the bookstore of my dreams

The bookstore I dreamed about last night was small, just a few hundred square feet. The books on the first floor weren’t for sale, because their magic might not last if they were removed from the premises and because the store’s footprint was so tiny that it might run out of books if people bought the books and took them away.

But the first-floor books were pretty awesome. There were sequels you hadn’t known about to all your favorite series, and how-to books that came with the right equipment and exactly the right level of instruction to make you a master. (A couple of my friends were trying out the martial-arts ones in the store.) As I browsed, the owner unpacked a rack of brand-new yet somehow original-series Nancy Drew mysteries. And I found a novel by Stephen McCauley that had an author photo of him beaming! This was the Stephen McCauley book where he was happy and not cynical!

The second floor of the bookstore had the regular books, new books that you could buy and take home. The magic of the second floor was that the exact right book for you would come to hand. If you wanted, you could think about topics or questions as you browsed on the first floor, and when you got upstairs, the book addressing them would be waiting.

To get to the second floor, you had to go up a steep ladder and pull yourself over a carved wooden gargoyle. My head had just cleared the top of the ladder when my alarm went off. I was disappointed, but it was so clearly set up that way I also had to laugh.

the library haul

I got off the bus a mile from home to pick up my library holds. Even though I’m in the middle of both Maisie Dobbs and James’ Ambassadors, I had to bring the new ones up on Spaceship Couch with me and sample them.

David Carkeet’s mystery novel (starring a linguist) Double Negative, because I so loved his piece The Crap In My Head the other day. (His crap has become my crap– I hear “A B? A B?” now too.)
Something called My Business Is to Create: Blake’s Infinite Writing, a writing advice book based on William Blake’s life and writings. Partly because, what chutzpah, and partly because I’m hooked on the genre.
Vivian Gussin Paley’s The Boy on the Beach: Building Community Through Play. I love her, I love the respect she gives children and their work together in the classroom. As she’s talking about play I of course experiment with substituting “writing,” just as I do when I read about religion, or about business or work. But here I wonder about substituting “television” instead– isn’t this why I prefer good television to movies?

As in a really good research study, play does not value closure. It seeks new direction and unexpected results. We want to be surprised but also reassured that we know the territory.

But now I have to find clothes to wear tomorrow, and put a frozen burrito in a sandwich bag, and floss, and stretch over the big orange ball so I’m not a curled-up, barely breathing reading thing.

Pudding On The Rice

The clerk at Pudding On The Rice said she was sorry, she couldn’t make Sanguinity and me the Shrimpy Pig crepe we ordered, because they were out of the cheese spread. “Somebody used it all up and put the container back empty,” she said.

“Co-workers are the same everywhere,” Sang said darkly.

When I paid and stuffed a tip through the slot in the paper glued down over the top of the tip jar, the clerk told me about the tip thief and how he came in, scooped money out of the jar, distributed it to his friends waiting outside the door, and they all ran in different directions. Hence the new lid.

I like being around employees who don’t feel like they’re paid to take on the corporate voice of their employer too much.

The food was just okay, but then again I don’t see a case with 20 flavors of cold rice pudding every day. White chocolate rice pudding, cheesecake rice pudding, lemon poppyseed rice pudding. We shared some rum rice pudding, which was strongly flavored but not actually boozy.

Try Broadway Coffee & Tea for a better crepe. But since I’m working days and Sang works most evenings, it was good to sit outdoors by the Park Blocks and spend an hour together before I went to catch my bus.

I am a mess of aspirations as usual

It is August, and The Librarian is off on adventures, for maybe two years. She has her tiny adorable netbook and her folding bike and vintage Volvo and will be reporting via blog and/or book. WOW. I’m sure I am not the only one feeling thoughtful at the sight of her actually marching off to pursue some dreams. And maybe even more so after witnessing a parade of other friends who came by to pick up stuff or help with house chores. She had a way of using help wisely and without fussing when it was offered, but still taking full responsibility for how things were going, and having the bandwidth to listen to and pay attention to people throughout. In short, there is more than one axis on which I want to be more like The Librarian. In the meantime, I now have a little experience painting a ceiling with a roller and putting down stick-on vinyl tile. And she saved the masking tape around the painted trim for me to tear down, because she knows I like that!

In order to get to her house, I got my bike out and cleaned it up for riding. About time now that it’s August, right? It’s a beater, with a little rust problem that’s never gone away since Burning Man, but it’s pretty smooth, fine for neighborhood trips. I’m not an enthusiastic cyclist, so I let myself count cycling mileage in my monthly training totals. (But not for the official Million Mile Ultra.) Aspiration: do this earlier next year and try some Pedalpalooza events.

This morning on the way to the bus stop I ate my first Himalayan blackberry of the season. Most of them aren’t ripe. Every year I say I want to make free-blackberry jam for Christmas presents–maybe this year! Any locals want to make a project of it with me? I’d probably be more motivated with someone to share the suffering and triumph.

I’m looking forward to finding a story to work on and finish– lately it’s been scraps and fragments, KFC assignments, stuff like that. Speaking of longer projects, remember the AlphaSmarts that people were typing their NaNos on back when, because they have like a 500 hour battery life and no internet and no big screen to suck you into premature editing? Well, they’re like $20 on eBay now. I’m tempted, for the next time I write something long. But that’s probably aspirational shopping.

physical or mental?

From GearJunkie’s short interview with Kilian Jornet, this year’s Western States winner:

Is ultra-running more physical or mental?
It is impossible to separate physical and mental — if you have mental, you construct the physical. It’s not just a percentage of one or the other.

Reed campus report

a mallard hen with a batch of five tiny beeps! It seems late for this. And, further down the canyon, one beep on its own, ignored by all the adults. I hope that has a happy ending.
ripe salmonberries in the canyon. Someone else had been at the thimbleberries up by the track, so I just smelled the roses.
the swingset has shiny new chains. Putting the seats at adult height is easy on the legs but makes for a short pendulum.
a CSO riding a Segway!

My four-mile run felt awesome. I’ve been running in NB790s, a minimal shoe I bought on super-sale when New Balance quit making them and then let sit in my closet. So far so good. Low mileage is fun. I think I’m going to enjoy every stage of my running comeback. Maybe that’s why it took me about seven years to get to a 50-mile event? Who knows how long it will take me to get to 100. But the scenic route is better than guilt and frustration, for sure.

Here’s something I never would have believed as a child: I’m seldom tempted by garage sales anymore. I have enough stuff…even books.

Reed is 100 and I am 41

I shared my birthday this year with Reed College, which put on its 100th Anniversary reunion celebration this weekend. I actually set foot on campus three times yesterday. My run in the morning was through the canyon, where quite a few older alumni were walking in ones and twos on the trails. Just since I was a student in 1992 there have been a lot of improvements and added trails, so I gave directions more than once. They all seemed like people I would like.

Sang and I did a walk-through in the early afternoon to see what was going on. A small Ferris wheel, tethered ballon, and ring-toss stalls were set up on the lawn with a few art projects; families were playing on the grass and the vibe was low-key picnic. All very…nice. Why do alumni not set up the naked slip and slide? Why is all the music so very inoffensive? It kind of depresses me how sanitized alumni events are compared to what goes on when the students are actually there. It feels a little fake, like a simulacrum of Reed.

We went back for the fireworks, where we met up with our friend N and also finally ran into people we knew from our freshman dorm. Up til then neither of us had recognized anyone. The fireworks at Reed are awesome! I hadn’t attended for years and forgot how close up they are. I kept being surprised I wasn’t showered with burnt paper, as I have been at Reed fireworks in the past. It was fifteen minutes, but a very full fifteen minutes. I was lying on the ground and could feel all the thumps as they went up. I am grateful that I haven’t been traumatized by anything explosive and can thoroughly enjoy fireworks. As a bonus, the dog has lost enough hearing so they don’t traumatize him anymore either! (He was at home, of course–but he used to hear them going off at Reed or the waterfront before they had even registered in my awareness.)

I also happened to read yesterday about two kidlit writers whose work didn’t take off until they were about my age. That’s always encouraging. The first was E. Nesbit, who published various things from age fifteen on, but suddenly around age 40 took quite a different tack and came out with her classic children’s stories. I found this out as I finished off The Enchanted Castle yesterday. To my commenter who recommended it after I was so disappointed by The Treasure Seekers, thank you so much! I felt wholly different about the authorial asides in this one. They didn’t seem condescending at all. I liked the book.

The other author is Patrice Kindl– I looked her up after seeing on the children’s literature listserv that she has a new title coming out soon. Owl in Love was her first book, published when she was in her early forties. It is wonderful and I want to read it again soon, but The Woman in the Wall is even closer to my heart, because I am shy and because its matter-of-fact surrealism suits me exactly.

Drifting away, and climbing trees

Yesterday morning I went for the first run in a long time. I realized when I pulled my water bottle off the shelf that it had been a long time since I’d held it in my hand or filled it with water! (Then I realized that weird black stuff had spotted the inside, and I found another bottle.) I did four miles omg. Could be I’m back to running and still on my way to 100 miles. Not this season, but maybe next year. If things go great this season, maybe I’ll try for 50 miles at Autumn Leaves. Hard to know.

It’s so easy to drift away from things. In high school I was a musician, getting first chair in statewide orchestras and working up short piano recitals. There didn’t seem to be any difference between me and the kids who went on to be music majors and professionals. But once I went to college I didn’t audition for anything, didn’t play anything on the piano that I didn’t already know, and pretty much left performance behind. I don’t really know why.

And so with running. After recovering from the PCT 50-miler, I never got back in the groove. Then the winter weather made it very easy not to run. I missed it sometimes, I guess, but not enough to pull on the tights. I could always walk instead, in my regular clothes and carrying stuff if I wanted. I still don’t know that it’s not just a fair-weather blip that’s got me running again. Have I tipped over the line of doing what it takes– for example, running on workdays when time is tight?

I was grateful to read Evan’s post today about the “I just HAVE to write!” crowd. Because that’s not me either. Weird but true: the thing I am most disciplined about is going to work at my job to make money. If I’m low on energy, running and writing and most other things (not reading though, hmm) fall to the wayside, but I almost always still catch that bus downtown to the office. I often wonder what it would be like for writing to be that bottom-line for me.

Makes me glad for those one-time fun things that I don’t have to worry about or get attached to– like goalball, and tree-climbing! Last Wednesday, Elizabeth and I finally cashed in her Christmas present, a one-day tree-climbing class out at a farm in Oregon City. I didn’t know if there would be other students, because since I’d signed up the website had changed and it seemed to be just the lead guy doing stuff on his own now, but there were six of us students. Plus a French intern who had only been immersed in English for a couple of weeks and asked charming things like “comfy, that okay to say in a class? You should be comfy?”

We got to climb almost first thing, supervised and using ropes they’d placed before we got there. Then with that out of our systems, we learned knots so we could run things ourselves. Oh, knots. I’d seen many of them before, but knots and card games don’t stick in my head for long. There was lots of cheerful “good! Untie it and tie it again!” from the instructor.

We picknicked out of the breeze, and strolled around. It was cool and overcast, and the ground was muddy. One student’s car had gotten stuck on the way to the grove. We were sharing the field with cows, but they stayed picturesquely in the distance. The trees were oaks, a hundred years old or a little more–not common to find a whole grove of them intact so close to Portland.

After lunch we learned how to throw a thin line over a high limb, with a little weighted bag, and how to replace it with the real rope. Then we got to climb one more time, on ropes we’d placed ourselves. Here are E and me (I’m in purple, with my helmet ridiculously askew, I know!)

Three of our classmates were coming back the next few days to learn how to move around in a tree and from tree to tree; they’d be sleeping in hammocks aloft at least once. I know I’d love that “spiderwebbing” part, because it’s really fun to stand and move freely on the limbs knowing your harness will catch you if you fall! But I was fine with calling it a day and driving home for pizza. Hello, sore muscles!

Chapbook photos

I can see I had better add product photography to my list of independent publishing skills to learn… but here are a few shots of Non-Nutritive Boyfriend.

The story is submitted to one literary magazine. I couldn’t resist: I’d be so tickled to see it in One Story! So I won’t be distributing or selling any chapbooks until I get a rejection or until the story has been published and rights have reverted to me. Either way, that will give me some weeks to rejuvenate and then go back to folding and binding, build up an inventory. I think I can still send a copy to my mom and dad in the meantime, though. :)

Next up is applying for an Oregon Literary Fellowship. Consider it if you’re a writer living in Oregon! There’s no entry fee, you don’t have to chase down letters of recommendation, and if you don’t win you can apply again next year. I haven’t found a down side yet. Though I am staring at question B: “Describe the main concerns of your work, or something about your process or intent.” So reasonable…so hard.

Graduation and Goalball

Graduation

Last week, and most of the week before that, I poured all my time into my final project for the IPRC Certificate program. I finished the revisions to my story last weekend, working all day both days; then every day after work I went to the university computer lab and laid out the InDesign files for text block and cover. Several days I stayed until the lab closed at nine. I was so tired after putting in three to five hours of extra work every day. Remind me to always work part time if possible!

I’m not sure if it’s just how I am, or the nature of the chapbook-making process, or a function of this particular project, but everything seemed riddled with errors. Files did not get saved where I thought I’d saved them (though I found them all in the end), the margins and page numbers ended up inconsistent after I did the impositions for the large folded signatures, a couple of the fold-and-cut guidelines I printed on the inside of the cover turned out to be wrong, et cetera. I had a last-minute endpaper change after my waxed paper idea did not work out. An hour before deadline I was at the IPRC, trying to finesse the stack cutter and in the process ruining a few of the copies I had lovingly sewn and glued. But I made it and turned in my two copies, phew! And I have plenty of materials to make more when I’ve had a little rest.

Graduation was yesterday, at a dance studio on Belmont. My run of errors continued and I was late, after walking a half mile to the bus stop and realizing while I stood there that I had no money or bus pass and had to walk home and back to the bus stop again. Sheesh. At least it was a sunny, pretty day.

It was on the warm side in the studio, and everyone had to take their shoes off, and some people dressed up, and we sat in folding chairs on wooden risers, so it all had a charming high-school sock hop feel to it. It was good to see my classmates again after working independently for a couple of months. People asked to see my chapbook and said appropriate things like, “What font is that?” and “I can’t see the ends of the thread from the final knot in your binding at all!”

So now I am fledged and certified in the writing and independent publishing of fiction and nonfiction! I appreciate a lot of things about the program. The writing workshop was good while it lasted, though I was sorry to see it fall by the wayside during production term. I got to see enough of letterpress and screenprinting to appreciate the art forms, and to know that I’m more of a digital girl. I got acquainted with InDesign and basic hand-binding. E-books were completely foreign to me before, and now I feel I could format my work for Kindle or other e-readers. And, as Justin the director pointed out at graduation, we don’t have to all move away and leave school–we can keep on cranking out our work at the IPRC for years.

(But first I have to draft a story for Ken’s Fan Club on Tuesday.)

Goalball

Last Saturday when I was in revision hell with my final-project story, I broke away to go to volunteer training at the university. I learned the basics of being a line judge for goalball, and today I volunteered at the regional tournament finals.

It was exactly what I needed as a counterpoint to my obsessive chapbook-making– a completely unfamiliar sport, the necessity of paying attention and hustling (the clock doesn’t always stop while I’m dealing with the ball), and being around people in a way that is not too much about me. And the games today were exciting!

Short description of the game:

Three players to a team, wearing eyeshades to block all vision, on a court about the size you’d see for volleyball, but with no net and with a goal that stretches across the entire back line. Court markings are laid out in tape with cord underneath, so the players can feel where they are. The ball is basketball-sized, kind of hard and heavy, with jingly bells inside. The teams throw the ball, low (it has to bounce before a certain line on the court, and the goal is only about four feet tall), trying to make goals, while the defensive players dive, stretch out, and otherwise try to block. A lot of the players, especially the men, do a twirling discus-type throw that produces a lot of velocity and spin. Scores tend to be in the three-to-eight point range, higher than soccer but not much.

And a Paralympics photo that shows the court and defensive positions:

There were six matches this morning, and my feet were very tired by the end from all the standing and shifting and running. But totally worth it.