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Aug. 13th, 2010 07:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
violetclm"I'm alive, and sometimes I know it; here's to those times." ~Vagabond Opera lyrics
Hi everyone! It's early-mid-August, school resumes at the end of the month, and I've spent all summer in Portland without so much as a momentary excursion to some other nearby burg. I get around on foot or bicycle (though the latter not as much as during the school year, simply because I don't have a class to go to five mornings a week), occasionally pressuring a subletter to give me a ride somewhere. Food Not Bombs, for instance, has moved its primary Portland distribution site from a site a bikable 4.6 miles distant to one a much less pleasant 7.2 miles, and the promise of a free and healthy dinner was enough to get me a ride, though sadly it only worked once. On another occasion my bike needed rescuing from the post about 4.8 miles away I had left it at the night before, where I had gone to see the March Fourth Marching Band live in concert as par of the Portland Bridge Festival, honoring the Hawthorne Bridge's one-hundredth birthday. (Every true Reedie, you understand, loves March Fourth.) Unfortunately some other reveler locked their bike to the same post after I had gotten there and inadvertently encircled one of my break cables in their lock, which made my homeward journey take much longer than anticipated (even excluding the hundred minutes lost waiting for the other biker's return). Fortunately it was good weather for the walk home, and I picked up an enormous bag of chips on the way; with the temporary loss of access to the Scrounge, with its constant and plentiful supplies of free leftovers, I have had to make do with very occasional trials of the far riskier and less profitable dumpstering. It is an unappealing alternative. In any case, the same subletter (also used at the beginning of the semester to help me pick up a bookshelf, come to think of it!) was gracious enough to take me back to my bike the next day, whereupon I promptly rescued it.
So, yes, subletters! I (or rather the house) have had several! They have no legal status as residents, so they have had to have been hidden when the property has been inspected, but they occupy the living spaces temporarily made absent by the Future's other residents, and save me the trouble of paying three months rent and utilities all by myself. Most of them are rising sophomores and much younger/different than my regular housemates, being much more interested in video games and watching movies than doing math/science or making food. The exceptions are a recently married alumni couple (who are leaving tomorrow morning for the city of the angels), who do make efforts to feed themselves, as well as being better at taking care of the house in general instead of leaving it a dish-bestrewn mess. In the absence of my regular housemates, though, I have become the house baker, being pretty nearly the only person to provide previously-commonplace kommie baked goods, and even gained some reputation as knowledgeable about food preparation in general, although I attribute that mostly to fakery on my part and do not particularly believe it to be true. A combination of dietary restrictions, preferences, and legal dissuasion from overmuch sharing of food, moreover, seems to result in what does get made disappearing more slowly than during the school year, even though people nominally spend more time in the house... I may simply be imagining that, though. They are all decent enough people whom I cannot discuss into too much detail without being compromising in one way or another.
Going into the summer, I noticed that there were a fair number of other people whom I knew staying in Portland some or all of the time as well, so I assumed that it would a pretty social time. Why else would they stay in Portland instead of going home or getting a job in any other city in the world? I was pretty much completely wrong, though, to my disappointment, as so far as I can tell hardly anyone who's been around has any appetite for social interaction at all. Speaking generally, they don't initiate, they don't respond, and when they do express interest in some sort of get-together, they balk at the idea of agreeing to any specific date or time. I made two attempts at picnics, for instance, but both were aborted due to lack of people committing themselves. Last week I tried at holding a party and invited twenty-three people, thirteen of whom lacked the social interest even to respond to the invitation in any way. In the end, one guest showed up, some hours late. Perhaps I need to up my number of uninvited visits, but that always feels kind of rude (/silly if the person doesn't turn out to be home). Anyhow, summer has definitely had overtones of loneliness and staying at home a lot.
There have fortunately been a few exceptions, and I give great thanks to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
bobfriediemajor, arcticpoodle, and Lila for their outgoingness. The third has initiated several social occasions, going so far as to suggest I go to parties (with various outcomes), and the first two (in addition to the former coming over a couple times to eat cookies and test my hearing for science) were my compatriots in attending both the Portland Pride Parade and a local Highland Games. The first was a pretty colorful (if commercial) event, with some other Reedies in attendance but in a different group we didn't see much of, followed by some wandering around downtown and a trip to arcticpoodle's new house (!) where we met her landlord and made some griddlecake-like things from another nationality. The Highland Games were really cool and a definite highlight of the summer... lots of music and dancing, colorful costumes, stuff I wanted to buy, literally world-class athletes, and good friends to experience it all with. I did a little bit of dancing and managed not to injure anyone, and overall felt much more like myself and less censored or careful than I do a lot of times these days around other people. bobfriediemajor, whose family instigated the trip, has a Scottish last name, but I never really thought about that until the Games, at which point I saw countless bits of souvenirs and memorabilia for various clans, including her family. This was of course totally matter-of-fact to her, but I, coming from a family (on my paternal side at least) that knows so little about its origins and is small enough to have its own Facebook group dedicated to figuring out what we know about our ancestors, was much amazed. It did not help my little identity crisis when arcticpoodle was in turn adopted by another clan on the basis of her last name being a variation on several more degrees of variation on their proper title. What to do, what to do? Anyway, Mattias has also come over a couple times, and that was nice, though he was really visiting the subletters, for purposes of gaming and/or meat eating.
The process of my applying to join the Peace Corps continues on apace, having begun back in March. (Have I mentioned here that I'm doing that? I'm not sure I have.) After my somewhat rocky interview process, I was nominated for service by the Corps, pending approval by an actual host country. First, though, I have to complete their medical status forms, which involve me getting checkups from a local doctor and hospital. I won't have everything ready to send back until the 30th at the earliest, which is when classes start, but initial results show that I am healthy of body and my teeth are in good condition (much to my surprise). I do however have mild anemia, and the omnivores may now proceed to laugh at me accordingly.
As for the actual official reason I'm here over the summer and not at home (as opposed to less official reasons like getting a feel for living on my own as an independent adult), my internship with Living Tongues, it is très unexciting. Despite my best efforts to protest that I was there for linguistics experience, not web design, and I brought it up mainly because I didn't know how competitive their hiring process was (probably: not at all), their initial task was to do some recoding work on their website, which I have not yet completed because it's dull stuff and the carrot on the stick that I'd supposedly get to do afterwards, based on what I hear from another intern, isn't all that much better. It's all stuff that's very useful for Living Tongues and I can understand why they want people to do it for them, but it's not useful or marketable experience. (On the not being done yet note: it doesn't help that the director didn't schedule a meeting and tell interns what he wanted done until a month and a half into the summer, during which time I never dared go home or make any other major time commitments because I never knew when the internship would finally begin.) If really interested, you can follow my progress at http://www.livingtongues.org/php/, bearing in mind that it's a good thing if everything looks essentially the same as it does outside of the /php/ folder because my work is much more on the genotypical side of the spectrum.
Hi everyone! It's early-mid-August, school resumes at the end of the month, and I've spent all summer in Portland without so much as a momentary excursion to some other nearby burg. I get around on foot or bicycle (though the latter not as much as during the school year, simply because I don't have a class to go to five mornings a week), occasionally pressuring a subletter to give me a ride somewhere. Food Not Bombs, for instance, has moved its primary Portland distribution site from a site a bikable 4.6 miles distant to one a much less pleasant 7.2 miles, and the promise of a free and healthy dinner was enough to get me a ride, though sadly it only worked once. On another occasion my bike needed rescuing from the post about 4.8 miles away I had left it at the night before, where I had gone to see the March Fourth Marching Band live in concert as par of the Portland Bridge Festival, honoring the Hawthorne Bridge's one-hundredth birthday. (Every true Reedie, you understand, loves March Fourth.) Unfortunately some other reveler locked their bike to the same post after I had gotten there and inadvertently encircled one of my break cables in their lock, which made my homeward journey take much longer than anticipated (even excluding the hundred minutes lost waiting for the other biker's return). Fortunately it was good weather for the walk home, and I picked up an enormous bag of chips on the way; with the temporary loss of access to the Scrounge, with its constant and plentiful supplies of free leftovers, I have had to make do with very occasional trials of the far riskier and less profitable dumpstering. It is an unappealing alternative. In any case, the same subletter (also used at the beginning of the semester to help me pick up a bookshelf, come to think of it!) was gracious enough to take me back to my bike the next day, whereupon I promptly rescued it.
So, yes, subletters! I (or rather the house) have had several! They have no legal status as residents, so they have had to have been hidden when the property has been inspected, but they occupy the living spaces temporarily made absent by the Future's other residents, and save me the trouble of paying three months rent and utilities all by myself. Most of them are rising sophomores and much younger/different than my regular housemates, being much more interested in video games and watching movies than doing math/science or making food. The exceptions are a recently married alumni couple (who are leaving tomorrow morning for the city of the angels), who do make efforts to feed themselves, as well as being better at taking care of the house in general instead of leaving it a dish-bestrewn mess. In the absence of my regular housemates, though, I have become the house baker, being pretty nearly the only person to provide previously-commonplace kommie baked goods, and even gained some reputation as knowledgeable about food preparation in general, although I attribute that mostly to fakery on my part and do not particularly believe it to be true. A combination of dietary restrictions, preferences, and legal dissuasion from overmuch sharing of food, moreover, seems to result in what does get made disappearing more slowly than during the school year, even though people nominally spend more time in the house... I may simply be imagining that, though. They are all decent enough people whom I cannot discuss into too much detail without being compromising in one way or another.
Going into the summer, I noticed that there were a fair number of other people whom I knew staying in Portland some or all of the time as well, so I assumed that it would a pretty social time. Why else would they stay in Portland instead of going home or getting a job in any other city in the world? I was pretty much completely wrong, though, to my disappointment, as so far as I can tell hardly anyone who's been around has any appetite for social interaction at all. Speaking generally, they don't initiate, they don't respond, and when they do express interest in some sort of get-together, they balk at the idea of agreeing to any specific date or time. I made two attempts at picnics, for instance, but both were aborted due to lack of people committing themselves. Last week I tried at holding a party and invited twenty-three people, thirteen of whom lacked the social interest even to respond to the invitation in any way. In the end, one guest showed up, some hours late. Perhaps I need to up my number of uninvited visits, but that always feels kind of rude (/silly if the person doesn't turn out to be home). Anyhow, summer has definitely had overtones of loneliness and staying at home a lot.
There have fortunately been a few exceptions, and I give great thanks to
bobfriediemajor, arcticpoodle, and Lila for their outgoingness. The third has initiated several social occasions, going so far as to suggest I go to parties (with various outcomes), and the first two (in addition to the former coming over a couple times to eat cookies and test my hearing for science) were my compatriots in attending both the Portland Pride Parade and a local Highland Games. The first was a pretty colorful (if commercial) event, with some other Reedies in attendance but in a different group we didn't see much of, followed by some wandering around downtown and a trip to arcticpoodle's new house (!) where we met her landlord and made some griddlecake-like things from another nationality. The Highland Games were really cool and a definite highlight of the summer... lots of music and dancing, colorful costumes, stuff I wanted to buy, literally world-class athletes, and good friends to experience it all with. I did a little bit of dancing and managed not to injure anyone, and overall felt much more like myself and less censored or careful than I do a lot of times these days around other people. bobfriediemajor, whose family instigated the trip, has a Scottish last name, but I never really thought about that until the Games, at which point I saw countless bits of souvenirs and memorabilia for various clans, including her family. This was of course totally matter-of-fact to her, but I, coming from a family (on my paternal side at least) that knows so little about its origins and is small enough to have its own Facebook group dedicated to figuring out what we know about our ancestors, was much amazed. It did not help my little identity crisis when arcticpoodle was in turn adopted by another clan on the basis of her last name being a variation on several more degrees of variation on their proper title. What to do, what to do? Anyway, Mattias has also come over a couple times, and that was nice, though he was really visiting the subletters, for purposes of gaming and/or meat eating.The process of my applying to join the Peace Corps continues on apace, having begun back in March. (Have I mentioned here that I'm doing that? I'm not sure I have.) After my somewhat rocky interview process, I was nominated for service by the Corps, pending approval by an actual host country. First, though, I have to complete their medical status forms, which involve me getting checkups from a local doctor and hospital. I won't have everything ready to send back until the 30th at the earliest, which is when classes start, but initial results show that I am healthy of body and my teeth are in good condition (much to my surprise). I do however have mild anemia, and the omnivores may now proceed to laugh at me accordingly.
As for the actual official reason I'm here over the summer and not at home (as opposed to less official reasons like getting a feel for living on my own as an independent adult), my internship with Living Tongues, it is très unexciting. Despite my best efforts to protest that I was there for linguistics experience, not web design, and I brought it up mainly because I didn't know how competitive their hiring process was (probably: not at all), their initial task was to do some recoding work on their website, which I have not yet completed because it's dull stuff and the carrot on the stick that I'd supposedly get to do afterwards, based on what I hear from another intern, isn't all that much better. It's all stuff that's very useful for Living Tongues and I can understand why they want people to do it for them, but it's not useful or marketable experience. (On the not being done yet note: it doesn't help that the director didn't schedule a meeting and tell interns what he wanted done until a month and a half into the summer, during which time I never dared go home or make any other major time commitments because I never knew when the internship would finally begin.) If really interested, you can follow my progress at http://www.livingtongues.org/php/, bearing in mind that it's a good thing if everything looks essentially the same as it does outside of the /php/ folder because my work is much more on the genotypical side of the spectrum.