Fools

She had wanted to spend this Sunday afternoon acquainting herself with the idiom of William Faulkner, but the post-lunchtime food slump precipitated an hour of heavy sleep at 3pm and the marked inability to do anything useful ever since. Even registering for Netflix proved a task of insurmountable obstacles, bound as we are to the UK billing address. April, and the second half of the semester, began last week. Sometimes the smell of mowing and warm wind makes it seem like the year (abroad) is coming full circle, slouching towards a second coming (cf. Yeats), or an end. And then it rains and the illusion blurs.

On Tuesday, the computer was clearly infected by this sensation of things coming to a close and decided to parade a protest - a histrionic refusal to logon in anything other than Safe Mode. Thank you to the magic computer man in the ETC, who gamely pattered his way through reams of coding and Dell intolerance. By the time everything had been sorted out at 8.30pm, he had worked 4 hours over the end of his shift. On Friday we escaped into the city for a walk around some of the parks. All the good food carts had sold out and closed by 3pm, so we went to her favourite alternative: the Whole Foods buffet. Here we witnessed a woman choking on her muffaletta. Actual windpipe blockage choking, which neither the idiot or I had ever seen before. In the 10 seconds or so before the woman maneuvered a recovery, the idiot ran around in circles and yelled 'Heimlich Heimlich??' at dumb eyed customers and the checkout boys and girls. The couple sitting to our left were so entwined and whispery that they didn't even notice. It made the idiot feel all weird - conscious of food and its mysterious jump into the esophagus, conscious of the woman texting and telling people that she almost died. To make herself feel better, the idiot persuaded me to take the 20 bus down Burnside and come and watch True Grit with her at Laurelhurst for only $3. She drank a cider and let her jaw drop down at the scene with Jeff Bridges in the desert, the scene with the starlight, and I had a box of popcorn from that ginormous machine they have in the foyer, where you can see the fresh kernels going in at the top and frothing out as they pop open. We pretended to get annoyed at the bus-stop as the 75 was 20 minutes late, but in fact it was okay: we listened to Why? and the rain smelt hot. Later we went to the Beer Garden on campus, which was sticky and, for once, kind of wonderful. Someone brought along their decks and played music. Terrible and happy dancing ensued on the rainwater-ed porch.

Yesterday was Saturday, another opportunity for an outing. She is crippled with the idea of leaving, now that it's April and Reed ends in May and the flight home is in June, and so all free days are dedicated to venturing Portland. East Burnside, I've realised, is posh and young-parenty, whereas over the Willamette on its West side foil, it demarcates the opening into Old Town, 'female impersonator' land, and the center for the homeless. While making our connection from the 19 to the Yellowline Max, we saw a middle-aged man shuffling along W Burnside clutching a cushion shaped, and dressed, like a small child. He held it against his shoulder as if burping its back. Wholly unnerving. From here our destination was the Mississippi and Skidmore food cart site which we had discovered in Spring Break. The idiot ate a Portlander sandwich from The Big Egg breakfast cart: two easy eggs, black forest ham, mustard, cheddar, chives, between two toasted slices of brioche. We trailed down sunny Mississippi to catch the Red Max back into downtown, and then the bus over Hawthorne bridge to visit OMSI on the Eastbank Esplanade (Oregon Museum of Science and Industry). Being claustrophobic and, quote idiot, 'pathetic', I waited outside and watched things bobbing in the river while she took a tour inside the USS Blueback submarine. She enthused just as much, if not more, over the thoroughly gawky and, she thought, adorable tour guide as the submarine itself. Take a horse to water etc. Another example: in the evening we went to Fire on the Mountain with some friends to consume large quantities of buffalo wings and grease, and she ordered a salad. Salad. Granted - she ate one of Febee's fried oreos for dessert, but this earned only partial redemption. I, on the other hand, ordered, and was successful in consuming, 12 wings, a large chilli cheese fries, an appetizer of fried pickles with chipotle mayo, and a fried Twinkie to close. The boons of an imaginary stomach.

Upon returning to campus, we looked in on Fetish Ball in the S.U (awkward nudity, a phallus totem) and spurned it in favour of Safeway cider and incoherent rounds of pool. I took great pleasure in watching the idiot 'conduct' a lucid conversation with the parental unit on Skype this morning. They're coming out to visit at the end of May, for the last week of Reed, and plans and plans and plans are forthcoming. The idiot's 'America To Do List 2011' is quite terrifying - the longest list she's ever brought into a being, a monster of lists, a constant imperious presence of LIST. The parental unit had originally wanted to visit in March, but the father got called for Somerset jury service and everything was put on hiatus. Confidentiality laws proscribe me from detailing the delicious subject of said jury service, but needless to say that sometimes I miss the Celtic Sea, non-Pacific, general parochial ridiculousness of the English West country.

Consette x

PS. Yes I know, yet to write about March, yet to write about Spring Break. I spend my life losing and reinstating order. She hates me for it.