Category — booze

Now that I am doing film reviews for The Mercury on a semi-regular weekly basis, I suppose I need to begin Taking Journalism Seriously. Except I’ve never considered myself to be a journalist. And other than that year and a half in the Journalism Department at the University of Oregon, I’ve never really considered journalism as a career.

My grandmother, who payed my tuition and my rent and sometimes payed my tuition and rent even though I wasn’t enrolled in school per se, scoffed at the idea of my ever becoming what she referred to as a “reporter”. I was too shy and too scared to talk to people and I don’t follow through on things and I never answer my phone and how can a person who doesn’t answer her phone become a reporter?

And I thought, “She’s right. I’ll never be good at anything. I guess I’ll just eat lunch. Again.”

So I switched majors, read a lot of Edith Wharton at a lot of different universities and never graduated, probably because in order to receive my diploma I had to talk to someone behind a desk in an office and that - for reasons obvious only to myself and shut- ins - scares the shit out of me.

So here I am, fifteen years later, thirty thousand dollars in debt to various lending institutions located somewhere in the middle states, and beginning a career in journalism. I just can’t seem to do things in their correct linear order. It’s like I have to circle around and around something until I get dizzy and then sort of fall into it by accident like a five year old. I have the career arc of a mildly retarded child.

I know I’m being hard on myself but that is what I do. It makes me feel safe, like I have boundaries that keep me in one place. Forever.

So now that I’m committed to a life without defined precepts and thank God for email because I still will not answer the phone, I have to start “pitching stories” to “people behind desks in offices” who might “say no” to me and “send me spiralling into depression and shame and substance abuse”. I’m feeling a little daunted. And flummoxed. And other suffixes.

My new friend Melissa Lion is really good at pitching stories and also talking to people behind desks in offices so I’m just going to copy everything she does until it starts to feel natural for me. You know, like how people learn to have sex by watching porn or how deep sea fisherman learn to work with the rod and the reel by listening to Billy Joel songs. Like that, only with more whiskey.

I would LOVE to continue our discussion of Battlestar Galactica today but we are recovering both physically and emotionally from a Friday night out with Justin and Megan which was super fun and then this happened…

Oh. My. God.

and this…

Why do people let me OUTSIDE?

Those two girls in the floral whatnots - we called the brunette one “Mary Kate Ashley” - weighed about 9 lbs 10 ounces and kept disappearing into the bathroom every five minutes. I can only assume that there is more than one use for a cocaine straw.

Melissa and I dropped by The Mercury Offices yesterday to pick up a dvd of a movie I will be sleeping through reviewing after I watch it with an entire bottle of wine in front of me open mind. And miracle of miracles! Brad the Office Manager was pleasant to us! Friendly, even. We did not get to say hello to anyone because they had all been given advance warning of our coming and presumeably, hid behind their Ikea Cat Palm or under their desks, as I would do if the situation were reversed because I am TERRIFIED of meeting new people. Especially sober. (Perversely, I spent the last 15 years in customer service - mainly riding that line between doing a good job and not showing up because I had a wicked cocaine hangover.) So that was FINE, really, except I’m a little confused about one thing and, I think, so was Melissa - the balloons and flowers and chocolate cake we assumed would be waiting for us when we got there…were nowhere to be found. NOT EVEN ONE CUPCAKE. On the serious.

Was there some sort of confusion as to whether we were vegan or not? Or maybe we have seasonal allergies and a fear of floating things? Did we…omg…did we smell? Like Republicans? Because there was just that one time in college and I was only experimenting and also I needed a place to crash for a few nights and homeless people were just, oh, I HATE GAYS.*

Sorry. Occasionally I lose time.

I’m confident this will all get sorted out eventually and next time we show up, Alison Hallett will be waiting for us with a bottle of vodka and some gelato. I am excited for this to happen.

(IT’S GOING TO HAPPEN, RIGHT? OMG.)

*God, internet, no I do not hate the gays. I love them. I do, however, hate things I don’t understand.

At approximately 4:15 this afternoon, Melissa Lion and I will be making fun of disabled people discussing Fair Trade and things at The Nightlight Lounge on SE Clinton with a cold chocolatey martini in front of me and a fistful of dollar bills to shove into the jukebox. I plan on playing the entirety of Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska and then maybe moving on to some Belle and Sebastian. I will go nowhere near Steely Dan because that is soooooo 2007 but I might play a little Nick Drake. Or Nick Cave. Or Stevie Nicks. One of the Nicks. I would play some Camera Obscura because I am obsessed with them right now or Eskimo and Sons, but I don’t think the jukebox at The Nightlight (or probably anywhere except my own fantasy jukebox) has either of those. Maybe someone who works there will read this and stick one of their cd’s in there and also, while I’m wishing for things, maybe the New Yorker will ask me to blog for them and pay me $500,000 a year to do it. That would be nice for me and, dare I say it, for them too. I would also like a flying bear cat dragon. Please.

So, now you know where we’ll be and what I’ll be drinking and what kind of music taste I have (Good - well, our friend Nate might strongly disagree with this because of my love for Guided By Voices and my kind of meh feelings about The Hold Steady) and if that doesn’t alert your inner stalker* (although God knows you all have much more important things to do than stalk me unless you want me to bore you to death with stories about my cat or that time I met Robert De Niro and he wasn’t wearing any shoes and I saw how tiny his feet were which kind of freaked me out) I don’t know what will. But I tried.

I TRIED, OKAY?

* Having my own personal stalker might stroke my fragile ego. I am just saying.

First off, I think I should explain how to pronounce “The Poor” or “A Poor” the way we do because it truly does make a difference when said this way. We pronounce it like “Yom Kippur”. Say it to yourselves out loud a few times. Have fun with it. “The Puuuuor.” Got it? Good, moving on…

The fucking Poor woke us up again at 2 in the morning chanting really stupid things at the top of their American Spirit filled lungs. I think it was something like, “I go to Art School and all this really means is I have a very expensive camera and an even more expensive cocaine habit” and “I can Eisenstein the hell out of a montage.” Also probably, “I will work at Office Max for the next fifteen years.”

I wish I was awake enough to have gotten a picture of Dane out on our tiny balcony in his underpants yelling, “Shut the fuck up” at them. It’s very classy when he does this. Maybe I’ll re-create it for you tonight, if I can get Dane boozey and pillsy enough to agree.

ANNNNYWAYYY…an exciting thing happened yesterday. Matt Davis of The Portland Mercury posted a nice blurb about Face of the Cookie on Blogtown. Whee!!! So I would like to first thank Matt Davis and then welcome my new Blogtown readers. Welcome. Make yourselves at home. And by “make yourselves at home”, I mean, “please don’t touch anything with your filthy internet fingers. I just cleaned.”

No, no, really…welcome. (STOP TOUCHING THINGS.)

NEXT.

We had our second successful New Seasons food dinner in a row. I made turkey burgers on whole wheat buns with bbq sauce, pickles and jalapenos. We also had roasted cajun sweet potatoes and roasted asparagus (not pictured here - I put them in the oven a little late and ate them halfway through dinner).

To the right of this shot you can see half of my blueberry pomegranate vodka drink. This was the first of, oh, eight maybe? How many is normal?

I had mine with plain yogurt and sriracha. I don’t know what The Poor have with their potatoes. Dirt, I assume. Or an old shoe. Maybe they can’t even afford potatoes and so they just live on their genius. Mmmm…genius.

I am sorry for the short posting today but you need to understand how 4 vodka drinks and a beer affect my brain.

SiT’s somomehting ilKe htis.

SEE? So rather than inflict my not smart on my intertube friends, I figured I’d show you the nacho makings and maybe I’ll show you how they turn out. That is, if it is even possible to get a picture of anything in the millisecond it will take for Dane and I to annihilate the whole pan.

HOWEVER, I was feeling an incredible amount of pre-remorse a little guilty about all the cheese and chips and stuff that are not really food, per se, that I was going to be eating so I’ve decided to make a black bean dip with plain yogurt, beans of course, a little salsa and Franks Red Hot, and spread that over the chips (I’m having baked chips, Dane gets the real ones) with some red peppers and jalapenos and more plain yogurt and salsa. I’ll sprinkle a little cheese on top of that because it has a flavr.

Oh my God, I just drooled on the keyboard while typing that last sentence.

It’s official. I am a drunken po-tard*.

(Portland retard. WHAT? IT’S A THING. BRING IT.)

I should write something scathing about the asshole manager from The Fez on Friday night who refused to give any of us our money back after we each paid 10 dollars to see the last 3 minutes of a fashion show that we didn’t know was happening and we thought it was 80’s dance night and the reason we thought this was because EVERY SINGLE FRIDAY IN THE PAST MILLION FRIDAYS HAS BEEN 80’s DANCE NIGHT* AND THE DOUCHEBAG (YES, I AM - GOD DAMN IT I AM! - BRINGING IT BACK) AT THE DOOR SAID NOTHING OF THIS TO US AND THEN PROBABLY RUBBED HIS GREASY FACE ALL OVER OUR PRECIOUS 10 DOLLAR BILLS AS WE MADE OUR WAY UP THE STAIRS TO THE POOREST EXCUSE FOR A FASHION SHOW EVER BUT I AM NOT GOING TO WRITE ABOUT IT BECAUSE I AM TAKING THE HIGH ROAD.

We ended up going to Lola’s Room for their 80’s Night and the best thing I ever saw happened..

I’m pretty sure my mom dated this guy in 1976.

Which made it ALL worth it.

* None of us had ever been to the Fez for 80’s night and with the exception of Jen, who is a very enthusiastic dancer, the rest of us as a rule don’t go dancing ever except if we are terrifically drunk at a karaoke bar and that just happens sometimes.

Two late nights and a hard deadline required the best hangover cure known to man.

Pho.

Spicy.

And when I say spicy I mean turns your eyes blue like a Fremen’s, spicy.

I’ll tell you all the stories tomorrow.

UPDATE
He’s been like this since 7 pm and has no idea I took this picture and shared it with the internets. SHHHHHH.