Tag: sister

Portlandia

Matthew EilarLeave a comment
L'eggo moi LEGO
A drawing I made of myself at work for a LEGO math program I’m going to be running.

Tonight I feel like I can finally exhale and start going back to normal again. My lovely sister and lovely cousin have been visiting for the last couple of weeks, and today was the last day for my last visitor and I finally feel free from questions like, “Am I selfish for wanting to take a nap right now?” and “Are they having fun?” and “Should we go out to eat again tonight?” It was a good visit, I was happy to have them, but now I can pick up the pieces, get myself back in order, and recover from what feels like three months worth of eating out and going out for entertainment. I’m not going to fill in the gap, but there are two really nice memories that I want to preserve and treasure:

A game of chess

Me and my seeester at a great Oregon Symphony concert last weekend.
Me and my seeester at a great Oregon Symphony concert last weekend.

I had a lot of fun with my sister: talking, visiting, going to see music, drinking. The most fun thing we did all visit though was to go to a NW coffee house that has chess sets available. We played one game fairly quickly, being quiet ourselves because there was a very Nancy Meyers-ish first date going on next to us between a hilarious woman with a young kid and a freaked out, very chill guy. The second game, I asked for her coaching, and we played a wonderful, nearly three hour long game that was neck-and-neck the whole way. I take very little credit for my victory, but she’s such a private person that I don’t usually get a window into her actual cognitive processes very often.

Queer Portland

Cousin Remy with Jesus Christ
Cousin Remy with Jesus Christ

My second outstanding memory was split over two days spending it out and about with my cousin Remy and Jesus Christ. The first night, we ended up going to CC’s on a night when it was weirdly busy, and having a couple of those small town/gay circles are small moments of serendipity that made me seem cooler/more of a regular than I really am. The second day we spent walking up and down Mississippi after a perfect dim sum breakfast.

Wed-ness-day

I woke up and made my cousin breakfast. I got a chance to talk to Luke Skywalker for a little bit, we’ve both been busy. She gave me a little bit of shit for feeling like I hadn’t had my “quality time” with her, but then we had a classic conversation over IM later in the day so I’m calling that even. Made it in to work on timeish, sleptwalked through my day– the less said the better– and made it home to veg out and try and get back to normalcy. I had a whole bunch of things I wanted to talk about but I don’t even care anymore and I’m eager to try again tomorrow.

Interregnum

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Prelude

One of the most compelling arguments for daily journaling is that the pressure of having to decide the scope and scale of how to write your life when any amount of time has passed can be such that it seems easier to just stop. I found myself filled with a restlessness this evening, and felt compelled to try again.

Sister

My sister and my cousin are going to be coming to Portland for a visit. I am happy to have them, and it feels very grown up to have them as houseguests and staying in my house. They’re over 21 now, which is going to make it a little different of a visit than other times she’s been up here.

Computer

My computer died. If I didn’t have a smartphone, I’d be freaking out, but as it is, I don’t feel cut off from other people. The bad part is that I don’t feel cut off from internet bullshit and distraction either, so it’s kind of like having the worst of both worlds: I’m still capable of distracting my time away but it’s a little bit harder to do actually meaningful things. I’m writing this on a roommate’s computer.

Endings of things are opportunities for reflections on things, and I’ve been thinking a lot about the other computers that I’ve owned. It’s been a really long time, maybe four or five years, since my computer has felt so capable that I could use it as a creative outlet. I’ve continued to use them to write music, to write words, but the last two laptops that I’ve used were so slow that any heavy lifting, like recording or audio editing, were out of the question. That’s been true for most of the time that I’ve had computers, and I’m really looking forward to that brief feeling of having a really fast computer. I decided that if I can get myself another job that pays better than what I’m making, and clear all debts, I will allow myself to finance one. Computers have always been important to me, and I’ve been putting some thought into learning more about how to create and maintain software, because the openness of the field attracts me and there’s just so much fucking money in it right now.

I do miss a lot, though. I miss my iTunes library. I miss my saved passwords. I miss typing on a keyboard. And, ugh, I love you apple computers but holy shit you are so expensive.

Radical Acceptance

I’ve been trying to chill out and keep riding the Radical Acceptance wave. Self criticism can be like 80% of what I do with any waking day, so trying my hardest to shut that down leaves me with a lot of time that I’m not quite sure how to use. I’m trying to trust my instincts a little better, to believe that the things that are interesting to me are interesting because I’m interested in them. To eat my dessert first. To believe that I can just pursue the things I want to go after without putting myself through some remedial boot camp first.

This is not easy work for me. But, I don’t know, it’s not the worst way to live at the very least, and at the very most, if I can come to access a little more belief in myself, that can’t be a bad thing.

Tongue Tied?

I went out to Blow Pony last weekend with Luke Skywalker, Jesus Christ, and his best friend. I lost Jesus and his friend as soon as we got in the door and never saw him again the whole night, but ended up having a good time with Luke. I also wanted to facepalm several times when I tensed up and got shy with the good looking, drunk men I essentially pay money to be near. Sometimes I get so crazy and sadsacky with thoughts of isolation and loneliness, that I forget that I can also fuck things up with good old fashioned dorkery and awkwardness. There was something almost refreshing in the universal cluelessness of the mistakes I was making, and fortunately was having such a good time otherwise that I could just laugh about it the next day.

Application

Applications are starting to head out the door in earnest. I’m really excited to maybe join a blogging platform that has an office downtown in Portland. They’re scaling up and it seems like a good fit for me. I think that if I can get an interview, I can get the job. My confidence is much higher than the last time I was looking for a job. In the end, my current job only adds so much onto work history and work experience, but I understand a little better what cover letters are for, and how to speak up for myself. I think I’m shedding some of the false humility of insecurity. Humility is good, but being humble because you are afraid to value yourself ahead of others is dumb.

Dick

I went back to Southeast Grind, and I’ve begun to park on a couch and ostentatiously read Moby-Dick in public like a real asshole. There was a point where I was reading Moby-Dick and listening to some classical music and sometimes glancing around to make sure that others were noticing how hard I was braining and I was so ashamed to be That Guy, but then I was also wondering what other guy I would be, and why do I have to be ashamed when there are so many other guys to be and some of them have to be worse… Eventually I lost track of which voice was self-loathing and which was self-accepting, and which I hoped to win and which I was afraid would.

Sitting in a coffee shop is not really first nature to me. I like spending time in them, but they’ve always been transition spaces for me: places to while away a half an hour before an appointment, or before arriving too early, or waiting for someone. I have a tendency when anxious to not be able to settle into a place. My body is not restless, I might be sitting as still as a stoner. But inside, I have a waterline slowly rising, asking “When can we leave?” The worst is sometimes when it happens during a music concert, and even if I’m really into the music, all my inside seems to want is for the concert to be over so that it can start picking it apart, indexing, pickling, storing, forgetting. When the waterline starts to reach my head, I have to flee.

Reading in the coffee shop is good practice. For what, I don’t know. But I haven’t gotten this far by knowing what I’m doing.

Dumpling

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Gentle reader, I find myself once again ill.

After dealing with pneumonia this winter, to feel so weakened by a simple cold feels like an insult. 

My grandmother was a great lover of talking about her illnesses. I found it very boring, so I’ll shut up now.

So, I guess I should be careful about shutting the door on a day before it’s finished. After yesterday’s perfunctory update, my sister chatted me which turned into an hour-and-a-half conversation about motivation, personal growth, what it means to finish things and finish things well, and explore some of the personal revelation/resolution territory that I’ve been in for the past week. We discussed Carol Dweck’s Mindset, which has been my jam over the last six months. It was strange to see her come at some of the same problems that I worried about as a student. I don’t think I’m that much further along in untangling my own human contradictions than she is, but it was interesting to hear her articulate ideas that I’ve had before but now think of as dead ends. For example, I no longer think about my own “motivation” or “laziness,” and tend to see my good and bad habits and desired and undesired behaviors as a product of feedback that feels good or other conditions. That’s really wordy: basically, I’ve stopped beating myself up about being lazy when there is another obvious explanation, like fear or lack of feedback, or lack of self-confidence. 

One of my goals for the new year was to work on the relationship I have with my brother and sister, and I am so happy that we are all talking right now.

I slept in and was a little late getting in to work in the morning. Our work phone has been down for three weeks—it’s so embarrassing that there seems to be no person in the whole organization with the combination of competence and authority to get a simple thing resolved—and I was so demoralized to be at work. It’s been a rough winter after a rough summer, and I have so little confidence in my workplace right now I’m starting to make myself crazy with how much I want a new job. As I was setting up the room for the day, I called my mom. I started to talk about where my head has been with trying to give myself room to dream of new possibilities (I know that’s all very vague, but I’m not yet ready to write even semipublicly about it yet). It ended up being a very raw and open conversation about some of the things that had happened to me as a teenager that made me a much more fearful person than the fearless child I had been. I got very emotional when she said to me that she thought that I deserved to go after what I wanted, to chase after dreams.

I got very excited about Portland’s first Dumpling Week. I’m still waiting to see if it’s going to be affordable, the only reason I could try Burger Week burgers is that prices were set at $5. One of the commenters on the Facebook announcement remarked on the fact that there were no restaurants east of 82nd on the list. [For out of towners, the area of Portland east of 82nd Avenue is where most of the recent Asian immigration has moved to.] At first, I resisted that critique, because its clearly an effort to support a fine dining scene, and it just doesn’t bother me that restaurants in a certain cost range, fanciness, and food aesthetic were selected to participate. At the same time, I thought about how the cruelty of this kind of appropriation is that the white majority sees a subcultural product/object/tradition/design, copies its most superficial aspects in a game of cultural telephone, then siphons away the profits from that subculture. But then I was thinking that a) the idea that any one culture could own a food form like the dumpling is ludicrous. b) the dumplings are just not the same. I understand wanting to identify with the romanticized family restaurant that’s making grandma’s dumplings and nobody cares and the big bad white haute cuisine restaurant across the river makes the same thing and everybody goes apeshit. But that’s not reality. The reality is that those restaurants have completely different ways of communicating about food, sourcing ingredients, presentation, restaurant design, and pretending like all that stuff isn’t important or meaningful is silly. Nevertheless, I’ve been thinking about it all day and don’t feel like I have an “answer.”

Speaking of race and culture, I was hit with two very interesting pieces that dealt with race and classical music in a way that made my soul hurt a little bit. The first was an essay on Wagner and anti-Semitism. I’ve never liked Wagner, there’s plenty of other composers to listen to, I find most of his aesthetic very creepy, and there’s something about his arrogance at claiming that all people must love his music that makes me resist it. Anyway, the choice that the essay tries to force is: either you believe that abstract music, just sound, has the ability to convey a spiritual message, in which case Wagner’s music itself, even that without words, is anti-semitic and abhorrent. Or, as much as we talk about why we love the music, music is incapable of carrying that kind of message and to speak of it as though it is is deceptive/cultish. Read it, if any of that sounds interesting. The second was a Jezebel post about a black woman that had a racist interaction with an older white patron at the Met during a production of Aida. The interaction, whatever. Racist, and shameful that she got no support from the ushers, but racist individuals can be rude anywhere. The part that broke my heart was that she is so completely right about the racist casting conventions of major opera houses. They are decades behind film and TV, neither of which are particularly good at imagination and casting or representation. The other thing that upset me is that if that happened to me, I would never go back.

Work was fine. I lost steam throughout the day, and by the end of the day I was completely burnt out from feeling sick. I got home and downloaded a bunch of new music to listen to, but mostly just dozed. Hopefully tomorrow isn’t too bad.