We’re past Christmas, sure. But as an introvert who recently had the terrible experience of social batteries running out, I feel this essay should still be required reading.
Bless you, Santarchy. Bless you, Seattle.
The Hairpin reprinted one of my very favorites.
I’ve been scroogey this holiday season. The first Monday I walked downtown after Thanksgiving, I surprised myself by looking up at the glittering lights, the newly installed tinsel, and the freshly opened Santa’s Cottage and thinking:
“Oh. Oh god.”
It wasn’t a strong rejection – instead, worse, it was a flat sigh of observing something I was uninterested in but powerless to stop. Continue reading
When I booked my ticket to see my family in Florida for Christmas, I knew the travel experience would be a little mind-bending. The only workable itinerary I could find left Seattle at 6:10 am on a Sunday; as that would be long before the light rail started running, I figured that meant a good five or six hours spent lingering in SeaTac, wraithing about until I could finally get on my plane and snooze my way south. As it happened, my kind-hearted neighbor gave me a middle-of-the-night ride to the airport, sparing me the hall-wandering I’d pictured.
That and using my Global Entry card to zip through the pre-check line were the sole bright spots of the day. And I started all of this with so much hope; I read this before I left and thought, Yes. Yes, I can do that. And I think I want to be that woman’s friend.
This looks like a game Q would use to prove a point to/torment Picard. It is, rather appropriately, just outside security at SeaTac.
Early in the morning, when the ultimate bleakness of things had not yet revealed itself, I started a little narrative that I thought I’d turn into a pithy blog post. Sample entries:
3:15 am: The United desk finally opens. Everyone is too exhausted to have any reaction to anything. They should spray tranquilizers from the ceiling like soma; flying would be easier for literally everyone.
3:45 am: I make the strange yet sort of logical choice to sit and wait for the pre-check lane to open, rather than going through the not-very-long regular security line.
4 am: I’M IN.
4:08 am: I’M OUT. And all my shit stayed in my bag, and my shoes stayed in place, and I felt less like cattle than I have during any TSA interaction for the last 12 years. Could this be love?
4:45 am: I am plunked by my empty gate. People are beginning to be animated, a change that lines up nicely with the Coffee Bean and Starbucks gates going up.
Cute. Optimistic. A touch banal, but I was operating on zero sleep after about 20 hours of being awake, so that’s to be expected.
Then:
Pant, pant, pant.
I talk to you from the other side, clearly. It’s the only way it could be – by about two hours into my seven-hour stay at IA-bloody-H, I’d lost the ability to create words and could only half-assedly read and watch bursts of Adventure Time – between bouts of furious texting to anyone who would listen to my pain.
Concourse D, SeaTac. More terrifying up close, as it is life-sized.
For once here, I lack a pithy aside or a warm observation. It’s two days out from the day itself; I am still flattened from the experience. This is not a story; this is a hand reached out to all the other people who get devoured for a few days or a week by family travel, travel that is completely unlike anything else undertaken by those of us cut by wanderlust. We go to places we would not ordinarily go, perhaps under any circumstances, except that people we love choose to live there, and so we choose to use some of our limited and so very important vacation time and money to go see them. And we hope that this regular journey is read as the profound, bone-deep, unshakable expression of love that it is. I know it is for me, and I also know how lucky that makes me.
I took this picture at SeaTac too. (I took no pictures in Houston. Some things are better left undocumented, dissolving in the memory with time.) I think whatever creative team came up with this needs to live a little, or perhaps to get better pills.
Whether you’re snug in your own home, crouched on the guest couch at a family member’s place, or making an easy commute to your parents’ house a mile from your own, I hope this finds you well. I hope you’re in a good place, a safe place, and that if you can’t be happy today, you can at least feel secure. If things aren’t happy for you, take a little solace in this and know that it’ll pass.
I’m with you in the suburbs
where you’re madder than I am
I’m with you in upstate wherever-you’re-from
where you must feel strange
I’m with you in your abandoned hometown
where you laugh at this invisible humour
We all get there eventually. And the only cure is leaving, again and again, after we gain, one more time, the clear understanding of what caused us to flee in the first place – and what causes us, over and over, to return. The joys and sorrows, the obligation and choice to oblige it. The peculiarly reassuring alienation that can only come with returning temporarily to a place you left behind.
I got here. And on Sunday, I’ll boomerang back – minus the purgatory, one hopes – and time will flow forward again. For me and for you.
In the spirit of “Yes, I would eat that” (something I say fairly often, if only to myself), I present: “Yes, I would live in that.”
Venues. VENUES. Listen: you need to tell your shitty patrons to shut the fuck up. This enables your non-shitty patrons to have a nice time. Continue reading
Winter settles fairly evenly across the middlest part of the Midwest. One part is cold and snowy, so most of it is, and the rest will be soon enough if it doesn’t immediately fall under the same blanket. There might be a difference of 20 or 30 degrees, but all the temperatures end up south of the freezing point eventually, so it doesn’t matter so much.
Washington isn’t like that. There are snow-clotted passes and temperate Sound- and ocean-bordering areas and this middle part that’s apparently part desert, and winter settles unevenly, uneasily across the state. After moving here, I realized the whole grunge/layers look was just a simple adaptation to the Seattle weather. These things are revelations when you’re from the outside. Continue reading
It’s trite to say, but I don’t care: I want to go to there. The last cultural thing I did in St. Louis before I left for college – early on a Saturday morning, after I’d stayed up all night, packing – was to go to an exhibit of environments at the St. Louis Art Museum. I think this would always be my cup of tea, but because of that bleary, edgy visit to that exhibit, things like this will always transport me that much more.
Did you know the SPD has a Tumblr? They do, and they’ve also gotten in on the current Doctor Who fervor. To great effect, I might add. Continue reading
I have lived in the Midwest and Boston, as has been established here. I am not a stranger to cold, to weeks of below-freezing temperatures, to cars careening off roads and sidewalks turning to slush and then ice beneath your feet, leaving you to discover just how catlike you really are.
In Boston, snow falls, and people shovel or stomp thin trails through the foot-plus banks of snow on the sidewalk. They walk their dogs along it too, of course. This results in yellow snow that can last for a month or more, little growing piddle patterns that you grow to know well as you walk to class or work, day after day.
Seattle has its own version.
Figure 1: fuck this.
Ok. So.
You get up in the morning. It’s a cold-ass day. You pass many fine coffee-serving establishments, as is the way of most stretches of sidewalk in our fair city. On your way to work, you stop and get your Americano or your latte or whatever other syrup-filled business you feel starts your day in the right way. You clutch it for a few blocks, waiting for it to get just below boiling lava hot so you can drink it.
And then, for a few blocks: BLISS.
The temperature is genuine, Goldilocks-grade just right. Quiet, EMP – this is nirvana, this perfectly hot-enough caffeinated bliss in a cup, yes, here we go, we may survive another day yet.
And then, too soon: lukewarm.
So what’s a Seattlelite to do? Chuck it. Pop that lid off, splash your coffee dregs in the bushes or, well, near enough. On the sidewalk’s fine. It’ll go away, right?
Wrong. WRONG.
There’s a certain kind of weather in Seattle that combines uncommonly cold with uncommonly dry. And then your goddamn coffee puddles last for-freaking-ever. For days on end, your fellow man has to make your rejected coffee another landmark to remember, because it’s too cold to melt and too solid to be scraped away by their sad, shuffling feet.
Don’t do this. You can carry the extra few ounces all the way to the next trash can with a bag, FFS.
I walk up and down hills to get to work, man. I can’t be dodging this stuff all the time. It’s early out, and like 20 degrees. Come on.
We can get it together to stop this. We separate our trash into no fewer then seven bins at this point, and we can master this too. Do it for you. Do it for me.
But let’s be real. It’s mainly for me.
Thank you.
The real-life version of those layered sand sculptures in bottles you used to beg your parents for at the county fair.
How to ride the bus when it’s crowded and shitty. This is required reading, Seattlelites. Yes, even for you. Especially for you.
I will add one more thing to that: mind your backpack, jerky. Because you – the one who gets on the 70 around South Lake Union and is completely unaware of the different perimeter your giant backpack gives you? You’re getting pushed when your big dumb backpack gets in my face. And you are not allowed to look put-upon when it happens. Thus spaketh… me.
Historical graffiti, including a profile painted in blood.
JeeYoung Lee’s photos are “un-Photoshopped” (my inner editor hates this non-word, eesh), but the apparently pretty small space that she works in may actually be technically magic by now.
Tavi demonstrates the sublime rewards and clear gravity of getting it while it’s still going on.
Symbols, assumptions, and the Wild West we should strive for: What Screens Want by Frank Chimero.
When the seasons change and the sun shifts, it can cause magical, weird things to happen.
I love bizarre art the best. And I may need to add this to my to-do list for my next trip to New York. Continue reading