Top 5, PDX Style

In honor of the fact that I just watched High Fidelity, here are the Top 5 Things I’ll Miss About Portland:

Number 5: The Unemployment Rate:

I know, this is a bit of an ironic thing to miss, having just become unemployed myself. Seriously, though, the unemployment rate in Portland is over 10%. It seems like no one I meet has a job. Every person has some story about what they’re doing at the moment that does not involve a job. Here are a few typical conversations that evolve when people are prompted with the question, “So what do you do?”

A typical conversation with an artist:

1. “So what do you do?”
2. “Oh, I’m a painter.”
3. “Oh, wow you’re an artist! Do you have any stuff for sale or in a local gallery?”
4. “Oh…no, I’m still, uh…working on my first few paintings.”
5. “Ah, ok – just getting started, cool! Do you have a side job at the moment?”
6. “No I just, uh focus on my artwork.”

Alternatively, a conversation with an outdoorsy type:

1. “So what do you do?”
2. “Oh, I’m a climber at the local rock gym.”
3. “Oh neat, you work at the rock gym?”
4. “No, I don’t work there, I just go there to climb.”
5. “Oh, cool, I’ve been there a few times to climb as well. So do you work in Portland?”
6. “Not at the moment. I’m just climbing, pretty much.”

My coworker Kayla said that when she lived in Southeast Portland, she was literally the only person in her building who had a job that required her to get up earlier than noon and wear something other than faded jeans and sandals. And for that she was called “corporate” by the other people who lived in her building! This is someone who works 10 hours a day to improve public education in Oregon, called corporate because she actually has a job to wake up and go to. Only in Portland…

Number 4: The Recycling System:

Not only is recycling ubiquitous in Portland, but there’s also the possibility that Portland has curbside food compost pickup. I say possibility because I am still uncertain as to the definitive answer on the subject. While it’s not in question that our green curbside compost bins can be used for yard waste, it is unclear whether there is a unified policy on whether or not food waste is acceptable as well. From conversations with all other Portlanders, I was under the impression that food waste could be deposited in the green bins as well until my roommate got yelled was told the compost company would not empty our green bin. They will still take food compost, however, if you make sure to fill the top of the bin with leaves to cover the forbidden contents beneath.

But what I like most about the recycling system is the city’s very economical approach to determining the amount of resources to use in collecting recyclable materials. You see, when you look at the amount of recyclable materials produced and put in recycle bins, and then you look at the total volume that Portland has the capacity to pick up every week, there’s a gap. There are more recyclable materials put in curbside bins than could possibly be carried off by the number of trucks utilized each week. And yet, all of Portland’s recycling successfully reaches processing plants.

How, you ask?

The city government is aware of the fact that there are many homeless people who will go around and pick out of people’s recycling bins to turn in the bottles for money. It is the homeless can collectors who are responsible for making up the remaining gap in hauling capacity. Some of the homeless people are pretty sophisticated, too! They may not have homes, but they do have bicycles (which makes sense if you’ve ever been to Portland). On the back of the bicycles they have a trailer hitch that has of a sort of rectangular frame with wheels into which you can put a small recycling bin, and they’ll go around filling up the bin with recycling from various cans and hauling them off to get reimbursed. A bum-powered recycling system. Awesome.

Number 3 – Portland’s Cyclists

The bikers. They are everywhere. And in a good way. Not like scabies or chicken pox, but like beautiful women or, uh…chocolate covered marshmallows. Portland is such a haven for bikers that people actually move to the city because they want to get rid of their cars. They move here, sell their cars, and then they buy a bicycle that costs more the car.

The amazing thing, though, is not just how many cyclists there are, but that they have power, too. They have the power of a full-fledged lobbying group or a voting bloc. Most recently, cyclists in Portland pressured state representatives to sponsor a bill that would make cyclists exempt from traffic laws. Well, that’s not entirely accurate. The bill (HB 2690) would permit the so called “Idaho stop” at stop signs. Cyclists will only have to slow down at stop signs, rather than stopping, and will only have to yield if there is other traffic present. Cyclists in Eugene, Oregon convinced the city administration to change its position on the bill, and now the City of Eugene no longer opposes the bill. I mean, cyclists in Oregon are serious about their bikes; these aren’t just pot smoking, no-carbon-footprint-wannabe hippies, these are representative-calling, letter-writing activists. If you’re a representative and you don’t listen to the cyclists in your community, you just might get a seemingly nice gift of a vintage water bottle – one that just so happens to have BPA, and will probably give you cancer. (all Portlanders now use metal water bottles to avoid BPA).

Don’t get me wrong, I love the cyclists. They’re fantastic. I’m not only impressed with their ability to overturn the law, but also their ability to thwart it. My roommate is part of a cycling social group called “Pub N Pedal,” and they have found a way around this age old conundrum: how to meet up at a bar with a bunch of people coming from different areas, have a good time at the bar, and yet make it home without endangering anyone or getting thrown in jail. I mean this has been a serious problem that many social groups still continue to face. Members of Pub N Pedal get around this conundrum by biking so they can get hammered at the bar, and not get hammered afterwards - for drunk driving, that is. Supposedly you can get a ticket for being drunk on a bicycle, but I hear it’s not enforced nearly as often. And it’s harder to notice because it is very easy to ride a bicycle safely and not wobbly when you’re drunk. I mean that’s what I heard. I wouldn’t know anything about that…

Number 2: The Vegan Scene

Yes, there is a vegan scene. Not just a vegetarian scene, like in many cities. I think there’s actually a commune of vegans living underground somewhere in the city where they don’t practice birth control, because man, vegans emerge from the woodwork here. It’s like you’re eating a nice steak dinner at a restaurant and then all of a sudden out the cracks in the floorboards you get 5 vegans who come up and swap out your steak for some marinated tofu and run around making chicken noises. Though a vegan myself, I don’t really understand it, to be perfectly honest.

There’s actually a vegan strip mall in one area of town that contains a vegan fabric store, a vegan bakery, a vegan grocery store, a vegan restaurant. There’s also a vegan option at nearly every regular omnivorous restaurant. There are even Friday night vegan Twister parties where groups of vegans get together play Twister naked while composting on themselves. It’s kind of weird at first but you get used to it after a while. There are so many vegetarians in Portland that the meat-eaters have actually had to start their own dating sites simply in order to meet other omnivores.

So how did vegetarians take over? Here’s my theory – they became chefs. I know what you’re thinking – vegetarians became chefs and simply stopped serving meat. But no, I think it was even more clever and conniving than this. They served meet, they just cooked terrible meat dishes. With sushi, there are only maybe 2 or 3 legitimate sushi places in town. The rest of the places are those sushi train places with the mass-produced sushi assembly line that goes around you on a conveyor belt. And in Portland they serve items on those conveyor belts such as tunafish rolls. No, not the tuna sushi you’re used to, which is a nice piece of raw tuna, often spicy. No, no – I’m talking tunafish from a can, the kind that is served with mayonnaise and occasionally celery. Yes, they put that in a roll with rice and seaweed and they call that sushi. So it’s through this subtle method that the vegetarians and vegans drove meat eaters away.

Number 1: The Weirdos

I love how there is a place in Portland for all the weirdos. People are just accepted here, even if they’re crazy, or smelly, or both. And there are a ton of weirdos here. At first I was a little alarmed, but I quickly started to find Portland’s weirdos quite charming.

There’s a woman at the Belmont Library comes in every day around noon, sits in on one of the tables at the back of the library, puts her stuff down, and spends about two minutes angling the chair so its back faces away from the person next to her at a 45 degree angle, as if to build a sort of barrier. She does this for two minutes: just wiggling the chair back and forth – arriving at 45 degree angle within the first 15 seconds, then moving it a little bit away, little bit back, until it sits at a 45 degree angle again. She then goes and gets 3-4 cookbooks, brings them back, puts them on the table (and at this point she turns her chair to face the table, negating her earlier work). And she just sits there, flipping through the cook book, looking at pictures of food. She just sits there for three hours, looking at food and muttering to herself.

That’s another thing, Portland has the highest population density of people who talk to themselves – and it’s not just homeless people who have been shunned by society, but people who are still an integral part of Portland’s businesses and/or families. I’m gonna miss the fact that people like that are accepted here. Even though I don’t walk down the street talking to myself, when I walk into the library among the weirdos, I feel like “these are my people.” The only reason I was taken aback at first is mostly because I was looking for someone to live with. Like I said, I like the fact that there is a place for weirdos in Portland; I’d just prefer that place not be in my home.