawk at the wind farms in Wyoming, like elephant herds, austere and almost regal in their slow spin.
Dad: “Do you think your mom would like this as an anniversary gift?” Me: “NO.” Dad: “But it’s telling the whole town. Isn’t that romantic?” Me: “Trust me on this one.”
As we made the curve toward the north, then the west, stopping by Boise to see a second cousin (and, as it turned out, get coffee and a new big-kid bed), the truck seat became harder, the hours a little longer, and the landscape began to change color to astounding oranges (Utah), and then to jut and flow and along the the Columbia River (bordering Washington and Oregon) as the wind whipped so hard it nearly knocked you over. This last little video is taken as we pulled through the last stretch of driving along I-84 into Portland, the sun settling into dusk, day waning. I’m not sure this convey the sense of nervous potential I was feeling, heading into a town I knew little about other than it will be home for the next three or four years. Hungry for details I tried to soak up like a sponge, the curve of the road, new radio stations with new call numbers I tried to remember, billboards, businesses, the familiar and strange.
Dad and I arrived into Eugene around 10:30 pm, and as exhausted as we were from the trip, we were also equally ready to be done with the moving bit, so we decided to push on through. And on a Saturday night from 11 to about 4 am, we moved the whole damn contents of the truck into the house, down a long driveway where the truck wouldn’t fit, and lifting furniture (couches! mattresses!) above and around the car parked in the carport. Dad gets major rockstar power points for the whole thing, and though I can’t remember the last time I was so tired (that includes a marathon), it was amazing to be able to get up the next day without any more heavy lifting to do. Just, you know, the small work of starting a life in Oregon.
moving in from Jeni Rinner on Vimeo.
TTFN. Photos of the new pad forthcoming in the next post, so as not to overwhelm the server or you!
Sediment
Shimmers of sagebrush and wine-through-glass,
diaphanous contortions of prairie grass
in wild-eyed wind-tinge.
A decision to shutter your face and pause. Moving
through the summer blue, the fall takes wing
in a precise, terrifying V.
Pursed in flimsy beckoning
a claptrap smile, a sit and stay awhile
keeps time in slivers of tree rings.
These hollow echo offerings.
While the rocks adjust, sift and settle
in the gulch bottom like a lonesome day,
feel the water rush overhead
as if for the first time, and it is.
You see it all again, the birth and breath,
the scrawny wet wings.
There are so many things I’d like to write about, coming off of one of the fullest months on record - weddings, projects, endings and beginnings, intense introspection and nonstop socializing. But today, as Colorado seems to have finally crossed the fuzzy boundary between summer and fall on a rare grey day, the move to Oregon seems suddenly so…sudden! Even last week, on the last day of work, it seemed as far away as a someday-day, a camel loping its way across the horizon - a mirage? - that will seemingly never arrive at the sand under my feet. But today, looking at the calendar and realizing that moving day is a little over a week away, it all seems very and suddenly real. How do I say goodbye to all the people and all the places I’ve known for five years now, to be ready to craft a new sense of home? I keep wondering if it’ll take waking up in Oregon sometime next month for it to really sink in.
All this produce…$25 from Miller Farms, at the Colorado Farmer’s Market, along with a shared piece of banana bread, stories from being dismissed from the army for having only one kidney, and a lot of help hauling all this food to the car. Somehow, this whole mess-a-food is going to turn into enough soup to feed 100 people for next Sunday’s PieceMeal event. Maybe Stone Soup? Thank goodness for food processors… more later once the mess begins!
produce from the miller farms' bag sale
In honor of this week’s DNC, wanted to give a shout out to the candidates via Wordle.net, a pretty amazing site that will generate a word visualization based on either imported text or feeds. Here were the two pictures I got from linking the site to the Barack Obama and John McCain blogs, doing my best to match colors, fonts, formatting as I could…interesting stuff, I think this is one of the times a picture is worth a thousand words. Don’t forget to play and make your own!
Totally perfect. From the “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks, a guilty pleasure of mine…I stop by and see a familiar sight, the sign that greets me on the way to their house every day…whoever Bethany is, I commend you for beating me to it!
I would like to rescind
or rather retract
I would like to redact
this thing I’ve said
I would like to rewind
this sorry tract
these lonesome calls
and heart attacks
I would like to remind
reclaim and unwind
I would like to refind
this thing we lack
We’ve covered the wood
for the winter storms
but it is still summer
and I am still warm
a bird in migration
an untitled book
a ship that’s adrift
a tetherless hook
And here’s where I give you
the crook of my arm
a bag of blue flowers
and a barn that still burns
with lips made of barbed wire
and a knee full of lead
I’m tired and heavy
and haven’t been fed
And here’s where you answer
with caution and lack
the hole in the bucket
the pages charred black
with hands clenched and lips sealed
and impending dread
you just want to quiet
the storms in your head
But you have an eraser
and I have a sieve
we could learn to forget
or, god willing, forgive
But these steps are somber
and this skin is raw
peeling off sweet dreams
and pitfalls we saw
So both of us waiting
for the other to blink
for the door that keeps closing
to close more than we think
So rest now, sleep easy
there’s nothing to fear
this river between us
will – somehow – run clear
