Stories from My Vacation in Eugene

I have been spending a lazy Sunday afternoon cuddled up to my laptop in my bedroom reading through a friend’s blog. She is very real and I like that. Perhaps that is what blogs are – a place to be real. I think one of the reasons “reality” television is so popular, though it is hardly “real” at all, is because we are thirsty to genuinely know one another. Perhaps past our walls we put up as defenses, we really do want to know each other as we truly are. If we did, do you think we would be happy we did or would we run in the other direction? I think it would depend on what we focused on. The beautiful person each one of us is, or all the crap that could surround it. Rather like a peanut m&m where the peanut is surrounded by all that chocolate with a hard shell on the outside. It’s a a great metaphor. I wish I could claim coming up with it.

As it is Labor Day weekend, I decided a mini vacation was long overdue. First, I had to relax before my vacation. When my roommate got home on Friday night, I challenged her to a game of Five Crowns. A popular card game in our household, we originally learned it from her young adult group. (I just go occasionally for game nights or beach trips.) It’s played rather like rummy with different wilds and a different amount of cards in your hand for each round. I got pretty good at Five Crowns pretty quickly. I creamed the rest of the players my first time out. I told you I was competitive. The last two times Katie and I have played, I won. Not by a lot, but I won. She’s quite good herself. The second time the rematch was my request. Go figure. So on Friday, it was her turn to cream me and she did it good and proper. I protested, gave her a hard time, we accused each other of cheating. Finally, she just looked at me and said, “Payback’s a bitch isn’t it?” So I told her I was going to put what she said on my blog… Yes, payback is indeed a bitch. So the moral of this story is: don’t piss off a writer. Even if you didn’t really piss her off, she can still skew the facts however she wants on her blog… :o)

So Saturday morning after sleeping in, I headed down to Eugene where my friend JD lives. JD and I met four years ago at a kariyoki night at a friend’s house and then I helped take him to the airport when he moved to Japan three days later. That was the last time I saw or talked vocally to JD. For four years, we instant messaged each other off and on as he moved from Japan to Argentina and got married. Probably partly because it was online, we were honest with each other, how our days were going, problems we had and such. We encouraged each other and helped each other along when we both happened to be online with time to talk. At the end of four years, we were both in very different places than we had met. This last spring, he and his wife moved back to Oregon and just recently, to Eugene, within a hour and a half of me. Those kinds of friendships are awesome aren’t they?

So, I had my destination along with a promise of salsa dancing in the evening. The afternoon, though, was my own. I have never spent a lot of time in Eugene as the university there is the arch rival of the university I attended for my bachelor’s degree, but I was looking forward to a fun afternoon. My first stop was the Buffalo Exchange. No, this is not a western movie set, it is a national used clothing store. My friend Tricia recommend it to me as she knew I am into the urban look and I was eager to check it out. Think urban, hip, and why would you ever wear that kind of clothing store and you got it. I soon found out I really like the Buffalo Exchange and am looking forward to checking out their stores in Portland next time I get a chance. You can google it if you like. I am still figuring out how people put outfits together in this style, there doesn’t seem to be a rhyme or reason to it so I am trying to create a style all my own.

Having seen a Saturday market down the street, I checked that out too. The folk in Eugene must be very clean because they sold a lot of soap there along with tie-dye t-shirts. It’s Eugene! The jewelry was pretty too and I liked the music. People were friendly and for a while, I just sat watching them. Things like, “You think those pieces of clothing go together, how interesting.” and “Oh, you are so gay.” walked through my head as I checked out the hippies dancing the afternoon away. By the courthouse, there is a bunch of young women and men selling colored glass pipes in cushioned cases and if you don’t know what those are for, you have obviously never been to Eugene. Ironically, I felt very comfortable amongst them. I’m not about to move there, but Broadway shows go through that town so it’s tempting.

Meeting JD and his wife was not as awkward as I expected it to be. His wife is learning English so JD did a lot of translation for us. We got to catch up and I discovered that wedding photos need no translation at all. One of my more memorable attempts to communicate was when JD was on the phone and I was trying to explain my niche as a “fringe Christian”. Finally, I came up with the idea of saying how I believe God is SOOOO big, (stretching out my arms), and many Christians put God in a box of right and wrong, who is saved, how to get “saved”, and who is going to hell, (cupped hands), but I believe God is SOOOOO big, that I am on the fringes and I like it there. I’m not sure she understood, but I thought it was a good way to say it.

That evening, we were riding in one of their friend’s vans talking. This may not seem that interesting to you, but you should know we were conversing in three languages at once. This made it very interesting. JD, his wife, and their friend spoke Spanish fluently and I know a bit. JD, their friend, and I all speak English, pretty well, and his wife speaks a little. We could all converse some in varying degrees in Japanese. So we are talking using all three languages jumbled together in something that resembled a tossed green salad spilled onto the floor with the four of us sitting on the linoleum with forks.

The salsa dancing was a lot of fun and I learned a lot. At one point I was sitting down to give my stomach a chance to settle. (I think it was the moving lights that did it) when a woman about my age sat next to me to rest and chat. She was one of the people I had been watching dance and up close, I realized she was strikingly beautiful, the kind you just want to stare at but try hard not to. I have been called cute, but honestly, beautiful is not how you would describe spiky hair and glasses. This doesn’t bother me a whole lot as I just want to be myself, but this comparative thought roamed my mind as I caught a glimpse of our faces together in the restroom mirror. Outside, as we left, I told JD about her, and not knowing what I had been thinking earlier, he told me that his wife had commented earlier that afternoon, in Spanish, how beautiful I was. It was one of those times when I just looked at God and found him staring back at me with his eyebrows raised in expectation. “Well?” was all he said.

One more good story. After the dancing, we went back to JD’s house to “hang”. There was a group of about nine men and women. One woman, at the insistence of JD, played a game where she had four pens and we had to guess what number she was thinking of as she laid the pens out in front of her. Several times, she laid out the pens until one by one, people understood, and they knew the number. I was the last one left, feeling a little foolish but stubborn, I wanted to figure it out on my own. Finally, I got it, but I didn’t tell them. Instead, I got up to get another slice of pizza when a guy who understood the game but didn’t like it much, said to me at the sink, “You got it didn’t you?” and I answered, “Yeah, but I don’t think I’m going to tell them.” So, with this idea for some fun, I went back in, sat down, and they again tried to help me to “get it”. After a few times of me intentionally guessing wrong, they started throwing the pens around the room. I couldn’t help but grin but they still had no idea I was putting them on. (I’m sassy too!) The guy at this point, crossed the room when I was taking a sip of juice, and said, “I don’t like this game usually expect for right now.” I lost it at this point in fits of giggles with a mouthful of juice and pizza. It wouldn’t have been pretty except I still had my cup in hand. I let the ruse go on for a while, enjoying myself immensely, until the two of us finally broke down and told them I had understood the game for quite some time. The moral of this story is: If you are going to frustrate me, be prepared to get a little frustrated yourself.

I hope you are all enjoying your three-day weekends if you have one, hope you enjoyed my stories. I’ll be posting pictures from the summer at the capital photo shoot soon. Now back to that blog…