notes from portland, 2.25.24
keeping it weird
foreword
a tasty tune
nick made this song, can you believe! some soothing sonic goodness to play in the background of this week’s read, perhaps?
my dad and i are in portland, oregon this weekend to celebrate a family friend’s birthday. we’re only here for a weekend, and in planning for what we’re going to do, my mom asked me if there were any old haunts i wanted to visit.
this is the part where i reveal to you that i wasn’t actually born in los angeles. WHAT!!!! i know, i know, this must sound rich coming from me; i’m the first person to roll their eyes at the transplants in la making declarations about how la is or isn’t. unfortunately i can’t claim that i was born here, but i was certainly raised here. the fact that you all call me shishi is because when we moved in the middle of my first grade year, the class i was placed into at warner avenue elementary school already had a shirene in it (though she spelled her name shireen and i think we can all agree that that is the inferior spelling). that’s what my parents get for moving to tehrangeles, i guess.
in my defense, i did all the important growing up in la, so i’m not shy about claiming la as my hometown. portland is a series of flashes of memory of places and associated nostalgia and warm fuzzy feelings, but i couldn’t really tell you much about what life was actually like there. last time i was there was when i touring colleges (i really wanted to go to reed college and in retrospect, i’m so grateful i was waitlisted and went to smith instead) with my mom. growing up, when i told people i was born in portland, the response was always “oh i totally see that.” i mostly think that was code for “oh that’s why you’re gay” which makes me giggle whenever i think about it. but hey, maybe it is. my parents lived there together for 8 or 9 years, so it’s hardly out of the question that the broadly liberal/accepting environment of the pacific northwest could have bled into their parenting style.1
so when my mom asked me if there were any old haunts i wanted to explore, i kind of laughed because well, i don’t super remember portland. i think maybe they’ve forgotten that i wasn’t always as lucid as i am now (shocking i know, but alas, even i was fallible as a toddler).
to be honest, i’m not sure if i’ve adequately braced myself for how much the city will have changed in the ten years (yikes) since i’ve been and the twenty years (yikes!!!!) since i lived there. this is further complicated by:
my personal connection to the city and
my career in urban planning, which makes me somewhat painfully aware of the reasons and processes of gentrification and the life cycle of cities.
re: point number 2, portland is sort of the original hipster city (i need all the seattleites who are drafting hate comments to me right now to hear me out), and while i think it is still riding on the coattails of the image it cultivated in the 90s and early 00s of being filled with bike-riding, coffee-drinking, tree-hugging queer liberals, nowadays, and especially post-pandemic, is dealing with a bit a larger reputation crisis among the right as a dying, crime-riddled city filled with homeless people and among the left as completely gentrified and devoid of any of the character it once had. neither of these assessments are completely wrong nor completely right.
personally, i think that from a governing perspective, portland, like so many cities, is doing its best to stay afloat in the ever-rising flood of a nation-wide social and economic crisis that the federal government has left for state and municipal governments to deal with (la has the same problem, with the added complication of a supremely fractured governing body, but more on that another time).
housing crisis? would be solved by federal funding.
opioid crisis? would be solved by more federal regulation on narcotics and funding to social services to support users.2
rise of far-right groups in oregon? would be solved by federal regulations on free speech.
death of downtown? would be solved by more federal aide to small businesses.
before you jump down my throat about overgeneralization of extremely complicated and nuanced issues: trust me, i know, it takes more than just throwing money at things (i got a whole masters degree in You Can’t Just Throw Money At Cities To Fix Them). but i just want to point out that our collective penchant for individual liberty and personal responsibility has clouded our ability to remember who is claiming to take care of us. that we can and probably should blame the people at the top. drinking out of papers straws versus taylor swift in her jet, etc.
okay i didn’t mean to get on a soapbox. where was i?
the other day dawson and i were watching the west wing and a character referenced the idea of students going up to the blackboard. i was about to open my mouth and tell dawson about how i remember when they changed all the blackboards to whiteboards in my school when i was in the second grade. we were all encouraged to write or draw on the blackboards before they were covered by the whiteboards and we did, furiously. we were sad about the blackboards changing in the way we’re always sad when saying goodbye to something we know, even if we know the replacement will be better. we were also excited about the prospect of our drawings on the blackboard being uncovered one day in the far-flung future, of excavators or archaeologists or construction workers or maybe other second graders seeing our drawings and remembering us.
except, as i realized (at age 26) seated on dawson’s couch, obviously they didn’t cover the blackboards with the whiteboards. logistically, it makes WAY more sense to unscrew the blackboards, take them down, and install the whiteboards in their place. in hindsight, it seems a little silly for me to have believed otherwise then and all the way until now, but who was going to tell me? we were all children once. as i am just now starting to uncover in therapy, i have so thoroughly separated myself from my childhood; i’ve equated demarcations of time and responsibility with demarcations of personhood. but in reality, 8 year old shishi is still in me. she earnestly thought the whiteboards were being installed over the blackboards. more importantly, she wanted to be remembered.
just because something i thought was true turned out not to be, or no longer is, doesn’t make the truth of it in the moment any less important or special. at 8 years old i thought i had a chance to make my mark on the world, as small as mine was at the time. now i know that wasn’t true, maybe it was kind words spoken by a teacher who wanted to put a positive spin on this change in her students’ lives (thank you ms. brownstein). it doesn’t mean it wasn’t special then, and it doesn’t mean i have to ignore the effect it had on me now. here i am, still wanting to be remembered. just because portland doesn’t look and feel like it did in the rosy glow of my early youth, doesn’t mean its effect on me isn’t worth acknowledging or celebrating or worth fighting for. here i am, still gay.
in other news
i haven’t touched my book in weeks. but i’m feeling more invigorated about this newsletter than ever??? i don’t know, you win some you, you win some a little less. maybe if i think about it hard enough, lasers will shoot out of my brain and the book will write itself. it’s a nice thought.
i love to be a data scientist
at the beginning of the year, i started a list to keep track of every wikipedia page i visit in 2024. i do this by hand, which mostly means that as soon as i open a wikipedia page, i then have to open my notes app and add the title of the page to my list. what would be really cool is if there was some sort of plugin that would track and compile the pages automatically into some sort of excel sheet. unfortunately i decided to get a degree in something useless like political science so i don’t know how to make this myself.
here’s all the wikipedia pages i looked at in january:
Willis Tower
United States Raw Milk Debate
Herdshare
Ratatouille (film)
Sweater curse
Steam locomotive
Dave Matthews Band Chicago River incident
Michelada
Geography of Bolivia
Altiplano
Lake Titicaca
Espace liminal (this one was the french language page)
Jehovahs Witnesses
Aabria Iyengar
Mika Zibanejad
Ottawa Senators
Watership Down
Shih Tzu
Euphoria (American TV Series)
Nuttall’s woodpecker
Endemic Bird Area
List of largest cities
<reply-all>
i’m reinstating discussion questions because i love to hear from you guys. feel free to respond in comments or reply directly to me.
i want to hear about your relationship to home, memory, and/or your inner child.
tell me about the clearest memory you have under the age of six. tell me about something you thought was true but turned out not to be. tell me about your relationship to your inner child. or tell me literally anything else.
i’ll see you next time. i love you.
xoxo,
shish<3
p.s. have you made something recently that you want to share with the other readers of this newsletter? send it to me!
p.p.s. have you had enough water today?
i want to be clear that i’m not saying that they would have been bigoted otherwise, but it’s not lost on me that the iranian population of los angeles is one of most consistently conservative groups in the area. my parents being super accepting of my queerness–even of my desire to follow non-traditional career path (read: doctor/lawyer/engineer)–is an exception to the experience of many queer iranians i have met (an exception i am wholly grateful for).
my cousin, shawheen, was a victim of this crisis and died of a heroin overdose in 2015. in 2020, oregonians voted to decriminalized the use of hard drugs and instead pour money into social services to support users. that measure backfired, in large part because the state hadn’t made adequate preparations to be able to process and handle the growing drug and housing crisis especially with an already crumbling healthcare system in the middle of the pandemic. public opinion has taken a turn, blaming the decriminalization measure for the increase presence of open hard drug usage in areas such as downtown portland. oregon state legislature is considering recriminalizing hard drug usage this year.