January 2024, stuck on trains
A few months ago, my friends and I bought tickets to see Tina Fey and Amy Poehler in Portland, Oregon, a three-ish hour trek for me. But “the best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry,” and all that, because the weather happened a few days before the show we’d planned on seeing for months.
A few months ago, my friends and I bought tickets to see Tina Fey and Amy Poehler in Portland, Oregon, a three-ish hour trek for me. But “the best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry,” and all that, because the weather happened a few days before the show we’d planned on seeing for months.
Seattle and Portland are weird cities; kind of sisters, kind of enemies, kind of friends. They’re similar but different enough that people from Portland tend to pride themselves on not being from Seattle, and people from Seattle feel superior to those in Portland. Before anyone gets defensive over this observation, a) I’m not talking about every single person who lives in Seattle or Portland, and b) I’ve studied these behaviors for years and am not speaking out of turn!!
Taking the train from Seattle to Portland is a joyous journey and one of the ways I ease the grouchiness I feel anytime I am tasked with driving to Portland. Again, it’s not an incredibly long drive–you probably couldn’t finish Titanic in the time it takes unless you hit traffic–but it’s a boring one with scenery too familiar to be interesting and I don’t really like driving all that much anyway. The train feels special and magical, especially in, well, weather.
Oh yeah, but about Seattle and Portland being weird cities. Their proximity makes it feel like we should all share weather and experiences, but we don’t. Portland is hotter in the summer, notably an issue in recent climate change years. Portland also tends to get more snow and ice; if that’s not true, it at least feels true and was recently quite true.
I decided to take the train to the Tina and Amy show to avoid driving in what seemed to be a lot of snow and questionable road conditions…in Portland. Seattle was fine, dry as a bone. I enjoyed a few puffs of a joint before getting on the train in downtown Seattle to nap and wake up close to Portland. My plan worked, except we never made it to Portland. I woke up in Tacoma and again in Olympia and was awake-awake by the time we were stopped in Kalama, Washington, a town I recently learned Marlon Brando’s first wife and son are buried in. We were stopped in Kalama for a comically long time with various updates from the conductor, letting us know a necessary train track switch was frozen and the guys with the blowtorch were having difficulty getting it un-frozen.
By this time, snow was all around us, and while it made for a beautiful view, it didn’t bear well for arriving in Portland. Around this time, I realized a lot of us on the train were hoping to make the still-yet-to-be-cancelled Tina and Amy show. A group of seven women in front of me started gabbing, texting friends awaiting their arrival, showing off their cute Tina or Amy merch, from Parks and Rec to Mean Girls stuff.
It became clear after a while that we weren’t going to make it in time for our first round of dinner reservations–mine were at 5:30 p.m., which would have been great timing if we had arrived in Portland at 3:30 p.m. as anticipated. But slowly, the train picked up and headed to the next station. We even passed the Vancouver train station, the last stop before Portland.
And then we stopped again. For a long time. Amtrak employees are federal employees and are legally not allowed to work more than 12 hours, which meant our conductor had to stop working. Moda Center finally canceled the show after hundreds of angry twitter users pressured them to do so, or because the city of Portland had canceled most of the public transportation necessary to even get to the Moda Center.
After a few hours stuck between Vancouver and Portland, where an Uber would have cost me only 25 bucks to get to my best friend’s house, the Amtrak “bigwigs,” as the conductor told us, decided to send the train back to Vancouver, a short 20 minutes away. Once we got back to Vancouver, we were finally let off the train to stretch our legs, try to make other plans, breathe fresh air, and finish our joints, if you were me. Everyone was trying to call Lyft and Uber, some people were crying, some people were sucking on cigarettes, some people were begging friends and family to come get them. The demand for rideshare was too high and Vancouver-based drivers were not driving into Portland because of the road conditions. Unsure what to do and getting nervous about my phone battery, I googled “hotels,” spent three minutes trying to find one located by some food or alcohol or both, gave up on my bad navigational skills, booked a room, and started walking.
It was dark as hell–after 8 p.m. in the winter, after all–and actively snowing. I have spent little to no time in Vancouver, Washington, though I noticed how cute the snowy park looked in what felt like the middle of the night. Walking past the dozens of tents through a homeless encampment, I felt fine, but once I’d passed their community, there was no one and nothing to ground myself with. Just then, the Lyft app connected me to a driver; great timing since two white men had mysteriously appeared nearby. I couldn’t tell if I was paranoid or if they were trying to get my attention. My driver picked me up, drove me to the hotel as I regaled him with the Amtrak tales, and waited to make sure the hotel had someone working to check me in. (They did.)
I walked in, and a beautiful nonbinary person was working at the front desk and said, “Oh honey, let’s get you checked in.” Considering my journey, I was weirdly in a good mood for no reason, but I must have looked a snowy fright. I laughed, asked if the Black Angus was still open (it wasn’t), and turned to face the elevators when I looked over and saw what was playing on TV.
Friends. My dear friends. I ordered McDonald's delivery, tipped all my wonderful service drivers even more than usual, and cozied into a king-sized bed with the worst season of Friends playing me to sleep like a lullaby.
I hope Tina and Amy had a lovely night in Portland.
Here’s what I read this month.
[Books I read]
Exit Interview: The Life and Death of My Ambitious Career by Kristi Coulter (2023) | Quick summary: A memoir about the burnout from a decade of working for a high-demand, dysfunctional corporation.
Coulter came across my radar when I read Nothing Good Can Come From This (2018) a few years ago, and my adoration of her was solidified when we had a twitter exchange, though I admittedly was tweeting from the Northwest Abortion Access Fund’s account, not my own. I love a good recovery memoir, and Coulter’s is among the top two, the other being Leslie Jamison’s The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath (2018). I like Coulter not only because she’s local to Seattle but because she’s witty, honest, and realistic. Her experience working for amazon.com for 10 years was grueling and riddled with casual and overt gender discrimination, over-expectations, bad management, and general disarray. I laughed a lot reading this but, unfortunately, highlighted a disturbing number of passages that remind me of nonprofit organizations—it’s not just Amazon that provides these intensely absurd and heavy-going experiences, folks.
[nonfiction, memoir, written by a white american memoirist, essayist, and fiction writer, longer read]
Little Heathens: Hard Times and High Spirits on an Iowa Farm During the Great Depression by Mildred Armstrong Kalish (2007) | Quick summary: The story of growing up on a farm in Iowa during the Great Depression.
I don’t quite know if it’s a genre, style, or combination of the two, but I enjoy reading books like Kalish’s Little Heathens, which feels like reading someone’s family documents in the best way possible. Kalish walks us through life on the Iowan farm during the 1930s, including recipes, cleaning solutions, and other valuable tips for keeping a home. I really enjoy reading how people survived before my own time—in this case, well before. In googling Kalish to write this bookletter, I learned that she passed away in May of last year at 101 years old. What a gift to have this book to document what could have been mundane stories but are actually fascinating glimpses into the history of DIY and what family responsibilities used to look like.
[nonfiction, american history, memoir, written by a white american author, iowan, and retired professor, longer read]
Little House in the Big Woods and Farmer Boy by Laura Ingalls Wilder (1932, 1933) | Quick summary: Based on memories of her early childhood in 1870s Wisconsin, these are the first two books in the original Little House on the Prairie series.
I haven’t read this book in over 20 years, I’m sure of it. I know it’s for legitimate children—I think Laura is 4 years old in Little House in the Big Woods?—but I still deeply enjoy this novel. Wilder’s should-be-mundane descriptions of the homesteading skills she is slowly learning as a part of being a Wilder are fascinating, and not unlike the way Little Heathens felt (see above!), I’m inspired by the manual labor, gentle preparation, and general knowledge of people who really had to work for their food, water, and shelter. Farmer Boy is similar but from her later-to-be-husband’s perspective. I prefer Little House to Farmer Boy and am eager to read the third book!
[fictionish, memoirish, autobiographical children’s novel, written by a white american author, very quick read]
Funny Feelings by Tarah DeWitt (2023) | Quick summary: Comedian Farley is on the up-and-up when a publicist suggests she date her best friend and manager, Meyer.
A fiction pet peeve of mine is when the character names are unbelievable, overly complex, or simply don’t flow. While I really liked Funny Feelings—despite not really enjoying stand-up comedy—I kept getting distracted by the shorthand for Farley, “Fee,” and the fact that they call each other by their last names and first names interchangeably, and they all kind of sound like last names. Meyer Harrigan and Farley Jones??? Anyway, they’re cute. I loved the representation of deaf kiddo; as someone who took a couple of years of Signing Exact English (SEE) in high school, I am a fan of sign language and wish we all used it.
[fiction, romance, written by a white american author, quicker read]
[Books I heard]
Leslie F*cking Jones: A Memoir by Leslie Jones (2023) | Quick summary: The memoir of comedian and actress Leslie Jones.
Besides the last 5% of the book, where we have to hear about Leslie’s hemorrhoids, I loved this book. We best know Leslie Jones from Saturday Night Live and the ill-fated Ghostbusters (2016) that I love and think people were super weird about. She’s loud, she’s proud, she’s smart, she’s seasoned, and she’s a badass. This audiobook is long (I imagine the digital or physical book is shorter—she seems to add a lot of casual conversation and genuine emotion to the narration. Regardless, I like and respect her, so I enjoyed the too-muchness of Leslie Jones, from the swearing to the crying to the rage rants. I love her appreciation of physical comedy, naming John Ritter and Buster Keaton multiple times, and her honesty about her costars, internet trolls, and comedy peers. Very enjoyable, raw, and hilarious.
[nonfiction, celebrity memoir, written by a Black american comedian and actress, longer listen, read by the author]
End Credits: How I Broke Up with Hollywood by Patty Lin (2023) | Quick summary: A memoir about the burnout from a career in writing for television.
I didn’t intentionally listen to two books about workplace burnout this month, but it happened anyway. If I do another “these books should get date” post (maybe on Instagram this time), Exit Interview and End Credits shall be wed.
You paid for this
You paid for this: books that should date
Jess Tholmer • Sep 26, 2023
Do you ever read a book and go that makes me think of that other book I read last month? Or last year, or five years ago, or whatever. Well, that’s what this post is, but I made it weirder by designing wedding invitations for the books that remind me of each other.
Read full story →
Lin is a sharp, funny writer who doesn’t hold back on sharing her brutal experiences on some of the most famous shows ever, including Friends. I love how Lin spills the tea but comes across as wholly professional, honest, and relatable. Often the only person of color in a writer’s room, I’m convinced Lin’s experiences were as rough as they sounded. Great, eye-opening listen. All jobs are bad!
[nonfiction, workplace memoir, television history, written by an Asian american author and former TV writer/producer, medium-length listen, read by the author]
Lebron by Jeff Benedict (2023) | Quick summary: A biography about basketball superstar Lebron James.
I think Lebron James is so cool, which isn’t a hot take, but until I listened to this book, I didn’t fully appreciate how or why he was as cool as he is. As someone who doesn’t speak sports, it’s hard for me to fully appreciate how groundbreaking or impactful a significant game is unless I’m watching it with someone who can tell me. But listening to this book, I have a better appreciation for Lebron James, his ability to take back the power from managers and owners, his love of the game, and his advocacy for Black people. I loved this book and enjoyed the narration. I’m a big Lebron fan.
[nonfiction, biography, basketball history, written by a white american author and special features writer, longer listen, read by chris jackson]
That’s quite enough from me. See you in February unless you want to hear from me before then, and in that case, please subscribe for money!
