4.12.2008 fun

The other night I went out with David, back in town to work on his dissertation. The chosen venue (selected by some of his mates) was for some obscure reason B Bar.

Otherwise known as the local meat market - hookup central - a venue I had never planned to visit.

David is a fine upstanding family man and also currently enslaved to a thesis, so he sat with his back to the room as we caught up.

Once the other academics absconded our remaining companion listed sideways in a fugue state of over-stimulation, nearly lodging himself in the cleavage of a girl at the next table.

Why? It is hard to accurately explain or describe. I've been to dive bars, glam bars, gay bars, every sort of elite or reckless sort of establishment you could possibly imagine, and can say authoritatively that B Bar is the trashiest place I've ever been.

In fact I would wager money there is nothing like it in America.

The experience does not translate.

B Bar is brazenly, brilliantly British - the Britain of Jade Goody, Kerry Katona, Celebrity Big Brother, and binge drinking.

My impression at the time, and still, is a sea of fake breasts randomly attached to hair extensions and spray tanned bodies, actively and creepily ogled by bald blokes on the pull.

There might have been pheromones in the air but it was impossible to know given the fog of cheap perfume and aftershave that made me sneeze over and over again.

I was fully expecting Robin Askwith to show up any second.

We west coast refugees exited the building in a state of shock, only to be confronted by the red velvet ropes at the Fez.

In a word, no. Local lore says what happens at the Fez stays at the Fez and as far as I'm concerned this translates to a permanent injunction against attendance.

It might appear from recent posts that my entire life is just one long party interspersed with the occasional boating adventure but that is far from the truth.

The most exciting events of my week? I consulted a tax accountant about the returns that need to be filed in two different nations.

Then, check it: I interviewed immigration attorneys - and hired one.

It is a sick truth that I was endlessly thrilled by these bureaucratic encounters. Next up: I need to account for every single day I've been away from the United Kingdom over the course of four years.

No problem. In fact, this is my favorite sort of task - how fun!

4.11.2008 mutuality

I rushed back from London earlier than planned to meet a friend flying in from Italy.

When last seen, Danny was a Portland based projectionist, Chorus member, one of the hosts of the annual Pisces party; she was still dating Mickey (the filmmaker, not my cousin).

Before that we both went to Evergreen and our years overlapped - she even worked at the child care center, though we don't remember each other. We both lived in the same NW scenes for years, and moved away around the same time, though we've never kept track of each other.

Back then it would never have occurred to me that any of my friends would veer from the fundamentalist punk ethos of that time and place, let alone appear one day as newly minted PhD student from an Italian university visiting the Cambridge History of Science Department.

Her particular research topic concerns sexual identity and she was inevitably disappointed at the doctrinaire opinions expressed by some (obviously, not all) local experts, because, essentially, they don't get it.

I was not surprised; I'm definitely the freakiest thing going in this town, and the only person I know who actively talks about queer identity - and yes, this is ironic given my lifelong refusal to admit to any identity whatsoever. It is just the nature of the place - I would never bother elsewhere - consider my efforts taking it for the team.

Plus nobody can take my kids away now; one is grown-up, the other too old to be at risk. Hurray for us.

That, however, is not the point, and it was incredibly satisfying to hang out with my own folk after a too-long hiatus.

The visit was brief but filled to bursting with enormously enlightening talks about our beloved former North Portland homes, the anti-intellectualism of that community, the good bad and painful process of leaving.

It wasn't all heavy discussions - we went through the inevitable list of food we never knew we would miss, things we've had to learn to cook, ingredients that are impossible to source. We talked about the various sorts of annoyances unique to traveling as a woman in Europe (the attention is quite horrifying if you are accustomed to living in a place where people don't make eye contact).

The smallest things become enormous when you leave home - we're both the sort who saunter forth with ripped clothing, in cultures where that does not translate.

At one point we were in a pub with a bunch of academics including a super macho dude I met in Spain last year. Danny and I created a little oasis of conversation in the middle of the academic chatter, ranging over all the sex scandals from home (and they can be quite shocking, even in a group of people who pride themselves on not caring), presuming that nobody nearby would hear or care.

Much later I learned that macho dude was listening, and quite improbably knows the punks in a certain eastern city (who are of course intertwined with PDX). I should have reflected on my surroundings and remembered the saying Loose Lips Sink Ships. Though I doubt he could have kept track of the names - half those we were talking about have transitioned to a different gender since we first met.

Beyond that I have probably solidified my local reputation as a femme fatale, and that is clearly not desirable or deserved. The fact that I lack mainstream morals does not mean I want anyone to hit on me. Especially here. Ick.

To avoid future entanglements, I have officially decided never to go out again.

Though that pledge might only last as long as, well, tomorrow.

Talking to Danny was the most amazing tonic - a strange but hugely nourishing combination of here, there, then, now, next. In my life there have been very few people who have understood exactly where I'm coming from, what I'm talking about, what I can't quite articulate (Mark Mitchell is the most recent example of this phenomenon, and I miss him woefully).

This sort of mutuality is not the result of love, friendship, congenial companionship - people have loved me hugely without ever understanding anything about me. It is something else, a similar set of views, an historical understanding of various cultural threads, with some kind of edge, like the tearaway spirit that can fling a person far from everything they once knew. Just because they want to see what happens.

I wasn't expecting much from the visit but Danny has officially become My New Favorite Person (I've Known Ten Years).

4.10.2008 try

Yesterday I started my annual effort to plant a garden, which despite my name and a long line of maternal gardening experts, is always ineffective - to the point of slaughter.

I never know exactly what I do wrong; I start with such good intentions, and everything goes awry.

In Portland I chalked it up to the alkaline nature of the soil, or too much shade... but the very same plants that never thrived under my care are flourishing for Danielle and Gabriel.

In fact, they are such good caretakers, I left all of my houseplants with them too - and the last time I visited Danny warned me off even petting them!

I am a notorious plant killer.

Yet still I try; yesterday this included a long bike ride out to the big block stores to purchase compost and a happy afternoon sitting on the banks of the river potting an assortment of shrubs.

I went with sturdy things in the hopes that they will be impervious to my attentions: a lavender bush, some heather, a weird one I've never heard of with red blossoms.

There are still violas, and trailing lobelia, which should last at least a few weeks (crossing fingers).

When I bought the boat oh so many years ago the previous owner agreed to leave his big planter if I kept growing what he had established: a lawn. This was easy, since it just meant ignoring the grass as it died off and grew back.

But now it is choked with too many roots and needs a proper clean-up. When I asked my kid what we should grow to replace it, he replied a new lawn, of course - so I guess I'll have to go out in search of grass seed.

Maybe this year will prove more productive than others.

Though I dare not purchase those tomato seedlings I've been eyeing - that just wouldn't be nice. For the plants.

4.8.2008 consolation

I've been felled by a dread curse: seasonal allergies.

Oh, woe is me!

This happened around the same time last year, and it was eventually so bad the British anesthesiologist I was partying with in Asbury Park NJ diagnosed me with asthma and spent the weekend sternly ordering me to stop laughing.

As if I could; life is far too amusing, even when my brain has been replaced by green goo!

The cocktail of drugs keeping me alive is incompatible with sinus meds, and no certified herbalist has come up with a safe effective solution, so I will just trudge forward, wheezing.

If memory serves I was quite unexpectedly cured last year when I wandered off to Arizona for awhile, but my next planned trip to a hot climate is Andalucia in June.

That trip will be great fun, not least because I just learned that Natalia and Javi (you might remember them from the Himsa crew) are moving to Cadiz next month. Friends from home, a short flight away, hurray!

Oh, and Cambridge offers this brilliant consolation - swans nesting, and the first ducklings of the year:

4.6.2008 connection

During the trip to London I had dinner with friends at a restaurant you may remember from an earlier anecdote in which Dino hit on a waitress who was definitely not interested though she later cornered me in a back hallway - a running theme last year that has, hopefully, abated.

The food was basic (steak and steamed spinach - I can even make that!) but yummy and we hatched hectic schemes that will unfurl across the next decade. At the end I didn't even blink over the fact that the meal cost approximately what I would have spent on six months rent back in grad school.

England has finally broken me - I don't even do the mental exchange rate any longer!

Another night a dozen or so friends gathered to celebrate a birthday. We were at Jaguar Shoes for a few hours and this year there were no ice throwing incidents, and (as far as I know) no sketchy hookups - mostly because the ratio of North American to British was skewed toward people who have passports in this nation.

Though someone did confide that they'd once had sex in the toilet at one of my other parties; c'mon, people! I'm all for semi-public coitus but toilet sex is nasty in a bad way!

My glamorous and gorgeous literary agent aka Susan turned up and informed me that she has given up chastising me about work. I laughed and apologized for not earning her more money, before pointing out that my stuff is destined to remain forever underground.

Lucky she likes me as a person, eh? Other agents would drop my contrary ass but she just sighs and strokes my hair.

The bar was a crush of Shoreditch hipsters packed in so tight we took up a defensive position against one wall, where I was extremely pleased to catch up with Xtina.

She is one of the only people I know who can listen to me rattle on about creepy medical procedures without being at all fazed - a rare and immeasurably valuable trait. Plus she is hilarious, hugely talented, and has the best hair ever. What more could you ask for in a friend?

Most of the group vanished around midnight, when one fellows smoking hot Not Girlfriend showed up. There is a whole rash of this going around in my social world lately, and I remain puzzled. Of course I've never referred to a romantic interest as my anything but the friends declaiming proprietary interest are not similarly uniform. They do, in some cases, use a title in reference to someone they love - they are capable of blithely claiming to have a girlfriend/boyfriend/partner/whatever.

In the current cases where individuals have denied a specific relationship it looks less like honesty and more like a distancing technique. If you sleep with a person, spend all of your spare time with a person, and (in this case) live with a person, surely there is a word to describe the connection?

With the teenagers it makes sense, since their lives are so confusing: I'm sure they have no relative clue of what they are doing. With this guy, not so much, except maybe insofar as he doesn't want me to tell whoever he is hitting on that he has a girlfriend.

This is not especially well reasoned, since I will then refer to her as That Girl You Are Fucking.

Susan and I were highly amused to watch as Byron got his flirt on with the Not Girlfriend, while the Not Boyfriend lurked about looking distressed. The presence of the girl clearly inhibited his normal routine of trawling the crowd, but with her attention distracted by the tall man, he had nothing better to do except once again attempt to talk to me about literature.

Later Byron claimed that he had not been flirting, and Susan and I shrieked with laughter. I replied At least you acted better than last year!

Byron asked What happened last year?

Susan replied You picked me up and rocked me and sang a lullaby!

Byron was astonished, but yes, it is true - yet another reason why other agents would steer clear of my company: I exert no control over the antics of the mad scientists. In fact, I find them amusing.

The evening mutated once again and I found myself dragged through the vomit-steaked streets of the city to one club after another, where, mysterious and surprising above all things, I danced.

4.5.2008 day

Guess where I went yesterday?

To a faraway riverside marina next to a pub founded hundreds of years before my country of birth, to pick up my boat!

Oh, how I missed her!

The trip started at the confluence of the rivers Cam and Great Ouse and proceeded at an orderly five miles per hour back to the city:

Swans, herons, countless birds I could not name, and flocks of geese:

Fields full of sheep and cows:

Remnants of WWII defenses:

The crew takes a break to sit on top of the boat and enjoy a sandwich:

What a perfect, amazing day:

4.1.2008 face

Last week was marked out by a cascade of critical tasks like obtaining a boat safety certificate, mooring permit, and waterways license - all coagulating with the same deadline (as two agencies simultaneously required the original and only aforesaid certificate).

On top of all that it became urgently necessary to reduce all the storage I have not looked at since moving here - quite an enormous and humbling task for many reasons, not least the fact that cleaning is not within my repertoire.

I can unpack, organize, and assemble, but am never inclined to throw anything away if it might someday prove useful.

That is why, opening boxes, I found amongst other things a yellow scarf purchased at a thrift store on South Tacoma Way in the late seventies and worn rarely since. And the shirt I wore that time Ariel and I went on a bizarre venture capital adventure. And boxes upon boxes of clothing discarded by various people - in many cases, not even people I know.

Purging was necessary but also entirely stressful. Finding my old journals just underscored the fact; Paris, Rome, Tallinn, Helsinki, Trento, Venice, Nice, Barcelona, Amsterdam, Granada, looping jaunts through the United States and United Kingdom, the occasional and always bizarre stay in Canada: my life over the last six years has been at best chaotic.

Remembering that fact is puzzling and helpful. The sheer physical effort of shifting a life, however, is torture.

By the end of the week this is what I looked like:

The morning after that photo I was shuffling around brushing my teeth when I looked in a mirror and dimly perceived something moving. I poked, assuming it was an optical illusion, but no - even without my glasses on I knew it was lice.

I commenced hopping around shrieking in rage and horror, much to the chagrin of a tsking host who told me to act my age.

But my advanced age does not by default involve bouts of head lice!

Any parent who has been visited by the pestilence knows how hard it is to treat in this chemically saturated age. We're essentially back to ye olden days of hopeless herbal remedies and tedious comb-outs.

Difficult in the best scenario, but remember, I have excessively long hair. And limited washing facilities.

As I crouched dragging a metal comb through the knotty mess I cursed the laziness or whimsy that persuaded me to live without haircuts for decades. If there had been scissors within reach I would have hacked it all off right then.

But there was no time, because to round out the hideous week I had to rush off to the teaching hospital for one of my routine tests.

This particular one involves a panoramic x-ray of my jaw to determine if there are cysts hidden away deep down inside. In the past these have been quite devastating, taking out molars and large portions of mandible. To date I have had perhaps six surgeries, with experts up and down the west coast dolefully informing me that I would need to be followed in specialized clinics the rest of my life.

These things do not upset me in principle - I am not worried about the results, fretful about the interaction with surgeons. For the most part I am laissez-faire to a fault about my health.

What I cannot stand, even now, after all these years, is the test itself. Forehead braced against a post, chin held in place with a plastic guide, teeth clenched on the bit, I am required to be still and hold my breath as the machine makes a steady perambulation of my head.

It only lasts for twelve short seconds - nothing at all in the course of a life - but if you grew up in therapy culture or have post traumatic stress disorder you will probably recognize this as a trigger event.

I'm tough, I'm resilient, I can face down anything. But in those twelve seconds I relive fear, pain, loathing, humiliation, a surging wave of memories of blood, surgical dressings, vomit, infection.

The only thing that keeps my face in the grip of the machine is the knowledge that they will continue until they have a perfect print.

When the consultant called me into the examination room he pointed to the print, the proof of devastation still visible in shadowy traces where bone and teeth were pulverized by disease. I knew at a glance that the result was fine, no new cysts - these things are easy to read.

What was more surprising was the fact that the doctor looked from the image to my face and then said But you don't look like someone with this syndrome.

My eyebrows went up but I resisted rolling my eyes. What did he mean by the comment? That I lack a distinctive lantern jaw found in a minority of those diagnosed, and that my original surgeons sacrificed my joints to avoid slashing my face open.

The point is however mostly rhetorical since this fellow, even if a world renowned expert, has probably only met three or four other people with the syndrome. If that.

I retorted I don't have a bifid rib either and he looked even more startled.

He recited the test results; exactly as I already knew from a cursory glance, my jaw is clear. I started to gather my things and said nonchalantly Awesome, thanks!

This was clearly not expected because he replied Erm, what?

I said Awesome! He shook his head and delivered a final announcement that made me sit back down abruptly: he informed me that I no longer need to be seen in clinic.

Twenty-four years after the definitive diagnosis, seventeen years after the most recent jaw surgery, against all known medical literature and the advice of any previous clinician, I am officially - not cured, never that, but free.

Liberated not from the disease itself, but from the experience of being a prized specimen, at least in regards to the function of the lower half of my face.

This is only one test of several, and I'll still need to do it, but I can go to the bright shiny environs of a dental office. My stateside surgeons would be appalled, but I am thrilled beyond measure.

There are so many things to love about this country.

My scars are visible to anyone who looks, but the people who try claim they cannot see them; whether the traces of surgery and sorrow are hidden by artifice or attitude makes no difference.

I left the hospital and raced away to London, leaving behind mess and drama, turning a damaged and hopeful face resolutely to new adventures.

Oh, and I decided not to cut my hair after all: