New Things

I apologize for taking such a long break from this blog. I know it disappointed a few of you. I've had a lot of changes in the past few months. For one, I was laid off from my job the day after I returned from Shi Shi. It was a shock. After the initial confusion wore off, I spent a lot of time avoiding computer-related activities  and doing other things that I had missed during all my time as a forty-hour-a-week employee. It was pretty great. 

What came of this time of exploration and freedom was a decision to go into full-time freelance copywriting. Copywriting is a pretty all-encompassing term. I write ads, blogs, web content, catalog copy and product descriptions, newsletters, etc. Really, I'm a writer for hire. The good news is that I have a new blog (one that's a bit more focused on my work and related topics). You can see that on my new website: www.rachelhisakowright.com. Please check it out if you haven't seen it already. I will still post on Rachel Wrong but it will be with less frequency (but more frequency than months past!). Thanks for reading. 

Shi Shi Ho!

I'm off to the magical lands of Shi Shi Beach tomorrow. For those of you who need a little magic in your life, I recommend this article about the fantastic reemergence of Dryococelus australis on Ball's Pyramid.

From NPR

Attack of the Flies

Okay, so I'm not really even sure how to explain this or if the magnitude of the situation is going to come across. Sometimes with things like this, it's hard to tell.

Yesterday I came home after accordion and made a salad and read my book and then a friend came over and we sat on the couch talking as the room slowly went dark with evening. To clarify, there was never a time when I was just sitting around with all the doors open. The doors were shut. Our windows have screens. I didn't notice any flies.

But then we left the house for half an hour and when I came home there were a couple of flies buzzing lazily around the kitchen like they had been there forever. You know how flies are. They drone around. You can't ignore them. They seem obsessed with being wherever you are, the dogs of the insect world, and then they are wily, acrobatic, and unwilling to be caught (or rather, squished).

I noticed those two in the kitchen with some despair, looping in the circles near the ceiling like they would be there forever, and then one came to rest on the cupboard. Right in front of me. I went for it. I smashed it with a sponge. And to my surprise it worked. You know how it usually is. You swipe through the air with your weapon and they just keep going, somehow avoiding you by millimeters. Whatever was going on with these flies was different. They may have been drunk. Or weak. Or unaware they were dealing with someone so ruthless. I killed that one with the sponge. Then I killed one in the bathroom with a French Vogue (Last year's September issue when Carine Roitfield was still there and obviously massive). I killed another one in my room by swiping it out of the air with a clog. I mean, this is not typical right? First try fly killings? Finally, right before I went to bed, I found another buzzing near the window which I swatted with my hardback Faulkner novel (I'm deep in a southern gothic binge right now), again totally killing it. That's four flies. In the course of about twenty minutes.

I would like to note that I picked up all of these fly corpses with a small piece of tissue and disposed of them properly. I said sorry to the first one. After a while it just got mechanical.

In the morning, I was telling Sam about it and I noticed one on the floor near the bed. A carcass. Cause of death unknown. This was strange enough with all the recent fly attacks, but then I went to put shoes on. Dead fly in my shoe! Neatly placed in the heel of the left shoe. I thought Sam was messing with me but he wasn't. He promised he wasn't. It was just there.

I've thought about it quite a bit and my conclusion is that our apartment may be haunted.

Meow

Kyle Arthur just brought this to my attention: http://cat.rachelwrong.blogspot.com.meowbify.com/

My life is forever changed.

It's Coming

 August 11, 2012. Be prepared.  

A little something to brighten your day

You know, sometimes you look through old folders and you find cool things. Like this:

Brooding stare from behind the guitar? Check.

Pinky ring? Check.

Awkward mystical title? Check.

Day brightened? Check.

Open Sesame

About once a week Sam makes me breakfast. It's a real treat. Today I requested steel-cut oatmeal. He looked around and ran in and out of the bedroom with various bags of assorted grains, none of which were steel-oatmeal. Finally he comes in with the right bag, at least, it appeared to be the right bag and I approved. I came into the kitchen about five minutes later to see the oatmeal merrily boiling on the stove top. After showering I came out of the bathroom to find him tasting the oatmeal. He grimaced and told me it wasn't ready. I took the spoon and stirred, only to realize that it wasn't steel-cut oatmeal at all, but sesame seeds. In case you're wondering, we didn't eat them.

Self Portrait of the Writer as a . . .

Total weirdo.

So, awhile back Gabe posted about the upcoming weirdness/amazing noir/modern dance/(with Kylie Minogue?) film Holy Motors, which I have to say, I'm really excited to see.

In this post he happened to reference Aaron Neville which took me back to the days of yore when I was a weird, somewhat solitary kid who was completely ignorant of pop culture and listened to whatever her parents happened to be listening to at the time. At this time in my life I remember a lot of Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan, Nottingham Hillbillies, and most importantly, the Neville Brothers. 

In the year 1990 the Neville Brothers came out with an album called Brother Blood. It featured predominantly in our car trips, dinner parties, and day-to-day lives. I was totally obsessed with this album. My obsession centered on a song called Fearless that featured the angelic voice of Aaron Neville (here). It's so inspirational! And romantic! And weird that I loved this song at nine years old!

I have a very clear memory of lying on the floor on my stomach next to our entertainment center (which featured frosted glass which would later be broken), listening to this song on repeat through my dad's huge puffy headphones, and writing down the lyrics in my tiny spiral white cat notebook so that I could, I don't know, walk around singing that song whenever I wanted.

Which was all the time.

People I Saw . . . Near Zupans

There have been few times in my life that I have thought I wanted children. One of them was this time. Back when I worked on 30th and Belmont, I took a lunch break and walked to Zupans. It was a gray day and I was probably feeling a little morose. But I passed this family. A mother and her two sons. Really typical in that neighborhood. But the older kid was like, "C'mon! What are you doing?" and was standing there staring incredulously at his younger brother. The younger kid was just kind of softly singing to himself and clinging to this tree trunk. But as I got closer I realized that he also had this massive green marker beard and mustache. All over his face. I made eye contact with the mother and we both just kind of cracked up. And I thought, I want that kid.  

Living Room Pop

Haim (one of my new favorites) just posted their first video. Here it is:



Living room band practice, bike tricks, R n' B synchronized dance moves, childhood video footage, and sweet lo-fi pop that somehow reminds me of our childhood babysitter who had a massive Kewpie doll collection and used to drive us around in her CRX and play "Hold on to the Nights" over and over again. Like, she would just rewind that tape and play it again. A quick Google reveals the singer of that song to be Richard Marx. I always thought it was a woman. Anyway, Haim and their modern ballads. I'm not saying that I'm planning a breakup, but should that ever happen Haim's entire library is going on my Breakup Mix.

Dealing with Dentistry

Oh man. Since when has the dentist become such a traumatic experience? It's not like I enjoyed it as a kid (I remember gagging when they tried to make me sit with my teeth in those fluoride foam trays and spitting pink stuff all over the place) but it wasn't a place that I dreaded beyond comprehension. My lukewarm feelings are no more. The dread is real.

Exhibit A: Gentle Dental.

A hellish, cream-walled prison of confusion, pop-up fees, receding gum lines, and Novocaine.  The first visit almost exactly one year ago should have been enough. I was sideswiped with a need for different x-rays even though I had recently had x-rays and would have to pay for these out of pocket. Already smarting with this indignity, I was forced to bite down on unpadded bite wings (they were out of the pads) which cut into my gums quite painfully, while staring at a ridiculous mural of a tropical white sand beach dotted with palm trees. This kind of crap (the mural, the missing pads) does not inspire confidence. The resulting struggle was epic and in an embarrassing turn of events I found myself glaring at this woman in her baggy scrubs and telling her she was hurting me. With exclamation points. Because she was. I realize this is somehow against the rules of modern dentistry. Going to the dentist sucks but you deal with it. You need take it like an adult, even if it feels like an advanced and creative form of torture. If you don't follow the rules you are treated like you're five and told what a great job you're doing as you sit there suffering. The whole thing is a complete humiliation.

So it was that I found myself too cheap to deal with the necessity of paying for new x-rays yet again and returning to same dentist office for my cleaning a year later. It was a mistake. An adult would perhaps acknowledge that this place was not the right place for me, learned from last year's mistake, and found a new place to go, x-ray cost be damned. But apparently the challenge of find a new dentist was too much for me. I just wanted to get it over with. So there was this: my dental hygienist with remnants of a heavy french accent who insisted on asking me questions about my life throughout the cleaning (why do they do this when their hands are in your mouth?), the exam which revealed two cavities (allegedly) and was conducted by a dentist not much older than me who called me sweetheart repeatedly and appeared to imagine himself a possible shoe-in for Vince Vaughn in Swingers. Desperate to avoid making another appointment, I signed on to get them taken care of then and there. The whole thing took on the air of a bad dream as I was shuffled from the cleaning room to the lobby and back again, was informed of the cost of the fillings after they deduced coverage of my weak dental insurance, and then the found myself in the midst of sudden dental chair and Novocaine-needle freakout which resulted in tears streaming silently from under the Ray Charles glasses they gave me, and the eventual administration of nitrous oxide. This made the dentist's schtick almost bearable (at one point he told the hygienist that he needed the area to be dry, desert dry, Gobi dry, Sahara dry, but thankfully I was able to ignore this as an indictment against against his dental qualifications, and remain sitting still and breathing through my nose.

I left with my Quasismodo face (you know how it feels) and vowed never to go back. For real. I'd like to think that I could hold it together in a different dental office, one that doesn't constantly inspire words like "chartalan", "highway robbery", and "malpractice" but we'll see. I'm not convinced that dentists aren't secret sadists, every one, but I am looking for recommendations. I need a new dentist.

Adult Partying

What do you do at Adult Party Weekends?

You rent a house. You fill it with all your favorite people (some of whom you only see once a year at this event). Once this weekend was dedicated to Sasquatch, but we've moved past Sasquatch, grown up, if you will, to dedicate Memorial Weekend to quality time sans music festival madness.

You drive south after work on Thursday, stopping in Eugene to say hello to old friends who can't make the journey this year. You eat tacos and then sit around the fire and listen to records. In the morning you go to breakfast at a fancy restaurant and celebrate birthdays and the weekend and all that is to come. On the way to Lake Shasta you will stop in the tiny town of Rogue River to get some diner coffee and buy a dream catcher. You make it to Shasta in the afternoon and proceed to set up your tent (everyone else is inside on beds and air mattresses but it's nice to have your own little cave). You check out the lake, you jump in, you drink white wine with icecubes and eat hotdogs, you set up the badminton net and witness the most spectacular, aggressive dive for a shuttlecock you've ever seen. Blood is drawn. At some point the dancing starts and you start whirling around on the linoleum kitchen floor for hours and hours and hours. Cars filled with your friends file in throughout the night. It's exciting. Conversations range from catching up, updates on adventures, boyfriends, jobs, engagements, to African Killer Bees, cloud formations, stories from years past, feats of strength.

You go for runs in the morning. Some woman will say to her kid, Look honey, those people are running on their vacation. They're crazy. You will laugh politely, unsure if she actually hates you for doing this. After breakfast, you swim across channels to access the best, grassiest peninsula where you will float around on rubber rafts, eat Doritos, and watch your friend Brian leap from the bushes and throw a makeshift spear made out of a cattail at one of your friends. You'll see an osprey catch a fish. You wish the sun wouldn't hide behind the clouds. Later you will battle Brian in a choreographed Jackie Chan kind of way and vanquish him with a mimed stab to the chest. After dinner you will apply temporary tattoos to your body, because this is what adults do, and you'll end up with a neck tattoo of a panther killing or perhaps mating with a snake. You dance and talk, you watch the sunset, you lie in a meadow filled with lavender and look at the stars.

On Sunday you  experience Shasta in the best kind of way, via pontoon boat. Your generous adult friends rent a boat and all of you go out on the water and you will do this safely and responsibly because you are adults. The weather is the best it has been all weekend and you find a sheltered cove where you swim for hours, floating on life rafts, eating candy, and narrating the interactions of the jet boat people like it's a nature show. You will pull into a different cove on the way back and make rock piles on the shore, proof that you were there. You'll see deer hiding in the shade of the trees as you motor slowly up one of Lake Shasta's many arms. You will stay on the boat with Liz and Alexa to form the All Girl Crew (AGC!) and aid Captain Jesse in his efforts to return the boat back to the marina after dropping everyone else off. You will try not the laugh when the boat comes in a little hot and the marina guy's tone turns to panic as the boat bounces off the dock. You and Alexa will carry the heaviest, largest cooler ever across the dock, stopping to drain it out of desperation and then wait forever, while it drains.

You'll go back to the house, where people are lazing around in the grass, in the sun, wearing borrowed hats and listening to Alexa read from Book 1 of the Avian Gospels. You will eat barbecue and a burger that is just a patty between buns and some ketchup and it will taste like the best burger you've ever had. You play charades, two-person charades, and act out completely ridiculous scenes, such as fighting over an orange at Winco and then shooting your adversary. You'll sip beer from the bottle and end up cleaning the kitchen late at night after making the biggest vat of macaroni and cheese that has ever been made, because that's what adults do when they eat adult food. The night will end lazily, with minimum rush, because it's the last night and everyone wishes they could stay longer, but you can't and in the morning you will get up, pack up, clean up and then drive back to Oregon.

That's adult partying.

Yelling Toddlers

Around six o'clock I was lifted from a very heavy sleep by a strange, continuous noise. It sounded most similar to a couple of hoarse toddlers yelling on one of those mid-grade roller coasters that make the rounds on the county fair circuit, you know, a few loops on a mildly hilly course. So, these kids are shouting "Whooooooooooah! Whoooooooooah!" and I'm thinking that it's totally inappropriate for toddlers to be yelling at this hour and then I really wake up.

I looked out the window. I'm not sure if it's mating season or if they're just very territorial, but these cats were sitting on this fence outside our place, just going for it. Normally I get pretty excited about petting street cats, but these guys are jerks. They stare at each other, make these horrible noises, tussle for a bit, and then break off and stare at each other some more, tails twitching. At this point Sam is awake too. I yelled out the window, "Shut up! No!" They turned and looked at me but then they're right back at it. I shut the window but it didn't matter, you could still hear them. I then decided to take matters into my own hands.

Had you been one of those cats, or a neighbor who happened to be looking out the window at 6:00 a.m., you would have seen me running at you, waving my arms, wearing my extra-large hot pink Lightspeed t-shirt and no pants.

That scared them off.

Second Place

It is rare that I get a chance to talk about personal success on this blog. However, this last weekend was nothing but a complete and utter success and I have the hand-thrown mug to prove it. That's right. Winners. Our team came in second in our age division in Pole, Peddle, Paddle!

A relay race of epic proportions (You start at Mt. Bachelor and do a downhill course, then a cross-country ski loop, bike to Bend, run five miles, kayak or canoe up and downriver, and then sprint a half-mile to the finish line), I did both the downhill and the finish sprint this year, and we came in for the silver. Not that I'm implying my performance was what brought us to victory. In fact, to be completely honest, all the other legs are the long, difficult, and crucial ones.

The first year we did this event I totally missed the start and added about five minutes to our time. Not only was this a horrific blunder, but missing the start is now referred to as "pulling a Rachel" at our company. Not ideal. Fortunately, each year has been better than the last and this year we changed divisions so that we might have a chance of winning a mug (the corporate category is especially competitive and only the top three teams win mugs). Sam was a supporter last year, but this year he got a team together for Greasebus, so we had the added bonus of another team to cheer for.

Highlights included the Greasebus team leaving Portland so late that we had to check in and get their numbers for them, though they luckily managed to sneak their boat (this gigantic silver battleship of a canoe) into the boat drop-off area a full half hour after the cutoff time, some puking and almost puking after finishing the various legs of the race, the mugs (of course), Kyle Arthur and I cheering for Caroline and Lindsay as they battled their way up the mighty Deschutes (we may have bummed some poor kayaker out due to our vocal celebration of the exciting fact that they were actually passing someone), a delicious bbq dinner, a rousing dance-off, and, in a rare and not-to-be-missed moment, Kyle Arthur waltzing with some bearded dude to Porno for Pyros. I'm still not sure how that happened. 

Anyway, the weekend was a great adventure and I'm actually excited about doing more running. Who wants to a do a race with me this summer? 

Fighting Injustice

It's the weekend! Almost! I'm off to Bend for the Pole, Peddle, Paddle but I leave you with this: Melissa "Marbles" McCarthy.

 

First You Get the Bunny . . .

Oh man. Friday was a sad, sad day.

Lately, there has been a void in my heart. When it comes to matters of the heart, there's very little you can do using the analytic side of brain. The hole is there when you think of it, the hole is there when you don't think of it, and no logical solution can fix it.

So I went to the only place you can go when there's a hole in your heart that you don't know how to fix.

That's right. The Human Society.

It was there that I discovered Bun Bun. Had I gone to the Humane Society at any other time, I may not have met Bun Bun. But the lady working the small animal room was a certified rabbit advocate and she wanted nothing more than to see me walk away with my perfect match in small, twitchy, rabbit-eared form. We looked at a few different rabbits, a sickly angora, a far too large brown rabbit called Thunder, a white, pink-eyed Easter bunny with a penchant for kicking. Then she took me to the back room to show me a few more. There were two back rooms actually. The first one contained a couple nice ones, but I wasn't convinced. It was then that she took me to see Bun Bun. Despite the fact that Bun Bun was given an annoying, yet oddly fitting name, I immediately fell in love with her. She plugged the hole in my heart. Bun Bun was a mini Rex, velvety soft, with grayish brown fur and large dark eyes. The rabbit advocate escorted us back to the front room where we sat in a small pen and I held her in my arms, feeling her heart slow as she got comfortable in my lap. Ugh. It's still too much.

I put her on 24-hour hold, mind racing as I pondered the perfect rabbit home, the various trips I would need to make to procure the various rabbit supplies, the sudden changes that would occur in my life to adapt to the responsibility of a rabbit in my life, and then the truth really came home. I would need to call my landlord and make sure he wouldn't evict us if he found a rabbit in our home.

I made Sam do it. I couldn't stand the disappointment of hearing "no" once again. And of course, that's we heard. Denied yet again. To make matters worse, she's already gone. Somebody else has my rabbit.

Romance in the Spring

Romantic Night is upon us once again. For those who don't know, Romantic Night is something that started a few years ago, back when I was one of the Ladies of 834 and living in a big purple house. It started one winter night, when the Ladies of 834 visited Tony Vu's house, and we walked in to find wine glasses in a row on the table, the fire roaring, and tuna steaks sizzling in the kitchen. It has grown into a longstanding tradition and has seen events as varied as late night hors d'oeuvres by the fire or sitting down and watching The Room while eating a giant cupcake.

It is happening tomorrow and I couldn't be more excited. Just to give you an idea of the magnitude of this event, you should read some excerpts from the emails that have been going around.

Ladies, 
Whisper to me tenderly the days next week when you will hunger for Charissa's succulent pot roast...
Sing out your times of availability to enjoy libations poured by Heidi!...
Proclaim your willingness to cancel all previous plans so that you may enjoy sweet morsels of yet-to-be-determined-appetizers from Ms. Wright!..

And lastly, please be there to partake in the pie I will have made for us--for Charissa, for Heidi, for Rachel, for Tony...

Romance is coming.


...


Hush, Tony, I hear your gentlemanly call.  I will be available any night next week for the making of braised meats and tender merriment.  I am all yours.  All ours.  Forever.


...


Considering that it will be nice all week, may I suggest a warmer-weather type meal? Fish tacos? Fried chicken and greens? I've never made fried chicken before - and you know what they say about how trying new things together keeps the romance alive.


...


Despite my eternal longing for the slightest taste of Charissa's simmering pot roast, I realize that love is a two way--err, four way relationship--err, wait, it's like 12 ways between all four of us, which is why romantic night is so damn good.


...


When I think of fish tacos, I think of love. Not the tawdry cheap love that a term like fish taco evokes, but the kind of deep, slow-moving-river-type love that exists between us. I will eat the shit out of some fish tacos. 


...


It's official.  I will create with my two hands fish tacos for us to enjoy on our slow-moving-river of love.




Romantic Night is coming. 

Free Stuff

I don't know about you, but I love free things. I can't resist digging through free boxes on street corners, even when you know they're going to be stuffed with slightly damp velour hoodies, broken picture frames, elastic-waist pants, and barely-operating kitchen appliances. Sometimes there are gems! You just never know.

So, I thought I would share a couple things with you.

One, you can go here and get a free download of Haim's EP. An LA trio of sisters (yeah, long straight hair and cutoffs and all that) who have this stripped down harmonic folk crossed with 90s R&B thing. Think Stevie Nicks and TLC skipping in a field. Pretty magical stuff.

Two, Cinco de Mayo Festival. The Waterfront. We're talking tacos, Ferris wheels, The Octopus, red-white-green, elephant ears, live music. This is taking place across the street from my office. I've been watching them set up and yesterday I took a walk along the esplanade to really check things out. The best thing? The carnival rides are brought to you by a company called Funtastic. Their slogan? Just Possibly . . . . the World's Finest Carnival. The amount of doubt brought in by the "possibly" has to be the best part. The Cinco de Mayo Festival is FREE tomorrow from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m and you can bet that Kyle Arthur and I are going over there to get an elephant ear. And probably tacos. And I might take a spin in the Hammer.

Bus to Nowhere

When I was younger I moved around quite a bit. The first four years of my life were spent in St. Helens, Oregon, and then we moved up to Washington for a year. I have a lot of great memories from that time. Mostly that when we moved back to Oregon I was allowed to eat cake for breakfast, a novelty that clung to my memory with a tenacity that many other experiences have not. We then settled in Newberg, Oregon, the home of my grandparents and as stated by the welcoming sign on the outskirts of town, "A good place to grow." We lived in three different homes in Newberg during my childhood, the last being the house that my parents still occupy. I was pretty bummed about that last relocation and had some compelling arguments for why we should stay in the city limits. I had made quite a few friends in town, we had all these cats (some stray, some not), and I didn't want to change schools. My parents were uncaring and we moved out of town with only a single cat in tow. The school that I transferred to for fourth grade was out in the sticks. No longer would we get rides to school. My younger brother and I would have to ride the bus to and from school like everyone else.

On the first day my parents weren't going to be home when we arrived since they had jobs with commutes, but my Aunt Sharon was going to be there to welcome our triumphant return. This would have been a real treat, as she was our favorite aunt. We caught the bus to school without hitch, we went through the bewildering cloud of a First Day at a New School, and then somehow my brother and I got on the wrong bus. We rode, silently, sharing a seat and staring out the window until we noticed that everyone had gotten off the bus but us. The scenery was unfamiliar. The hills were on the wrong side. Besides the roaring of the motor, it was eerily silent. As the bus continued its ponderous meandering into town I sat stewing in horror. This bus was completely out of control, destined for some horrible place, and we were in its clutches. I was a shy child and the prospect of actually speaking out loud to an adult was frankly terrifying. With sweaty palms and a cracking voice, I finally worked up the nerve to ask the bus driver where we were going and why we hadn't been dropped off. She squawked into her radio. The radio squawked back. It was clear a mistake had been made. She then revealed that there was nothing she could do because this bus was destined to pick up the Middle Schoolers. I broke into a cold sweat. Middle Schoolers.

We were going to have to wait it out and ride the bus with the middle school kids until the bus driver could loop back around and drop us off. She was understandably apologetic but nothing else could be done. Finally the moment of dread occurred and she let the doors open with a hiss. They piled in, all loud, coarse language, upper lips covered in awkward fuzz, grotesque heavy metal shirts, shaved legs, backpacks covered in Sharpie. It was like the bus filled with vikings. These were gigantic thugs, probably drug users, practically adults. Hoping to be unnoticed, Laurence and I sat very still and just waited for it to be over. Eventually one leaned over and said to my brother, "Hey! Hey! Are you a homosapien?" I stayed quiet, studying the vinyl seat back in front of me. I didn't know what this meant. Laurence didn't know what this meant. "Are you?" It was obviously offensive. "Leave him alone!" I snapped, showing a vestige of retaliation that would later be a teenage trademark. And that was that. We were left alone. We eventually, after hours of being on that wretched bus, were released into the early fall air to walk down the lane and find our worried aunt sitting with warming milk and Oreos. It had been a harrowing ordeal that we could hardly put into words. But we had survived.

Call Your Girlfriend

So, I'm in Liz's wedding at the end of the summer. This will be my first time being a bridesmaid (I've been a groomslady but that's a little different) and you can't really be sure what to expect from this sort of thing. Thankfully the most intense request thus far is this: Learn this dance. Be prepared to reenact this video in unison with the bride and your fellow bridesmaids.



I practiced six times last night. It's really coming together.