Some of my friends are taking vows to update their blogs more often.

Happenings in my so-called everyday life of late:
- After a couple weeks of visiting family in Kentucky and Georgia, I moved to Portland on June 18th.
- I stayed at a friend’s place in Sellwood-Moreland (a lovely neighborhood full of antique stores, neighbors with rabbits and chickens, and other magic in further-SE Portland) until July 1.
- I moved into the house I’m currently inhabiting, with three other women and five dogs, in North Portland, about a block away from Peninsula Park, which boasts the oldest rose garden in the Rose City, dating back to 1913.

In two months post-NYC, I have:
- nearly stopped calling the house “my apartment”
- recreated several of my mother’s Southern dishes, including pimento cheese, which no one here has heard of, in the ample kitchen
- planted my own herbs in pots
- gotten used to having at least one dog in my presence at all times
- gone back to New York once, which felt like entering the Gates of Mordor

Things to love about Portland include:
- the Saturday Market
- the many food carts with really tasty fare under $5
- the short city blocks downtown that make it feel like the Village with fewer people
- the way the light falls
- the fact that everyone recycles and most everyone cycles (I rode a bike for the first time since I was 12 recently)
- the gigantic KEEP PORTLAND WEIRD mural on the wall of a building near Voodoo Doughnut
- Powell’s Books
- the smaller alternative bookstores, Reading Frenzy and Counter Media, right down the block, where you can find everything from ‘zines to Guido Crepax’s comics
- the couple I saw riding a motorcycle downtown with their white fluffy dog onboard, wearing goggles
- the fantastic new cuisine, such as that found at 50 Plates, which would cost 3x more in NYC

Things that are hard to find even in Paradise:
- a job
- health insurance

Portland has practically no flaws other than its economy. I can personally attest to the fact that, though the recession is making it difficult to find work anywhere these days, finding work in Portland is nearly impossible. It looks like I may finally achieve my life-long dream of becoming a starving artist!

I am paying more for COBRA than I am for rent. Considering that my monthly income is pretty much non-existant, this is impossible to sustain. BlueCross of Oregon rejected me for “pre-existing conditions” despite the fact that I am 26 years old, completely healthy, take no medications and see no doctors except for routine exams. The Oregon Health Plan rejected me because I’m eligible for COBRA. I’m still applying with other providers, but, the likelihood that I’m going to wind up uninsured unless I find another full-time job with benefits seems fairly high. This is ridiculous; health care in this country right now is disgraceful.

Some books I have recently procured (mostly for free or dirt cheap, I swear):
- Inner Experience by Georges Bataille
- Postmodernism: A Very Short Introduction
- Miss Manners’ Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior
- Our Bodies, Ourselves
- Hateship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage (stories) by Alice Munro
- The Diary of a Country Priest by Georges Bernanos
- The Raft is Not the Shore by Thich Nhat Hanh
- Simone Weil: An Anthology
- Wallpaper* City Guide: Vienna

Speaking of cities:
- Ellen, my best girl-crush from Statesboro High, whom I tried to my darnedest to seduce (and apparently succeeded, considering we’re still friends) via long rambling letters exchanged in AP American History, and who, in her utter coolness, went off to college in Dublin, and then married an Irishman, and then moved to Cambridge (England, not Massachusetts) while he got his Ph.D. in mathematics, just moved again to Hannover, Germany. I am going to visit her and her husband there in September. We are going to try to make an excursion to Vienna, which has been my favorite city (from afar) ever since Jennifer famously said that if I were a city, I’d be Vienna, over ten years ago.
- After much deliberation, I have finally come to the conclusion that, of all the places I’ve been, the place that most closely resembles Portland is Amsterdam, by a mile. Nowhere in the States really compares.
- I am going to be in New York next week.

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