So here I was reading these posts and getting a little upset, and it makes me want to pull my husband a little closer. We’d all like to think we’re immune, I guess.

When I got engaged to J., I moved across the Columbia River from Portland, Oregon to Vancouver, Washington, to live in his townhouse. He bought it roughly 3 years ago. Because one of the stipulations of the $8,000 housing  tax credit he received states that the owner can’t move out of the residence within 3 years without having to pay it back, we naturally decided that the most reasonable thing to do was for me to move in until that time limit was up, then reevaluate our options.

Here we are a year and change later, and the 3-year period is almost up. I’ve been gunning to move back to Portland since, well, since I moved in. Vancouver is like this terrible place full of strip malls and chain restaurants, and while I don’t mind living in a Dallas-esque place if I have to, it’s certainly not why I moved to Portland, which is cool and fun and hip and lovely and livable. Not to mention, J.’s townhouse is located in a pretty shitty part of Vancouver. The little private street we live on is nice and faces a creek and some large trees, but the rest of the street that you have to traverse to get to our house…well, it’s better left unsaid. It’s the kind of neighborhood that I can’t just leave the house and talk a nice walk in, a) because it seems unsafe, and b) where the hell would I go? The gas station, the combination Chinese restaurant/drug den, or the check cashing place? Not to mention, my commute is horrendous. At my old job, I couldn’t afford parking in downtown Portland so I had to jerry-rig a combination of cars, buses and trains. On a good day it took me 40 minutes to get to or from work; on a bad day, 70 minutes one-way. Now that I’m at my new job it ranges from 20 to 50 minutes, less in the morning and more in the evening, in stop-and-go freeway traffic. It’s pretty bad. And did I mention, adding insult to injury, that because I live in Washington and work in Oregon, I have to pay both sales taxes on things I buy in WA, and (obscenely high) income taxes on the money I earn at my job?

So now we can technically sell the house, move to Portland, and get on with our lives, right? Except. The house is underwater by roughly 20%, give or take. Now, it’s not a very expensive house by Portland standards, so 20% isn’t like millions of dollars, but still. Blame it on the terrible housing market or that J. didn’t put down as much money as he should, but the point is, we couldn’t sell this house without having to shell out way too much of our own money.

So I desperately want to move back to Portland to be closer to my job and friends and, well, cool stuff. J. is applying for jobs in Portland as well, so ideally we’d both want to be in N/NE Portland to avoid the bad commute.

Unfortunately, it’s not a great time to be in the rentals market, and here we are in the position of having to find a place to rent as well as offer up his WA townhouse for rent. I never wanted to be a small-time landlord; the expense and the risks are just too great, and it’s somewhat doubtful that we could even find a decent set of tenants who can pay enough rent for us to break even while not, you know, destroying the place.

Portland, meanwhile, is headed toward a double-dip in its housing market. The rentals market is flooded with people desperate to sell their homes but who can’t get anything close to what they owe on the mortgage. And people who lost or short-sold their homes need houses to rent. And the continuing influx of hipsters need places to rent as well. So we’re up against tough competition. I managed to rent 3 really great places in Portland when I was living there, due to a magical way with the Craigslist refresh button, plus some e-mail and in-person charm. It’s more difficult now. It looks like we’ll have to give on something, whether it’s the price we’re willing to pay, the neighborhoods we’re willing to live in, or house amenities.

All this while we’re trying to pay down our student loans, save for a house down payment — who knows when/if that’ll happen, given Portland’s housing market — and save for an eventual baby (noI’mnotpregnantyet). Not to mention having to help our current roommate find a new place to live since we can’t rent the house while she’s still living here.

It’s not an ideal set of circumstances, but I’m hopeful it’ll all work out. We’re seeing a place tomorrow that has hardwood floors and a gas stove (!) (you don’t understand, that’s a big deal in Portland), so we’ll see. We’re coping with underwater real estate just like millions of other families, and we feel lucky that we can easily afford to deal with our obligations and wait out the market. But yup, this still sucks.

If I were king, anyone over age 21 would be permitted: a small dinner or happy hour with a handful of friends. The end, full stop. Maybe some Rock Band at home, though I’m no fan of Rock Band parties either. You could throw a larger bash on milestone birthdays, no more than once every 10 years.

I finally removed my birthday information from Facebook because the endless stream of insincere birthday wishes just got me depressed. This is not to say I fear growing older — on the contrary I’m actually pretty excited about it. But I think this neverending string of celebrations for not dying during another 365-day period is a bit grandiose.

It could also be because I’m just really, really bad at remembering my friends’ birthdays.

UPDATE: J. tells me that Patton Oswalt has a funny bit on this.

1. Yoga three times a week.
2. Exercise 150 minutes a week. And because I needed some sort of more specific goal-within-the-goal, I want to bench press 110 lbs. by the end of the year. Let it be duly noted this is a pathetic goal, but at the moment I can only handle 55 lbs for three short sets, so I’ve got a ways to go.
3. Read 1 book per week.
4. Get back to learning Spanish by completing all of the 13 CDs and accompanying exercises I have from a set I bought a few years ago.
5. Financial goals: Save up $xx,xxx in our down payment fund, and increase our net worth to $xx,xxx by the end of the year. The numbers aren’t important but I wanted to note these goals here too.

More to come soon.

2011 was a good year for:

Relationships: I got married to a wonderful guy and had a beautiful, sane wedding, and a couple of nice honeymoons. Not a day goes by that I don’t stop and think about how lucky I was to find this person – and more importantly, how lucky we were to find each other at the right time in our respective lives. Thanks again, OKCupid algorithms!

Relatedly, I made a list of all my friends, family and acquaintances who got engaged or married in 2011. I stopped counting at 28 couples. Even though I know that statistically speaking something like 8 or 9 of these couples will get divorced one day, it’s hard not to get mushy about all of these sincere expressions of love and commitment.

Career: I didn’t talk about this a lot on the blog this year, but in late spring I applied for a new job at a new company purely on a whim, and got it almost immediately. Aside from a significant raise, a better title, more interesting/ challenging work, and a more supportive boss, I left a company that was obviously floundering (and still is) and a work environment that was, in retrospect, toxic.  I just assumed all big companies were like that, with constant gossip, blame-shifting, and passive-aggressive as the dominant style of communication.

My new job is a breath of fresh air — I’ve learned firsthand that this kind of positive workplace culture really matters. So my advice – even if you’re in a good-enough job at a good-enough place, don’t stop looking around for your next opportunity. In January of this year I had no intention of leaving my job, but doing so was one of the best decisions I’ve made in a long time.

Finances: This may put me squarely out of line with the rest of the country, but 2011 was also a good year for our finances. We both got raises. We upped our retirement contributions a bit. We paid off a decent chunk of our collective student loan debt (still got quite a ways to go). We paid off his car loan and a small 401(k) loan he’d taken (a financial decision he never would have made if only I’d gotten to him first). We paid for our wedding and two honeymoons ourselves, in cash, and with only a grand or two in wedding cash from family. We’ve got our finances combined, finally, and have set up targeted savings accounts for about 13,000 different goals. Quite frankly, I have no idea how we managed to do all this. But I’ll take it.

In 2012 we plan to balance saving slightly more for retirement, paying down our student loans, and saving up for a house (and a tiny baby to go in that house). I’m too risk-averse to go whole hog on one thing, so we will spread our cash around in savings and prolong the recession by not spending much money on ourselves. Oh wait, that’s not true: J. is getting adult braces! I’m married to Benjamin Button.

Everything else: I didn’t set concrete goals this year on doing yoga, working out, reading books, or learning Spanish. As a result I did precisely none of those things consistently. I’m busy setting some goals for 2012 that are reasonable.

The bottom line: 2011 was good — although it seemed to fly by, no? — and I’ve no doubt 2012 is going to be even better, apocalypse and all.

My French came back! I was shocked at how good I sounded. Granted, I wasn’t having anything more than basic conversations with waiters and shop owners, but I made myself well understood and may have even passed as French once or twice.  A few people spoke back to me in English, which I found rude, so I continued speaking to them in French.

In terms of sight-seeing, we did everything. A few times, I sent J. out on his own, when I wasn’t feeling well enough to get going in the morning in a timely fashion. He navigated the city admirably and managed to go to the Louvre twice by himself, as well as to the Saint-Denis cathedral north of Paris.

Saint-Denis is somewhere I’d never been and wanted to see, but alas I wasn’t feeling up to it. This is where all of the French kings and queens are buried. During the Revolution, their bodies were disinterred and, uh, desecrated with various bodily fluids. Relics and statues were destroyed or vandalized. You can still see where certain statues have slogans and markings on them:

We toured the usual suspects of Paris: the Louvre, the Tuileries, l’Orangerie, Musée d’Orsay, the Pantheon, Musée Cluny, l’Arc de Triomphe, les Champs-Elysées, the Luxembourg gardens, Père Lachaise, Centre Pompidou, and Versailles. I had been to Versailles a few times before but had never gone down to see the Grand Trianon, Petit Trianon, or Marie Antoinette’s little farm. (By the way, have you seen Sophia Coppola’s Marie-Antoinette? Great movie.)  I think Marie-Antoinette gets a bad rap. As J. said to me, “This is basically where she cosplayed as a peasant.” But if you were thrown into her situation, you might have wanted to escape too.

We ate, and ate, and ate, and drank. We planned well on the food, with a few exceptions. First, I accidentally sent J. the wrong phone number for Le Châteaubriand, that uber-hip restaurant I mentioned here, so when I called to confirm our reservation, I was told we didn’t have one. Apparently there’s another Le Châteaubriand in Paris and J’s French friend had probably reserved us a spot there.  Ugh. Also, we were excited to try Frenchie because we knew it was in our neighborhood. On Friday night after a spectacular dinner elsewhere, we found Frenchie to try and get a reservation for Saturday. Not only was it across the street and around the corner from our apartment (we had no idea it was so close), but it’s closed on Saturday and Sunday. Only in France, god dammit.

But don’t pity us, we ate plenty of duck and steak and chicken and cheese and bread and croissants and desserts. And drank good, inexpensive wine. Our other great find, thanks also to David Leibowitz’s blog, was Le Rubis, a crowded old-school French wine bar just off the rue de Rivoli. We managed to squeeze into a tiny table and ate a hearty array of duck confit, oeufs mayonnaise (French deviled eggs), and rillettes – washed down with some good cheap Beaujolais.  I think we may have been the only non-French people there, and we weren’t getting stares, so we must have blended just enough. Le Rubis came complete with gruff waitress. A true Parisienne experience.

I’ll leave you with this photo outside a restaurant we saw:

Which translates to:

“Here, the cows aren’t mad; the chickens don’t have the flu, the pigs don’t have the plague, the cheeses aren’t stuffed with listeria, and eating here won’t make you fat. The food arrives daily, just like our customers.”

I am actually really, really worried about my rusty French and whether I’ll be able to communicate with servers and clerks in a way that doesn’t make them point and laugh at me.  I should have brushed up a bit.

We got a reservation at Le Châteaubriand, which was featured on an episode of No Reservations and is still supposedly pretty amazing.

We’re staying smack dab in the center of town in a little apartment that couldn’t be more charming if it tried.  Here is our final Google Map, all choices vetted properly. Happy Thanksgiving to all y’all; on Thursday we’ll probably be eating veal or something equally un-American.

I know.

I know.

It doesn’t have to be this way, as one good friend said. And it doesn’t.  But it is.  There are a lot of reasons for my pathetic track record when it comes to listening to and discovering new music this year. Most of it boils to “get off my lawn” crankiness.  My newish job is fast-paced and doesn’t afford me a wireless connection to stream music, not to mention that for the time being I’m sitting in an open desk surrounded by the chattering class.

I lost and bought and lost a couple of dozen mp3 players (recall that I was the last person in the US of A to own a Zune before that product line shuttered).  I let my subscription to eMusic lapse, which caused me to never download new music ever.  I’ll only do things – go to the gym, go to yoga, download music – if I’ve prepaid for the privilege and feel like I’m not getting my money’s worth if I don’t.

I’ve tried and failed to adequately figure out how to optimize Grooveshark and Spotify.  I like having my entire music collection on one tidy device, so my iPhone is out.  I hate having to create meticulous playlists.  I hate having to go back and switch out tracks when I get bored of the ones I have on there.

Plus, I live in Vancouver, WA instead of Portland now, so fighting traffic to get home and then go back “into town” for a show is almost out of the question these days.  I think I’ve been to one show this year, and it was the Flaming Lips, to whom I swore a blood oath of perpetual attendance at all future shows, so.

To top it off, I commute via car these days. My car is a cherished workhorse, but the stereo system is almost entirely shot. If I put a CD in, there’s no guarantee I’ll ever get it out unless I go at it with a pair of tweezers.  And my car’s old enough (2003) that I have no output to hook in my iPhone. My car doesn’t even have a goddamn tape deck!

I don’t deserve a trace of sympathy, I know. But what would you have me do under these circumstances? I don’t mind not being up on whatever new bands are out there — I’m old, I’m over it — but at this point I’m rarely even listening to my own music collection because it’s so inconvenient. Go on, water me with your crocodile tears.

 

View Larger Map

As you can see, we’re having some trouble narrowing the field down.

The Flaming Lips came to town, as they do, and via the @waynecoyne twitter feed I found out he was going to be at our local records emporium to sign stuff and chat, and also to release the 6-Hour Song for the first time.

I happened to get out of work early that day, so I headed down and stood in line. The man is extremely friendly, to the point where he’ll chat with you for 5 or more minutes after doing the obligatory signatures and photo snaps.  This is endearing but no so much for those further back in line.  I was one of the last three people to meet him before he had to go to the Keller for the show. I bought this (beautiful, by the way — each LP was pressed on different-colored vinyl so no two are the same…mine is a turquoise green), got it signed after spelling my name two/three times (happens), got this photo, and went on my way. He said I was so efficient about the whole thing, which I was, because I had stood in line for two hours and needed to get home before I headed back downtown for the show. The people behind me were grateful for me speeding myself through. He really is the sweetest, most genuine guy.

I don’t even own a record player!

The show was also great, my seventh time to see them. This time featured a Dark Side of the Moon cover and interesting things with lasers that I’ve never seen them do before.  I also note that Wayne has stopped playing Taps on the bugle as part of the setlist, which they’ve done since the Iraq War started, so…if we judge by the Flaming Lips Protocol, I think the wars are over?

So that was a good day.