Dear Portland – Stop Texting Me to Hangout at 2pm on a Weekday

Disclaimer – this was not a weekday.

So I moved to Portland last summer from San Francisco and, as you can tell from my previous posts, (A Scumbag’s Guide to Portland) I’m madly in love with it. All disputes people have with this city are completely irrelevant to me. When I told everyone in SF I was moving here, they were like:

Them: “CHLOE what about the fucking rain?”
Me: “Well guess what, assholes, I’m Irish/white as a vampire/get sunburned on a foggy night/prefer the shelter of dive bars to a sunny day/ just blew my rent money on a new pair of Burberry rain boots so bring on the rain.”
Them: “CHLOE there’s only like a month of summer weather there!!”
Me: “…OMG Portland gets a whole MONTH?”
Them: “CHLOE aren’t you going to miss the SF foodie scene?”
Me: “Lolz. Food carts.”
Them: “CHLOE but you’re whole family is in SF!”
Me: “Precisely.”
Them: “CHLOE there are no JOBS THERE.”
Me: “Well hahaha, suckers, because my job is transferring me!!!”

This is the face I make when I get texts at 2pm on a week day to party, you slackers!

So therein lies the problem. When I first moved here, I kind of scrambled to make friends. I was meeting great people, but they all seemed really close-knit; in fact, the whole city was like one big clique, shattered into pieces based-off their rotating part-time schedules at The Pita Pit. So while they were partying at Colonel Summers park on a Wednesday at 2pm, I was at my desk, most likely biting my lip contemplatively, and piecing together some reports. “COME RAGE AT THE RIVER IT’S LIKE 80 DEGREES DUDE! Bring your BUDWEISER TOWEL!” they would text me, relentlessly. “No,” I would regretfully text back, again biting my lip, but this time to stop the tears from forming, as I imagined the rocks being skipped, the PBRs being drained, the fun, floaty plastic things being destroyed, the belligerent mistakes being made. Because I was at work. Like a normal 27 year old person. Or what I thought was normal.

This cat likes to party.

I guess the main problem is that you can totally survive here without a full-time job. This seems to perpetuate obscure, forgotten ethics, like “creativity,” “art,” and, “having fun over the age of 20 on a weekday.” I mean, like, it’s totally ok to be a barista here. In fact, in some tribes, it is considered a legitimate career. People revere you as an incredibly responsible adult if you are a night-shift supervisor at a pizza place. This is, of course, because rent is mostly like, between $300-$400/month, for a sweet house with other sometimes-employed people, who totally enjoy life outside the confines of
fluorescently-lit cubicles. So as much as it’s really cool that i have this whole “steady paycheck” thing going on, I can’t help but sometimes feel that I’m working to enable my online shopping addiction as opposed to just paying my rent. (Although I’m guess I’m also pretty lucky, because I work with a rad team, whom I adore.) I have this sneaking suspicion that when I successfully turn into an adult, (which will totally, totally happen. Some day. I think. Maybe. Jury’s still out.) I’ll be happy I stayed at work.  It’s just that Portland during the summer time sometimes makes me revert into the pouty, spoiled brat I was when I was 16, grounded while everyone else was at Warped Tour.

Do you have a legit career in Portland? Do YOU ever suffer from FOMO? Have YOU ever destroyed an awesome floaty thing by accidentally putting your cigarette out on it at a river? Let’s DO this!

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