I'm a stumpy-legged fish paddling in a dwindling pond

Summer is speeding by while I'm learning the nuances of networking. Another delicious 90° day in Portland. I went out in the mid-morning coolness to meet yet another prospective client, a “life transformation” coach who no doubt thought she was meeting a prospective client as well. (Har har, joke's on her.) By the time the mercury hit 90°, I was safely hunkered in my cave, windows closed, shades down, blinds drawn, with a wet rag draped around my neck and a pitcher of sweating ice tea close at hand. I like it. For me, it doesn't get much better than this. No complaints allowed if you are one of those pale-skinned Portlanders who don't like hot weather. It could be a lot worse; be grateful we don't live somewhere where missiles are falling. If you are one of those unlucky folk, I'm very sorry for you, and I hope you survive.

Here in Stumptown, in this funny little networking pool I seem to be floundering in, I'm afraid of what will happen if we are all each others' clients, and no one is making any money. I fear it might be like eating your own leg for dinner—fills the empty stomach but at the expense of your git-along; maybe that's why they call it Stumptown.

I've said before networking is a long-term strategy. I asked the “life transformation” coach I met with today if she was able to transform her own life through networking. She admitted networking is a long game. She sipped her orange smoothie. I slurped my iced chai. I can read the signs now. There's a certain set to the shoulders and neck, an unmistakable glint of desperation in the eyes.

“How long can you hold out?” I asked.

“Not much longer,” she confessed.

“Me too.”

“But it's not a totally useless strategy,” she said, and went on to assure me that now we were “referral partners.” That is my new favorite jargon, referral partners. I refer people to you, you refer people to me, the miracle of money floods our parched landscape, and all boats rise. Or something to that effect. The point, obviously, is that money must flow in from an outside source, because we referral partners are feeling a mighty thirst. Well, saw off my legs and call me Shorty!

Last week, a brief flare of something occurred (I won't call it hope, because it wasn't). A headhunter found me through the American Marketing Association. She invited me to submit a resume for a market research temp job for an insurance company. I'm like, ok, whatever, I could do it for two months... get up early, pack a lunch, take the bus, get home after dark... yeah, for two months, I could do it. So I trucked on down to the Pearl to meet her in an old funky office building just off Burnside, kitty-corner from the famous Powell's City of Books. While I waited for her to arrive (I was early, as usual), I took some photos through the third-story window. Which actually was openable, by the way. Not that I had any plans to open it, in case you were wondering.

She arrived. We sat across from each other at an old wooden round table in a dinky conference room, just a little too far apart for comfort, but taking up all the space.

“You have an unusual background,” she began. I laughed. Right then, I knew my chance of getting this temp job was next to nil. I've heard those words before. They always mean the same thing: You are odd. You are different. What have you been doing with your life? You don't fit in here. We can't hire you. But I am not a quitter: I soldiered gamely on, answering her questions, addressing her concerns.

“I'll submit you to the client,” she said finally, “Because you never know.”

And that's the thing. We never know. Total flukes can happen. That's how I got the nutty job at the crappy career college, which was pretty much a bend in the road that attracted all sorts of lunatics. I fit right in there with the other misfits.

Well, turns out I did not get the temp job, no big surprise. Not enough of the right kind of experience. I understand. Not every actor who auditions gets the part.

Meanwhile, back in the networking pool, I am endeavoring to scramble onto the sand, so I can perhaps slide over to a different, larger pool, where the fish are bigger and the designer duds they wear so boldly have deep, deep pockets. Enough of these wizened, parched, desperate referral partners! Get back, you wretches. And, oh, by the way, some of the other referral partners I met last week are starting a Meetup for Small Business Owners. They've asked me to be a presenter. I've got 20 minutes. Will you come to my presentation?

The reunion planning committee crashes and burns

You want to bring the crazies out of the woodwork? Plan a high school reunion. I offered to assist, along with a handful of other well-meaning busy alums, and things were going more or less swimmingly (you bring the cake, I'll draw the stupid mascot on a poster, etc.) until two committees made some unilateral decisions, and the self-styled reunion committee chairperson derailed into tall grass.

It's my nature to help from behind the front lines, so to speak, and in this case, my instincts to hang back and not attend any committee meetings were correct. Maybe my intuition is more trustworthy than I thought. In a matter of a few days, a series of one-sided tirades escalated into a bizarre personality meltdown, culminating in the cancellation of the reunion. Wow. It just goes to show, you can graduate, but you can never really leave.

I think it started when someone not on the committee said something they shouldn't have on Facebook about the park that the chairperson had chosen for the event (too far out of town, too dirty, etc.). Our illustrious chairperson immediately lit up the internet with a vitriolic response. Some of it ended up in an email that got forwarded to me. I immediately hunkered down to dodge the bullets whizzing gaily over my head.

“If everyone in our committee does not like my leadership, let me know,” she wrote (which one committee member proceeded to do). “After all the hours I have spent.....and the hours I have put in, I am just about to cancel this reunion!” Then she banned two people from attending the reunion. (Can you do that?)

“This reunion is so important to me,” she went on. “Some of us may not be around for the 50th, so the 40th should be colorful and fun. I am so upset right now in tears.”

I found myself wondering if she's perhaps chronically ill? Maybe she's terminal and she doesn't want to say anything? ..... Nah. If she were, she would have let us all know, early and often. Nope, I'm pretty sure she's diagnosable with nothing more serious than a really mucky case of self-centered Little-Hitlerism. Which, unlike many other -isms, is not fatal, although if you have it and finally regain your senses, you may wish it were.

Sadly, things really started to unravel when the chairperson was unable to attend a committee meeting (due to a stress attack brought on by being slandered on Facebook). The remaining three stalwart committee members did what any group of functional adults would do: they got on with the business of planning the reunion. Then they bravely sent out minutes, which were forwarded to me. (I guess I'm the phantom member of the committee.)

Upon receiving the minutes of the meeting she had not attended, the chairperson sent out a response. She typed her rant between the lines of the secretary's minutes.

Secretary: We decided to continue with the planning, in the absence of the chairperson.

Chair: I don't see that you needed me there. You've made decisions! It should have been opinions!

Secretary: In regard to the cakes, if everyone agrees, this is what we'll do.

Chairperson: No! You do not make decisions!!! (You can measure blood pressure by the number of exclamation points, did you know that? It's true.)

Secretary: We'll order one sheet cake from Costco with [name of high school] on it in red and blue.

Chairperson: I told you I was getting the cake. I had a special table for it. It would have been simple if you had listened to me from the beginning. I already decided the cake and I said I was doing it.

(Wow. Just typing this dialogue is raising my blood pressure. I feel an exclamation point coming on.)

Secretary: Sorry, but I don't think we can ban anyone from the event.

Chairperson: It is not your decision!!!

Another email came through shortly after from one of the three remaining committee members, apologizing to the chairperson for upsetting her and tendering her resignation from the committee. And then there were two (and me, lurking).

The last I heard, the remaining two members have yanked the planning from the chairperson's grasping hands, and she's taking nitro tablets and calling her nurse. Well, so maybe she is ill. I guess I will work on being more compassionate.

The moral of this story? Best to let high school remain in the past. You didn't like those people 40 years ago; you aren't going to like them any better now.

Your sweet hopeless dreams have finally come true

I often get spam email in my Outlook inbox. I've set up rules that filter out anything with the words pfizer, viagra, penis enlargement, breast enhancement, or send money now, I'm in jail. Today one email slipped through that made me laugh: “Your sweet hopeless dreams have finally come true.” Isn't that charming? The email read like a poem. Maybe it was a poem, who knows. A sweet hopeless poem surrounded by a bunch of nasty hungry links.

Speaking of sweet hopeless dreams, today I attended a networking-event-slash-sales-event-disguised-as-a-seminar at a venue on Alberta Street in North Portland. If you know Alberta Street, you know that I'm not cool enough to hang out there. But it was broad daylight, not the wildly hip street fair known as Last Thursday, so I felt like I might be allowed to pass unmolested. I hiked hesitantly up some wide metal stairs and entered into an open loft area with pale fake hardwood floors.

“Welcome to the studio!” a small thin dark-haired woman said enthusiastically. She wore a short beige dress made of heavy lace. She looked like a doll. It was hard to tell her age: I filed that information away for future contemplation... wear short lace dress, look ten. Got it.

I was early, as usual. A tall older woman approached me, and we talked for about ten minutes. It took maybe 30 seconds to explain what my business was about. The rest of the time she swamped me with a description of Scientific Hand Analysis. I'm not even sure those words should be capitalized. What is it, you ask? I think it's akin to phrenology, astrology, and idiotology. Not certain.

People drifted in. All women. Huh. We arranged ourselves around some tables, set up in a horseshoe, facing a large blank wall on which was projected a pale PowerPoint slide. The seminar began. The slides remained pale and colorless because there was so much light in the room. The topic of the day was something about delegating tasks and getting organized. I can't remember exactly what it was called—and it only happened this morning. What can I say. I remember certain things and not others. For example, I remember how I felt when the seminar was over and the sales pitch began. I learned a lot from that part, mainly that if I ever use that tactic to sell my services, I hope you will take me out back and shoot me.

The young woman was definitely a pro, no doubt, and it was clear that her main motivation is getting money, lots and lots of money, preferably as she is laying by the pool while her “team” of minions is running around executing the tasks she has blithely delegated to them. She confessed, she thinks she's hilarious. I confess, I was cross-eyed with irritation after the first fifteen minutes of her presentation. I did a little reminiscing about my days as an instructor: Was I ever so annoyingly self-centered?

After the presentation, we went around the table introducing ourselves and handing around our business cards. Out of eleven people, six were coaches of some sort. Two did web design, and one was a marketing consultant. There was also a mortgage broker and a juice enthusiast. I sent around a stack of eighteen cards and got back nine. (That means two people didn't want my card. What's up with that?) I connected with a spike-haired web designer, and we made a commitment to meet next week for coffee. That's what I'm talking about! Networking!

This afternoon, as I was editing yet another chapter of the dissertation that won't end, I reflected on the strange energy that occurs in a roomful of women. Many of the attendees knew each other and entered the room boisterously, greeting each other with hugs and squealed hellos. I watched and listened, playing my familiar observer role. I felt like an alien, but that's nothing new. That is my normal state, especially in a group of women. I always feel like I don't quite belong. Maybe it's my mustache, I don't know. Or that I obviously don't care how I look.

The proprietors of the venue hold these events monthly, and apparently there is a membership group you can join. For a moment I considered it—only $99 per year! That's no bargain when you are an anti-social misfit. I have an erratic history of joining groups, especially groups of women. I was trying to remember what groups I joined in high school. I know there were a couple. I also know I didn't last long. I tried to play the game, but each time I flunked out (by choice) of each group I joined. Someone would pull out a guitar and start singing Neil Diamond songs. Someone else would start discussing periods and makeup. That would be it for me. A few minutes ago, I looked through my senior yearbook to see if I could find myself in any clubs or groups. I guess I managed to avoid all the photo days, because I was nowhere to be found. Was I really there at all? Debatable. It's been forty years, you can't really expect me to remember.

Don't talk to me, I'm networking

I'm starting to get a sense of the networking scene. Tonight I got another perspective on it at a networking event about networking. I know, so meta. Everything is meta these days. Or über. This was an über meta networking event. What was ultra neat about it was the location. The event was held at a new cooperative workspace on the eastside of Portland, out by the river (that's the mighty Columbia, in case you were wondering) under the flight path to PDX, in the uber armpit we call Gresham.

Yeah, Gresham! Who knew! I know, yech. Gresham is where I drove a school bus, way back in the year when the world as we knew it ended (2001). It's funny how things stay the same, round and round. If my business doesn't pick up pretty soon, I may find myself steering the short bus around Gresham once again. I'm kidding. Mostly.

The coop space is in a half-empty industrial park out on a semi-rural road, which means oodles of free parking and no traffic. Inside is a suite of offices formerly occupied by a solar manufacturer (bellyup? I don't know, didn't ask). The anchor tenant in the new coop is a security firm. During the presentation, young men in security guard uniforms marched stolidly past the open door. I bet some of them are proud graduates of the career college that used to employ me.

Before the presentation began, the office manager, a giddy pale girl with brown hair and an annoying giggle, took the little crowd of networkers on a tour of the space. Apparently a bare handful of entrepreneurs has signed up so far: lots of cubicles occupied only by empty "hot desks." I could have access to one of those random desks for only $275 per month. For that sum, I would also get my very own mailbox (not a PO box), access to a really nice printer/copier, and use of several conference rooms and classrooms. If the location weren't so far away (and if I weren't watching every penny slip through my clenched fingers), I would consider signing up. With all those security guards roaming the halls, I would certainly feel safe, out there in bumf--k Gresham.

After the tour, we settled into some uncomfortable plastic chairs in the main classroom space. According to the thermostat it was 77° in the room, a refreshing change of climate from the 92° heat outside.

The presenter noticed no one was sitting in the front row. “Someone should sit in the front row, or else I'll remove the chairs,” he warned. He was an oddly shaped man, with his jeans belted tightly around his bulging middle, longish droopy brown hair and glasses... and what I think might have been cowboy boots.

I was in the third row. “What are the benefits of sitting in the front row?” I asked, trying to be funny but probably sounding snarky. I started to pick up my stuff.

“You'll be closer to me,” he replied. “It will be more fun.”

I didn't have the gumption to tell him neither one of those sounded like benefits to me. But I moved anyway, and so ended up the only person in the first row, about three feet from the lectern. Two people were in the second row, sitting five chairs apart. Three people were in the third row, each two chairs apart. A couple people sat in the last row, also not together. Clearly, this was an anti-networking group: We'd managed to spread out among the chairs with at least two chairs between each of us.

The presenter fixed us all with a stare I recognized from many years in many classrooms: Uh-oh, the teacher is getting ready to wax pompous. I buried my attention in my journal, feeling a little too close to the lectern and the somewhat odd man who lurked around it. Wait a minute, no fancy slide show? no handouts? no music and light show? no dancers?... sigh. I guess after the AMA events I'm a little spoiled. “How many of you are introverts?” asked the presenter.

Of course, I raised my hand, not too high, but high enough to be seen; I didn't want to seem like a grouchy student. I didn't turn around to see how many raised their hands, but I would have bet more than half, judging by how desperate most of us seemed to be to carve massive personal space out of the room.

“I bet I have personally shaken the hand of at least 5,000 people in the past ten years,” the presenter said proudly. Dude. Clearly an extravert. Any introvert would have drank the funny kool-aid long before they got to 500.

The evening wore on. Where's the frocked and bearded emcee, I wondered? Where's the funny dude in the purple velvet jacket? The über meta-ness of being at a networking event about networking wore off and turned into an über grind. I did my best to make occasional eye contact with him, so he wouldn't get discouraged, and while I doodled in my notebook, I plotted my strategy to hold my own networking event, a real networking event, one from which the introverts come away feeling invigorated and hopeful instead of weak, morose, and despairing.

Stay tuned.

I am my brand; my brand is me

Solopreneurs work alone, by definition. That means we are the face of our business (...and the hands, feet, wide butt, and bulging belly). We not only represent our business, we are our business. There are no data entry snoids or social media geeks working in the back bedroom. There's nobody but us. Like it or not, we are our brand. As I sit here in my muggy cave of an apartment, looking across the gloom at my plywood shelves and dusty books, as I hike up my pajama pants to my knees and put another cool rag on the back of my neck, I think, wow, if this is my brand, then I am in deep doo-doo.

Thunderstorms rolled through today and left some fresher air. I was going to go out in it, but I was felled by the dregs of a migraine brought on by some food substance as yet unidentified. After I woke up from a nap (during which I met god, believe it or not—whoa, what was that substance!?), I made the mistake of looking at a job search site. As sometimes happens, I found a listing for a job that I could see myself in, and then I felt compelled to take some action and got hopelessly bogged down in customizing my resume, writing a cover letter, and crafting an essay about why I'm the best person for the job. I never think I'm the best person for any job, so right away my effort was doomed. My enthusiasm melted away, and I ended up on Facebook promoting my 40th high school reunion.

Whenever I feel like this, I find myself singing There's a place for us... in an off-key quavery voice fueled by a forlorn hope that there might actually one day be a place for me. It's futile. Both the singing and the dreaming. I'm getting a little long in the tooth to be fretting over finding the perfect job. I know enough now to know that any job is better than no job.

Meanwhile, I've been editing a series of chapters for some music educator who is blazing through his dissertation on the history of choral music in America, a topic I know nothing about, in Turabian format, which is a style I know nothing about. Luckily for me, this author is a very good writer, so I'm mostly fixing his tables and footnotes and curly quotation marks. That means I'm making good money per hour. No complaints. Except I still complain, because that is what I do.

I don't really need a brand. I just need some clients. Once they know me, they will trust me. When they trust me, they will recommend me to others. That is how it works in this business. They won't care that I have a fancy logo or a slick website. They won't even care if I have a business card. They won't care that I work in my pajamas and have hair sticking out of my nose while I'm Skyping. Am I right? Think about it. You grant a lot of slack to people you like and trust. In fact, if they are slightly eccentric, you will justify your opinion about them by embracing their eccentricities and defending their quirks to others. In time, a benevolent mystique will develop around their name. Their logo, no matter how awful, will become precious, like Pez. At that point, they could Skype naked and no one would care.

That's the kind of brand I want. I guess I could save a lot of time and just take my clothes off now.

I'm going to die penniless at 90

This is a great time of year to be homeless in Portland. Not that I'm homeless, yet, just saying. This is my kind of season: day after day of mid 80s to low 90s, fresh breeze, sparse clouds, unfiltered sun, and no rain... ah. Now if I could just get the relentless bass from the cafe's sound system, my neighbor's 1:00 a.m. cigarette smoke, and the invisible grass, flower, and tree spores and pollen to stay outside, everything would be perfect.

Well, almost perfect. I spent the past two days editing a chapter in some guy's music history dissertation, which isn't so bad, compared to some other topics, I guess. (Imagine how I'd be raving if it were... I dunno, The Lived Experience of Autistic Computer Geeks With Co-Axial Redundant Router Tendencies. Actually, that sounds sort of interesting. I just made that up. I have no idea what it means.)

English is the dissertation author's first language, thank the editing gods. So it could be worse. The truth is, I just don't like editing papers. That saddens me for two reasons: First, editing is the work that is coming my way; I can't afford to say no. And second, I'm apparently good at it. I got some praise from the dissertation guy. My reward was the opportunity to edit his next chapter. Lucky me.

Just because you are good at doing something is not a sufficient reason to do it, in my opinion, especially if you hate doing it. Learned that one the hard way when I made my living sewing clothes for ten years. I'd rather live in a chicken coop than do that again. Ditto for driving a school bus. Or working in a nursing home.

Speaking of nursing homes. No, speaking of chicken coops. No, speaking of not liking to do something but doing it anyway, yesterday I drove downtown to go to a local marketing luncheon. I parked 10 blocks away (free!) and hiked along the dusty streets. I wore loose black linen pants, a loose white linen shirt, blister-inducing sandals, and a straw hat on my head to ward off the mid-day sun. I carried a water bottle in case I got heat stroke.

The event was held in a brewery. The smell of yeast and hops was delicious. True to form, I was the first one to arrive (I have a chronic fear of being late). I selected my personalized name tag from the stack by the door. I wandered over to peruse the artwork on the huge brick wall: $1550 for a 30" x 40" unframed canvas caked with paint in a style I could best describe as preschool abstract. Is the artist actually selling this stuff? Jeez. Maybe I should have kept on painting. Oh well. I sat down at a table near the front and watched as the presenters arrived and began milling around the laptop on the lectern, fussing with cords.

A young blonde woman wearing what looked like a shirt-waist throwback to the 1950s but what was probably the height of current fashion hesitantly approached me. “I think we need this table,” she said.

“Would you like me to move?” I asked. It was a table set for seven people. Surely, I thought, there would be room for me.

“Please,” she said.

“No problem.” I gathered up my stuff and relinquished my seat, taking my water glass with me. Take that, you table usurper. I looked around the big empty room. So far, there was one other guest, sitting alone at a table near the back. I had on my reading glasses, so I couldn't tell if the person was male or female, but it didn't matter to me. Rather than sit alone, I wove through the tables and sat down in the chair to the person's right. He/she/it turned out to be (according to his own labeling, offered quite early in our conversation) a gay Jewish writer, recently of Albuquerque, whom for purposes of this discussion, I will call Eli. He handed me a business card without hesitation. I reciprocated, feeling very professional.

The table soon filled up with other guests. Eli handed his cards around to everyone, and even leaped up once or twice to hand his cards to people passing by, making me feel slightly less special, but reminding me that this was a networking event, after all. I wasn't here to make friends. Or eat the food, although I arrived hungry, well, starving, really, and had set a strong intention to eat whatever I could get my hands on.

A woman about my own age wearing tan capri pants, strappy white sandals, and a white blazer sat down in the chair to my right. How does she keep it all clean, I wondered.

“What do you do?” she asked me.

“I'm a marketing researcher,” I replied, ready to hand her a card.

“Oh, so am I,” she said and abruptly turned to the man on her right. She never spoke to me again.

I paid $30 to eat barbecued pulled pork, baked beans, salad, and tofu. During the meal we were educated-slash-entertained by a local marketing guru, who waxed philosophical about innovation while strutting in front of strikingly designed yet obtuse messages arranged on 20-foot tall PowerPoint slides. As far as I could tell, the purpose of the slides was to serve as artsy backdrops for the man in the gray three-piece suit, while he blathered about innovation. I did my best to listen. At first I was mildly fascinated at how he seemed to have prepared the speech so well that he needed no notes. Was it memorized? Was he reading off cue cards? Was he speaking extemporaneously? And what the hell is he talking about?

I usually take notes when I'm at an educational event, and if I can't figure out what to write, I draw pictures: diagrams, arrows, big puffy words, caricatures... the images you see in this blog, for example. Doodling helps me listen. I try to keep my notebook hidden in my lap, but sometimes people see what I've drawn and feel compelled to say something: I couldn't help but notice your drawings. You're very good. You should put those on t-shirts. Yeah, thanks. Maybe you're right. Nothing else I'm doing seems to be working.

Near the door, on the way out, I connected with the president of the local marketing chapter and expressed my interest in volunteering. I've filled in the website registration form. I've emailed the volunteer coordinator. Now I've personally informed the president of the chapter. I don't know what else I can do, so I'll just let the universe take it from here. If I'm meant to volunteer, it will happen. I'm a little desperate: These marketers are members of my target market. Before they hire me, they need to know me and trust me. My best bet is meeting them in person through service.

A few minutes ago, I invited the president of the chapter and the writer to connect with me on LinkedIn. Within five minutes, both did. I guess people are using smartphones to manage their social network, unlike me, still slogging along on the pay-as-you-go, no-data-for-you-loser plan.

Someday my ship is going to come in. I know it. It may be a rubber dinghy, and it may end up crashing on the rocky shore of my financial ruin, but by god, when that damn boat goes down, I'm going to be on it.

I may be down but I'm not out

Wouldn't it be nice if after you earned a Ph.D., the world stepped up to hand you a perfect job? On a silver platter would be nice, thank you. Can't they see how special I am? Sadly, as you may have guessed, this is not the case. Which explains why today I got up earlier than normal, put on slacks and a jacket, and trundled downtown on the bus to the temp agency. After I filled out a quarter-inch stack of forms and aced a safety test (talk about leading questions! for shame), I met with a blonde woman named Norma, who was very enthused about the upcoming three-day weekend.

“I'm marching in a parade tomorrow,” she said.

 “Oh, really? How nice.”

“With my llamas!”

“Wow, llamas,” I echoed uncertainly.

“Yes, I dress them up in ribbons and I put bells on their feet. My boy llama hates that.”

I don't think I would want to piss off a llama, boy or girl, but whatever. I was more concerned that I had forgotten to take off my little black cap when I went in to the interview. Although clearly wackjobs are allowed at this agency. Maybe that's a good sign? As long as I don't have to feed a llama, I'm cool.

Finally, the dreaded question: “So! What are you looking for?”

Uhhhhh... world peace? Thin thighs? A rich uncle? How about a job that doesn't suck? I'd settle for that. I didn't say any of those things. I don't remember what I said, but it must have been acceptable, because she moved on to her next question, busily scribbling my answers on the sheet in front of her.

“Do you know Visio? Do you know SharePoint? How about Lotus Notes?”

“Lotus Notes!” was my intelligent response. I knew bell-bottoms had returned, but...

The interview questions were a strange melange of queries, reassurances, and semi-vicious probes. I wasn't exactly eviscerated, but I got the feeling she was impatient with me. I suspect I was the third or fourth hothouse flower she'd seen today, the day before her precious three-day weekend, and she was just about at her limit. I took pains to assuage her snippiness by assuring her I just wanted to make a contribution somewhere, whatever the hell that means. She seemed to accept my peace offering. Later I began to think maybe she was just slightly jealous of me. Maybe she would like to be an unemployed teacher, or an unsuccessful solopreneur. Hey, it's not too late! As I handed over my passport and social security card to be photocopied, I found myself hoping that someone would suddenly dash through the lobby and steal my documents. Take my identity—please!

On the way downtown, I sat in the back of the bus in the seat that overlooks the front part of the bus. There wasn't much to survey in the bus domain in front of me, but I thought about many things as we bounced and jiggled toward the Willamette River. For instance, I wondered how far I would fly if the bus driver had to suddenly slam on the brakes. Then I thought about how my wide derriere would probably anchor me in the seat and felt better enough to move on to my next thought, which was a conscious awareness that I might feel worse after going to this interview. I told myself if nothing else, the whole adventure would provide material for my blog. So far, both predictions have come true. I did not feel better after signing up with the temp agency, and I now have something to blog about.

When I finally dragged up to my back door, feeling like a poorly dressed loser, I found two little cartons of raspberries on my back porch, wrapped in Winco produce bags, which means my mother visited while I was out. She no doubt saw my car but couldn't get me to come to the door when she knocked. When I got inside, I dutifully called her on the phone.

“Hello, Mudder,” I said when I heard her voice.

“Whaaaat!?” she replied, which is not the usual way she answers the phone when I call, so I knew she was perturbed at getting what she perceived as a brush off. I expect it from your brothers girlfriend, but not from you! She asked if I had got the berries. I said, yes, thanks. She wanted to know where I was, and I told her I went downtown to sign up at a temp agency. She was rabidly interested, no big surprise. I managed to deflect most of the interrogation into a discussion about her ill-fitting dentures. We made plans to go for a drive to Silverton tomorrow to see the Oregon Gardens (open year round, so they say). If nothing else, the weather will be good, and it will give me something to blog about.

Summer: Time to reunionize

Summer is reunion time. Close family, extended family, and high school classmates, our relatively short summer in Portland brings us all together. (Don't blink.) My summer is shaping up to be an immersion into my past, whether I like it or not. It's a convenient although not entirely comfortable distraction from marketing and job hunting, the two activities I'm pursuing with roughly equal fervor, which is to say, not much. When I'm not marketing, networking, or job hunting, I'm entertaining my sister for a long weekend, seeing cousins I haven't seen in 30 years, and getting ready for my 40th high school reunion.

Two weeks ago, my immediate family rallied around a rare visit from my sister. The high point, besides seeing my siblings all together in one room, was visiting my only girl cousin on my mother's side of the family for a brunch at Elephant's Deli. All in all, it was a lovely visit that required a week for me to recover from, gastronomically speaking.

My mother had only one brother, which makes it easy to keep track of family on that side. My mother had four children, as did her brother: thus, I have four cousins, one of whom is the girl cousin I adore. I stopped keeping track of additions to the family after the first generation of cousins. My cousins had children (my cousins once-removed), and their children had children (my cousins twice-removed). They are all so removed, I've given up all hope of remembering their names. I'm lucky I remember they exist.

Things are a little more hectic on my father's side. Adoptions, age gaps, my widower grandfather marrying a succession of sisters... it gets really confusing, especially come to find out my father was adopted—a fact that apparently everyone knew but us. The people I called Aunt So-and-So and Uncle Such-and-Such weren't really relatives at all, which could explain why my immediate family felt like outcasts at Christmas get-togethers. (Although I swear my adopted father and his so-called cousin could have passed for brothers in their younger years, leading me to wonder who my father's father really was. But that's speculation with no satisfactory ending.)

Somehow I became Facebook friends last year with a younger cousin on my father's side. A few weeks ago, I happened to notice that she was planning a family reunion. Even though we aren't close and I only see her once a year at Christmas (her mother was like a sister to my father, but they were really cousins a generation apart), I decided to invite myself: What could she do, say no? I invited my mother, too. “Sure,” the cousin replied, “but bring your own meat.”

My mother begged off at the last minute, claiming digestive problems (you can get away with that when you are almost 85) and up until the time came to go out the door, I seriously considered doing the same. I'm not really a social person. But my curiosity won out. I remembered the cousins I spent Christmases with when we were children, pre-teens, and teenagers. Boy cousins I had crushes on. Girl cousins I envied for their Barbie Dreamhouses. Eleven cousins I hadn't seen in thirty years. Do they still have hair? Do they still play with Barbies? I wanted to know. So I went to the park, bringing a salad and some chips scavenged on the way from the grocery store.

I looked across the wide expanse of green grass at the crowd of people milling around a long line of picnic tables. I didn't recognize anyone. Was this the right family reunion? This could get embarrassing. I hesitated behind a tree, examining the faces. At first, they all looked like strangers. Then I saw the Facebook cousin and her family. Yep, this was my family. People looked in puzzlement at me as I approached the matriarch of the family, a tiny wizened wrinkled woman in a blue track suit.

“Hi, do you remember me?” I smiled at her.

“Of course I remember you,” she said. “You're Carol Mary. You look just like your mother.”

People clustered around then, some to find out the identity of this stranger talking to their mother/ grandmother/ great-grandmother, and some to greet me with exclamations and hugs. For me, recognition took time; thirty years changes people. Hairlines recede. Hair turns gray. Waistlines expand. But smiles stay the same. I recognized the kids I spent Christmases with, a little grayer, and in one or two cases, gayer, but all still the same. Kids in grown up bodies. Just like me.

For the next three hours, I moseyed from cousin to cousin, group to group, introducing myself and snapping candid photos. Memories began to flood back. We reminisced. The dread cousin Jimmy turned out to be a pretty nice guy, mellowed by cancer and a reduced life expectancy. His scary wife turned out to be an overly protective untreated Al-Anon. Who knew. I met cousins, cousins once-removed, twice-removed, and thrice-removed... four generations buzzed around the picnic tables, along with a dog or two, barbecuing burgers, grazing the salads, nibbling at cookies. Some moved more slowly than others—the oldest one is 91, the youngest hasn't figured out how to stand upright yet. Adoptions didn't matter. We were all family.

Next month is my 40th high school reunion. That should be interesting. I'll keep you posted.