Look Up

This picture is me wearing a "speakerphone hat" listening to a song that the owner described as "Santa Claus is Coming to the Ghetto, or something like that." The owner of the hat happens to also be the owner of the house on the front cover of Chuck Palahniuk's book Fugitives and Refugees: A Walk Through Portland, Oregon. I happen to be seventeen.

And oh-so-subtlety witty. Bwa ha ha.

My birthday was Thursday and I didn't do much but it was nice nonetheless. I got an appropriate amount of attention (haha) and several nice notes -- most of which basically said, "Happy birthday! You're great! But you seem sad..." which was... fine I guess, kind of funny. From my father I scored Death Cab tickets for November, which I'm really looking forward to that. I recently had Plans burned for me and it is fantastic! One amazing song after another but I am particularly obsessed with the album's acoustic love poem, "I'll Follow You Into the Dark." Allow me to send it to you on instant messenger because if you are a good person you deserve it.

So I've been hating cross country lately, right? So of course I'd been dreading Friday, because Coach Roth and all the upperclassmen were building it up to be a very hard workout. And it was. Thousand repeats, a set of four. And although there were frustrating moments in the workout, and quite a lot of pain, "Team Zero" worked diligently to stay together and to come in at the proper time every single repeat. At the end of practice, we had a sort of competitive 800-meter race. [Final time = last finisher's time + amount of time between first and last runners.] So it is a full-out sprint and we have to stay together in order to get the best time. True pressure, and I was full of terror and desperation as the quickest girls used valuable breaths to shout encouragement to push me forward faster. Never once in this race did I give up, and honestly that's a first for this season. Physically it killed me but we finished strong and all in all it definitely brought us together on more than one level. So although I still don't feel that great about the season thus far, it was a far from discouraging practice.

Then I watched Crash at Sam's house with a large group of people. Oh my God, great movie, but possibly the most draining one I've ever seen. I don't want to say much except that it affected me deeply and although it's gruesome and terrible at times, it's something nearly everyone should see at some point. Please. Rent it.

"It's the sense of touch. In any real city, you walk, you know? You brush past people, people bump into you. In LA, nobody touches you. We're always behind this metal and glass. I think we miss that touch so much, that we crash into each other, just so we can feel something."

And today! As for further explanation for the above picture. I roped my fellow junior journalist Katherine Bakke into coming with me to help write a column called "Unraveling the Fringe: Exploring Portland". So today we drove many miles (much of them on wrong turns) to explore Belmont, Clinton Street, and the grand finale of the Our Lady of Eternal Combustion Church. At the last we met Reverend Chuck E. Linville, who is featured in Fugitives and Refugees as one of Portland's distinctly strange and lovable weirdos. He creates and drives art cars, belongs to the Cacophony Society of Portland, and is a registered minister(along with his dog Reverend Bill). Full story coming soon. For real. But yeah, we talked for over an hour and a half and it was totally awesome. It made me love, love, LOVE Portland even more than I already do.

But alas. I've got to be at Jesuit at 6:15 am for morning practice. You know what that means... um if you didn't, it means, goodnight.

"Well I never pray, but tonight I'm on my knees, yeah
I need to hear some sounds that recognize the pain in me, yeah
I let the melody shine, let it cleanse my mind
I feel free now
But the airways are clean and there's nobody singing to me now!"
[The Verve]

posted by Allison Francis @ 10:01 PM