Home and Heartbreak: 120 Hours in Cowlitz County

Hopes were high for this week.

I had five days away from work and plans to spend the 4th of July in my hometown, where I've spent nearly every 4th in my 25 years. I've been hard on my hometown in the past. There are drugs, abandoned industries, poverty, the persistently declining graduation rate of my high school ... all cyclical. The truth is, though, having been away for some seven years, I can now say that the 18 years I spent there, nestled in the sort of idyllic middle-class, blue-collar neighborhood where everyone knows everyone in every well-kept Dutch Colonial on every tree-lined block, well, they're the kind of 18 years I plan to give to my future herd of little nerds.

And the 4th of July, well, the 4th of July is when my hometown gets all gussied up. The population swells as all of the Cowlitz Countians flock to Lake Sacajawea in the center of town to wait an hour in line for elephant ears and buy tatty kitsch at the flea market and watch burly loggers run with chainsaws at the lumberjack competition. People stake out their spots on the lake bank early in the morning for the night's fireworks show ... which every other year seems to suffer from some sort of technical malfunction (which we all willingly forget every year). As a kid, you went to the lake to catch up with friends during summer break. You convinced your 6th grade boyfriend to buy you a glow stick and an ice cream cone and let you hold his hand during the fireworks' Grand Finale. In college, it became the event for which everyone gathered back in town from their respective college campuses, to see the people they haven't seen in months, years. Even at 24, the nostalgia far outweighs my angst at the preponderance of "Speak English or Get Out of My Country" bumper stickers.

So in some sort of ironic twist of whatever, on Day One of my annual Go 4th Nostalgia Fest, I managed to get myself dumped by my high school boyfriend. Thud.

As I get ready for my year in the nation's biggest metropolis, I've been grappling with these ideas of home and belonging and such as, like. Do I really want to be on the East Coast? Am I crazy to abandon my Pacific Northwest, which I will argue with anyone is one of the most stunning places on Earth? Am I a big BIG city girl? I like to think the answers to those questions are no, yes, no, but that's another story altogether. Back to my broken heart.

As I was sitting on my parents' couch ruminating over the fact that I was just text dumped by the long-time apple of my eye, I realized that the place no longer felt like home. I wanted nothing more than to be back in Seattle. I wanted my kitchen, I wanted my market, I wanted to walk up to Kerry Park and watch the ferries cross the bay or sit on the patio at Linda's and bullshit with friends, new and old. Yeah I've been hard on Seattle at times too (too corporate, too fratty, not Portland, etc. etc.) but those are only on my bad days.

Seattle is the place where, over the past seven years, I've grown into my own. I like my Seattle life, my Seattle self, immensely. And I'm just coming to realize, as I box up my apartment, that I'm going to miss both, immensely, this year.

My hometown is my hometown, but Seattle, well, Seattle is now home. I'm going to miss her. Talk about heartbreak.

when bad things happen to bad people

you know, i'm not really into dancing on people's graves, but i can't help but comment on this. sorry jerry. this was obviously some sort of coordinated attack by the jews, gays, feminists, Teletubbies, pagans and ACLU. but what really gets me, is that there is now some sort of unspoken (or loudly spoken) decree that all republican presidential candidates need to issues statements on this. this guy was a radical, on-the-fringe hatemonger. these guys really need to pander to his fans? really? REALLY? there's something wrong there. this is about the time i need mike gravel to show up and call a bigot a bigot. old man has balls. (i'm pretty in love with mike gravel.)

a good man is hard to find

i had a wonderful weekend, beginning and ending with good friends, with some gourmet frito pie thrown in for good measure. kate is well. olive is well. no complaints can be heard from apartment 48. when i started this blog again, i was hoping it would force me to write about, synthesize, contemplate what the hell is going on in this world. i failed to factor in how truly depressing the state of the world is at this moment. staying informed has turned out to be a masochistic effort. i need some inspiration this monday morning. i immediately thought of sarah vowell, one because i missed her for the bazillionth time this weekend, and two because when i think of people with the most impassioned love/hate relationships with this country, i think of her. at one point, the full text of my favorite sarah essay "the nerd voice" was online, and i'm failing to find it right now. i found an excerpt i quoted in a blog years ago and it goes something like this: "I wish that in order to secure his party's nomination, a presidential candidate would be re­quired to point at the sky and name all the stars; have the peri­odic table of the elements memorized; rattle off the kings and queens of Spain; define the significance of the Gatling gun; joke around in Latin; interpret the symbolism in seventeenth­-century Dutch painting; explain photosynthesis to a six-year­-old; recite Emily Dickinson; bake a perfect popover; build a shortwave radio out of a coconut; and know all the words to Hoagy Carmichael's "Two Sleepy People," Johnny Cash's "Five Feet High and Rising," and "You Got the Silver" by the Rolling Stones. After all, the United States is the greatest country on earth dealing with the most complicated problems in the his­tory of the world-poverty, pollution, justice, Jerusalem. What we need is a president who is at least twelve kinds of nerd, a nerd messiah to come along every four years, acquire the Se­cret Service code name Poindexter, install a Revenge of the Nerds screen saver on the Oval Office computer, and one by one decrypt our woes." in my search for that, however, i ran across this again. and thought i'd share. it's lengthy and slightly dated, but if you strip off the time-specific bits, the meat of it will make your heart hurt. you can hardly believe it came from the mouth of a politician. for the lazies of you, this: "'We the people are--collectively--still the key to the survival of America's democracy. We--as Lincoln put it, "[e]ven we here"--must examine our own role as citizens in allowing and not preventing the shocking decay and degradation of our democracy. Thomas Jefferson said: "An informed citizenry is the only true repository of the public will." The revolutionary departure on which the idea of America was based was the audacious belief that people can govern themselves and responsibly exercise the ultimate authority in self-government. This insight proceeded inevitably from the bedrock principle articulated by the Enlightenment philosopher John Locke: "All just power is derived from the consent of the governed." The intricate and carefully balanced constitutional system that is now in such danger was created with the full and widespread participation of the population as a whole. The Federalist Papers were, back in the day, widely-read newspaper essays, and they represented only one of twenty-four series of essays that crowded the vibrant marketplace of ideas in which farmers and shopkeepers recapitulated the debates that played out so fruitfully in Philadelphia. Indeed, when the Convention had done its best, it was the people - in their various States - that refused to confirm the result until, at their insistence, the Bill of Rights was made integral to the document sent forward for ratification. And it is "We the people" who must now find once again the ability we once had to play an integral role in saving our Constitution. And here there is cause for both concern and great hope. The age of printed pamphlets and political essays has long since been replaced by television - a distracting and absorbing medium which sees determined to entertain and sell more than it informs and educates. Lincoln's memorable call during the Civil War is applicable in a new way to our dilemma today: "We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.'" i didn't link those two pieces by accident. say what you will about celebrity al and his oscar, but don't ever tell me the man doesn't have a great mind.

round 1

It's going to be a long two years.... Preamble: The amount of money spent on political campaigns in this country anymore is appalling. I remember a recent local campaign in which a candidate had to go into some gross amount of personal debt just to get a spot on the televised debate. The fact that presidential candidates have to pander to Hollywood bigwigs so they can pay their campaign bills makes my blood boil. Lowdown: Barack attended some Hollywood egofest fundraiser hosted by David Geffen and Spielberg and others at which Mr. Geffen took potshots at Bill and Hillary and then handed $1.3 million to Obama's campaign. (''Obama is inspirational, and he's not from the Bush royal family or the Clinton royal family. Americans are dying every day in Iraq. And I'm tired of hearing James Carville on television.'') This happened just a day after Obama spoke to a crowd in Las Vegas about getting away from "slash and burn politics" in Washington. Hill got hot and bothered about all of the above and called for a denunciation of Geffen's comments by the Obama camp: "While Democrats should engage in a vigorous debate on the issues, there is no place in our party or our politics for the kind of personal insults made by Senator Obama's principal fundraiser." (principal fundraiser??) Obama's camp responded: "We aren’t going to get in the middle of a disagreement between the Clintons and someone who was once one of their biggest supporters. It is ironic that the Clintons had no problem with David Geffen when he was raising them $18 million and sleeping at their invitation in the Lincoln bedroom. It is also ironic that Senator Clinton lavished praise on Monday and is fully willing to accept today the support of South Carolina State Sen. Robert Ford, who said if Barack Obama were to win the nomination, he would drag down the rest of the Democratic Party because ’he's black.’" SNAP! I've subscribed to Hillary and Barack's email lists more for entertainment value than anything. After receiving Howard Dean's rabblerousing emails for the past year from the DNC, I figured there would be some gold coming out of the Hillary camp. This morning I open up my gmail to find a heartfelt letter from Bill (picture of him lovingly embracing is wife included). "Thank you so much for your support. Hillary and I couldn't do it without you." One rough weekend and she's already pulled out the Bill card? I'm not going to even get into how insulted I am that less than a month after she's announced her candidacy, she's already whoring out her husband's popularity. Pull up your big girl pants, Hill. I'm against this time-wasting slander as much as the next person. Get on the television and give me your plan to save my country from its current course toward complete ethical, intellectual and physical annihilation; don't waste our time putting out press releases urging your competitor to apologize for some loudmouth in California who doesn't want to have sleepovers at your house anymore. And don't even pretend like if that same loudmouth handed you $1.3 million you wouldn't take it.