Juxtaposition

I'm just lying here, on my giant bed that is more than half-covered in papers, laundry, and two cats, delaying the inevitable.

What's the inevitable? Getting the laundry out of the dryer. Finding something more for the girls and me to eat. Fishing my phone charger out from behind my bed and plugging it in before my phone dies (which may or may not happen).

A guy from Craigslist said that he would probably deliver a couch to us today, but I haven't heard from him in several hours, so I'm starting to get nervous. The girls are excited about the couch now (it's purple, plus they've been asking for a couch), and they'll be very disappointed if the deal falls through. I'll be disappointed too. It would be hard to find another purple couch on Craigslist with an owner willing and able to deliver. And trying to go get it on my own with a Zipcar would be daunting.

Yeah, I sold my car. Last week, actually. Well, my family did it for me, so that I wouldn't have to pay through the nose to keep it downtown or have to ride along for test drives with strangers. I paid off my highest-interest credit card and the lawyer that I retained 1 1/2 years ago and then was never able to pay (he's a very patient man!). And we are officially a car-less, walking, collapsible cart-dragging, MAX-riding, streetcar-hopping, bus route-deciphering, ride-bumming family. It's fun, and hard, and good exercise, and freeing, and constraining, and sometimes a little embarrassing, but mostly, it's the way things are meant to be right now.

We're enjoying living in our new home. It's a 1930's apartment building. The hallway and kitchen walls are covered in cupboards and drawers, all painted over so many times that the drawers stick and the cupboard doors don't close properly. The windows open outward, overlooking the Portland Park Blocks, a beautiful lane of grass, maple and oak trees (now endlessly raining red and yellow leaves), sidewalks, and benches.

The apartment building and the park blocks have something in common - a characteristic that they share with much of Portland. They are both charming and repulsive, depending on the attitude of the viewer. For many, living in an ancient building with squeaky floors, layers of lead paint, paper-thin windows, plaster walls that crumble when you try to nail or screw into them, and plumbing so problem-prone that water is shut off to the building roughly every two weeks for "maintenance" is not something they would choose. Nor would be living alongside a street with a constant stream of drunk party-goers (party-leavers?) passing by your bedroom window, laughing and yelling from midnight to 4am every Friday night. Nor overlooking the park where every dog owner within a mile radius takes his dog to "do its business," and where more than one homeless man makes his bed each night.

Those things are not ideal, but they are not what defines our new life at Portland State. The girls and I celebrate our new home. To us, it means being a separate family again, no longer living in the home of another. It means walking to dinner at the campus cafeteria. It means running down the hall to show the RA a loose tooth. It means working together to carry the groceries for the three blocks back to our home. It's togetherness and discovery and public drinking fountains hastily gulped from on the way to pick up a package from the housing office.

And so, you can see the juxtaposition of my excitement and passion for our new home with the exhaustion and depression that I wrestle with on a daily basis. Any means of reconciling the two has thus far eluded me.

Cheers.