On the Brilliance of High Fidelity and Organizational Faux Pas

You may or may not know this about me, but I am obsessed with the ways in which people construct their homes. In particular, what they choose to fill them with. Structures and spaces are all well and good, but speaking as a 20-something non-profit employee and all that implies, I don’t anticipate owning a home, well, ever. So structural niceties are always an added bonus, but I’ve learned to focus on the filling, because the vehicle is liable to change every 12 months.

There’s this wonderful website. Do you know about it? www.apartmenttherapy.com. I believe the original mission of the folks at AT was to provide a forum for renters, whose spaces will never grace the pages of Better Homes & Gardens, to share their decorating triumphs, challenges and queries. I first turned to AT when I lived in Chicago and was not allowed to paint the walls of my otherwise super cool apartments. What does one do to own a space they don’t own? I am now fully addicted to this website. I peruse it daily, paying special attention to the spacious, built-in abundant, hard wood floored, light boxes that are apartments in Chicago, as well as the amazing Danish design that crops up over and over on the house tours.

Keeping in mind that I love seeing what’s going on in the design world, particularly as it pertains to other YFBs (young, fabulous and broke), I’m noticing a few trends that run the gamut of ridiculous to just plain tacky. One that I find particularly egregious.

I’ll introduce this design “don’t” with a quote from High Fidelity (which, by the way, you can watch for free right now on hulu.com if you don’t already own it and watch it on a monthly basis like I do). In this scene Rob is reorganizing his record collection and Dick shows up to invite him to a club:



It is comforting. There’s a logic to Rob and the autobiographical organization of his records. It’s a bit unconventional, but it works.

Which brings me to my point: If I were to walk into your house and you had organized your books autobiographically, I would be impressed. If you had organized them by subject; biographies on one shelf, exhibition catalogs on the next, international classics in one area, American gothic writers in another, travel books, dog-eared and full of sticky notes, next to your bed, text books you can’t bear to part with prominently displayed on an otherwise unused desk and embarrassing books that you love but don’t want to admit loving in a cardboard box tucked safely away in a closet; I would have sincere respect for you and probably suggest we become best friends, because that’s how I organize my books.

But, if I were to stroll into your home to be met by a sight like this:

I would promptly turn on my heels and never speak to you again. Because this means you are stupid and I don’t want to associate with stupid people. This is the most ridiculous thing I have ever seen in my life.

Let’s compare color-coded book organization to Rob’s autobiographical record organization, shall we? Say you have a book on Fleetwood Mac. A biography of the band. To find said book on this shelf, it wouldn’t help you to know it was a biography. Nor would it help you to remember that you purchased this biography in the winter of 1997 after a particularly bad break-up with a fellow band mate. The only thing that could help you locate this book on this shelf is the color of the spine. Doesn’t that seem ludicrous to you!?

I can hear what you’re thinking, “That’s not a very large bookshelf. It wouldn’t take too long to locate anything on a bookshelf that size. Also, rainbows are pretty.” Well, my friend, I would counter like so:

If you like rainbows, get one of these –

Maybe drape it from the top of your bookshelf. Anchor it atop your shelf with a pretentiously large book on dada. You’ll get the same effect.

Or go outside on any given day in Portland at about 7:30 p.m., there’s bound to be a rainbow in the sky.

Because the larger your book collection grows, the harder it would be to find anything. Try finding Fleetwood Mac’s band biography on this bookshelf!

I spent some serious time researching this phenomenon in decorating and was appalled (but not shocked) to learn that decorators have purchased books in bulk, just to fill out a particular color area underrepresented in their clients’ legitimate collections! I can’t make this stuff up! There are seriously flea markets out there that will sell books of a certain color by the pound! And regardless the topic or the condition of the book, people buy them.

It makes me wonder if these same people, who I assume to be of low intelligence, visit Powells and expect the Red Room to have nothing but red books in it, the Green nothing but green, etc. I wonder what they imagine the books in the Pearl Room to look like. I wonder if employees at the information desks are ever asked, “Could you point me in the direction of orange books please?” I wonder if, in the checkout lane, cashiers ever inquire about their customers’ book choices. “I see you have a vegan cookbook and the Grill Master’s Guide to Meat, what gives?” To which the buyer might reply, “They’re both blue.”

I think it’s a good thing I don’t work in a bookstore. I would be fired after refusing service to morons like this. But any self-respecting bibliophile would take offense at such poor design sense.

On a related note, and by way of conclusion: if you like animal prints visit the zoo. Don’t skin a zebra and use it as a rug. Yuck.



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In short:

I discovered today: that I love the music and lyrics to many Decemberists songs, but I can’t help myself. I hate the vocals.

It’s most rainy and cold here today. I believe there is a conspiracy brewing on Mt. Olympus to evacuate Oregon of all mortals and take over what is usually a delightful place to live.

Listening to on repeat:


My life, in a nutshell: meh.

How Does Your Garden Grow?

The sun finally came to Portland! And I'm thrilled to announce that the forecast looks promising. I think we're out of the woods.

I was skeptical this morning when I expected to wake up to sun streaming in my window and instead woke up to panicked scratching at my door (Sunny) and an overcast sky. But I refused to succumb to despondency and went to the farmer's market. If you've never been to the PSU farmer's market I'll share a little about the layout. It's located on the park blocks in front of the university downtown. Huge trees shade it almost entirely. So it wasn't until I left that I noticed the clouds had cleared entirely and we had blue skies. And not blue like this:



Which was enough blue to get me excited earlier this week (view from my office window). But true, I saw a mountain on the horizon today for the first time since April, I think summer is actually well underway, that doesn't have even the slightest tint of gray in it, blue. Which makes me turn my attention to another color, green, and the myriad things being cultivated in my backyard at this moment.

We (my roommates and I) built four 4' x 6' boxes in our backyard early in March. We dug, we sifted, we chased out neighborhood cats and we purchased a cubic yard of 4-way (compost, top soil, manure, and something else, I can't remember right now).

We also wore schnazzy bucket hats, mud boots and garden gloves, like so:

Sadly, it was much sunnier and warmer in March than it was in May...









Mother's Day weekend I purchased lettuce, tomatoes, sugar snap peas and basil and after about a month, this is what I've got:





I also made a visit to my absolute favorite shoppe in Portland last weekend: Portland Garden Nursery at SE 50th and Stark. I spent almost $60 (yikes!) on annuals for my flower basket. As per usual I bought about three times as much as I needed and therefore had enough to fill this other pot.

I'm aiming to match my glory days - my flowers on my back porch my first summer in my second apartment in Chicago. I remember sitting on the El on my way home from work and hearing people comment on them. "Did you see that porch!? Those flowers were beautiful! Wouldn't it be lovely if everyone who lived along the red line planted flowers like that! It would make my commute so much more enjoyable." On a number of occasions these comments were directed at me and sometimes I said, "Yeah, that's actually my porch." To which my fellow El riders would congratulate me on my green thumb and tell me how they'd never managed to keep even a basic houseplant alive. I would swagger home, pretty pleased with myself after such encounters.

So I've planted bacopa, two different potato vines, marigolds, portulaca, petunias, cosmos, creeping Jenny, some tall stringy bugger with purple flowers on it (I can't remember its name, maybe salvia though), coleus, geraniums and verbena.

Someday, I would like to have a garden from which I could make bouquets like so:

It's shocking to me that this is only $20! Having worked in a flower shop that sold combinations like this for upwards of $50, this seems like such a deal!

I really love the gardening frenzy that has swept the younger generation here in Portland. I'm hoping that by summer solstice (which I'm hoping to mark with a fabulous garden party) I can make a huge salad with my greens. By the time my family comes in August, I'm hoping for big tomato salads, tomatoes on toast, salsa, etc.

So how am I enjoying today's sunshine, you ask? I'm sitting inside, watching the US v. England game. Somehow now that the forecast is less grim, I'm feeling less of an urgency to spend every dry second out of doors. Weird how that works.

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In short:

I discovered yesterday: that when driving to Opal Creek on a cloudy day I like to sing sad Gillian Welch songs on the top of my lungs. When driving home from Opal Creek on a sunny day I like to sing this on the top of my lungs:


Dog hair covers approximately 77% of my life (but it's cleaning day!).

Sauvie Island strawberries are ripe. I will be picking and eating them tomorrow.

Summer is not a time for dramatics. It is a time for gelato and vuvuzelas.

I would very much like a vuvuzela to call my own.

My life in a nutshell: ebullient

The Thing About Acronyms Is

We played this game, an icebreaker I guess, at a week long Jesus indoctrination palooza I attended when I was a kid. We had to take our first initial and come up with an adjective or an object that we could put in front or in back of our name that started with that letter. Alliteration is always appealing to youngsters and the kind of matronly women who run these events. (You can imagine my horror then, when in college I had an art history paper returned to me with "avoid alliteration always" scrawled over an offending line. I thought it was so clever! But I digress.)

My 9 year old self sat Indian style, quite perplexed. Thanks to the unorthodox spelling of my first name, there was a dearth of adjectives I could employ. Someone must have noticed my distress because I felt a tap on my shoulder and in a whisper I was informed that I could use 'C' words that had the same hard sound as 'K'. This posed a bit of a moral dilemma for me though. I could easily think of a dozen 'C' words to tack onto my name: crazy, cool, caring, cosmic, candy, colorful, crayon (it didn't have to make sense, it just had to repeat a sound), careful, cooky . . . the possibilities were seemingly endless. But if I had learned anything in life it was that any job worth doing was worth doing well and somehow substituting a 'C' where a 'K' belonged cheapened the whole challenge.

I finally landed on something brilliant and we began sharing. There was Jacob the Jaguar, Daring David, Smiley Sarah, Steven the Snake, Dandelion Deborah, I squirmed, my name was going to blow them all out of the water. Finally my turn:

"Kristina the karate-kicking kangaroo!" I beamed with pride, imagining my alter ego looking something like this:

Jaunty, swashbuckling, self-assured. All things I aspired to at 9. I don't remember eliciting any particularly satisfying praise for my genius, but I still remember my Jesus camp moniker.

So what does this have to do with acronyms? Glad you asked. In wracking my brain for the perfect name for my blog, I considered using my name as an acronym somehow, and the only thing I could think of was knock-out. It humored me later when I realized that knock-out, to many people, looks like this:



When in all sincerity I had this in mind:

Far be it from me to stop you if you associate me with the former, but scout's honor, I had the good ole 1-2 in mind when I chose this name.

Also, I have no idea what is flying out of this sad bastard's mouth, but my god! What a hit!

Which brings me to the real purpose of this post. Hands down the most exciting thing in my life right now is my recent inclusion in a women's book and adventure club. The idea is that we choose a book that in some way can be adapted into an expedition of some kind. I picture us, a group of savvy Portland women, Tom & Hucking it down the Willamette, each with a copy of the Mark Twain classic tucked in her rucksack. Or perhaps holing up in a cabin somewhere (Opal Creek, perhaps?) reading Walden. Whether or not the reality lives up to my expectations, we have yet to clear the first hurdle, viz, coming up with a name.

Some ideas were tossed out at our first meeting at The Secret Society Club last Wednesday: Women's Adventure Group (WAG), Female Adventure Group (FAG), Women's Adventure and Book Club (WABC), etc. I felt all these names were lacking in gusto and did little to capture the spirit and pure brilliance of the venture. I also was a little perturbed (give me a moment to whip out the soap box) at the realization that the title necessarily contain a gender identifier, because one would likely assume that a group wholly devoted to getting out in nature and being wild was comprised of all or at least mostly males. Just like sports leagues are either understood to be male or specified female (think NBA and WNBA or PGA and LPGA).

So I have since devoted not a little time to coming up with something truly astonishing to call this club. Something I could bring to the group and be just as proud of as I was of "Kristina the Karate Kicking Kangaroo" back in the day. Something that doesn't necessarily identify us based on gender, but rather on our level of bad-assness, which is pretty high. I thought starting with a strong word was key, so when strung together our acronym spelled something snappy. Here are some of my thoughts:

B.A.D. A.S.S. = Book and Daring Acts Social Sect

R.A.R.E. = Reading and Recreational Expeditions

G.O.R.E. = Get Out, Read, Evolve

Frankly, none of the resulting possibilities were all that great. So I abandoned my initial approach in favor of being clever:

Life Mimicking Literature (LML)

The Wanderlust Society (TWS)

Ready? Set . . . Go! (RSG)

Better, maybe, but not outstanding. I then thought about referencing the region in the title:

Willamette Valley Readers and Wanderers (WVRAW)

Cascade Society of Adventure Seekers (CSOAS)

Where the Green Ferns Grow (WTGFG)

Bridge City Ramblers (BCR)

Then I went for pith. One or two word names that don't speak to our purpose, just give us something to call ourselves:

Pizzaz (lame)

Dynamo (phallic and lame)

Snappy Hour (hocked whole sale from my last place of employment)

I am truly at a loss. The thing about acronyms is they need to be catchy. They need to roll of your tongue and stick in your mind. They need to concisely state your purpose. What would you call us?

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In Short:

It's raining. Again.

I recently realized: much to my chagrin, that I talk a lot. A LOT.

Summer starts in 12 days.

Listening to: All Gillian Welch, all the time.

Funniest thing I've heard/read today: Q: What did the snail say when riding on the turtle's back?
A: Weeeeeeeeeee!

My Life in a Nutshell: anticipatory.

With Summer in my Sites

Have you looked at the weather forecast for Portland recently? It looks something like this:

Monday:

Tuesday:

Wednesday:

Thursday:

Two weeks from now:

A month from now:

My camping trip:

My birthday:

Next year this time:

The day I die:


And of course, there's an upside, as there is to many a natural tragedy, this one being that the grass is actually greener on my side of the fence for once. That, and I haven't had to water my garden for about a month.

Imagine my delight though when I checked the forecast today and for the first time since April this popped up:


So the sun is partially occluded by a cloud. I'll take what I can get.

Something I've come to appreciate about Portland in the 1 year, 9 months and 12 days I've lived here is the feeling of entitlement that comes with having been here longer than the latest arrival. When a newcomer complains about the rain, I think to myself, "If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen." I never express that though, I just smile and say, "You get used to it. Don't bother with umbrellas, just buy a good rain jacket." I then point them toward REI.

But let me just say, as a person who has grown accustomed to the relentless deluge that characterizes October - March in the Northwest, this month has been tough. So I've inundated myself with youtube videos of various people covering the Beach Boys "God Only Knows" and I've begun cataloguing my plans for when the sun finally graces us with her presence:



With summer in my sites...

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In Short:

Dog hair covers approximately 62% of my life right now.

Song on repeat: God Only Knows (the original is the best)

Funniest thing I've heard/read today: http://blogderudyfernandez.blogspot.com/2010/05/working-out-knocking-oneself-up_23.html

If I had a week and all the money in the world at my disposal I would: Go somewhere sunny and warm!

My life in a nutshell: soggy