FROM THE ASHES

our will towards looking good in pants is a flagrant promotion of vanity. no one here expected to be saved. but, as may twenty-first approached, we also didn't spare ourselves the vain hope that something might happen on saturday to save us from having to think about how much better in pants we'd have to look for year number two.

it's difficult enough to optimally fill a social calendar in order that our own fulfillment and non-disappointment be maximized, but now we also find ourselves under an obligation to an audience, and it isn't clear whether discussing an entirely new set of events and topics or simply re-covering the same ones from last year in sequence one year later would be to the highest benefit for all parties. the latter course seemed initially appealing -- although admittedly shticky -- for its potential to help us address any lingering (or looming) questions surrounding our diaphanous relationship to metablogging. however, that relationship can be just as easily addressed in brief, and immediately: this isn't a metablog, but rather a blog that occasionally adopts the discursive modes usually associated with that medium in order to comment on it; i.e. not so much a blog about blogging as a blog that sometimes (and sometimes implicitly) discusses the idea of the metablog. and that, of course, certainly isn't our saying that there's anything doubly meta going on either. we might be musing over the corpse of postmodernism, but we're not the ones who killed ourselves. it's just like with the hipsters, except that, well, they (we?) managed to be both the obituarist and the hand holding the smoking gun (cold and lifeless after the suicide) until the meta-meta-self-aware elephant in the room sat on the party. and portland didn't learn a thing, even if some of us managed to dive off before the shark got jumped (virtually, by identity thieves in a gentrified former warehouse district), which is the reason that the other plan won't work either. this town is damn near finished. luckily, we won't have to worry about that or anything for too much longer since the world is ending in five months. and lucky for portlanders, where we live is a lot like hell: the weather is awful, but all of your friends are there.

so yesterday, instead of letting myself get down about my indecision -- or the ultimate futility of deciding -- i let myself stay down about the outcome of the soccer game. none of the starting members for columbus got raptured, but that still didn't help the team break portland's inaugural season at-home winning streak. the game's only goal scorer was a former columbus player who was brought over to portland in last year's major league soccer expansion draft. columbus' best scoring opportunity? narrowly foiled by portland's keeper, who went to my high school. my memory wants to put him on the junior varsity team freshman year.

i won't be watching any of the mtv remake of "skins," but the bbc version is brilliant (as they'd say in the bbc version). video verite finally has the third season, which isn't on the shelf at the store because the store's one copy came home with me yesterday. (spring fever.) i spent my entire afternoon wondering over the benefits of different designer sparkling waters, commiserating with a beautifully wrecked cast of wasted british youth. you wouldn't think that would have afforded me much time for anything else, but even for my lowered spirits i still attacked the four sunday crossword puzzles that i'd neglected during the lead up to the anniversary party. who's wasted now? three and a half finished before riding to namaste for the dinner buffet. that's productivity.

i had no idea there was a dance floor in the lounge, and i'm confident that the party of thirty sitting at the lofted level brought it after i left. the staff had only just started delivering the group's cocktails by pitcher. i, however, had planning to do. get ready for another year.