I moved to Portland from DC about 6 months ago and it's been a somewhat rough adjustment, trading the many-splendored east coast for the much slower and hippie-infused west, but I've been doing my best to carve out a space for myself here and leave behind my east-coast chauvinism. If asked for a measure of my progress so far, I'd self report high marks: I've dedicated myself to blending with the local social customs and have even gone so far as elective caffeine addiction, Blazer's fanship, and DIY home repair; I've curtailed my use of un-PC terms like, "retarded" and "faggy," and when I bought my house, I walked through it with a lit sprig of lavender in order to cleanse the place of other energies (a friend's idea). I've drawn the line at elective alcoholism, recreational drug use, and ironic facial hair/tattoos (granted, I'm a woman so the ironic facial hair isn't something I could elect even if I wanted to, but I wouldn't if I could and you get the idea).
Despite being here for 6 months now, and my concerted efforts to blend in, I sometimes forget that I'm in the Pacific Northwest. This is probably a normal occurrence for folks who've been deeply rooted in one place for a decade or more, and then relocate to a new and foreign place, but I continue to be surprised each time an incident occurs that serves to pull the context of my new life sharply back into focus. Today, it was an incident at the branch library up the street.
I took a walk up to the coffee shop to purchase my energy for the day and decided to stop in to the library for a book about which I'd been reading reviews online. I didn't find it on the shelves and decided instead on one about quantum mechanics. With the book in one hand and my coffee, still too hot to drink, in the other, I took second place in line at the check-out desk. The woman in first place -- respectable-looking 50s-ish, short brown hair, slender and dressed mostly in pink -- was engaging with the librarian about some matter of due dates or late returns when all of a sudden, her hand came back in a repetitive sweeping, downward arc, away from her body and towards mine, as if to say, "shoo!" She turned slightly and called over her shoulder to me, "move back, move back. You're crowding me." Then, she turned back to the librarian and said, "people should be in a line, they get too close." The librarian returned, "we're getting signs." All this happened without either one of them looking me in the face. I stayed firmly planted where I was, deciding to make the woman as uncomfortable as possible as punishment for her bad behavior. When she was done checking out, she moved to the side and muttered something about how I need to not be so close to her.
In my mind, 2.5 feet is a sufficiently wide birth, and I should know, touching other people is one of my least favorite things. I couldn't believe this woman's reasoning - what kind of self-entitled bitch asks for space this way....from a total stranger? I wanted to tell her that she's lucky I don't stab her, which is what would have happened to her in my neighborhood in DC or NYC, and which is what did happen to her in the sequence of events that ran through the fantasy world of my mind. But, instead of my natural inclination (stabbing), I chose to go with a more socially acceptable response and offered her the following advice, "If you had asked me like a normal human being to stand back, you might have gotten what you wanted, but you chose not to do that."
I don't know what it is about Portland that makes people do and say stupid things, but I'm starting to see a pattern. Like, the other night at the bar, I was sitting outside with two friends; there were probably 8 empty tables out there and people would occasionally step out onto the patio to smoke. My friends and I were engaged in conversation when a tall bearded guy came out, sat right down at our table and lit up his cigarette, the smoke of which blew right into my face. Now, this guy was likely drunk, but that is no reason for bad manners, even in Portland. I had to tell him to get up and move to a different table. Somehow, it didn't occur to him that what he was doing was incompatible with appropriate social convention.
All this makes me wonder what motivates these people to behave as they do. Clearly, the hag in the library is used to getting whatever she wants, no matter how she asks for it. And, the shocked look on the smoker's face when I told him to move belies a certain incredulity that someone would take offense to his intrusion and subsequent smoke in the face. Is this brand of bad behavior contextualized to Portland? Or maybe to suburban living? Or perhaps to the broader west? This was certainly not part of my experience back east.
These types of events also make me wonder how well I'm actually doing at blending in. Maybe I'm not as chameleon-like as I think. Or maybe, there's some part of the social paradigm I'm missing. Either way, I continue to be surprised by what people consider to be appropriate social behavior. And, I guess maybe that's not such a bad thing. At least it's interesting.
Saturday, March 13, 2010
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