Live Through This

It's downright unsporting of me to refer to San Jose as a hole, I know, and to call it an armpit, as I'm afraid I did on at least one occasion last night at Tequilacon in Portland, Oregon, is a spite-filled misrepresentation. After all, it's not Elizabeth, New Jersey.

I just wish people would stop asking me how I like living here. If you can't say something nice, you shouldn't say anything at all — I learned that from Thumper's mother in Bambi. And I try, but, well, most of the time I don't do a very good job of it.

Oregon is beautiful, and I loved Portland. I loved the we are SERIOUS about coffee culture. I loved the greenness, and that there were trees that I recognized. I loved the artsieness of it. I absolutely adored McMenamin's Kennedy School, where we spent 15 hours drinking on Saturday night. The website and the pre-Tequila descriptions of it did not do it justice. But most of all, I loved Powell's bookstore:


It was so beautiful there, it verged on depressing, because it reminded me that I live in a giant smog-filled desert suburb with delusions of grandeur and a chip on its shoulder because of the fantastic world-class city just up the road. The best thing about living in San Jose is San Francisco. Sorry, Mrs. Thumper.

I loved what I saw of Portland, even though it rained, even though I spent only 24 hours there. I'd like to visit it again. I've also got a growing itch to visit Alaska, fueled by reading the in-flight magazine on my Alaska Airlines flight to and from Portland.

But I have to remember that vacation syndrome that Dan explained to me when I first moved here. Portland may be beautiful, but it's not home, any more than San Jose is. This is still a foreign country. Communicatrix, a.k.a. Colleen, hit the nail on the head during our very interesting conversation last night. That woman is scarily sharp and I was, as usual, clueless. I didn't realize until I saw them leaving together that the sexy photographer who'd been snapping pictures of us all night was Colleen's BF.

We were leaning against the wall in the hallway, outside Tequilacon HQ, when Colleen asked me, "Is Jack here?" The chance of that would have been only slightly greater than leeches falling from the sky, a phenomenon that occurs with alarming frequency in the novel I read on the plane, Kafka on the Shore.

Next, Postmodern Sass's one-word summaries of Tequilaconners.