The ‘Dredge Report

Street harassment of women is real and constant and infuriating, and many of my friends have blogged at length about the issue, although strangely enough 10 seconds of Googling didn’t lead me to any of those old discussions, so just take my word for it. In D.C., it was, as Catherine has documented, an ALL the TIME kind of thing, worse in warmer weather but always present. In Paris, it was the worst of the worst, and I don’t even have time to recount my experiences there as a young single woman walking around that city (*Note: In at least one important cultural distinction, that is to say street harassment, the French are worse than us by many thousands of kilometers). In Boston, my neighborhood was kind of isolated and near hospitals and parks, so I didn’t encounter it a lot. Here in Portland, I hadn’t encountered it at all, until tonight.

On Tuesdays I take a circuitous route of buses home, and today I was waiting at a stop when a loud man approached me. Usually I keep my headphones in and avoid eye contact when such men get in my comfort zone, but today I thought I would give him the benefit of the doubt. Middle-aged, half-toothless, and clearly drunk or high — no, that’s okay, I thought. He asked me for money, I politely said, “No, sorry I don’t have any,” and he said, “Oh, don’t be sorry.” Then he continued, “And if you’re ever in the neighborhood again and you see me walking by…” — IMPORTANT: This is the crux of it all. I immediately assumed that he was actually going to say something, if not kind, at least not horribly awful, like “say hi to me again” or “smile.”

Yeah. Fucking. Right. No, he ended this sentence with an intensely vulgar proposition. Not run of the mill, either; clearly he was thinking about the worst, most disgusting thing he could say to me to elicit a reaction. I should mention at this point that I had been standing in a bus shelter as he approached me, and by the time he delivered his riposte, he had subtly backed me into the corner of it. And, as is the case in that kind of situation, one-liners escaped me and my shoes weren’t appropriate to kick him hard in the shins, so I had to pivot my body to slide around him and walk away, hitting/scraping my knee on the metal corner of the bus bench in the process. Ow! It still hurts.

And for 5 minutes I was disgusted and hated all men; nay, all of humanity. And then for awhile I was angry, which is cool because I never get angry, really angry, so this was a great way to get in touch with that generally-useless yet primal human emotion, and cheaper than therapy. And then I stewed on the bus home, especially after getting a text from my roommate saying her car had been broken into last night.

Because what exactly are you supposed to think about your fellow man when, in the course of one hour, you a) get accosted, insulted, and injured as the result of some asshole’s offhand remark?; and b) learn that a thief stole your roommate’s gym bag out of her car and nothing else?

Humanity, I ask you: WTF?

Luckily, I was able to stop at the crunchy co-op on the way home and pick up a vegan snickerdoodle and some kombucha-type drink. If that shit isn’t the curative elixir I’ve been told it is, heads will roll.

April is a blockbuster of a show month here in the Land of Ports.  According to Google calendar, in the next month I’m slated to see: Stereo Total and Leslie and the Lys, Los Campesinos, Mates of State and the Black Kids, Richard Buckner, and, if I get my lazy ass around to buying a ticket, Bloc Party and Menomena (I’m a fan of the latter, not so much the former).  And last night, on a whim, I headed over to Mississippi Studios to see Bobby Bare, Jr, who was absolutely killer, alternating whiskey-soaked vocals with stories about a) his daughter and b) hookers. Oh, and there were trumpets.

I know that with my indie-committed friends, it’s like pulling teeth encouraging them to check out bands that err on the side of (forgive my use of the term) alt-country but decidedly aren’t Wilco or the Old 97s, as if seeing a band with a steel pedal guitar is going to give them tuberculosis.  So, I give up.  Ignore living legends like Alejandro Escovedo and absurdly talented upstarts like Bobby Bare, Jr.  Stick to your synth-pop of the week!  More room for me at their shows.

If you’re reading this, odds are good that you know me, have met me, or at least have some inkling about my personality and interests. Which is to say that you know for me to apply the label “outdoorsy” to myself is laughable. But here in Oregon, where day trips to mountains and oceans and beaches and trails and waterfalls and rivers is as easy as hopping on I-5 or I-84, I find myself becoming more and more interested in, er, being outdoors. Last week I went hiking, and today I did it for the second time, and since the plural of anecdote is data, let it be written in stone: I no longer loathe the outdoors. I may even go camping sometime, and more astonishing, I may not hate it. This is a sea change of epic proportions.

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This is a few weeks old, but I had some friends in town recently and took them on the classic Gorge tour — waterfalls, Vista House, Hood River. This is Latourelle Falls — my favorite of all the waterfalls because you can get so so close to it.

I worked from home yesterday, and it was such a beautiful day that I took Pony on a long walk down Alberta St. to grab some lunch. There’s a garden store with an outdoor area, and a nice brown lab was resting quietly until Pony sidled up to her and started barking like a maniac. In the resulting ruckus, I knocked over a cardboard box on the sidewalk that was full of empty egg cartons. You know, free to a good home. And I thought, on the one hand, only Pony is dumb enough to threaten, unprovoked, a dog twice her size. But on the other hand, only on Alberta Street would someone randomly set out a big box of egg cartons under the assumption that yes, someone else will want these.

Mugshot of the perpetrator:

The Reading Frenzy Benefit that I wrote about here? It was fun, there was no Sleater-Kinney mini-surprise-reunion, the end. Carrie Brownstein showed a few Thunderant films, only one of which was really, really funny. And a couple of writers did readings, which would have been really great if only the crowd hadn’t been so loud as to drown them out. Hard to do a quiet reading when there’s 40 people swarming the bar 10 feet away for drinks at any given moment.

After Corin’s set, which began as a couple of quiet solo songs and then got a little louder as she was backed by the guys from Golden Bears, everybody just kind of milled around in the hopes that the trio would bust out a song or two. Carrie was still there, after all, and I could’ve sworn I saw Janet, but maybe I was just imagining things. But after a few minutes the jig was up: the best band of the last 10 years is not to be together again, at least for now.

But the good news is that I got exposed to a handful of really impressive local bands. Golden Bears, Tu Fawning, Explode Into Colors — all great. Especially Explode Into Colors: if you’re looking for an all-girl punk band with the energy of the Gossip and the, um, growliness of Karen O, go look them up. Highly recommended, at least live. And Mirah, who’s quite simply amazing. But you already knew that.

Here is an article that speaks to the core of my on-again, off-again Type-A personality.  If I have more than, oh, 10 or so e-mails in my Gmail inbox, I get antsy.  At work, I use a different program where you have a list of your e-mails in one frame and you preview them in a frame below that.  I try to keep my e-mail list to where it’s “unscrollable” — meaning I can see everything at a glance without having to scroll down.  Since I’m not that high up the totem pole, this is less difficult than it sounds, but it does require the ability to scan, contextualize, and either read, respond, or delete an e-mail within, oh, 10 minutes of receiving it, most of the time.

Which is to say I ignore all those folks who say you should only check your work e-mail at predetermined times.  If you get 600 e-mails a day, that’s fine.  I’m not that important.

The only e-mails that I keep in my personal Gmail inbox are those things that are “outstanding items” — an online bill I’ve yet to pay, a reminder about this or that event, that type of thing.

I know some of you do that thing where you keep literally everything in your inbox, even when unread, until it spawns thousands of pages, instead of archiving things as you deal with them.  The thought of that makes me a little queasy. But I admit my quirks, and embrace them.

Resolved: On this website, which catalogues the “ad” versus the “real” version of popular fast food items, both the Burger King Whopper and the McDonald’s Sausage McMuffin look better in their “real” incarnations.  Discuss.

Also, I know it’s pretty much a foregone conclusion that everyone denies eating at McDonald’s, ever, but you know what?  When I’m on a cross-country road trip trying to get the hell out of Nowhere, Kansas, I eat their Sausage Biscuits, and you know damn well that you do too.

Via Jezebel, the Flaming Lips song “Do You Realize?” has been named Oklahoma’s official rock song.  That may well be true, but really, isn’t it also Humanity’s Official Rock Song?

If the Lips don’t start touring again soon, I will continue to be sad about it.

And remember that the next time they do tour, I’ll pay for a $15 share of anyone’s ticket that’s never seen them before.  Rules and regulations apply, of course.

So I’m still on my “use Netflix to watch a bunch of classic movies that I never saw for some reason” kick, with an occasional delay for a Weeds or Six Feet Under marathon.  I’ll write later about my list and what’s been good (So far? Everything but Deerhunter.)

But I keep meeting these people, these people that I respect and whose presence I enjoy, that haven’t seen movies that I consider it impossible to have not seen, given that we came of age when we did.  OK, so I still haven’t seen Gone With the Wind, but like, it’s 4 hours long and really old.  RV has not seen: The Lion King, Titanic, and Forrest Gump.  Another friend whose name I’ll leave out of this hasn’t seen Jaws.  Got that? Jaws.  I was incredibly confused by that for about 4 minutes, and then I resolved to just go rent Jaws vols. 1-4 to soothe my aching brain.  The one where the sharks terrorize the water park is the best.  Oh, and the ones with Michael Caine.  Anything with Michael Caine.

I’ll stop now, before anyone remembers that I haven’t seen any of the Lord of the Rings trilogy.