Me in Seattle...Sightseeing

PDX Squared

I'm sitting in the Portland airport again. This time headed to ATL then Austin to get my car -- a nap at the Joyces (my surrogate family in Austin) and hopping on the road. The red eye is full with a Costa Rican soccer team headed home. A big bunch of them. Hopefully they have been drugged with melatonin. It's raining surprise surprise. I think I'm ready for a dose of the south. Wow my sentences are choppy.

Headed to Seattle for two days by train and rode along the coast. The clouds cleared up just long enough on my way out of town so that I could see the mountains - really different than Colorado mountains but just as incredible. Spent some time in Pike's Market, went to the first Starbucks, ate at a hole-in-the-wall cured meat shop, had LOTS of coffee, and checked out the Seattle Library....AMAZING. Between Powell's in Portland and the Seattle library I'm on a Lit. high. Architecture of the library was incredibly modern, they have a conveyor belt shelve books and the longest running dewey decimal system thats marked on the floor and winds up six floors of non-fiction. Not for the faint at heart. Saw a friend from high school and a friend from college who took me to a record store and took me into the archive basement - literally shelves upon shelves of vinyl sorted alphabetically and by genre. Amazing.

State of the Union

Snowy, rainy, cloudy, in Portland which set the perfect tone for the State of the Union address. Though my stomach was in knots for the majority of it and I wanted to slap that smug look right off Cheney's face (for those of you who watched it, how about the offsetting of the red and blue ties for Bush and Cheney. If he hadn't quit I'd think Rove came up with that one.), I realized at the end of his speech that this president of my generation, the only one that has been in office since I could vote, and the first for me to hate, was effectively over. He can war monger with Iran, he can make slippery comments about Pakistan, he can even say that New Orleans is doing just fine, but none of it matters anymore. In less than one years time he'll be unemployed and relaxing in Crawford. Two years from now he will be working at a consulting firm or starring in Cialis commercials and selling his autographs on eBay. It went by pretty fast I suppose. I guess slippery slopes typically work that way. I only hope that we can do better.

Back in Portland, headed to Seattle in the morning, Austin on Friday, New Orleans on Saturday. Is anyone else nervous about the Super Bowl, Super Tuesday, and Mardi Gras happening within a few days of each other. And fashion week? I am concerned that the western civilization my have an apocalyptic orgasm with all of this excitement. So, don't party too hard.

Back to the West Coast

Just got back to Portland. After a six and a half hour flight. Tired.

Travel Buddies

An eleven hour train ride is a long one, and it is amazing how much time it gives you to learn a lot about the other passengers even if you don’t say a word to them. The couple next to me is British, but they moved to Canada 42 years ago. They have a 39 year old son* (their oldest) who lives in Brooklyn in a new condo with his wife and their first grandchild. The gentleman talks louder when he has his earphones in (she apologizes for him but he doesn’t notice) and she looks forward to crossing the St. Lawrence River for the first nine hours of the trip. Albany’s pretty, but not that pretty.
The woman in front of the couple for the first half of the trip is loud, and a TMIer who does surprisingly well with the customs agent. She is an American, but has an apartment in Canada and has residency there where her Jack Russell terrier is being watched by her best friend. Her favorite movie is The Queen, which she alerts surrounding passengers to several times. Perhaps I am bitter – she is headed to New York to work in an internship capacity for The New Yorker. I considered several times stealing her passport and adopting her identity, but I’m not sure how I feel about British royalty. The man in front¬ of me was reading “Stop Being So Nice To Your Coworker,” an article printed out on Yahoo tip guide written by either Kublai Khan or Gordon Brown. He has been caught (by me) several times, checking out the fashion designer headed to the big city. The couple next to me discusses the cost of petrol. The wife is sharp with numbers.
“$3.21 a gallon. My, my. Only .80 per litre. (Canadians are paying 1.10) Wow.”
“What are you paying?” asks the American with a penchant for tiny interns with annoying non-accents. After telling him, they then talked a bit about the cost of petrol in France. She complained about how high Canadian gas taxes and car taxes were, and, smelling an ally he asked the question I wanted to ask, and have asked several people, all with similar responses.
“How do you like nationalized health care?”
“Oh, I quite like it.”
“You just said that you felt like you were being taxed a lot and not seeing anything for it?”
“Well yes, for roads and things. If I pay taxes on cars I want to see road improvements, and our roads are horrible. That’s what I’m paying for after all. If we didn’t have health care, I know we’d be alright. We’d pay for insurance and all of that and take care of ourselves, but what of the people who can’t afford it? That doesn’t seem fair to make someone choose between health care and feeding their families. My first child was born before socialized medicine and I quite preferred the system when my second was born.”
“Yes. I suppose so,” he said, “I’ll pay something like $10,000 more in taxes a year if we adopt it.”
“Well, if you will have to pay that much more, then you obviously make a lot more money. I suppose I’m a socialist at heart really. I think this is the way the system is supposed to work even if I get frustrated with it from time to time.”
He swivels back in his chair. And wipes the conversation from his memory. He’ll keep hunting for a Canadian who will tell him its okay to vote with his wallet.


*The son is a graphic designer. He started a company when he was in university in Montreal and went to Holland after winning a competition held by a bank in search of a new logo. He won, they brought him over and he worked with them for a year. They wanted him to move to London, but seeing as it was so expensive and he was so heavily recruited by a designer in Chicago, he moved and worked for the same company for a decade and then bought out the fonts segment of it and moved to Brooklyn. His wife graduated from Yale with a masters in design and they now work from home together. He just finished the new logo for the San Diego Chargers.


I am back in New York at Jennie's dad's house. Her room has a fantastic view of the Hudson river in Tarrytown NY. I'm visiting her farm today and head back to Portland this afternoon. Yes, yes I'm bicoastal.

Aurevoir Montreal

My last day in Montreal was full, fun, and fricking cold. I climbed up Mont Royal (a stunning 764 feet above sea level) and got a good view of the city in panorama. I comtemplated several times chopping off my bad little pinky to save it from the hypothermia that was sure to kill it anyways. I hiked up and down Mont Royal and St. Denise streets and then made the biggest mistake I have made since arriving here: I went into a gourmet grocery store in a solidly French neighborhood while hungry. Figs were sold by weight...I thought...but I suppose if my biggest mistake is spending ten Canadian dollars on figs I am doing alright. My bonours and bonsois are getting good enough that I can play off the fact that I hardly know any words besides those two, but if they ask me if I need a bag I am kind of screwed. Ahhhh. You are American. And then in flawless English they rub their bilingual education in my face: Do you want a bag... No, Merci. Your welcome. My train leaves at 9:30 in the AM, and I might go ice skating at the metro before it departs if I can get up early enough. Or maybe I will spend the time at a coffee shop watching French Candaians scuddle around and talk in their cute little accents for a little longer...

Montreal Part Deux (Not fluent. Yet...)

So, the whole purpose of me coming to Montreal (or atleast the fake purpose to get me back up here without feeling as though I am frittering away my money) was to visit Concordia University and meet the faculty of the Communication Dept. and check on the status of my application. After checking out of hostel and meeting up with my couchsurfing host (its a netwroking system for travelers who are willing to share their couches for free...) who is a costume designer and very French, though her English is impressive and better than some Southerners I know, I headed across town to the school. I grabbed a cup of coffee at a shop near the campus, and asked the whereabouts of the journalism building - the girl working at the coffee shop had just graduated from Concordia with a major in...you guessed it...journalism! She pointed me toward the building so latte in hand I headed to check it out. After wondering around the amazing building that is only two years old, incredibly technologically savvy and entirely devoted to media studies, I found the office I was looking for and introduced myself to the administratvie assistant (that is right, we never use the word receptionist any more) and she led me to the department chairs assistant. After a brief intro to the school she led me to the board director of admissions to make sure all my pieces and parts of my application were complete. She asked me my last name in front of him and as I spelled out D-U-N-N he said, Ah the one from Colorado, youère applying for the fellowhip (no question mark, french keyboard). Its good to put a face to a name. And then, as if that were not enough to put a pep in my step, the co-chair of the department encouraged me to speak with the other department chair as our research interests align and if I got the fellowship I would be working with her. So. Keep your fingers crossed. If I get the fellowship the university would pay for all of my tuition and a living stipend. Cha-ching. The city was windy and cold today with a good foot of snow on the ground. Boo hiss. Tomorrow, Mont Placè hike, hunting down a pair of sneakers, and meeting with the department chair...wish me luck.