Sanguinity

questions from fray_adjacent

1. How has vidding been going for you?

Don Musically. (I'll never get it! Never!) Domingo Montoyally. (Domingo slept only when he dropped from exhaustion. He ate only when Inigo would force him to. He studied, fretted, complained. He never should have taken the job; it was impossible. The next day he would be flying: he never should have taken the job; it was too simple to be worth his labors. Joy to despair, joy to despair, day to day, hour to hour.)

So, you know. *shrug* Es geht.


2. What's your favorite thing about Portland?

That I've been here for twenty-five years. Watching a city evolve is fascinating. How things shift, or become something else, or cannot be shaken off. The often unwitting ways that its stories become instantiated in the landscape and buildscape. The push-pull dynamics of time and money and nature and all the various factions of society.

And of course, the longer I'm here, the more I understand. I used to think that the street trees -- the trees in the parking strips between street and sidewalk -- had no order, made no sense, but of course they do: they speak to fits of fashion and idealism and money and politics and weird coincidence just like everything else, once you know how to read them. Fascinating.


3. What's your least favorite thing about Portland?

Sakes alive, the hipster fit of self-consciousness that's been happening lately. Such mugging for the national gaze! Portland has long had a reputation of being quirky-and-thus-cool, but the most annoying parts of Portland society are so full of themselves right now, I can't tell you. They had always trended toward being full of themselves anyhow; they certainly didn't need the encouragement. I am so looking forward to the day that the national what-is-cool eye gets bored and looks somewhere else.

During a different decade, I would have said my least favorite thing is how landlocked the city is. It's an international shipping port, and yet I think of it as landlocked! But I grew up on the Puget Sound, where the water was there everywhere you turn, where the long, slow breathing of the tides was always at the back of my consciousness. Sometimes I look at this skinny ribbon of freshwater running through Portland (and the less skinny strip abutting Portland), and admit that I have no fricking idea if the tide is in or out, because it just doesn't matter here, and I feel such loss.


4. Tell me about a book that made a huge impact on you (at any point in your life).

Kidnapped, Robert Louis Stevenson. It's difficult to say, "Oh, this is precisely the impact this story had on me," but given that I spent an entire summer reading and re-reading the quarrel in the heather—

Alan stood quite still, the tails of his great-coat clapping behind him in the wind.

"This is a pity," he said at last. "There are things said that cannot be passed over."

"I never asked you to," said I. "I am as ready as yourself."

"Ready?" said he.

"Ready," I repeated. "I am no blower and boaster like some that I could name. Come on!" And drawing my sword, I fell on guard as Alan himself had taught me.

"David!" he cried. "Are ye daft? I cannae draw upon ye, David. It's fair murder."

"That was your look-out when you insulted me," said I.

"It's the truth!" cried Alan, and he stood for a moment, wringing his mouth in his hand like a man in sore perplexity. "It's the bare truth," he said, and drew his sword. But before I could touch his blade with mine, he had thrown it from him and fallen to the ground. "Na, na," he kept saying, "na, na—I cannae, I cannae."

—and swooning with the romance of it all. (Oh, I still swoon! Alan! Davy! Alan! and then Davy realizes he's just torn it, it was all just pride and stupidity and there's no apologizing, but he figures a little h/c might bring Alan back around, so he's all, "Welp, Alan, I guess I'm just going to have to die of exhaustion right here where I stand," and Alan is all, "Wait, what?" and Davy is all, "You heard me! DYING!" and makes like to faint, and Alan eats it up with a goddamned spoon and then they're best mates again FOR EVER AND EVER THE END, well, except that there's still a bunch more novel because they have to go get Davy his revenge and his inheritance and then they have to get Alan safe off to France, and realistically, yeah, they're star-crossed on the best mates thing because Davy's a Campbell and Alan's a Stuart and politics and death sentences and whatnot BUT STILL. BEST MATES FOR EVER AND EVER THE END.)

...and thus I learned that if you have mortally offended your best friend, you can always try faking your death and that might help. It has served me in good stead through the years.


5. Why do you like math so much? ;)

It's pretty. :-)