Month: October 2019

When I lived in San Francisco, I was a consumer of culture rather than a producer. I went to museums and live music shows regularly, soaking in some of the best talents in the city. Although I’d take pictures of paintings I admired or dance to funk and gypsy jazz, I was always one step removed from the artistic process—a respectful observer rather than a true participant. It never occurred to me to pick up my guitar and try to join a band, submit my own acrylic paintings to art galleries, or audition for a play; I was always more comfortable in an audience.

Eugene, OR has a much different relationship with creatives. If you have a desire to make something or perform—no matter how niche or obscure—you can find a loving supportive group of fellow enthusiasts. 

My husband, Jon, found a home in Star Trek Live Theater, a motley crew of Eugenians who looked up to the show’s trailblazing characters and utopian view of civilizations. Although I didn’t watch Star Trek growing up, the actors here bring a homespun tenderness to the stories. Since they’ve been performing together for years, it’s also a strong community of friends who see each other through life’s varied mountains and valleys—both the triumphant and the depressing moments outside of the stage.

Last Friday, on the invitation of the Star Trek Live sound engineer, Jon performed in the First Annual Edward Gorey Ball—a costumed celebration of dark art and poems. I hadn’t heard Gorey’s work until Jon would rehearse lines from “The Gashlycrumb Tinies” at home:

A is Alice, who fell down the stairs.

B is for Basil, assaulted by bears.

The ball was held at Spectrum, Eugene’s LGBTQ bar and one of the best spots for nightlife in the city. In addition to some readings and a bit of Gorey’s history, there were burlesque dancers, contortionists, and two cello players.

It was actually the juggler who inspired me to write this piece (for whom I’ll use the pronoun “they” to avoid assumptions about gender identity). Before their performance, they walked to the front row of the audience—long knives in hand—and warned the crowd that objects might come flying in their direction. The front row, bedazzled in black lace, dark sequins, and shiny leather, smiled and said it was cool.

The juggler took to the stage in a checkered harlequin costume. They began juggling three skulls to music. They dropped a skull once, twice—three times!—and every time, the spherical reminders of our mortality went bouncing into the front row as predicted. The juggler then picked up the knives and with great enthusiasm, tossed the blades into the air until one dropped and bounced into the front row. (Not to worry! Performance blades are dulled.)

What I noticed throughout this performance was how everyone cheered with loud encouragement every time the juggler made a mistake; it didn’t matter that skulls and long knives were literally bouncing into the shins of the audience. People just wanted the juggler to feel the love and keep trying.

That’s the creative lifeblood of this community—The Little Eugene That Could with her unflappable “I Think I Can” attitude. No matter your level of talent in any arena, there is a friendly audience waiting to cheer you on through your artistic process.

In addition to countless creative classes at the University of Oregon and Lane Community College, Eugene has: 

• Open Mic Nights for comedy, poetry, music, and performing arts
• Toastmasters (a group to improve one’s public speaking)
• Danceability (dance classes for differently-abled people)
• Pub Science Talks (scientists lecturing at a brewery on something cool)
• Multiple not-for-profit community theaters 
• Monday Improv (a beginning improv group that gathers weekly)
• First Friday Art Walks (artists connecting with downtown businesses to put their work on display for the night)
• The Saturday Market (the country’s longest-running weekly open-air market for artisans and farmers)
• Sunday Learners Jam (an opportunity for beginning musicians to join a group at a local jazz club)

This list really only scratches the surface and a lot of these events are free or low-cost.

One thing I noticed about San Francisco was that the wealth had begun to stifle the local culture; not only had the city become unaffordable for teachers, social workers, and janitors, but it had pushed out a lot of musicians, painters, and performers as well. Some moved to Oakland—until that city also became out of reach—and now there’s a migration to midsize cities like Eugene, which has attracted many of Portland’s priced-out artists. 

What happens to communities when culture is forced to leave? Sure, apps and tech are cool, but so is thriving artistic energy. That old art collective suddenly becomes a tapas restaurant; that dive bar with weekly open mics makes way for a swanky cocktail joint; that family-owned bookstore turns into yet another coffee shop which charges $6.50 for a pour-over.

The point is that the free market is not a good arbiter of culture. It’s designed not to expand people’s minds, but rather to play to their baser instincts: greed, status, indulgence, intoxication. There are few companies that would truly put cultural value (not to mention environmental or public health) above their bottom line. It’s not their fault; that’s just the way the system works.

Good art and culture aren’t always comfortable. They force people to stretch their presumptions and make space for a new perspective. This makes people more empathetic and generous, more galvanized in the face of injustice. The free market doesn’t have those objectives, although some companies would like to think of themselves that way and commodify culture to increase their bottom line.

Overall, when everyone is too damn busy on the endless hamster wheel of modern work, a city begins to die a little. People stop looking you in the eye and step over unconscious bodies in SoMa; tent cities of the evicted and mentally ill take over once-peaceful blocks; deaths of despair skyrocket as the city becomes both glitzier and grimier. 

I’m grateful that Eugene has its heart in the right place. Many people who grow up here return after a few years living somewhere else. There’s just nowhere like it. Strong local leadership and shared values helped to steer Eugene toward embracing everything that makes life worth living: art, community, natural beauty, generosity, kindness, and simple pleasures.

Here, I won’t think twice about submitting my art to local galleries, picking up my guitar, or getting silly with an improv group. I Think I Can.

When I decided to get married, I wanted to ensure I was bringing the best version of myself into the partnership. During my bachelorette party, I asked my closest friends what personal flaws I should keep an eye on and try to improve. One of them pulled me aside and revealed that sometimes I take things too personally. I grimaced and recoiled from this revelation. I absolutely do take things personally and although I knew it, having one of my best friends point it out in a loving way helped to diminish my defensive impulses.

I grew up with a single mom school teacher and modeled myself after her diligence, conscientiousness, and a borderline-perfectionist orientation to detail. (Let me put it this way: if God Herself had a font, She would model it after the flawless lettering of Mary Minerman—both printing and cursive.) 

My desire to excel and improve myself was mainly good, but it did have its drawbacks; I once revealed to my fourth-grade teacher that my greatest fear was getting bad grades. I even remember the moment when I started thinking of myself as “the smart kid.” It was a year after we’d moved to Laguna Beach and we were learning fractions in Mrs. Clapp’s third-grade class. She wrote three figures on the board: 1/2, 2/3, and 3/4. Without sketching any handy pie charts, she asked us which of these was the largest.

The most popular girl in the class raised her hand and said one-half was the largest because halves were bigger than quarters or thirds. I raised my hand and said three-quarters was the largest, reasoning that while each fraction was missing only one of its pieces, a quarter was the smallest piece missing, and therefore it was a more complete pie. 

The teacher wrote our names next to our guesses and took a poll. Most of the class believed that the popular girl had the correct response. After all, a half is larger than a quarter. A few brave souls raised their hands in support of my reasoning. When Mrs. Clapp revealed that I—the new kid—had the correct response, I beamed with pride. More important than having the right answer was the fact that I’d finally found my place in the social hierarchy at Top of the World Elementary School: I would be “the smart kid” and I would work very hard to maintain that status.

I always thought I was pretty good at hiding my insecurities as a child, but I had my perfectionist tells. If I said something socially awkward, I would ball my fists and buckle my knees, as if this internal pressure would help diffuse the external tension. I usually would think of something more clever to say later and repeat it over and over to myself to ensure I wouldn’t make the same social miscalculation. Should that topic of conversation arise again, I would be ready with my immaculate line.

I think my tendency to take things personally arises from my self-imposed quest for perfection. If someone offers criticism, it makes me feel further away from my (admittedly impossible) ideal, but this is the wrong way to receive information from the world. Why can’t I accept legitimate feedback as a learning opportunity instead? 

When my friend told me I took things too personally, something changed. Now when I feel the sting of defensiveness rising in my throat or bringing a flush to my cheeks, I put my impulses in check.

Last week, I even came up with a little mantra. I was on a hike to Tamolitch Blue Pool along central Oregon’s McKenzie River. It was a clear fall day and the valleys were bursting into vibrant fiery shades of yellow, orange, and red. Although I normally hike with podcasts, the environment demanded the undivided attention of my senses and I went without headphones. As I rounded the corner toward the turquoise pool, a large insect flew hard straight into my face. 

“What the fuck? Why did that insect just try to kamikaze me?” I said indignantly, totally breaking my zen. I stewed for 30 seconds as I rounded the trail along the cliffs, climbing down toward the water’s edge. 

I sat down on a cool boulder and looked up at an amphitheater of fall color and down into the cerulean depths, where yellow reflections gently swayed. I thought to myself, Wait a second. What if that insect was just trying to give me a hello? Slamming into my face is its only way to get my attention. It wasn’t a missile; it was just a zealous kiss.

This new perspective has implications beyond the aggressive insect, of course. What if I viewed all of life’s misgivings, errors, and difficult lessons as zealous kisses rather than missiles? I no longer have to take something personally if I assume the best intentions of others or accept the message as a benign teaching moment.

Thinking that my new mantra was brilliant, I shared the story with my husband.

He asked me earnestly, “Don’t you think that mantra is a little rapey? I mean, a zealous kiss?” 

Ugh, “rapey?” What the fuck. Why can’t he just appreciate my mantra? I took his feedback as a benign teaching moment and laughed to myself: I like the way “zealous kiss” rolls of the tongue, even in this post-#MeToo world. Bless his heart for having that reaction.

After all, my husband’s perspective wasn’t a missile; it just was a zealous kiss.

After finishing undergrad at Berkeley in 2006, I felt that graduate school was inevitable. Many of my peers had secured spots in law school, medical school, and various master’s degree programs at coveted universities across the country. It wasn’t a matter of if Cal students were attending graduate school; it was treated as a matter of when.  

I looked at my fellow 22-year-olds and admired how they seemed to have everything figured out. There were some students with finance and business backgrounds who even scored six-figure salaries as consultants fresh out of their undergraduate programs. (Of course, little did they know that they would be the first to be taken to the chopping block in the Great Recession of 2008.)

Rather than joining this flock down the well-worn paths of graduate school or the U.S. job market, I decided to take a chance. I went to the on-campus travel agency and discussed my desire to live abroad with a young clerk. She showed me some flyers about various European and Latin American countries, but when she mentioned the three-week Trans-Mongolian Railroad trip across Asia, my eyes lit up. I put down a deposit for the following May. I planned to bounce around Europe for a year before catching my train in Moscow all the way to Beijing. 

I didn’t realize that I’d just made a decision that would determine the next four years of my life.

I asked the agent about securing work in Europe; I was lucky enough to have full-tuition scholarships and worked as an RA to pay for my room and board, but I was cash-poor. The agent told me about the British BUNAC program for recent college graduates, which would allow me a six-month work visa. I applied and picked up my documents later that week.

Shortly before my graduation ceremony, I met with my friend Ivan at a restaurant on Telegraph Avenue for lunch. I asked him to choose a number between 1 and 30. He chose 15, so later that day I bought a one-way ticket to London for June 15^th.

That was 13 years ago and I never looked back. One week after I landed in London, I’d secured a flat, a job, and even a Dutch boyfriend who introduced me to a nice group of friends. For six months, I worked as a waitress at Hard Rock Cafe—the first one in the world—and as an editor for a small record label, helping them create the liner notes for their CDs. I met all sorts of new friends—a music professor from Syracuse, a South African martial arts instructor, and an Eton graduate turned punk rocker who attended classes with Prince William.

I didn’t know anyone in London when I bought that one-way ticket; I just jumped with an open heart and an open mind. The experience of moving abroad alone into an unknown future was challenging and humbling, but it was also integral to building my confidence as an adult; if I could land in a world-class city with nothing—no place to live, no job, no friends—and build a life for myself, I could do anything. 

With the deadline approaching for my British work visa, I applied for a teaching position at an eikaiwa (a private English conversation school) in Japan, hoping I could defer my start-date until after my Trans-Mongolian trip. Unfortunately, they wanted me to start in February after a training program in Tokyo, so I never did take that train across Asia, but I did live in Niigata City, Japan for over two years.

Niigata is known for having the best rice and sake in the world. It’s relatively rural, although my city had over one million inhabitants. My students and the small group of gaikokojin (foreigners) were very welcoming. My company had arranged my housing and helped out with navigating municipal bureaucracies. For example, there were 7 regular types of trash, plus several more categories for uncommon items such as used batteries. They all had inscrutable labels, but learning that trash sorting system actually opened my eyes to how wasteful we are in the U.S.

 I also admired how orderly Japanese homes and customs were, how graffiti was non-existent, and how even the (very few) homeless lived in immaculately constructed box homes with sliding doors and a mat to keep one’s shoes. 

Japanese society is communal-minded, while Americans’ me-first mentality is reflected in our disrespect for public property, littering, and crumbling local transportation. We prioritize individuals over the group and although I’d learned about these two types of societies in college classes, experiencing them first-hand was transformative for my thinking. One of my favorite parts of living abroad was cultivating a new basis of comparison for everything I took for granted about people and societies.

In Niigata, I met my boyfriend Paulo, a Brazilian post-doc and oral-maxillofacial surgeon. He was also a talented musician and had learned much of his English from Bob Marley and Pearl Jam. He was finishing his program and heading back to Porto Alegre, Brazil. 

 I’d spent my last few months in Japan learning how to speak Portuguese so I could communicate with Paulo’s family, but before following him to South America, I wanted to explore Nepal and Southeast Asia with some of the money I’d earned. It had been years since I’d taken any serious time off of work or school and there’s a special pleasure that comes with full-time immersive travel with no definitive end. 

I planned most of the trip on the fly and I’d recommend that others do the same. Being comfortable with the unknown and refusing to overplan my travel came with great rewards. The internet can only take you so far with the way it privileges certain content; for the best recommendations, it’s always better to ask around. For example:

• I had no idea that my new friends on Nepal’s Annapurna Circuit would recommend a multiday trip down the Mekong River. 
• I had no idea my new friends in northern Thailand would recommend the Gibbon Experience, a series of ziplines between treehouses in the deep jungle and a non-profit that defends forests from slash-and-burn policies.
• I had no idea my new friends in Angkor would recommend Malaysia’s gorgeous Perhentian Islands.

After this unforgettable trip, I set off for Brazil and traveled widely for many months while working remotely as a ghostwriter. Although that relationship didn’t work out, I was beaming with confidence after several years of living and traveling abroad. 

In early 2010, I moved to my favorite U.S. city where most of my closest college friends had been working since graduation: San Francisco.

At that time, I worried that I’d forfeited several years of career growth for travel and it would take me a long time to catch up. And at first, this was true. For several weeks I slept on a friend’s couch until I found a waitressing job at a nice restaurant to get on my feet. A couple of months later, I found a job as an addiction specialist in a non-profit clinic, where I worked unhappily for a couple of years—underpaid and overstressed. 

But then it happened: I secured a position as a managing editor at a Silicon Valley tech company and “caught up” to where I would have been career-wise if I hadn’t traveled at all. I’d kept up my paid and unpaid writing over the years and essentially was hired on my Twitter feed, blog, and ghostwriting samples.

That was seven years ago and I’m now the chief content officer of a company started by the same director who first hired me in the Bay Area. I work remotely, so while continuing to develop my career, I lived in Argentina for ten months and took a one-year road trip all over the U.S. with my now-husband to figure out where we wanted to settle down. (We bought a house in Eugene, Oregon a few years ago and still love it here.) 

If I hadn’t traveled after my undergrad, I wouldn’t have developed the language skills, resilience, adaptability, deep knowledge of other cultures, creativity, conscientiousness, and professional confidence I have today. If I had jumped straight into graduate school, I would have developed an expertise, but having a niche—not to mention crippling student debt—would have only constricted my choices. For example, I’ve observed that many of my friends with PhDs end up taking positions in Bumblefuck, Nowhere (NO) for tenure-track positions. Nobody wants to live in Bumblefuck.

I encourage everyone—especially in their 20s—to work abroad and travel with abandon as much as possible before settling into a more typical path. It’s harder to wander in your thirties when parts of life have already ossified. That house, career, family, and graduate school can wait.

You’ll be much richer the experience because if I’ve learned one thing, it’s this: ditching life’s little road map shapes extraordinary people. 

Isn’t it suspect that one political party systematically needs to cheat in order to maintain power?  

• In North Carolina, the Cheaters collect absentee ballots in African American neighborhoods and throw them into the trash. 
• In Texas (and many other states), the Cheaters draw serpentine districts to limit the number of legislators their opponents can elect.
• In Oregon, the Cheaters flee the state rather than hold a vote on a carbon tax where their opponents hold a legislative supermajority. 
• In Georgia, the Cheaters insist that their gubernatorial candidate, the acting Secretary of State, should remain the top elections official of his own race. His team then improperly purges 340,000 voters from the rolls and delays 53,000 voter registrations—80 percent of them were people of color. 
• In Arizona, the Cheaters close 70 percent of polling sites in Phoenix’s Maricopa County and tens of thousands of people wait in line for hours to cast ballots. 
• In Florida, the Governor—a Cheater—puts his state’s voter registration site “under maintenance” during Voter Registration Week. 

And this is only the past two years. 

Across the country, the Cheaters try to purge American voters from registries using the error-prone “Crosscheck” system.  Fair Fight 2020 found that 1.6 million people were removed from the voter rolls between 2010 and 2018. 

In the Senate, the Cheaters don’t hold votes for any legislation that might make their opponents look good. Rather than doing their jobs, they worked tirelessly to make President Obama look ineffective, denying him a Supreme Court appointment and repeatedly attacking the Affordable Care Act—one middle finger to Americans’ healthcare access and the other middle finger to wasted taxpayer dollars. 

In the House of Representatives, the Cheaters voted to gut the ethics committee. They have no problem deregulating codes of conduct or the corporations which poison our air and water, but yet they want full control over American women’s reproductive health.

In that vein, the Cheaters are the ultimate hypocrites. They contend that they’re “pro-life,” but they refuse to ban assault weapons, strike down capital punishment, improve the lives of the most vulnerable among us, or even make basic birth control readily available. 

They are also hypocrites when it comes to government spending. A few years ago when Obama was in office, the Tea Party Wing of the Cheaters was very upset about the federal deficit and national debt. But recently, the Cheaters passed a fat tax cut for the rich, which the CBO projects will add $1.9 trillion to deficits over 10 years. Federal spending also hit a new record ($3.7 trillion) and deficits are only projected to climb through the end of 2019. Of course, the Cheaters are now silent about our country’s fiscal health, as they are when our astronomical military budget climbs ever-higher. (The U.S. spends $649 billion annually—more than the next seven countries combined.) 

The Cheaters also say they love small businesses but they refuse to support our most entrepreneurial group of citizens: immigrants. On the contrary, they prefer to lock up Latino children in concentration camps to please the rabidly racist contingent of their party—red meat to feed the MAGAts. The racism stoked by Cheaters actually helps them maintain power through fear; it’s one of their most effective tools. 

The Cheaters get very upset when you call them racist, but they refuse to condemn the Supreme Cheater who (in reference to Haiti and African countries) bemoaned “Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here?” The Supreme Cheater also stated that people from Haiti “all have AIDS” and empathized with white supremacists after their Charlottesville rally, which killed one counter-protester.

Worst of all, when the Cheaters hear a fact they don’t like, they brand it with the scarlet letter of “fake news” and treat it as a matter of partisan opinion.

How can Non-cheaters—the people who act with integrity—defeat the party of bad faith who will lie and steal to maintain power? As children, we’re taught that good people win in the end, but we’ve witnessed too many Cheaters seizing control of the American government, fueled by unlimited campaign donations and the popularity of their trusty propaganda network, Fox News.

I feel alienated from people who support the Cheaters and assume that those voters are one of three things: greedy, dumb, or complicit. The greedy ones—the Money-grubbers—support the Cheaters for their economic views and celebrate when funds for education, healthcare, and basic social services are slashed for tax cuts that will never “trickle down.” The Money-grubbers divert those funds into their offshore accounts or into the Cheater campaign coffers. 

The dwindling federal budget for education has helped create the second Cheater subgroup: the Fools. These people believe that humans don’t cause climate change; that brown people are coming to steal their jobs; that immigrant children should be locked in cages; that women should stop invading the workplace and shouldn’t have access to reproductive healthcare; that Christianity is superior to other religions and Islam is bad; and that the USA is better than all other countries and should be able to play by different rules. 

All of these views are destructive and dumb. Perhaps the feeble-minded are hypnotized by middle-aged white male anger or blonde Fox News hosts’ bare legs. They take the Cheaters’ bullshit hook-line-and-sinker and relish in “owning the libs.” (For the record, blowing out our candle isn’t going to make yours burn any brighter, morons.)

The third subgroup is waiting for the Cheaters to wind back the clock and stop being so uncouth. These are the Enablers, otherwise decent people with their heads in the sand. What they don’t understand is that this is not their white grandfather’s political party. There’s no going back from “grab ‘em by the pussy,” creating Latino concentration camps, or the Muslim Ban. 

And most recently, the Supreme Cheater—again, a man who cheats on his taxes, at golf, and on his wife with a porn star—asked the Ukrainian President for the “favor” of investigating his political rivals’ family. Knowing this conversation was damning, the Cheaters tried to bury the notes about it in a separate computer server used for sensitive information—exactly the behavior that had them chanting through frothing mouths “Lock her up! Lock her up!” More MAGAts feasting on red meat.

The Non-cheaters lack a backbone, but the Cheaters lack a soul. The Money-grubbers, Fools, and Enablers are everything we were taught as children not to be: intolerant, hateful, manipulative, dishonest, self-centered. 

What kind of example are we setting to the next generation and to the rest of the world when we elect Cheaters? It’s not a good look. 

Impeach the Supreme Cheater and VOTE. THE REST. OUT.