Loitering in Fremont

So I got to bed at 9 am, and was able to sleep until 1 or so when I had to start working on some administration stuff. It’s so funny — Wednesday was Pack Parachute’s opening, and yet it was so quiet for me, because Susan is the one with the 9000-person contact list, so she was the one releasing the press release.

So today (still Wed for me) I’ve been waiting around in this false calm before the real work begins and had all these strange patches of free time. I was supposed to meet “Justin Timberlake” (he is going to have to deal with the pseudonym because he looks exactly like the singer, as everyone he’s ever met including me points out him upon first meeting) up in Wallingford at 5, and ended up sitting on the street for an hour.

JT fails at sleep — he woke up this other morning at 3 am, and then today didn’t wake until 10 minutes before we were supposed to get together — so I lolled around Wallingford while waiting for him and nursing a superb Americano from Tutta Bella’s.

I sat on Stone Way and watched the weather, which was and has been really peculiar for the last week. Normally Seattle “bad” weather is really sullen and passive aggressive — “I’m going to drizzle for a bit but just because I want to not because you tell me to” — but for the last couple of days it has been reminding me of Chicago weather.

Rapid bursts of clouds that are blue skies 10 minutes later — on the bus through the U District it was raining on one side of the bus and not on the other. My hair got whipped into a kind of frizzy pudding, but it was actually pretty pleasant out, and it helped that I was not the raving ball of stress I had been the day before as we raced to open.

JT arrived in a taxi (those software engineering boys do love to throw money around . . . ) and we walked west to Fremont. We were attending some seminar at 7, and I wanted to show him the troll under the Fremont bridge.

Fremont is an odd duck — it’s one of the neighborhoods in North Seattle and sits above the canal that links Lake Union to Puget Sound, and I hear that every couple of years it tries to secede from Seattle without any luck. It  has this 15 or 20 foot statue of Lenin in its main square, an enormous rocket doing god knows what, hosts one of the local Outdoor Movie Nights in an old parking lot that people drag ratty couches to to watch films in the evening under the stars, and is in general a cove of eccentric artists.

JT and I got to the seminar right on time but were late entering. We had stopped at the PCC natural market for some food (“Oh sick!” JT said when I showed him the display of wheat-free, dairy-free, whatever-else-free food at PCC — JT is Canadian, and not eating the wheat) and had to gobble it quickly.

I honestly couldn’t tell you what this seminar was about. It was free, so I had attended it, because I’m up for anything free. It was something along the lines of making your life better by giving this organization $500 for a three-day class and following their mantras for personal fulfillment — and I just had to book it after the first hour. JT stayed for the other two hours, and I strolled around Fremont.

It was so strange for me to have that free space of time. Normally if I go anywhere I have my laptop so I can work, but I hadn’t brought it along that evening because we had to walk a fair amount and it would have hurt my back to carry it. (Multiple herniated discs, don’t ya know.)

I made a small nest in some clover above the canal and brooded about the seminar, and how wrong it felt to me, the salesmanship of selling peace of mind and serenity. I called one of the ladies I do co-counseling with and she listened to me while I worked through the economics of it all, which led to me thinking about the economics of the charity.

I have MST, and for years was never able to ask anyone for help. I’ve been able to cry so much of that out, and now am better about asking for help, and even now am finally comfortable asking people for money for the charity (bahaha and thank god!) — but some part of me still has a little trouble accepting money for “nothing”, and by nothing I mean no good or service in exchange for the donation.

Because that is the way capitalism works, and I have always believed in it and have been an economic conservative my whole life (I have a degree in political economics), but watching that seminar made me think about something that has been slowly boiling in me for a couple of days — that some basic tenets of the world wide economy are wrong. It’s all based on telling people that they are not good enough the way they are, and they have to buy this or that product or $500 seminar in order to be fulfilled.

I don’t know — somehow all this ties together and I think will make me better and more comfortable at my job as director of a charity when I figure it out.

I almost fell asleep in my clover nest above the canal, and so went to a cafe and then happened upon some fellows setting up for the Outdoor Movie Night. I got the schedule for the summer — The Godfather, Army of Darkness, Shawn of the Dead — it’s going to be a great summer! The first film is Edward Scissorhands, and Seattle barbers will be competing in a cut-off before the show for a pair of Golden Scissors. I do adore Seattle.

Anyway, at 10 JT and I were picked up by my tiz (my sister) and we went downtown to watch a little Arrested Development. I just arrived home only to discover that perhaps some of my email isn’t getting through and the press releases weren’t sent out after all? Criminy!