the cure for homesickness

Rachel and Christian came to visit! It was so fun! Guys! I can't even tell you how fun it was! We did practically no work the whole time and just laughed and drank wine and ate food and omg we are sad they are gone now.

Here they are being all like "woah this house is beautiful / Indiana rules":


Their reaction to our surroundings made us remember how much we loved it during our first several weeks here -- not that we don't still love it, but with the combination of homesickness and the natural taking-things-for-granted-ness that always builds up, the thrill had somewhat faded. It was invigorating to watch them exclaim at the huge house, the sense of space, the remarkable amount of architectural beauty, and of course the awesomeness of the uncles/grandma.

The first night we went to Tim's studio for beer and geez ("geez(sp?)" = Tim's name for his particular genre of music, generally but not exclusively made by people over 40, i.e. "geezers"). Then we spent a weirdly warm sunny afternoon running around Fountain Square, a 50's-style 'hood with a wonderfully preserved old theatre and diner, bowling alley, lots of vintage/antique places, and a bar called Radio Radio which obviously rules.



We wandered through the nethers of the art-studio complex by the Big Car Gallery and stumbled upon this monster made of, I dunno, whiteout?, but Rach wasn't skeered:

My uncle Pat had a party, so we finally got to see his house in all its glory. There are no words, really, and the pictures definitely do not do it justice. How do you describe a party at the home of an insanely generous and witty bachelor who calls himself "The King" and built a karaoke stage and a bar in his home and has nine-foot paintings of Madonna that he commissioned himself displayed on the wall? You just can't. Somebody needs to make a sitcom or reality show about my uncle Pat and his roommate Jay. Seriously. It's just way too hilarious and awesome not to be enjoyed by the masses.


Then we went to Chicago for one night, which was a lot of driving for a little stay, but it was really fun to be running around a big city again.


And then Dan got food poisoning from the restaurant in Chicago. Aaaand it was his birthday dinner. We arrived back in Indianapolis just in time for Dan to have one night of complete hell, and then it was over. We spent the day lounging around the fire, watching movies, and playing Catan while rain poured against the windows. (Note the transfer of the Catan Winner's Medallion from Dan to me WOOO.)



Their last night here, Rachel and I sat on the couch and had a long awesome talk while Dan and Christian went to Tim's studio to sip tequila and record what Tim called a "space jam," which apparently doesn't put anyone but me in the mind of some Bugs Bunny / Michael Jordan movie from the nineties. Dan and Chris were both super inspired by the night, mostly by Tim's laid-back and less-cerebral (i.e. un-Lyon-esque) approach to music-making.

And then they left and Dan and I were both hit with a TON of actual work. Like, I immediately began twelve-hour workdays. It sucks because their whole visit was so invigorating (that's just the perfect word) that we wish we could transfer the energy to creative stuff. Sigh/reality.

More soon about our plans for the short remainder of our trip and the drive home. Thank you Rachel for taking pictures!

fall and other surprises

There are many benefits to this trip that don't have anything to do with its stated purpose. Some of them have surprised us; others we expected, but had no idea how much daily joy they would bring us. So, creativity-related benefits aside, here's what we're loving...

First: FALL. Dudes. Fall is amazing. Indiana has still not apparently reached the peak of fall season, and it is already so gorgeous, we can hardly drive down the street without running straight into a tree. As Dan put it the other day, as we drove past a particularly amazing tri-colored tree leaning out from the edge of a yard to greet the street: "I've just never seen anything like that." This tree was green in parts, yellow in others, and then the leaves around the edges seemed to have been dipped in a can of red paint--and the red is not reddish, not that amber-brown dead-looking red, which is also beautiful but more familiar; this is a practically fluorescent shade of red that just doesn't exist in California. So yeah, we're loving the proper seasons. We've been pretty gay about it actually. Mulled cider, pumpkin pancakes, sitting around a fire made with wood that my uncle has been drying in the backyard for years. I'm telling you. These midwesterners are on to something.

Second, of course, is family. My grandma is the sweetest lady ever and it's pretty much impossible to eavesdrop on one of her five-minute conversations with the cat and not feel really good about the world. (That cat talks back, for real). My uncle Tim and his girlfriend Susan are like our personal tour guides, arranging road trips, showing us some tasty Thai and Indian restaurants, and on weekend nights, indulging in a game of Catan or two (yes, you heard me, two). Susan even made this insane necklace with a picture of Klaus Teuber on the pendant, to be worn by the victor. My uncle Pat has every good television series ever on DVD, not to mention two full bars in his house (yes, again, two!) plus a karaoke stage. We haven't used the karaoke stage yet but we have a dream of somehow incorporating it with Beatles Rock Band.

Third: feeling relaxed, like, all the time. It's not bad.

And now for some pictures! We drove down south a couple hours last weekend to a forgotten-by-time town called Story that had an amazing dive bar in the basement of its only hotel, the Story Inn. Several men and women were very rowdy and drunk in there, and then they left on horseback. Grandma was glad they weren't driving.

drove to chicago

We spent the weekend in Chicago. Dan's brother Matt is there all week on a business trip, and he flew out early so we could all hang out for the weekend. It was fun; we did touristy stuff all day and on Saturday night we had legitimate Mexican food (the Mexican food in Indianapolis is beyond terrible) and went to a blues bar. It felt strange to be, um, well, doing things. My brain was sort of stunned to have been removed from the world of the novel, while my body was exhausted from not sitting in a chair all day.

The Art Institute was free to Bank of America cardholders, randomly, so we went twice.


We took a boat tour of Chicago architecture.


Why doesn't San Francisco have better public art?


Before driving home on Sunday we stopped at the Chicago Diner, "Meat-free since Eighty-Three," and Dan was so happy I thought he might faint. Here he is with a vanilla-chai tofu milkshake, a vegan chocolate chip cheesecake, and a coconut lemon cake. Yes, we got three desserts. Dan's lost 25 pounds in five weeks; he took the weekend off.

when i'm sixty-five

I have sixty-five pages written, and I'm super happy with all of them. (I would have a lot more if I included those I'm not happy with.) I'm especially happy because Dan read the whole document and gave me some sincerely positive feedback, along with a few suggestions that made it way better. YAY. I'm getting excited. It might actually get finished and it might actually not suck.

Today we ate lunch at Jenxie's, a vegan restaurant in the basement of a methodist church downtown.

Dan likes this picture.

This weekend: Chicago!!!!

blergh + breaks

My workload has subsided somewhat, having finished the monster report, but Dan's has increased. We're both struggling to find creative time in each day.

However: I changed the storyline/structure of my novel and now it's suddenly way more fun to write. I'm actually dying every day for that delicious hour or two when I can put away the paying gig and crank out a page. Yay. I wish I'd felt this way when we first arrived in Hope, when I had entire days free to write, but it feels good anyway.

Of course, we take some breaks. Catan (Tim shown here workin' on a Longest Road):


Pool (the most contact my skin has sustained with the sun since I was a teenager):


Sunset in Broad Ripple:


In other news, my friend Janet from grad school just published her book, The Creepy Girl (the title was my suggestion, she tells me, though I have no recollection of this), and it's getting amazing reviews. Buy it, if you wanna be creeped! And Rachel says John's finished his book too! More inspiration to crank.

senda salami to your boy in the army

After two full days in my New York hotel, it came to my attention that Bridget and Giovanni were also in New York. Uh what? I had an unexpected morning off, and the three of us wandered around the EV and LES, strategizing ways to achieve bi-coastal living while eating candy and getting tomato-faced from the sun. Our wanderings included a typical new-New York coffee shop (an Adam C haunt) but then lots of Mad Men era (ok Peggy-specific) spots like Katz's Deli and Economy Candy:





Then I had just enough time to meet Angela for lunch. Ange and I were roommates at Berkeley and came to New York for the summer of 2001 to be interns, which was everything you'd expect: sharing the world's tiniest room, scrounging pennies from our laundry pile, finding grand importance in every moment simply because we were in New York, etc. She's doing amazingly well, btw! She excaped the NY magazine industry just before it imploded and now works at Macy's as a copywriter, while also writing screenplays and becoming a media mogul (video journalism site coming soon). Forgot to take pics but she looks exactly the same.

I really love New York. Trying to remind myself not to glamorize it too much and remember why I left, but it's hard when everything is so damn timeless and inspiring and urgent and the people are all so abruptly nice and even the weather is perfect. I just want to live everywhere all at once.

the end of hope

If our first week in Hope felt like a month, our last week has felt like about ten seconds. I've gotten overwhelmingly busy with Actual Work, and Dan has been juggling a bit of FunMo along with car-repair errands. (Nothing major, don't worry). But it does look like we're both going to meet the Hope Deadline (one chapter, one song), if only by the skin of our teeth.

Yauni and Dave came to visit on Sunday so we finally hit the tourist sites. We planned on meeting at Lake of the Woods, but we ran into them at Fields, natch, when we stopped to buy beach towels. We spent some time at the lake and then went to Sucker's Creek and the Othello Tunnels. Yauni showed Dave her childhood homes (although her mom's old hippie cabin in Othello is now an eco-retreat, haha) and the boys got wowed by the Tunnels. (Dan's planning a Rambo post, stay tuned.) It was such a beautiful day. Finished with pie at the Home Restaurant and a short tour of Eva's house before we had to kick them out so we could watch the Mad Men premiere.

View of the bridge from Sucker's Creek.

Even the Tunnels parking lot is epic.

It's always nostalgic coming back to Hope, but this time it's been especially intense. Partly because my parents aren't here anymore, and partly because I haven't had a proper visit in so many years. And mostly, perhaps, because I'm really shoving my face in the nostalgia, seeking it out and indulging it, as research for the novel's coming-home themes. It's been fun, but I'm looking forward to leaving and returning to 30. No matter how great my Hope memories are (and they really are great), nostalgia is still an intrinsically melancholy thing.

Yesterday on one of my many sloooow drives past my house, which my parents are renting to another family, I saw a young girl in a bathing suit darting out the front door, skipping the steps on the front porch to jump onto the lawn. I could feel the concrete porch under her summer-hardened feet, the cool arrival of the mossy grass. And I actually heard myself saying, in a defensive whine, "Hey!" That's my life, random little girl. Jeez.

vancouver, thank god

Just enjoyed a brief but much-needed respite in Vancouver. The day before we left, Dan and I were so excited about going to a real city that we could hardly sleep. It'd been five full days in Hope at that point, and it felt like nothing less than a month. Five days is a long time to listen to the drone of your own mind.

First stop in Vancouver was the Bobcats. The Bobcats have been playing at the same pub on Denman St. every Sunday for years, and it's been the epicenter of Brickley Family Funtimes for much of my adult life -- I even made Kelli and Sam come when we visited Vancouver a couple years ago. This video is pretty terrible but I felt self-conscious standing on the dancefloor with my FlipCam, especially since everything about the Bobcats is supposed to transport you to a decidedly pre-FlipCam era.



The crowd was all 60+, but they looked 80+ (hard livin'), and they danced like they were 50. In other words, we had the BEST TIME. Seriously. The waitress was speedy with the Granville Island Lager and of course we knew all the songs, earning us some approving and slightly salacious nods from the crowd.

Yauni and Dave picked us up and took us to the best Indian meal I've ever had in my life, at Vij's in South Granville. Yauni is an old family friend, the kind of friend where your mom has pictures of her in your bathtub when she was two. Dave, Yauni's boyfriend, promotes shows in Vancouver, which is actually his family business -- his father was the Bill Graham of Vancouver, and he has actual stories about Grandmaster Flash crashing in his childhood bedroom. Later we went back to their apartment and Bonnie (Yauni's mom / family BFF dating back to my parents' hippie days) came over with a frostbitten bottle of vodka in her purse. Pretty sure Yauni is contributing to the heated conversation about my mom's amazing wheat-germ-covered-frozen bananas in this picture...


The next morning Dan and I took the Aquabus to Granville Island, where we spent most of our time at the Kids Market wishing we were seven. SNOOPY SNO-CONE MAKER!


Then Yaunie and Dave took us on a driving tour of Vancouver (awesome except for the pouring rain), shopping on Robson, and then to Commercial Drive for dinner at an ancient Italian restaurant called Nick's that is recently enjoying a hipster renaissance, probably largely to do with the bibs.


Then we went to Casa Gelata (218 choices of ice cream flavors but they were out of my favorite, Tiger Tail, so I tried to manufacture my own with one scoop of black licorice and one of orange sherbert, which I don't actually recommend, nosiree) and drove the long dark highway back to the boondocks. Awoke this morning to our first substantial requests from Actual Work (FunMo/Outlaw), blech...

portland

Portland surprised us with its awesomeness. Heather devoted her entire Sunday to showing us around, which included: brunch at the Cricket Cafe, QT with the cutest (fattest) cats ever, a thorough Powell's tour, beer and pizza at one of the city's many $3 theaters, dinner at a Japanese restaurant, and a free show of exactly the kind of local indie-rock we wanted to hear. We caught the tail end of a heat wave, meaning that it felt insanely hot to us, but everyone else seemed to be greeting the slightest breeze with ecstatic relief.

We treated ourselves to a couple nights at a hipster hotel called The Ace. The paint-dripping text on the walls was kinda, um, No Doubt, but everything else about the place was great.


Especially the Leonard Cohen lyrics on the lobby wall.


Portland is filled with people on permanent concentration-vacations: they work a few days at a coffee shop, which earns them enough to pay their minuscule living expenses, and they spend the rest of their time making art. Heather pointed out that this aspect of the city has a few drawbacks, mainly the overwhelming amount of not-great art. But still, it made us a bit SF-resentful. Heather's gorgeous and spacious one-bedroom apartment is eight hundred flippin' dollars a month. Plus they get actual summers!