Month: December 2014

One letter’s journey to the wrong side of the country.

This arrived at work.  It was sent from New Jersey.  
Josias Campusano-Polanco?  Doesn’t work at my school.
105 Clark St?  105 is the street number of my building, but we’re not located on Clark Street.
Roselle, NJ 07203-2504?  None of those come close to matching the city, state and zip. (the 7,  2, & 0 match in that digit order, but nothing else)
So this letter traveled from New Jersey to my work in Portland, Oregon just because our street address is 105.  Weird.  I was so amused I wrote the recipient a note on the back of the envelope before sending it on its way.

Crazy Basketball Player and Crazy Statement

Ten years from now we will all be amused by this hair, (facial and otherwise).

This is from an article about Green Zebra Grocery Store. It’s a tiny grocery store that has the aesthetic of a natural foods store and the size of a convenience store. The owner is looking to expand to other neighborhoods and is drumming up investors.
Here she says, “The Kenton neighborhood is part of an urban renewal neighborhood, and they didn’t have a grocery store.”
But the paragraph above says, “When the store opened in Kenton, the nearest full-service grocery store was the Interstate Avenue Fred Meyer, about a mile away.” 
I live in the Kenton Neighborhood and I think Sedlar doesn’t have a good grip on the Kenton geography.  The Interstate Fred Meyer is four blocks away from me.  And about six blocks past that is a New Seasons.  I feel very well served by grocery stores.  Also, even if the Fred Meyer is a mile away from the furthest reaches of the Kenton neighborhood, that’s pretty darn close.  Walkable in 20 minutes.  I’m thinking of my friend who lives in Cully.  Now that’s an undeserved neighborhood for grocery stores.  
I’m all for putting fancy convenience stores in food deserts, but I think maybe the neighborhood should be a food desert.

Hopefully in 30 years this will seem ridiculous.

Can you imagine paying $43,016 per year to become a dentist?  That is an insane amount of debt to take on, even if dentists do make a lot of money from the get-go.  What’s even crazier is the jump from $15,000 to $43,000 in just ten years.
I’m hoping our student-loan-saddled generation can make things better for the next one, because something has got to give.

Three sentence movie reviews: Wild

It’s a good year for book-to-movie adaptations and Wild joins Gone Girl in the pantheon of engrossing books that became excellent films.  The movie manages to make a long hike (which is, when you get down to it, a lot of walking and internal processing) engaging cinema. I think they did a particularly nice job of capturing the circular nature of thoughts when one spends large amounts of time alone as well as the vulnerability some women feel being out on their own.*

Cost: $8.25 (bought advanced tickets)
Where watched: Cinema 21 (Theater 3) with Kelly.

*Which, by the way, really sucks.  Thanks, asshole guys, for making women feel unsafe.

Also!  The scene that caused much brouhaha when it was filmed last year outside my school was in the movie!  It did not land on the cutting room floor.  Predictably, the scene itself was layered with music, so there was no need to have people ask the children to be quiet during recess.  Annoyance aside, it looks really cool, like a real snowstorm in Minneapolis, not a balmy November day in Portland.

Also, also!  This is the second film in a row I’ve seen Gaby Hoffmann be the friend to a woman who needs an abortion.  She seems to be carving out a pro-choice niche.

poster from: http://www.impawards.com/2014/wild.html

Postcard from Texas (by way of California)

This is from regular commenter Jan, who bought this when she visited Austin for a wedding.  She tells me it’s her favorite postcard of Austin that she has ever seen.  
Me too!  It was particularly great picking it out of the rest of the mail because I really had to study it to get it in the right direction and the cognitive dissonance while that happened was very fun.