It's all around you, like smog. This train isn't bound for glory.
Background by Deak Ferrand, who pwnz.
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I have apparently been living in Seattle for nearly a month, which is an odd thing to find myself saying. I don't particularly feel like I have been living here, even though I have a daily commute and other external signs of citizenship - it seems very much like I am visiting. This is probably because I have been staying with friends, and living, more or less, out of the two suitcases I brought with me.
So here I am, in training to do technical support by 'phone, which is Very Hard, (I have to learn, basically, everything about our large and specialized software, and a bit about the clients' industry) and playing houseguest until I can secure an apartment - probably April 1 (no foolin'!).
And trying to figure out the natives. Well, they can't drive for shit, and they dress down aggressively, but they are very good-natured, and polite. I don't think I have encountered anyone yet who is openly hostile. It is a bit unnerving. Also, there really is a lot of coffee up here. And yes, it rains a bit, but not heavily. Noöne seems to have an umbrella, and I already find myself sniffing contemptuously when I do see one in use. Seattle is, in a word, damp. The upside of this (and I'm not sure that there is a downside) is that there are living things growing on every available surface - mosses, lichens, and selected fungi, all of which please me enormously. The lichens suggest that the air is actually not terribly toxic; I hope my system can handle clean air without going into some sort of cellular crisis.
It is a relief after so long in the sticks to once again have access to the amenities of urban life. Ethnic food! Indie record shops with scruffy elitist scenester clerks and records by bands with complete sentences for names! (Which would be a good name for a band.) Shops selling Tibetan imports to soulless new agers! Used bookstores! Weeklies written in such an ironic voice that even the authors can no longer discern what their point-of-view actually is, funded largely by ads for prostitution! Busses! Rush hour! Communists! Panhandlers! I love cities, and they love me back - for a price.
Seattlites are even more nationalistic about "The Emerald City" than San Diegans are about "America's Finest City" - a slogan many of us take in deadly earnest. It is amusing. I don't think we're in Kansas anymore!
Looking back on what I know about my family, I notice that they changed states (of residence, sadly, not of mind) at least once per generation, so I suppose I shouldn't be surprised to find myself continuing the road movie.
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