Trippin'

As in, going on vacation. Actually, I'm starting out of order, because although we got back yesterday from our big trip (as you may have read about over at Piggs' place), today is fresehest in my mind. Today two of my aunts and I went to the Ren Faire. I've actually been a number of times over the course of my lifetime. I've certainly skipped years, but overall I'd say I've been at least as many years as I've skipped. My experience was nice enough -- I basically ate and sight-saw (?) -- I had a strawberry crepe with an iced latte, cinnamon almonds, some dolmas with pita and kalamata olives for lunch, and later a chocolate dipped strawberry. I also bought an attractive pepper plant with yellow, purple and red peppers that are allegedly very spicy. I didn't try them, but my aunt Joy took a small bite and burned her mouth. All right -- curry's on the way for Pigghead. I also got to see a belly dancing troupe I really like. Laugh if you will, but they do the more traditional style of dance, not cabaret, and they're very talented. It made me miss belly dancing, which I used to do (and quite well, I'd say). Oh well, my dancin' time is pretty much taken up with ballet now.

BUT . . . what I really wanted to blog about, and made mental notes on all day, were the "costumes." See, I think there are four types of people at any Ren Faire. Allow me to classify. First are the actual Faire people -- the ones who adhere to strict rules about their clothing -- no synthetic fabrics, a mandatory number of skirts, no machine stitching that's obvious, etc. They are the ones most likely to talk to you in faire speak, too. Then there are the wannabes. These people do not actually work for the Faire, and are therefore more likely to fudge with the clothing, like wearing Birkenstocks or a polyester bodice. On the other end are the civilians (if you're familiar with the Society for Creative Anachronism, they call them "mundanes.") I was one of these today in my jack Purcell Converse, denim skirt and cabana boy t-shirt. Years ago I was a wannabe, and I still have my costume, but consider it too much of a pain in the ass to wear anymore, plus I feel stupid doing the talk. I know how, I just feel fucking dumb saying "gramercy" instead of thank you. So now I just don't bother. The fourth category are one major reason I still like going to the Faire. I love these people. These are the goofballs who wear, say, jeans, tennis shoes, and a poet shirt. Or their Gap brand prairie skirt and a peasant blouse. Or flowery palazzo pants with a shawl wrapped around their waists. Or Harley Davidson chaps and a polyester cape. Or homemade harem pants with metallic gold paisleys. Or plaids with checks. Or everything they own that has fringe. Or camoflauge shorts with black and white checked tights (this is a guy). Or tye-died knickers. Or a broomstick skirt, macrame bra and glued-on pointy ears. Or a crushed-velvet dress. Or a leopard print body suit and a moon and stars print headscarf. Or pinstriped pants and a vest. You know? They're trying. They think the event warrants some kind of dressing up. At their office Halloween party they probably make some kind of effort, too. They just suck at it. They want so badly to be part of the creative festivities, but don't know how. It's like when a group of really creative, funny people all sit around with a drink or two in them and start telling outrageous stories, and the balding guy in the corner hopefully pipes up "my sister works with the disabled." It's just so wrong and out of place that it brings the whole thing grinding to a halt, but later on, behind the guy's back, everyone repeats "MY SISTER WORKS WITH THE DISABLED! HAHAHAHA!" My longtime winner has not been replaced, but today's winner was a women at least in her late thirties who wore a polyester harlequin outfit. She was stick skinny, and this blue and grey monstrosity hung off her everywhere except where her fanny pack interrupted it. It was so not a natural fiber that it would have melted to her body if set alight. My all-time winner, of you're wondering, was a twenty-something in a homemade I Dream of Jeannie outfit that was basically pink tulle stuffed haphazardly into the leg seams of a pair of thick pink panties on permanent right-side-wedgie. She also had GIGANTIC gold curly-toe elf shoes. At one point, she came out of the privies with a long sheet of toilet paper stuck to her elf shoe.
The kids, by the way, are a different story. Today I saw a Snow White, a Beauty, several fairy princesses, a ballerina, some Bohemian/gypsies, a couple Robin Hoods, a couple Peter Pans, some pirates in varying degrees of fierceness, and I don't even know what else. But they're kids, it was cute, who cares.

On to topic #2!! Some of this will echo Piggs' post, but I don't care. Last Friday we left for Eugene, where we surprised his sister and her kids (her loquacious but very likeable husband came home later). I loved all of them, and really would have nice things to say about the two older kids if you asked me, but the littlest one was a total pistol, just a spitfire (they call her the devil child), and I was crazy about her! Some examples: When accused of calling her brother an "A-hole," she widened her big eyes and said defiantly "He IS an A-hole." When Piggs was teasing her about something, she replied "Uncle Piggs, I can't show you the middle finger, but I could write it and show you that." After he described the "Chelsea" (a skitch, the infamous skinhead girl haircut that is essentially just bangs) she almost threw a tantrum because she wanted one so badly. Of course, she was also really bummed when we left, and was using clever delaying tactics -- "Wait!! I have to make you a card!" Yeah, I'm in love. I was also especially enamored of the toddler in the family, who didn't say a word for about the first 24 hours I knew him. I assumed he was just a non-verbal kid until we were having lunch together and out of nowhere he started telling me about his "big scary dream." He went on for about ten minutes, and only about every fourth word was intelligible, but there was a big yellow truck for sure, and something bad definitely happened to "MINE EYES!" He was very expressive, and will probably be a good storyteller someday. There were hand gestures and everything.

Like almost everyone in the world, Piggs thinks his parents are by turns insane and exasperating, and although I could see traces of it, they were very nice and welcoming to me, and I really loved his family. I was sorry to leave Eugene, even though I was excited about seeing Portland. Oh, another thing people always seem to think is that their moms are good cooks, but in Piggs' case, this impression is totally justified.

Also in Eugene we saw the U of O, which was a really cool campus. It looked like pictures I've seen of fancy-schmancy colleges on the East Coast, with all the old brick buildings, columns, statues, lawns . . . it was rad. Also, I was surprised to learn that Eugene is so hilly! I'm not used to driving in hills at all (in fact, in S.F, I often just park and walk or take public transportation, or even drop my car off in Emeryville and take Amtrak in to the city). At one point near his mom's house, we were on an incline that was probably 60 degrees or more. We stayed in a motel that had non-smoking rooms. The room wasn't bad but the corridor smelled to high heaven. Ooh, another cultural shock was that it was hot in Eugene. I mean, it's hot here, but not normally there, so we kept getting accused of bringing the heat with us. What surprised me though, was that here, 103 doesn't kick my ass. I recognize it's hot and prefer to sit around and eat popsicles, but there it was an absolute killer. First of all, it's muggy and humid. And second of all, nobody has central air conditioning!!! I mean, if my house gets too hot in my town, I can always pack a book and go sit in a coffee shop for a while, or go shopping. Because, duh, they're air conditioned. But we went into this bookstore in Eugene, and I was excpecting a blast of cold air when we opened the door, but noooo . . . in fact, it was every bit as hot in there. I wondered how the books survived in the wet air. Loquacious brother in law said something at one point about getting an air conditioner. I replied "Wow, that's a big project, and expensive!" He replied "Well, they have them down at Target." Hmm, it took me a minute to register that he meant an evaporative cooler, a window unit, a swamp cooler! No, dude, air conditioning involves VENTS in your WALLS.

Okay, then we drove to Portland and saw so much cool stuff. PSU, downtown, Multnomah falls (and others whose names I don't remember), the Rose Garden, the Hawthorne (which was my favorite shopping destination), Belmont, Coffee People, Baan Thai (amazing), The Space Room (great drinks, too smoky), JB toys, Stumptown, The Stepping Stone (You eat here because we let you), Cricket Cafe, Zupan's, MB's house (and his fuggin' cool rooftop, from which you could see the whole city. Some notes --- if you really want to see the Rose Gardens, don't go with two boys, one of them ADHD. We basically ran a straight path throught the gardens, went to the bathroom and the gift shop, and then the boys said "Well, what next?" Um, guys, I haven't actually seen the gardens yet. Thought that's what we were here for. To their credit, even though they're guys and had seen the gardens before, they indulged me as I looked around.
I thought this was funny: people were very nice, and several asked me how I liked Portland so far. I generally replied "Oh, I like it! It reminds me of San Francisco, but bigger and more spread out." Well, they almost uniformly replied "Portland's not bigger than San Francisco, it's much smaller, and also it's not more spread out: We have urban growth boundaries, so we have to build up within certain boundaries." Well, I almost started to believe them. It felt like we were driving a long way from one side of the city to another, but maybe that's just because I don't know it well. I started to doubt my impression, so I looked up the info. -- S.F. is 46.7 square miles and Portland is 130. Phew, I felt better. Also, I don't need to check on whether Portland is more spread out -- look at ANY residential street in both cities. SF rarely has air space between houses, and Portland is more like my little valley town, with at least several feet of space between houses and actual front and back yards. I don't feel like looking it up, but the population per square mile is insanely different, too. SF was at something like 15 thousand, and Portland was 3-something-thousand. It was great, though. The weather was pleasant, the city itself was nice (listen to a Portlander complain about the "dirty hippies" on Hawthorne and you'd think you were heading to Haight-Ashbury rather than a rather cleaner Castro), and the food was overwhelmingly good. The best of all, though, (I like saving the best for last) was all the people we met. I won't name names, because I'm still a little nervous about giving away personal info over the web, but let's say that Chester's mommy was AWESOME, I liked her boyfriend "some-people-call-me-Maurice," and their friend J.L. I got to spend a goodly amount of time with my long lost friend Cruciferous Vegetables, we saw Toltec, one of my sweetie's best friends (whom I like very much too). We went on a scenic drive with Mr. Whittler-Sculptor, gamed with Zoombaba and Bob Dylan's biggest fan (as well as others), and had a couple meals with the Lipstick Librarian.

Oh, Powells. I maybe shouldn't be allowed in there. I had this plan where if I saw a book that appealed to me, I would write down the title, author, and maybe publisher or ISBN so I could order it later. But then I kept finding good-looking books that were also on super-mega sale. So how could I even consider buying, say, "Honeymoon in Purzdah" over Amazon, paying twice as much, and having to wait for it to be shipped? I think I came home with twelve books or so. Ooh, also -- Portland is the "City of Roses" but they might want to consider being called the "City of cool fucking stationery," since everywhere I went I found awesome, unique cards and postcards. I ended up with a bunch of that stuff, too.

All told, between the cities, the people (family and friends), the scenery, and (not to get too mushy here) the always-welcome company of my sweetie, I had an enormously good time, and I can't wait to visit again. I just don't want to drive. No, seriously, on the way home I was shaking my head at intervals to wake my brain up. I try to limit my use of nagging powers so that he doesn't become inured to them, but I may turn the energy towards getting that boy to drive.

Now I'm exhausted (again/still), so I'm going to read, since my typing skills have fallen off dramatically in the last quarter-hour.