Minnesota, Vol. 1
<<2003-10-28 - 9:40 a.m.>>

The weather in Minnesota was perfect, crisp and stretched. It was something penetrable. It was weather you walked through. Weather in Portland this time of year still has that sometimes, but generally falls into two categories: weather that acts upon you and weather that is mercifully passive and generally nonexistent. So the Minnesota present-but-welcoming weather was a nice thing.

Nikki's friends...not bad. There was a girl with a hipster swipe of hair, rolled jeans, layers of thriftstore clothing. There was a slight initial thrall, and then she revealed her musical taste, which runs to generic West Coast hip-hop and Justin Timberlake, and for a sardonic hour or so I was the coolest girl in the room. Let me tell you, this is a new experience.

Everyone who found out I go to Reed had a reaction. The most frequent reaction was along the lines of "Oh my God! I visited Reed! ...And I was...kind of scared of it. Do you really work all the time?"

In Minnesota Nikki and Jenny and I went to the Mall of America, which was, even through the gauzy wrapping of irony, truly unpleasant. It beeped and hummed, the volume of background noise left no room for foreground. You walked and stared. Apparently, each floor is a mile around. There was a thrift store that is apparently a Kool Kids' Store at Macalester, and it was neons and generics and racks of new clothes and in general much less thiftstoreish even than Buffalo Exchange, and that is really saying something.

I had a little flareup when Nikki announced (like it was nothing, like of course, like I already knew) that her trip with Jenny to London is marked at about a month. Which means about a week with me and Chloë in New York. I asked, "So when will I see you?" and she said, lamely, 'Well, there's like the week of Christmas..." And this suddenly made it seem relevant that she had been singing such songs for Jenny's arrival, had been jumpy and impatient, that on the way to pick Jenny up she snapped at me when I tried to correct our route (which did, in fact, turn out to be wrong), told me I was judging her life when I commented mildly that the style of socializing that involves wandering from party to party and only recognizing fun when there are substances involved isn't really mine. And I was upset and in the Mall of America, and I went to take a little walk, and journalled a bit, under pretense of finding a bathroom, and when I got back from not being very far away, I discovered that Nikki and Jenny had left the alleged thriftstore and were testing mattresses at a store next to it, watching me pathetically emote and waiting for my return. Creepy-crawlies in the spine.

But later that night the three of us made dinner without salt, which we forgot to buy, and drank cheap wine and watched "Coyote Ugly" and screeched and giggled, and it was like home, only with cinderblock walls. Nikki said she wanted to talk about the London kerfuffle, but we never got around to it.

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