Chicago, Day One.

After a wonderfully warm visit with friends in Lansing, Michigan, Nathan and I drove to Chicago late last night from Detroit. (We were originally going to catch a bus from Detroit, but missed it. I guess such a snafu was bound to happen at some point in our travels...) The light was wonderfully weird as we drove into the sunset. This was somewhere near the Indiana border:





We had to be in Chicago by last night, because I had an appointment here this morning with the British Consulate to secure my visa to legally enter and work in the UK. Here we are at the Consulate, with me looking all nervous before my appointment... (but also, one of the few decent photos of us together)


Success! I was granted the visa without a hitch. After the appointment we went to the Westfield Center to eat some hummus, falafel, and pita, at the suggestion of a consulate employee. We quickly learned that Westfield has a lego store so the center has several life-sized figures made out of legos. I was way too amused.


In the afternoon we ran around downtown Chicago checking out the amazing architecture and getting our fair share of exercise. Nathan and I both got a really great feel from Chicago. I confess that I have unexpectedly fallen in love with it. Perhaps after the rather barren condition of Detroit, I am easily impressed -- but truly, there is no argument against the fact that Chicago is a world-class city. Although it lacks the cultural diversity of a city like London, aesthetically it is actually more pleasing. This is obviously a hugely economically successful city with an abundance of creative minds and a lot of public and private funds to back it up.

Of course I must now subject you to a whole boatload of photos from our afternoon adventure.

The view of the Chicago River next to the Wrigley Building (where the consulate was):



The Chicago Tribune Building (Shouldn't a Spiderman villain live here? I mean, really.)Typical condominium buildings that totally blanket downtown:

Pritzker Pavilion and a partial downtown skyline on the edge of Millennium Park:
The view of Pritzker Pavilion (a Gehry creation, naturally) from the adjacent pedestrian walkway:

The Park was happening on a Thursday afternoon with LOTS of people tooling around all over the place:A juxtaposition of the Cloud Gate structure and Pritzker Pavilion:

Cloud Gate is mockingly called the Bean around these parts. Let me tell you, it is freaking COOL. Here was our view from the underside of the Bean:

Can you spot us from this viewpoint?

Here we are on the pedestrian bridge overlooking Pritzker. It was a really fun afternoon:



After our adventure, we rested up a bit and later met up with our friends Nancy and Micah once they got off work (they are both architects, who were some of Nathan's best friends back in architorture school) for some drinks and appropriately, some Chicago deep dish pizza.

Chasing dreams and friends

I am struck by how often Nathan has been declaring himself an ex-architect. It will take me a long time to not think of him as such, since the entirety of the time I've known him (nearly 6 years), that is primarily how he has defined himself. Visiting Arcosanti in particular was interesting, as that is the place he decided to become an architect at age 11, one fateful day in mid-August 1987, and now he is decisively moving on from that chapter in his life. He found this photo of he and his brother Henry from the very day he decided to become an architect, taken in the Arcosanti café:



And here we are in nearly the same place in the café, "glistening" as can be expected:


This period in our life (and our Farewell US Tour in particular) is all about transition, but it is also about coming full circle in many ways to plans and dreams we had for ourselves as children. While our pursuit of our dreams has transpired in an unconventional manner (I don't think I've mentioned to many people that I dreamed of living in Oxford since I was 11 or 12), we seem to be living them out and I'll be honest: it is totally bizarre. And I feel so very, very blessed.

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We left Arizona behind late Saturday morning and spent the entire day in travel (when you include the 3 hour time difference). While we will miss Arcosanti in particular, we will not miss the heat.

On Friday we spent the day in Phoenix, driving all over tarnation in order to purchase a suit for Nathan's Oxford activities, while it was 110 degrees outside and much more humid than we'd anticipated. We spent Friday night with Nathan's good friends, a couple of whom we hadn't seen in over 5 years. Unfortunately we completely forgot to take any photos that evening. We spent the prior evening in Flagstaff with our friend, Sienna and her fabulously fantastic son, Rowan (who is now 4 1/2 years old). I'll post photos from that evening soon.

And now we are in the Midwest. Michigan, to be exact.

I can't remember the last time I was in the Midwest... I think 9 years ago. As many of you know, I am originally from South Dakota--and Nathan and I had a debate (as we are wont to do) the other day in which I stated that South Dakota was part of the Midwest. According to him, the Dakotas are in the Plains states, not the Midwest. I must say that Michigan looks quite different from South Dakota. There are trees everywhere, and it is green, even at the end of summer.

We are here to visit dear friends. Saturday evening and Sunday all day were spent with some of our favorite people, Kirk and Robin...

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..and their incredibly adorable daughter (also our godchild):



We wandered around downtown Detroit, and some of its surrounding environs, while enjoying the perfect weather. Last night we went out to eat delicious Indian food and then went out to a nearby billiards bar (it was their first time at such a place in over 5 years... I guess being a parent will do that to you):

We had a wonderfully fun time together. I miss will all three of them so much.

The blessings and mitzvahs of our lives are incredibly apparent on this trip. I find myself continuing to grin ear-to-ear, even in the mellowest and quietest of moments.

Leaving Portland

As Desirée wrote below, we're currently at my old home of Arcosanti, having already traveled through California, visiting many friends and family along the way.

Leaving Portland was, as anticipated, a melancholy experience. I don't think I quite knew exactly how melancholy it would be until a few days before we left. Walking into my one of my favorite Coffeeshops (Half & Half) with my good friend (and co-worker) Tony, I told the baristas that this was probably the last time that I would see them. Their eyes grew improbably moist, and they said that I could have anything I wanted for free. (Of course I thanked them for their generosity, then insisted upon both paying and leaving a $5 tip).

That's when it struck me: in other large cities I've been in, the functional everyday interactions between people aren't really relationships at all -- they're formalized, depersonalized roles. Baristas and bus drivers and bank tellers and so forth are just that: job descriptions, not fully-realized people at all. When I studied environmental psychology in college, I was taught that this was the inevitable by-product of living in, and relating to, a large population. There is supposedly not enough room in the human psyche to perceive large numbers of other people as real human beings. Beyond a certain point, we percieve others as mere actors, automatons, what have you. That is why small towns are supposedly so much more personable and friendly than large ones: they haven't crossed the "deindividuation threshold".

After living in Portland, I'm not sure that I can buy this theory anymore. The people there are genuinely and sincerely friendly. They routinely thank the bus drivers when getting off the bus, for example. This is no mere empty etiquette, mind you -- on the one occasion when I had a truly obnoxious bus driver, the people getting off the bus told her to go fuck herself (in so many words), and they sincerely meant it. The much more frequent expressions of gratitude were also, I believe, perfectly sincere.

It's not this attitude that I will miss, per se, but rather the genuine human connections I made because of it. There were half a dozen baristas I was close to. We learned about each others' lives, and they never minded on the not infrequent occasions when I would absent-mindedly wander out of the shop without paying; they knew that I could always settle up later. They shared their favorite bands with me, and when I began experimenting with sensory deprivation tanks as a means of relaxation, several of them decided to give it a try as well. I always sought their opinions on my various & sundry plans for world domination. They were all-around excellent people. I will miss them.

I will also miss the tellers at the nearby bank, who were unaccountably sweet and mellow people; I will wonder about how Mark the Bank Teller's brand new kid is growing up, and I have no doubt that he will wonder, in turn, about how my crazy life is progressing. I will miss the wisecracking, shit-talking, deal-cutting employs at various car rental offices. I will miss the the guy whose only job was to stand on Burnside with a balloon-festooned "Mattress World" sign, waving and grinning at the passing traffic. Man, did he love his job! Gives me hope that there really truly is a place for everyone in this world. He'd always ask me how my day was going as I walked by on my daily commute. At the end of his day, he'd find some passing child (or anyone else) whose day would be made by adopting a cluster of balloons.

These people, and so many more -- some of whom I only met once or twice, but still had shockingly holistic interactions with -- are what I will miss the most about Portland. I will also of course miss my many closer and more official friends -- but not too much, because I know that they will always remain my friends regardless of where I am in the world and that someday, somehow, I shall see them again. And I'll miss the unique Portland-flavored eccentrics -- the jovial trombone player with the mickey-mouse ears, who seemed to be terribly confused by every fourth or fifth note, or the random Park Block people who distributed newspaper samurai hats or played croquet with bowling balls and sledgehammers -- but every place has its eccentrics, I hope. I will also miss the place: bicycling on the river during the warm clear days, reading at Powell's when it's dark and rainy, the winter ice storms, summer's leafy green light, the crazy volcanoes lining the horizon -- but these things will still be there when I come back to visit.

I won't be in touch with my bank tellers and baristas and bus drivers, however. They will likely have moved on to other jobs by the time I come back to visit, and I doubt that I will ever see them again. And this makes me sad, because these people became real to me, and I genuinely care about their lives.

When I was a child (around age 6 or 7, I believe), I went through a period wherein I found it almost impossible to believe that other people were real -- that there were billions of other people in the world, all of whom saw different things through different sets of eyes. It seemed utterly implausible to me. Being an individual struck me as such a terribly complex and singular thing that I just didn't see how it could really be infinitely repeated, with infinite variation no less. For a while I entertained the notion that all these other people were actually real, but rather simulacra who would pop out of existence the moment they left my visual field. (This raised certain issues. If other beings were mere artifacts that were constantly being created and destroyed based on their proximity to me, then the world must in fact revolve around me -- which also struck me as rather improbable. So perhaps I was living inside of some huge virtual reality experiment, designed by aliens to test my reactions. That would certainly explain a number of inconsistencies and improbabilities that I'd observed in the world: bad VR programming, that's all. I'd probably make worse mistakes, if it were left up to me. But wouldn't those aliens then also have their own rich and unknowable interior lives, bringing us back to the same problem yet again? When my musings went recursive, I moved on to other things.) Eventually I stopped worrying about it, but I don't think I ever fully grokked that all these other people in the world actually exist.

I suspect that most people go through a similar process, if more subconsciously (and perhaps leaving out the bits about aliens and VR). Eventually, they come to terms with the fact that their immediate friends, family, and neighbors are real people, but can't quite bring themselves to embrace everyone they meet within that fold. And then we're taught that this is all that anyone is capable of: authentic interactions within a limited social group.

But Portland taught me otherwise. I'd like to think that wherever I go, from now on, I will take a bit of this Portland attitude with me. I will try to always answer questions like "how are you?" with inappropriate honesty, and encourage the random strangers I meet to do what the same. I will always try to get to know the person who is serving my tea or bagging my groceries, because likely as not, they're decent people with interesting lives. This will make life richer, no matter where I live -- but it also makes leaving harder.

Farewell US Tour: part one of the gratuitous photo posts

As of approximately one week ago, we are no longer Portland residents. We've had a crazy last few weeks, particularly the last week we were in Portland. We already dearly miss our many wonderful friends in Portland. Here we are looking gleeful and shiny-faced at the farewell party hosted for us at Miss Amy Lechner's house:


And here I am at that same soiree, after my friend, Cat, caught me, apparently being all mischievous...



Yes indeed, our friends make us happy. Very, very happy.

So fast-forward a couple of weeks to the present: Now we've cleaned out our beloved NW Portland apartment with the help of several wonderful friends, shipped off our belongings either to parental-types or to our new mailing address at Linacre College in Oxford, found catsitters for our cat-children, and took off on what we have deemed our "Farewell US Tour." The tour includes stops in California, Arizona, Michigan, Chicago & New York over a 2 and a half week period. We are blessed enough to have friends in each and every one of these ports. (And, I recently purchased a modest yet excellent digital camera and I fear you'll have to deal with frequent photo posts forthwith.)

In the middle of last week we both took off for California - I visited a friend in San Francisco whilst he spent five days at his mom's place in Atascadero (central coast, near San Luis Obispo). While in SF, I ate lots of food, visited a hookah bar, bought my camera, visited the Museum of Modern Art, and all the while spent some quality time with my much missed friend, Katie. Here we are during a visit to the beach by Golden Gate Park, one of my (inexplicably) favorite places in the bay area.



Now we are in the second leg of our tour - Arcosanti, Arizona.


Nathan loves the high desert. Although he has become a wussy northwesterner after having spent five years in Portland, he always shines (literally and figuratively, haha) when he comes here.



I always have a tough time explaining Arcosanti to those entirely new to the concept. Nathan spent nearly five years during his most formative period (16-20) here and it is a funny, frustrating, and magical place. I have been here about three times, but neither of us has been back for a visit in five years (since we did a dance workshop here in August 2002). Since I have no ability to provide a concise explanation of Arcosanti, I think I'll just post the description provided on their website:

"In 1970, the Cosanti Foundation began building Arcosanti, an experimental town in the high desert of Arizona, 70 miles north of metropolitan Phoenix. When complete, Arcosanti will house 5000 people, demonstrating ways to improve urban conditions and lessen our destructive impact on the earth. Its large, compact structures and large-scale solar greenhouses will occupy only 25 acres of a 4060 acre land preserve, keeping the natural countryside in close proximity to urban dwellers.

Arcosanti is designed according to the concept of arcology (architecture + ecology), developed by Italian architect Paolo Soleri. In an arcology, the built and the living interact as organs would in a highly evolved being. This means many systems work together, with efficient circulation of people and resources, multi-use buildings, and solar orientation for lighting, heating and cooling.

In this complex, creative environment, apartments, businesses, production, technology, open space, studios, and educational and cultural events are all accessible, while privacy is paramount in the overall design. Greenhouses provide gardening space for public and private use, and act as solar collectors for winter heat."

All this background information is merely to explain last night's most exciting event.... encountering a tarantula on the road to Arcosanti back from our evening's activities in nearby Prescott. He was a spry, handsome little bugger:


While tarantula sightings are a common occurrence around these parts, this was the first time I'd seen one in the wild and I got a huge kick out of it.

More dorky updates as warranted!