Daft

It's early in the morning after the night and I'm trying to make her go to sleep, but instead she's sitting at her desk and listening to King Laconic, thinking of loving Norwich and loving Portland both. She falls in love too easily.

Daft Ball was sweaty. They couldn't open the windows in the S.U. on account of Eastmoreland residential angst (La Résistance on Friday was shut down by the noise police).

Glossary:

Daft Ball - dance party dedicated to Daft Punk, at which the theme for Spring/Fall is announced (VOODOO).
Spring/Fall - a sort of mini Renn Fayre for those out of sync seniors who graduate this semester.
Renn Fayre - three days of this in May, apparently.
La Résistance - excellent party hosted by the French House. Red wine (clearly French), cider (less so) and hip-hop (?).

Anyway, the parties recently have all been significantly better than Halloween's Harvest Ball, which I thought was a load of twaddle. Being existentially attached to Mrs Rochester (yes, she dressed up as Mrs Rochester - see badge) was just too much. And having to listen and 'dance' to Reel Big Fish with the house lights fully up is not something I should be expected to tolerate.

Although the days before and after Harvest Ball (30th October) fully compensated. They started selling hot apple cider in Caffe Paradiso. Then the German House hosted Oktoberfest on the 29th. And on the 31st, the idiot and Gianmarco and I went into Portland for a screening of Psycho in the Arlene Schnitzer, with live accompaniment from the string section of the Oregon Symphony Orchestra. That was something. All followed by a meal at Jake's Famous Crawfish: scallops and a beautiful little tiramisu, and the end to probably the best day of Halloween ever.

Ok, really, at 03.46am - it's bedtime now.

Consette x

Falltumn

It's November now, but outside the wind is still quite warm, and the rain has been discrete. The grandmother back in England told the mother to tell the idiot, one weekend a few weeks ago, that there was a storm over Portland, but really it was just a little damp and grey. Oregon is not satisfying the hyperboles of News 24, neither the crazy apocalyptic weather I had come to expect. Leaves are orange, squirrels are nutting, pumpkins are pumping. All the necessary Autumn imagery: deployed.

Fall break seems like a long time ago now, as the intradiegetic temporality at Reed (to steal popular phrases from the idiot's Henry James class) is somewhat speedy. Actually, I guess it was quite a long time ago. The royal we have just been lazy.

In typical fashion, the idiot scheduled and apportioned her time into nice square pockets of fun, so as not to waste a second. She is fully conscious of the fact that there is only SIX WEEKS this year with which she can travel America outside of Reed. And as much as she loves Reed, it could be anywhere in the world, existing in its own hermetic microclimate of unshoed vegetarians and hipsters brewing tea in jam jars. So anyway, here was the schedule for fall break: the first of the six weeks.

FRIDAY 15TH OCTOBER: We go to our first ever ballet with host sister Amelia. It is Sleeping Beauty. Host mum/mom Karen gives us special chocolates in the interval, and then we share a pretzel, and Amelia eats too many skittles. The boy who dances Bluebird, right at the end, is beautiful.

SATURDAY 16TH: She procrastinates over Charles Olson paper, gazing at her self-imposed deadline as it approaches, meets her, and then fades into distance. We take a trip to Hawthorne to clear the head. Eat that bowl of chili, buy a proper quilt, convince ourselves that we see Johnny Marr in that ridiculously huge vintage place near 34th. A bum looks up at her from the sidewalk and says 'I need you for my experiment'. She thinks of the Human Centipede and hides for approximately an hour and a half in the cereal aisle of Fred Meyer.

SUNDAY 17TH: She wakes up at 5 in the morning to finish Charles Olson paper. Fails. We keep to the schedule of fun regardless and catch an early bus to the coast. We drive up into the clouds, and all the pine trees are from Twin Peaks. The best of days ensues. We wander, read, write, pretend to write, lunch on chowder, take far too many pictures of the same rock, and fall asleep in the sand. The idiot starts The Unbearable Lightness of Being as her 'non-course' book for the break. The sun goes down, then we sit in a cafe and eat an incredible ham and cheese sandwhich. Bus home at 7.30pm, back in her room by 10pm. Everything falls together, the centre holds, and she finishes her paper with salty Pacific fingers.

MONDAY 18TH: A day for downtown Portland. The sun is still astonishing, and the idiot buys some tomaytoes from the farmer's market in Pioneer Square so we can eat them on the sunny Eastbank Esplanade, while segway tours hum around. People as space age meercats, truly silly. Find a shop called Reading Frenzy, dedicated to zines and making zines. The nice lady directs the idiot to the IPRC (Independent Publishing Resource Center) upstairs, which is in fact a cosy library of more magnificent zines. The idiot sits and reads things for a while. I go to Whole Foods and buy 450g of strawberries. 'We' (mainly the idiot) consume the entire box during the 10 minute walk from the bus stop back to the dorms. A trail of hulled stalks maps our route.

TUESDAY 19TH: Abundance of good weather becomes disconcerting. We take a day trip to Washington Park, up and to the west of town. View from the Japanese Gardens covers all three mountains. She falls asleep on a bench in the International Rose Test Gardens. Day ends with quite an attractive homeless man, nicknamed 'Scurvy' by his friends. She gets angry with me for flirting, but she knows that I know that she's only angry because her less proper self would have flirted if given the chance. Scurvy tells us about heads-up pennies. If you find a heads-up penny, it's good luck and you've got to keep it. The idiot leaves a heads-up penny at the bus stop for someone else's good luck. My eyes verily roll. We return back in time for a lovely meal with Annie and George.

WEDNESDAY 20TH: First day of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival with Gray Fund. Road trip down to Ashland takes 5 hours, but we chat to nice new Reed people on the way, and cashew nuts are in circulation so things remain amicable. Ashland Hostel is far too nice to be a hostel. Reed has the entire basement to itself, and we play Apples to Apples into the night. The idiot misjudges the adjective card CASUAL, and takes a risk in offering up SCHINDLER'S LIST as her noun card. Collective disapproval. But she wins the round anyway.

THURSDAY 21ST: Exploration of Ashland in daylight. Hilly. The 'healing' lithia water in the main square tastes of fart. Our first play is a matinee of Throne of Blood - an adaptation from the film, a sort of Japanese noh-ish Macbeth. Traumatic. We have an early and ginormous dinner (they feed you well on Gray Fund trips) before Hamlet in the evening. I am, of course, a purist, and a bit too conservative for such a liberal interpretation, but the idiot approves for the most part, and thinks this Hamlet must have seen Tennant's Hamlet from two years ago. That crazed pop-eyed soliloque looks familiar. American audience behaviour is diverting. Random claps in impressive moments, as if to say 'well done, that was pretty good, so I'm going to make some noise and interfere with your next line'. Also, standing ovations are pretty much obligatory.

FRIDAY 22ND: A cheesy matinee of She Loves Me, then home. First experience of Burgerville on the way back. The idiot finishes The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and is very much moved. She is perhaps too pleased with herself for completing, and for prioritising 'non-serious' over 'serious'.

SATURDAY 23RD / SUNDAY 24TH: Seriousness begins, and all that has been deferred needs to be dealt with. The idiot rushes a presentation on Kamau Brathwaite. On Sunday we meet the Dubays (cousins of friends) for dinner. There's a log fire, and a lovely family, and a spread of food like you wouldn't believe. Cranberry and pear pie, then a Halloween 'party bag' from Inga containing Reese's cups, chocolate digestives and a mini pumpkin. Fall break ends fatly.

Consette x

Nos

She and I are going into Portland to see Never Let Me Go this evening, for once permitting an intravenous dosage of the algia for the nos. I don't allow nostalgia, as a rule, but sometimes a little slippage is manageable isn't it? At least, I reckon so. Never Let Me Go is a movie adaptation of a book I've never read (one of the idiot's favourites), but I'm told a pleasing amount of screentime is devoted to the English countryside and boarding-school politics. The idiot burst into tears during the trailer. I thought about cricket bats and matron. I think both our needs will be satisfied.

She hasn't been too homesick yet; we both think of England in a wistful, happy sort of way, rather than with the agony of a gut-wrench loss. She keeps in touch by Skype once a week - midnight chats in the laundry room, every Wednesday after Henry James - and she has that revolting Possum puppet thing from home to keep her company. Like she needs another figment of her imagination. Sometimes she makes-believe that Possum can talk. There's also Masterchef USA on youtube to compensate for the lack of BBC iPlayer and 4OD: Gordon Ramsay with high-fives and hissy-fits. We've barely watched a television since arriving, apart from Nancy Grace or The Daily Show in the gym.

With regard to Englishness, the accent hasn't got me as far as I would have liked. In fact, it is rarely mentioned. Back at home everyone assured me (with different and prettier metaphors) that an English accent in America is like a small, precise fish hook in a pond full of easily-led salmon. The idiot even thought it might compensate for a certain lack of bosom. Alas, there has been little salmon - and none of it smoking. Even so, we make great efforts to maintain the Englishness. I deride any hint of an American inflection, creeping into her classroom chat from time to time, and am so far keeping on top of things. The other day I caught her pronouncing Chopin like show-pah instead of shop-ah. Pretty embarrassing. In writing, a proliferation of zs has become an issue, but I forgive her on this count because it pleases the professors to be correct.

Two additional revelations about Americans:
- They don't know about bacon sandwiches, oh so different from the BLT, and seemed genuinely appalled at the notion of ketchup with white bread.
- They don't put x kisses at the end of their messages, unless you are the other half and they would actually kiss you in real life.

I can assure you that, in spite of my habitual 'x' sign-off, I would kiss none of you in real life.

Consette x

Gorge

It's ever so cold in the room now: a quilt has been purchased, a heater is being considered. And do we have a kettle? No we do not have a kettle. The idiot remembered some English Breakfast Twinings she'd brought from home, and so we moseyed downstairs to make a cup, only to encounter the absence of the kettle in the kitchen.

But surely? No kitchen comes without a kettle.

Anyway, now we're sitting in front of the fake log fire in the common room, and I am writing and she is drinking hot milk (microwavable compromise). Last time I promised to talk of Portland food, and as it's fall break at the moment we have been doing more eating than usual. The idiot has composed a list of all the food carts she wants to visit in the year, as 'cartopia' is quite the Portland craze (see book entitled 'CARTopia' for more details). Today we went to The Whole Bowl in the 9th and Alder parking lot, which was delicious. I ate more than she did in the end, but left all the rice at the bottom for her (am on a non-imaginary low carb diet). It was almost identical to the bowl of chili we had at Chili Pie Palace on Hawthorne, except not nearly as generous and a little bit greener. Avocado was of better quality this time. In Chili Pie Palace they spelt it like 'avacado', like: 'go on love, have a CADO for the road.' This all makes a welcome change from the habitual Pad Thai at Sawasdee Thai, or falafal from Aybla Grill, which seem to be the only options available to us on Saturday afternoons. A Monday at the 9th and Alder parking lot, on the other hand, sees every cart open for business, and being the pathological commitment-aphobe that she is, it took us about an hour to decide, finally, on The Whole Bowl.

Here's some other things about food. And let' try to stay in chronological order, or the idiot will get upset:

GREASE: She notes in her diary, the very first thing: 'Grease smells different on this side of the world.' It really does, though. The grease in Vancouver airport was still, undeniably, grease, suspended above the food hall, and getting into my coffee and my apple. But it was that particular flavour of grease, which immediately took the idiot and me back to our first American experience in 2008, and all those Greyhound waiting rooms.

SUGARY BREAD: You will not find bread without sugar. Full stop. Period.

VOODOO DOUGHNUTS: Not Krispy or Dunkin or any of that rubbish, but pagan and bloody, with a pretzel twig sticking out of its stomach. As I mentioned a few posts back, we bought a big pink box of 20 for Vicky's birthday. The apple 'fritter' is, for future reference, gargantuan, and the 'Captain my Captain' one has stale Captain Crunch cereal all over the top. Just look at some of these.

SNOW CONES: Probably the most exciting aspect of a baseball game is sucking your way through a snow cone.

JEWISH NEW YEAR: Thanks to Holly and her amazing host family, the idiot was invited to a Rosh Hashanah feast in early September. I couldn't go because the idiot said they were trying to keep numbers down and, she said, my presence is awkward sometimes, like no one's really sure what to do with me or whether to talk to me at all. Charming. Anyhow, host daddy picked them up at 9 from Eliot Circle, straight after Henry James, and the idiot told me later that what followed was one of the best meals she's ever eaten. Apples and honey for good luck, with eggplant puree and fruity bread, then the clearest broth with delicate little matzah balls, then brisket and glazed chicken (I think she said marmalade) and green beans and almonds and tiny fried potatos like tiny flying saucers, and then honey cake and fruit salad and biscotti.

OTTO'S: A 'sausage kitchen and meat market' on Woodstock, where we ate such a good sandwhich one bleary Sunday lunchtime. It had apples in it, and any sandwhich with apples in it knows what it's about.

BLUEHOUR: Not to say that the burger outlets are undeserving of blogspace (and we've frequented one or two), but...actually, yes, I do and shall say that. Because I'm Consette and I've tasted the finer end of Portland now. Hm. After seeing 'Howl' on a Gray Fund trip, we were taken out for dinner at Bluehour, where the idiot ate her first oyster and then had figs and pound cake for pudding. Thanks and bowing to Betty Gray.

PRETZEL M&Ms: America dares. Inspirational.

PORTLAND NURSERY APPLE TASTING: Two weekends in October, an inflatable apple in the sky, cider (non-alcoholic wtf), strudel, honey, and over fifty varieties to sample, down a long long table with a cocktail stick and a checklist. The idiot, as you can imagine, was in an embarrassing state of bliss. There was a period in her life when she could eat up to four or five apples a day, but mummy had to put a stop to all that for fear of tooth-rot. Inevitably, though, she had a minor relapse at the Apple Festival and bought far too many apples, and then made excuses about eating them within 24 hours in case they spoiled.

AMERICANS: Quite a long way back now, after the Korean feast night, the idiot and I witnessed an argument between, what appeared to be, five Americans. It lasted over an hour and centred on the supremity of different countries in different fields; their cultural prestige in philosophy, music, food, or what-have-you, with each American defending a country of their choice. It didn't take me long to realise that this wasn't just five Americans arguing hypothetically on behalf of other nations, but five Americans who claimed the cultural lineage of their chosen nation, and claimed it with quite an unnerving sincerity.
One thing I've learnt so far is that you'll never get an American-American. No one would ever profess to being that. Instead there's German-Americans or Italian-Americans or Irish-Italian-Thai-Americans. Interestingly, or perhaps not, the argument began and ended with food, the category everyone wanted to win.

Consette x

Sustenance

I just sat on the desk and watched her eat a slow and solitary bowl of porridge. 8.30 in the evening, Come Dine With Me on youtube, Sunday - some things are too ingrained, what’s a shift in continent going to do about it? But even though it’s my role as imaginary friend to chastise, really and honestly I’m with her on this one. Nothing like porridge.

PORRIDGE, mind, NOT oatmeal.

Thing is, Commons closes at 7 on a Sunday, which means that everyone eats dinner at about 5 or 6. This is bizarre. The idiot is taking a stand and has decided to boycott the dining hall on Saturday and Sunday evenings, flying the Quaker Oats flag instead. Lunch can also legitimately be eaten as early as 11.30am in America. Since when, seriously, has this been normal human behaviour? Where does breakfast feature? And don’t they get hungry at night, after their super early suppertime? My only conclusion is that there are numerous covert meals scattered in between the regular ones. If they ate their dinner any later than 7, then there would be no room left-over for post-dinner or neo-dinner or dirty dinner (don’t ask what dirty dinner is; the idiot has been thinking a lot about dirty realism recently, and things rub off.)

The food in Commons is good and edible, for the most part. The idiot brazenly chose the paella during Spanish week, which was a real low point of coagulated rice and dried, earlobey muscles. And garlic features in almost everything. The fruit is HUGE, the apple pips are WHITE, and the juice is like pure syrup. Some days I’m pretty sure they smash up Hobnobs and call it granola. Ranch dressing is double cream isn’t it, really? As I said, though, it’s okay for the most part. We’re surviving. The idiot and Holly have developed an addiction to marinated tofu, and I’m getting fat off the grill food (one of the guys who works there said something nice about my accent once, but now it’s like I’m not even there). Hot turkey sandwiches are pure hype, with queues on Thursday lunchtime bisecting the cafeteria. But they taste of hype, and hype tastes good.

In terms of cultural differences, it took a while to get used to tomaytos and not tomartoes, and the idea that pudding cannot be used as a superordinate category which covers all desserts. Gianmarco is determined that pudding is something you pronounce as ‘puddin’, referring unequivocally to a little pot of chocolate. Mad.

She misses cooking though. She misses getting steamy with her ladies in Magdalen St kitchen, Norwich, UK, where there wasn’t enough room for 3. She misses Rachel’s soups. Having pre-purchased board points here means that she has to eat them up in Commons, and she can’t really afford a new set of pots and pans and spoons and bowls and cheese graters anyway. Reed students (I refuse to call them ‘Reedies’) don’t have time for cooking. This is le fact. Although, having said that, one of the best meals we’ve had here so far has been courtesy of John Bang and his Korean friends, who cooked up a Korean feast in the Sequoia kitchen one Saturday. The idiot went bright, bright pink from the kimchee.

Next time: food venturing into Portland and surrounds. Now: Ella and Louis and bedtime.

Consette x

Sober

Some coherence is required after last night, I think. Little cat-foot steps towards a more wholesome one-ness, to which the follower (3 followers!) is subjected. Blog as therapy, blog. The theme of the 'Hotbox' post was meant to be partying at a liberal arts college; the whys and wherefores, the where-tos, and, most of the time, the HOWs? Clearly the idiot (and I) managed it yesterday, but that was the culmination of many disconsolate amblings around campus not knowing what to do or where to go. But yes, I'll outline some of the successes, the achieved parties alluded to last night, with a slightly more adult approach to things:

PARTY 1 - VICKY'S BIRTHDAY PARTY: This was the first party wangled without having been organised by the International Society (who are keen on ice-cream parties above all else). Vicky bravely turning 22 only a few weeks into termtime. Everyone's exposure to The Red Cup. Two hours queueing for Voodoo Doughnuts on SW 3rd Avenue in the rain. Big pink box doughnut treasure. Vodka in plastic bottles.

ANNIE SUI'S BREAKFAST PARTIES: On 34th and Holgate in Annie's real house - mauve with a porch, and a swing on the porch, and a basement. Attended my second of these this morning. Be careful which mug you drink from, as Annie can be particular about mugs just getting bandied around, even by imaginary friends. The first party on 19th September involved potatoes, scrambled eggs, ham, cheese, mangoes. As Annie wisely considers: breakfast is just an invention of Kellog's, so we can pretty much eat what we want and not worry that it isn't cereal or something breakfasty. Today's breakfast involved pancakes (sorry, crepes), mushrooms, onions, pumpkin butter, bananas, and drug-specific placenames on the table.

RKSK: Reed Kommunal Sh*t Kollective. Not really a party as such. Just a Thursday night, voyeuring on the 'Kommunist' induction. Born in the USA playing in the quad. The idiot getting quite caught up in that, tearing apart the Springsteen irony web with dumb grin glee. Everyone lining up to be part of the revolution. Lots and lots of naked people in the library. Burning of soft toys. Community Safety Man circling on his segway, which I will never ever be capable of taking seriously.

HIPSTER PARTY: How on earth did they get to this? Verily an accident.

GIANMARCO'S BIRTHDAY AND HOTBOX: The idiot is giving up alcohol on account of this night (last night). She has been high on the scale of rubbishness today, moping around and looking MIZ, doing all her reading for class just too slowly to watch, not letting me go outside in case I go awol again. I went a bit awol at Hotbox.
NB. Hotbox is a house about a minute or so off campus, owned by Reed students and proffered up for parties every other weekend. Frequently closed down by the police (I know, right?) The idiot drank beer out of tupperware. I got to being social, which was nice, and was very skilled in keeping down the burger cake from Gianmarco's surprise birthday cake event. Burger, chips and ketchup, mostly composed of icing (exhibit A). Nom.

Consette x

Hotbox

I love you gusy so mush.

She attempted cynism in our poetry class today. Not adivisabel. Advisabel. Advisabel. Advisable. I left and drank thing.s. This is the product of such things. She is so embarrasingg. Wait - addin man on facebooh. FRacebook. Facebook. |'ll get there in the end.

I love youu giusy so mush.

Parties at Reed. Welcome.

Consette is not acquainted with spiris. Tonight it was Gianmaroc's Birthday thingymajiggy. Gianmarco's. W drank, we ate, we conquered. Holly and Vicky and Rachel bought a hambuger cake, no kiddin. Gianomarco doesn't do Birhtdyas Birthdays so welll bless hime. Him. He didn't know when to cut, and when he did know when to cut, he didn't know who to cut for. Consette was confused. Me. I am XConsetee. Consette. Yar.

What other experience of parties have I had? Please excuse my drunk.

There was Vicyy's party back in the day, back when it all begaaaan. By the way: Vicky - so impressed with you going through with that. I would have pretended an alternative birthdate. Voodooo doughnuts though, it nwas a beautous party.

Then last weekend, that arbitraru=yhipster party we managed to crash. What happened there. Cos=nette. Consette got with no-one that night. But there was this house like a barn., like people had accidentally turned up there (even though everything was so clealry clearly not accident), and there was this big red box, and this basement where people smooked, smoked, and there werre clever people from conferences who had protracted arms and such and who were really bye the bye.

Bye bye friends.

And RKSK. What was that.Kommunist irony? I'm notsure. Nude freshman just showing they had genitals. Bless. Parties at Reeed. Welcome. B=ut they pkayed played Bron In The USA (springsteen) at the start and I (Consette) got all squiggly inside like: What could I with myself right now? I could be quite an embarrassing and shameful human being right now. I could get violent on Bruce Springsteen (maybe even naked), and then it would be bad. All the freshman got naked. And it WAS bad.

And the CSOs on Segways. Silly. Zooming around like Daft Vaders.

Sorry loves. I'm just overage here, and drunk. Happy Birhday Gianmarco,

Consette x