i find myself returning to art.

it's been a long time since i created just for me.

took pictures just for me.

i like taking pictures, but doing it for the love of it has been long-lost.

i've only realized this since coming to seattle.


i think my inner artist, so shy for so long, is re-emerging after a very long hiatus. if i'm honest, the last time i made art for art's sake, just for the pleasure of creating, just for the joy of shaping something out of nothing and holding it my two hands, was in high school.


tell me if i'm wrong, but there's a lot of fear associated with creating.


you're putting yourself out there. art isn't fact, and no one tries to take it as such, so therefore its up for discussion, appreciation, ridicule, dismissal, praise. maybe there isn't that fear once you get into a flow. you find your stride and you're just so happy making pictures that to you are beautiful (and won't necessarily go into your portfolio) that what anyone else thinks is just noise.


i've joined the goodfoot art collective, a group of artists and performers in seattle, a few of whom are my friends. the rest i haven't met yet, but we have a shoot on saturday and some shows coming up soon, which i'm really excited about.


my freshman year at carolina, a friend told me about st. anthony's hall, the co-ed arts fraternity on campus. i loved the idea of a bunch of artists coming together and sharing their work as their dues. but there were still dolla bill dues, more than i could afford, and though i considered pledging, i opted out. so when milton told me about goodfoot, i was in. i think it will push me in some really great, healthy ways. i'll keep you posted.


for now, here's some of what's been inspiring me lately:


1. K E X P 90.3, my favorite seattle indie radio station.


this morning i heard an amazing story about a 22-year-old artist from new jersey who is off-the-charts brilliant... and he can't communicate except through his art. he's autistic, in the extreme, and it took his parents YEARS to figure out what he wanted to say and how he wanted to say it. they finally found that he's a genius artist and has a relentless drive to create. what struck me is that maybe some people are made with focus and creativity so incredible that it limits other aspects of their humanity. i couldn't decide if this is beautiful or tragic. i almost cried, sitting in traffic on I-5. that would be like me.


anyhow, this guy, alex masket, made the cover art for a new compilation album out of NYC where a bunch of artists were asked to interpret the quatrains of Nostradamus and make music based on their interpretations.


you can listen and read about the project on ESOPUS magazine's site here. natureboy's "ode to merry maid" might be my favorite.


2. bon iver's sunrise concert at a hollywood graveyard.


also heard about this on K E X P yesterday morning. how did i miss this?! bon iver, along with a bunch of others, organized an event that started at 2 am and included a wes anderson film, planet earth + march of the penguins, sleeping bags, wine, coffee, pastries, buddhist monks, tombs full of hollywood stars, fog, and bon iver taking the stage at ten till 6. if his songs aren't perfect for dawn, i don't know who's are. sounds like the greatest concert i've never been to in my life.


3. sigur ros


i'm always inspired by sigur ros. i'm almost always in the mood to listen to them.


related confession: i don't like radiohead. i've tried and i've tried. all my most knowledgeable, music-loving, artsy friends LOVE radiohead and i just can't.


strangely, sigur ros is similar. but here's what i realized: when i listed to radiohead, i feel as if there is no hope left, as if the sun will never come out again. but when i listen to sigur ros, the same raw emotion is there, but i know the sun will break through the clouds eventually, even if the promise of light isn't for always. must be the hopelandic.


here's my favorite music videos (which are just as lovely as the songs by themselves):
glosoli
untitled #1 (vaka)
hoppipolla
svefn-g-englar


and now, to put myself out there (not like i haven't already on facebook, twitter, etc). here's some of my favorites from around seattle lately...











(can you tell i've been listening to a lot of sigur ros and bon iver lately?)






ps: if you're reading this wondering what else i'm doing besides just living in seattle and taking pretty pictures, i started an internship with World Vision USA this week, doing photo research, photography, and video editing. i'm juiced. its so good.

it really shouldn't be that difficult to find california. it's a big state, and it shares a border with the state i currently live in. also, i have GPS. and there's this great newfangled invention called googlemaps.

common sense, GPS, and google, yes even google, failed me this weekend.

my assignment was in jacksonville, oregon, quite close to the border of california. i had a bit of downtime before my assignment, so i decided to take a little trek to the redwood forest. my sources told me it was a mere 2 hours away, perfect day trip length, leaving me enough time to get back and shoot my story. a straight shot on the highway through some gorgeous country and bam, i'm in one of the world's oldest forests.

after an hour of driving in circles, i was still only 10 miles from my starting point, and lord knows how far from the redwoods. though the battery was dying, i turned on the GPS.

with my tires on pavement, the uppity librarian robot voice (who i named eunice at the beginning of the summer when i drove cross country) told me, "you are not on a road. getting on a road is the first step of your journey. go to hoot-n-holler lane."

no hoot-n-holler lane in sight. i kept driving. eunice corrected herself and told me to keep going straight. i did, and suddenly i was on a road without marking, rapidly ascending a mountain. what. i gave it a mile, then turned around. eunice freaked out, so i turned her off.

i had passed a general store during my circling, so i circled back to find it again and get directions. though the store looks exactly like one you'd see in a wild west movie, it was full of hipsters and people my age who looked rather out of place. as the guy at the counter was giving me a map and directions, i noticed a man to my left who didn't look out of place at all. he was exactly the kind of person you'd expect in a place like that — old, skinny, wearing a camouflage hat.

not only that, but he had a hook for a hand. yes, a hook. furthermore, strapped around his hips was a tooled leather holster with an ivory-handled pistol, on the same side as the hook. how do you pick up a gun with a hook?

guy at the counter: pointing to the map, "we call this four corners." eunice calls this hoot-n-holler lane. "go straight, you're going to go over a mountain. it's very winding and very beautiful. i could send you another way but it would take you a lot longer."

captain hook: "heh heh. you're sending her over the mountain. heh heh. i was just up there this morning. noooobody up there. heh heh."

i ignored captain hook and concentrated on the directions, still baffled. i thanked the hipster at the counter and left, and as i pulled out of the parking lot past the store, there was captain hook, ever sinister and chuckling. i waved and grinned.

the road was the same that i had been on before, and yes, winding and beautiful. but also mostly unpaved, very narrow, had some fallen trees and lots of forks, and no signs to indicate which direction to go. so i did a lot of guessing. also, given that it is a rural mountain road, the chances of driving off the edge are higher than say, driving on I-5. all the while i had visions of myself careening over the edge in the jeep, only to be found weeks later with my tongue dried up, my body bloated, and crows picking out my eyes. i'm sorry to be so gruesome, but i have an overactive imagination when it comes to these scenarios.

i also ran over my first ever animal, a tiny squirrel who i thought i dodged, then i saw in my rearview mirror his tail fluttering like a flag of surrender. i'm so sorry, little squirrel. i'm traumatized, and you are dead.

the moral of the story is that i finally did find the redwoods, but instead of 2 hours to get there, it took 4. i think hipster and captain hook were in kahoots and sent me that way because i was an infiltrator, perhaps from california (they hate california here), and hoped i would be eaten by bears. faster way, my foot.






+

today is my second to last day at the oregonian, and saturday i'm moving to seattle. so it's time to be a little reminiscent.

sherlock holmes says that "the little things are infinitely the most important," and it is the little things about portland that have endeared this city to me. so, goodbye portland.

i will miss your cool in the morning, the need for a jacket in summer that is gone by noon.
i will miss your love of bicycles and excellent biking lanes (and bike snobs. someday i will be one of you).
i will miss your stinky dogfood smell, willamette river, and your sweet brownie smell, woodlawn.
i will miss you, powell's, oh how i will miss you.
i will miss you, any day of the week garage sales.
i will miss you, hawthorne street and mt tabor.
i will miss you, oregonian, and your old romantic notion of the newsroom with its rough-around-the-edges inhabitants and endearing pessimism and incessant swearing.
i will miss you, food carts on 10th & alder, especially addy's.
i will miss you, wednesday farmer's market.
i will miss you, southwest trails.
i will miss you, full service gas stations.
i will miss you, little brown room with strung-up paper cranes.
i will miss you, hilarious oregonian security guards.
i will miss you, company jeep 112.
i will miss you, broadway bridge. 

i will miss you, wild pioneer oregonians.

speed blogging, here we go. i am due to be out of the office in 15 minutes, so it's enough time to distill life from the past few weeks into a few brief paragraphs/lists.

for labor day i went to visit mike + sue, the aforementioned wonderful oregonians taylor and i did a story on this summer. since the story came out a few weeks ago, they aren't really sources/subjects anymore and so have now become friends. or really, more like grandparents. they've been asking me to come visit for a while, so i took the first opportunity with a day off and no agenda to trek out to their mountain home up a dirt road in my civic... right.

they offered to have me spend the night and when i politely declined, stating that i had to work the next morning, sue asked what time i was due at work. when i said 10, she said, "oh for GOD'S SAKES! i changed the sheets and everything! you have plenty of time!" and so i stayed in their log cabin in mt hood.

but before the sun went down, they took me to a waterfall a few miles up the mountain so i could get a little more flavor of their home. it's a 2 mile hike in, and mike swore we wouldn't make it in and out before dark. sue was on a mission to prove him wrong, so we made the hike in 20 minutes. i kid you not. unless i was running, i don't think i've ever covered 2 miles that fast, especially in the woods.

i may or may not have seen an elk a few weeks ago on assignment on the oregon trail, but just to verify, i told mike and sue i was hopeful for a bear or elk sighting in the woods. we picked huckleberries on the way up, and where there are berries, there are bears, so my hopes were high.

yet as we hiked along the secluded trail, i began to worry. what if we really DID see a bear or an elk? elk may just sound like a cousin to a deer, which is true, but elk are more territorial and can quickly charge a threatening human. we all know how dangerous bears are, though at the end of berry season, less so.

we hiked single file — sue leading the way, me in the middle, and mike bringing up the rear. i timidly asked sue, "what should we do if we really see a bear or elk?"

without missing a beat she said, "oh just get down and mike will shoot it."

i turned around wide-eyed, and before i could finish asking, "do you have a gun?!" saw him fumbling beneath his timber-cutting plaid shirt for his pistol.

i was at once terrified and reassured, yet the terror was only momentary, quickly and greatly outweighed by incredulity at the people i get to spend time with and the great fortune taylor and i had of meeting these crazy, loveable, wonderful people.

and, i admit, i hoped even more that we would see a dangerous forest beast, just to see mike kill it. but alas, the most exciting animals we saw were a rabbit and a banana slug. which, nick kristoff tells me, will make your tongue numb if you lick them.

the next morning sue was off to work before dawn and mike was leaving to cut timber shortly thereafter, so i made my way down to the kitchen at 6am to bid them farewell. mike offered to make me coffee or give me a banana for the road, and just as i accepted the banana, i looked down at the kitchen floor and beheld 2 turtles. yes, turtles. in the kitchen. at 6am.

"what are these doing here?" i asked mike, knowing that nothing about them should surprise me anymore, but they do.

"oh, the kids left them here when they left home," he answered.

they have 2 kids: zac and sonnet. both are in their 30s and have been away from home for YEARS. no way... turtles don't live that long, do they?

"oh yeah, those are probably 25 or 30 years old," mike assured me. "they hang out in the bathroom most of the day, and when they have to do their business or they get hungry they come in the kitchen. i just put them in the sink and they do what they need to do and i feed them."

house trained turtles. bear hunting with house guests. sleeping in a log cabin. befriending timber-cutters.

surely experiences i would not have had, had i stayed in NC.

people never fail to entertain, surprise, enlighten, and flavor life. i love that we're so varied from one to another and within ourselves and each season we live through.

eight days left here and so many more stories to hear and tell. i love this job.

tonight's assignment: swedish hipsters making applesauce while belting out mariah carey.
tomorrow's assignment: girltalk.
friday's assignment: kayaking.

other briefs on the brain:
the magic of the braid
buying books
avoiding pine nuts
website update! www.abbymetty.com! tell your friends!





ps: this book is rocking my world.

so many different kinds of blogging. i'm a fan of this blog right now:
http://sirryrabbit.tumblr.com

its just clean and simple and has pretty pictures.

sometimes i like being in depth and detailed and ever-so-slightly emo, but maybe a little simplicity is good for me.

so here's an update:

today: blah
tomorrow/wed: literally going on the oregon trail with wagons, mules, hoop skirts, campfires, etc
thurs: going in a stunt plane. yessss.
friday: east coast bound, hallelujah.

a picture:



(an assignment last week that made me feel i had stepped into one of willy wonka's chambers of color)


and a video:

Anthems from Abby Metty on Vimeo.

props if you know what that title is from, but i'll give you hint.

the end of all narnia books never fail to make me cry.

c.s. lewis excelled at communicating truth in a way that it's not abstracted, but it becomes tangible, nearly touchable, digestable, solid and nutritional.

truth feeds. i need lots of it.

what i'm listening to on repeat today:

I Will Exalt You - Hillsong from Carlos Whittaker on Vimeo.

peace, peace, peace like a river.

the promise we are given: the healing of harms. 

the healing of harms. the healing of harms. the healing of harms. 

my life in lists and briefs from the last few days.

my injuries keep leapfrogging each other. will i ever not be bruised/scraped/scabbed/broken in my bones?

i feel like a broadway starlet, waiting for my big break. i've applied for so many jobs this week, feel like i'm on the brink of many things, something has to break the membrane of joblessness.

today is cheap steak day in the test kitchen. never knew there were so many carnivores in portland, but there are because this is a FOOD CITY and meat is GOOD here.

i went to astoria last week on assignment and then someone told me that the goonies was filmed there, to which i said, "oh that makes the goonies AND astoria way cooler." then i watched the goonies and realized i'd never seen it before. what. now i love it, because it seems to be a combo of hook + sandlot, both of which i love.

i'm dogsitting while my roommate is in africa for a month. lola, the dog, has been sleeping in jenny's room because she didn't like sleeping with me. so i shut her up in there so she doesn't cause mischief around the house in the middle of the night. in the morning when she hears my alarm goes off, she throws her small body against the door over and over again and cries to be let out. it doesn't matter if my alarm goes off at 6:30 or at 9, lola will thrash.

today i did one of two or more video interviews i'll need for the story i'm working on with taylor. taylor transcribed the first audio interview we did with mike + sue, our subjects, and it came to 27 pages. i was reading parts of it in the car today on the way there and laughing out loud at some of the things we asked and they answered. like this.

abby: so you guys just had your 40th anniversary last year. congratulations.
sue: yeah, geesh

mike: last year somebody fell a tree on me, a big ol' honkin' tree.

abby: so did you just pick your nose up? (after he told a story about his nose getting cut off)

someday i'm going to put up the whole timber part of the interview with mike, because these stories are just WILD. timber cutting is DANGEROUS. and while these stories are gruesome and i'm sure they were awful at the time they happened, they are kind of hilarious when mike and sue tell them back to us, and even funnier to read over again.

part of the reason i like working with journalists is that they use or pronounce misused words correctly. for example, the word "supposedly" is not pronounced "supposebly" or "supposively" but "SUPP-OS-ED-LY." now if i can only convince you all that there is no "x" in "espresso." get it right.

things that populate my life these days:

john steinbeck
cherries
chocolate
re-reading chronicles of narnia
odd-hour road trips
hood river
video interviews
the company jeep
newman, the security guard.
adventures
injuries
riding my bike
bridges
cuban bowl
london fog
lance armstrong haters
hummus
thai fried rice
paper cranes
v neck tshirts
cutting out the creepsters in my life
jessa + abby
getting the newspaper and then never reading it
imagining pioneers
communion
trying to stay in the pacific northwest
enter the worship circle
neosporin
murals
picking raspberries
losing my keys
recycling
buying used books
sweaters + scarves
taylor dungjen's use of the word "pow," which i love.

that is all. please, pacific northwest, keep me forever. or at least for a while longer.

portland is quite a romantic city. i'm surprised. i admit, before i moved here, i was expecting lots of abrasive personalities. i don't know why. actually i do know why, but i feel like it would get me in trouble if i divulged.

anyhow. portland is called the city of roses, for a good reason. it is full of them. it seems like in NC, roses are only for old ladies who have time to cultivate them in their yards and enter them in competitions and things. not so here. like with so many other things in portland, roses have a wild, unkempt beauty. there are lovely rose gardens, yes, but so many people grow them in their yards and don't give much thought to pruning or keeping them "pretty." they're even on the highway. they are allowed to grow as they will. and so they are lovely.

there's also plenty of california poppies, which i love, and i'm so sad they don't exist on the east coast. john steibeck describes them this way:

"... not orange, not gold, but if pure gold were a liquid and could raise a cream, that golden cream might be like the color of the poppies."

so true. i need to photograph them, they are my favorite.

so, portland is full of flowers.

also, there's a phantom smell of brownies on my street quite often, which i can't figure out, but i'm not complaining about.

also, there are lots of babies and pregnant ladies. and we know that romance usually precedes babies. so there's more proof.

even more proof of the romance is that it is overflowing into my assignments, but not by my choice. yesterday i was at an auction and one of the auctioneers asked me out for drinks. twice. keep in mind this was sunday morning, i was on assignment, and he was in his 50s. i'm sorry, i don't date auctioneers. i could do without that bit of romance.

i do tend to be spending a frequent amount of time with old men though. its a theme. this week it was marty and the senior rollers, portland's 55+ bike club (bicycle that is, not motorcycle). the women in the rollers weren't representing today, so it was me and a gang of old men hanging out on bikes. cool.

last week i spent a couple of days with bill reeves, owner of rosedale fruit farms in mosier, population 430. bill is a cherry farmer, and he spent hours on wednesday and thursday showing me around his orchards and introducing me to the migrant laborers he hires each summer, some of whom have been working for him for the last 30 summers. i had to exercise a lot of self-control being surrounded by literally thousands of cherries. i love cherries so much.



the pickers start at 5am, so i had to leave my house in portland by 4 to make it for the early part of the day. but the view was worth it.

 

bill was also a character in his own right. maybe we all become characters as we age. the weight of stories makes us richer, deeper, more contemplative. but also less inhibited. i don't know how this pertained to the assignment at all, but in the course of our conversation bill told me "i ran over the hippie's dog," talking about his neighbor who he doesn't get along with anymore (i wonder why). he obviously had no regard for their dog, or their lifestyle. not sure if that dog lived or died. funny guy. he's had parkinson's for 10 years, and until february was using walkers and wheelchairs to get around and still do light farming. in february he had brain surgery where they "tuned him up," as he said, and now he's almost fully funcitonal. no more stony face, hand tremors have subsided (he was using a pocketknife, guess he's mostly okay), and he can walk and drive on his own. he was amazed by all this, as was i.

mosier, where the orchard is, is six miles east of hood river, along the columbia gorge. the gorge must be short for gorgeous, because it is. and it has some of the best windsurfing in the world. i've never touched a wetsuit, much less a windsurfing board, but it's something i'd like to try now after watching people on the river do it. however, no water in oregon is ever fit for swimming in, even in august. it's cold here.

i've been fortunate enough to visit hood river 3 times in the last week (it's about an hour outside portland), and looks like i'll get to go again tomorrow, hopefully in the company JEEP, which i love. what a good job.

today at the senior rollers assignment, i got to go to mt. tabor, which is one of the highest points in the city, where you can see the whole grid of portland and the hills around spread out below you from the top. if i haven't communicated it enough yet, oregon is beautiful, in every possible way. this park is no exception, full of huge, stately evergreen trees and flower filled meadows. how could i not love it here? after the bikers left, i sat at the top of the hill for a long time by myself, without agenda, to (as new-agey as this sounds) just be. mediate. think. reflect. soak. it's been a long time since i've done that, and its restorative. in that place where peace and beauty kiss, there's solace.

part of what helped was music. i met a photographer last night who said that his photo teacher in high school was of the opinion that in order to make good art, you have to surround yourself with good art. i know this in my head, but don't practice it very often. it's so true. so today, in order to galvanize more creative juices in my solace, i listened to these (if you're in need of inspiration, have a listen too):

life in technicolor ii - coldplay
that great day - johnny lang
the moon - the swell season
where the road meets the sun - katie herzig & matthew perryman jones

more often, i absorb good art through good writing. lately it's been steinbeck's east of eden and jonathan safran foer's extremely loud & incredibly close, both beautifully written with lines that stay with me for days and weeks after i read them.

another i'm reading is madeline l'engle's walking on water, which i'm a big fan of, after only 2 chapters. it's about faith and art, which always sounds so boring, so christian bookstore-ish, but this is beautiful and is shifting me at a deep level.

more beauty lately in the people i've been meeting and our conversations. this weekend my roommate left for tanzania for a month, but passed me off to her best friend lilliana, who took me to two summer parties on saturday. one was a midsummer's night theme, and we made flower crowns and drank champagne and listened to live jazz/reggae. it was a party straight out of the pages of martha stewart, and it was lovely. i'm totally making flower crowns at my next party.

portland is full of artists and creators and thinkers and it's shaping me in ways i've hoped for for a long time. this place is good for my soul.

the other thing i've been pleasantly suprised by in the people i meet here is their sincerity and ability to follow through. there's little flakiness. this could also be because many of the people i've met and spent time with are in their late 20s/early 30s and i have just graduated from college, which is populated by flakes. it's nice when someone says they will do something or call you or introduce you to someone or show you a place, and then they actually do it. i never expect that anymore because it's so rare, but maybe it's time to reinstate that expectation.

when i don't have assignments, i spend lots of time in the office watching short documentaries or finding inspiration on other photo/multimedia sites. here's some of my favorites from the last few weeks.

ps 22 choir
express | condition critical
soundscapes
shepard fairey
penguin creative
twitter in iran
cellular obscura
duckrabbit multimedia

... and as my own creative outlet, a chronicle of our journey westward from NC to OR:

Oregon Trail from Abby Metty on Vimeo.

"And this was really the way that my whole road experience began, and the things that were to come are too fantastic not to tell."
-jack kerouac, on the road

the road experience. let me tell you something. road trips might sound cool and glamorous, and so might jack kerouac, but now i've seen the other side and let me tell you something. let me tell you real good. its not what they say it is. you know those movies where people are cruising down route 66 with the top down, scarves over their hair and big sunglasses on, probably laughing with perfectly applied lipstick, and a jack for every jill? that's not it. you know those movies where people leave, and drive to california in search of themselves and every moment of their journey is an enlightenment of the greatest kind? that's not it.

our road trip was long. we had some great moments along the way, but i can't say it was the greatest trip of my life and i'm so ready to do it again. north carolina to oregon in a civic with no AC is no joke. i think abby and jon would agree with me here. we keep talking about kansas and how awful it was. and that's all we can seem to remember. that, and the 14 hour day that we (or rather, i) so poorly mapped out when we (i) decided to drive from denver to boise, thinking it wouldn't be that far. its far. and its desert, and we got a speeding ticket in wyoming with nothing around but mule deer and prairie dogs for hundreds of miles. the cop had a flat, crisp accent that can only come from living in the barrenness of wyoming for years and years, like the sun had baked all the color out of it.

anyhow, road trips under 2 days (depending on where you're driving) are fun. i like driving to nashville and atlanta. those drives are kind of pretty. and driving through kentucky was beautiful. while we were driving through KY, i wrote this in my journal: "i think i may be falling in love with america." and i did, at least in KY. not so much after that. i'm sure driving down the california coast is beautiful, and i think that's the route i'm taking to go home, because i just don't know how i can go through kansas again (though i don't think oklahoma or west texas are that great either).

really though, aside from kansas, eastern colorado, and parts of that barren drive through the desert and rockies, there were some amazing moments on our trip. our route was chapel hill --> nashville --> kansas city --> denver --> boise --> salem --> portland. kansas city and denver were the favorites.

kansas city was not a place i expected to enjoy. but i fully did. we stayed with old family friends, the kornises, who i think i mentioned before. they were so kind and welcoming to us, and gave us the first meal we had eaten since leaving home 2 days before. otherwise, our existence was contingent upon granola bars and apples, and maybe a little beef jerky. so pot roast and vegetables were like the food of the gods to us once we arrived at their house. fred is full of fire and seems far younger than his 60ish years. he reminds me of nadia, who i met in ukraine several years ago, who doesn't tell people her real age, only her age counting from the time she met jesus (which at the time i met her was 17 years, i'd guess her real age to be 60). fred is traveling to some dangerous areas in asis and the middle east this week, and i hope to be like him when i get old. i hope to be like him now. his wife barb is so kind and mothering. they gave up their bed for us. that happened in 3 out of 5 places we stayed on this trip... we were overwhelmed by people's kindness.

fred took us to ihop, the international house of prayer, which i've heard so much about and streamed live online, but had never been to. it was pretty intense when we arrived, but really good to be there and see so many people praying and worshiping jesus. after that, fred took us on a guided late night tour of kansas city, with (unexpectedly) some of the largest and most expensive houses in the united states. they were incredibly, unimaginably huge. fred said he knows a guy who gets paid $50,000 a year to maintain the yard at one of them. shoot, if i can't find a job in the journalism industry, maybe i'll just move to KC to cut grass for that kind of salary.

fred and barb warned us about the drive across kansas, but i don't think anything could have prepared us. the excerpt i put in the previous blog from little house on the prairie is so accurate. it baffles me why anyone, the wilder family included, would choose to settle in kansas. i guess they just got tired of being in that wagon. abby put this as her facebook status: "abby northcott blames everything on kansas. go ahead. you should too." and i responded: kansas is responsible for poverty, global food shortages, tornadoes, hurricane katrina, stirrup pants, snakes, bad hair days, the oil crisis, and most of all, the economy. we're assuming kansas city is exempted from these accusations, of course."

but finally we arrived in denver, which is a surprising place, because after hours and hours of flatness, and even when you've finally crossed into colorado and its still flat, you finally see a tiny snippet of a mountain far in the distance. but it just springs up suddenly, with no warning of foothills of any kind. it seems that eastern colorado is the ugly stepchild that no coloradians want to talk about, only claiming for their own the majestic rockies. oh no. eastern colorado is bad. don't forget it, all you who live in denver and west!

we stayed in the suburb of littleton with abby's friend joanna, who was so kind to host us for TWO nights at her parents house, and take us to those beautiful mountains all day saturday. little did we know what we were in for when we went off-roading with her friends. there was still plenty of snow on the mountaintops, and we were probably at 9 or 10k elevation. since the appalachians are only ~4 or 5k elevation, our lungs were tired, and we got winded pretty easily when we started hiking. not to mention that we hiked in the snow with shorts and sandals on up to a glacial lake. the hike was so worth it, but i wouldn't do it again in sandals in a hurry. and off-roading was a first for abby, joanna, and i, and i must say, doing it in the rockies was pretty intense. we screamed a lot, my shorts got ripped, and i felt something pop in my ribs when joanna's knee hit my chest during a rough spot on the trail that jolted the three of us standing up in the back of the jeep. yikes. i'll just keep my fingers crossed and hope that one heals up on its own. joanna and company took us to beau-jo's pizza in an old mining town on the way down the mountain that night, and i don't know if it was just because we were so exhausted or what, but it seems like i've never tasted pizza that good in all my life. you save the crust and then put honey on it when you're finished and good lord, it was delicious.

from denver, we headed that long long way to boise, and stayed the night there with abby's friend's boyfriend's friend. sketch. the next morning we had coffee with my friend jeff, who i met while working on special olympics in boise in february.

the last leg was boise to salem, where we stayed with kara, an old family friend whom we hadn't seen in at least 12 years. she and her husband and 2 boys have a lovely home, cooked us a beautiful dinner, and were great company... and all this after moving back from china last week, en route to harvard for grad school next week! we felt so rested after being with them. kara's husband bill was kind enough to take jon through all the hoops in oregon/washington to pick up his motorcycle for his big road trip through canada and back home again.

finally made it to portland on tuesday. feels great to be here. oh, and i can't conclude the road experience without mentioning eunice, our trusty gps service on my cell phone. eunice has been invaluable on this trip, helping us find cheap gas, starbucks, banks, and the places we laid our heads at night. however, when we went through hickory (which we are convinced is the most ill-planned city in the continental usa), eunice got us lost. even though it was our first meeting with dear eunice, jon completely lost faith in her and began calling her a "dirty skank" and a "whore" for the rest of the trip. abby prefers the term "harlot." but, i admit, i'd be totally lost in the desert of utah without eunice. so, eunice, i salute you.

so, portland. here i am.

i don't have internet at my house yet, so i've taken to the streets in search of coffee shops with free wifi. which, as it turns out, is nearly every one (minus starbucks, jerks). so today i'm in grendel's coffee shop somewhere in southeast portland. i have yet to learn my way around, but i find myself navigating by coffee shops and bookstores. i don't always drink the same thing, but yesterday i had lychee tea, which was lovely, and today i'm having a coconut latte, which is fitting for the weather (which has finally turned portland-esque. i was disappointed when i arrived with the heat and "mugginess," as portlanders said. i said, "HA! you don't know muggy until you've lived in the southeast.").

i digress. my go-to contemplative beverage of choice is a london fog, which i only recently discovered but love love love. i'm not much on coffee, but tea i could drink all day long.

back to the portland-esque weather. today i'm wearing a sweater that i bought for the express purpose of moving to portland. little did i know it would come in handy so soon. i anticipated using it on the day when i get an assignment in the woods or slopes of mount hood, which is about an hour from downtown. but no, it's today, just 3 days after arriving, in early june. i'm not a big fan of this rain (i'm sure my skin will thank me years down the road for this, my palest summer yet), but i could get used to the cool weather.

i'm in search of a bike here. everyone bikes. and i found out today that parking might be kind of a problem at the oregonian, the paper where i have my summer internship. there's a festival starting next week called pedalpalooza, and i'm thinking maybe they have bike giveaways or something. i've also heard that there are places in town where you can build your own bike for free. anyhow, here's an event i saw on pedalpalooza site:

"Jesus Cycle Procession: Resurrect your own, personal Jesus as we ride through the night prepared to pay for (and indulge in) the sins of humanity. Come as your favorite savior: Carpenter Jesus, Baby Jesus, post-resurrection Zombie Jesus or choose the ever popular create-your-own Jesus. Our congregation will start the ride off with Bike Porn. Those not wanting to partake of the films can join the group at the SE Lucky Lab between 10 & 10:30. From there we'll follow temptation into the night."

... umm.... won't be participating in that, but i thought it was funny/sad/telling of portland. i never thought i would experience culture shock in my own country, but the west coast is quite different than home. east coasters, i've discovered, are far more direct. in the northeast, people are direct and mean, hiding nothing. in the southeast, people are direct and nice, sugarcoating everything, so that they are telling you the truth, but nicely (for example, following up a potentially mean statement like, "your child is failing 2nd grade" with "bless his heart"). west coasters are very non-committal. there are no yeses or no's, only whatevers. people are laid back in the extreme. i'm curious to see how this applies to journalism, as its all about being direct. i ask a question, i expect an answer. if i don't get an answer, i try asking the question a different way. so maybe i'll just have to rephrase questions a lot more than i normally do to get the answers i'm looking for.

been settling into my house the last few days, taking lots of trips to target, ikea (!) and the grocery store. yesterday, my grocery list was chicken and nails. i discovered that putting nails on your grocery list makes you sound so much more badass. try it.

grocery:
eggs
nails

grocery:
lettuce
nails

grocery:
ice cream
nails

see what i mean? i'm just going to put nails on my grocery list every single time i go now, just to feel cooler.

when i'm not being so cool, i've also been doing things like getting my oil changed and trying to find the bank. today i went to meineke, and met a super interesting woman named doris colmes, who is a german jew, and fled with her parents in 1938 at age 10. she said her dad was a nutcase and took them to paris to go sightseeing, but then they would hide at night from prowling nazis. she wrote a book called the iron butterfly, which i want to go pick up at powell's now, because she has had such an interesting life. she's friends with elie wiesel, one of the most reknown authors on the holocaust. who knew getting your oil changed could be so interesting?

my neighborhood is the most diverse in portland, so i've heard, which is nice in a city that is infamously white, and full of volvos and subarus. kind of like a much larger carrboro, although carrboro also has a large hispanic population. its full of flowers and has a couple of cool parks close by, which i like to walk to with my roomate's cocker spaniel, lola. its nice having a dog around, because i miss mine, and i don't like to be home alone. my house is really cute, and my roommate, jenny, is really nice and willing to show me around portland.

this has been the longest blog ever, but now you are fully informed about my life for the past week or so, and how i feel about portland. also, my parking meter is about to run out and i think the owners of grendel's are wondering why i'm still here.

ps: one thing that made our trip bearable was fantastic music. probably the most fantastic of all is cloud cult. everyone should listen. the lyrics have so many biblical references ("you are living water," "you came up from the ground in a million little pieces," "everybody here is a cloud/everybody here will evaporate"), but you can tell the singers are questioning and curious. their son died as a toddler several years ago, and a lot of their music is written from that pain, although i think they recently had another baby.

"somewhere along the line i knew there'd be girls [boys], visions, everything; somewhere along the line the pearl would be handed to me."
-kerouac

what a wonderful place kansas city is. its funny how you have expectations of a place before you get there and then it turns out to be totally different than what you thought. this place is beautiful, and full of really cool houses and shops and people and fountains and worship and trees that i never would have imagined in the midwest. i don't know what i thought about the midwest... but i did read little house on the prairie on the first 2 days of this trip to remind myself. but that was written about reconstruction-era america, so i think things are slightly different now. also, it has more to do with kansas, than kansas city (which is half in missouri, which is totally different), so i think i won't really understand little house on the prairie until tomorrow when we drive that long, flat expanse in the civic with no AC. we're headed west where the states get squarer, flatter, and the roads are straighter. until we get to denver, that is.

kentucky was beautiful. also not what i expected... i guess i had heard about it, but i was so at peace while driving across all those rolling hills. today driving was just what i needed to clear my head and focus on the adventure ahead. yesterday was a little sad, leaving home and NC for a long, long time.

last night we stayed in nashville.... or rather, clarksville, which is almost in KY. not really nashville at all. funny little place, but lindsay was so nice to open her home to us. we had to fight off the chiuauas, who weren't too happy about us being there. abby and i made jon watch the notebook on the oxygen channel, which he compensated for by drinking a fosters, which if you don't know, is a huge can of australian beer. i think it made him feel like he wasn't being totally emasculated.

tonight we are staying with old family friends, fred and barbara kornis. they have been amazingly hospitable and kind. we love them already, though jon and i haven't seen them in 15 years. do the math, and realize that we were just barely reading the last time we saw fred. toinght we pulled up to their driveway and fred was waiting on the front porch strumming a guitar. abby's dad is a rock star (literally) and so she felt right at home. fred is a full-time missionary based out of KC and loves jesus and people so much. so naturally, we love him, and barbara. being here is like being at grandma's house. they cooked us our first real meal in 2 days... we've been pretty hungry living off bananas and beef jerky in the car, so it was lovely to have beef and carrots and peas and bread and butter. AND our last glasses of sweet tea for the whoooole summer. :(

fred took us to ihop tonight... no, not for pancakes, but international house of prayer, which i've heard about, but finally got to see. wish i could have stayed longer, but it was great to be there for that brief hour.

so, tomorrow, onward to denver, which is going to fantastic, because abby's friend joanna is taking us off-roading and hiking. sweet. after being rather lethargic for 3 days in the car, hiking is going to feel reeeal good on these bones.

music today:
cloud cult
stevie wonder
once soundtrack
wolf mother
bon iver
dan in real life soundtrack
wyclef jean
      ... side note, the music is running out faster than i had anticpated. if you'd like to make a mix cd for us, please do, and email me for an address where you can mail it. :)

our book lists:
abby: living on the devil's doorstep, three cups of tea
jon: a brief history of time, the voyage of the dawn treader
me: little house on the prarie, christy, on the road, living on the devil's doorstep (i like to keep a lot going at once. my family tells me i treat books like nicotene... chain reading as opposed to chain smoking).

snacks of choice:
beef jerky, bananas, chewing tobacco (for jon), gas station pizza (also for jon), apples, peanut m&ms, trail mix
    ... and this was all the real food we had today and yesterday until arriving in kansas city tonight.

my twitter updates are more frequent, and accompanied by pictures:
twitter.com/abbymetty