Monthly Archives: August 2010

Insecure, exhausted me, and a completely unrelated angry face.

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Lately it seems like I need weekends to recover from my weekends. I feel like I’m always on the go. During the week, I’m driving around, working with candidates in their district, and then come weekends, I’m in Seattle or down home or with friends in Portland.

This is the kind of thing I love. Right now I have no interest in feeling like a permanent fixture in a permanent city, or working in an office 9-5 every day. I like being out and about, exploring Washington, meeting people, talking about strategy and that kind of thing. I like feeling like I know something, and sharing that with people.

I like spending my free time all over the place. Wanna meet in Mill Creek for some margaritas? Lake Washington to soak up some sun and sip drinks from plastic coffee cups? On a Monday? Yes, yes, yes.

I’m wearing my car into the ground, I’m exhausted 90 percent of the time, and I feel a little loco the other 10. But, I’m still feeling incredibly happy, and what’s more than that, I feel free and independent. I’m doing a kick ass job at work. I’m keeping all of these things straight, getting most of my stuff done, and I still have time to drive drive drive to see people, be with them, laugh with them, etc.

But geez. Here’s some more stuff about me.

I’m a nervous creature, especially when things are going  so well. I live in a constant fear that I’ll somehow “fuck things up,” if only because I’ve experienced that catastrophic fall that’s completely inevitable when things are going well time and time again and I’m slow to blame other people, but always quick to blame myself, even when I know it’s not my fault.

So I’m always playing conversations over in my head, editing and wishing I’d said this or that instead of that and this. It’s tedious and awful and luckily I don’t do it with everyone – just the people I feel the least comfortable with but like the most.

There have been a lot of people in my life that I simply don’t feel cool enough to hang out with. It’s so stupid, because I really do have pretty decent self esteem. I know I’m pretty awesome. But I was really, terribly un-awesome back in school. I’m talking absolutely pitiful self esteem. Thought I was ugly and stupid and socially awkward and the whole shebang.

But I’m slowly getting out of it, so I should be outgrowing that mentality, right? Sure. Except occasionally when I really like someone, or think they’re super awesome, I feel a disconnect. I get self conscious.

So let’s make a not so subtle transition: I was drinking the other night. Normally this cancels out that immediate double check/I’m going to fuck it all up mentality and censors are seriously down. Not the case here.

Miss Mackenzie and the Karl and the Jeremy were down here on Saturday. After being accosted and solicited by an old man named Doc from the Oly Hempfest, we ended up back at my place with some beers and some cards, which of course led to Kings, which includes I’ve Never for 5s.

This led to a conversation about sex. Now, I don’t have a very large sample size with the whole sex thing, so for the most part, when I’m talking about sex, it’s “my ex” this, and “my ex” that. There’s just no getting around that.

In the midst of this, while the Jeremy is in the bathroom or my room or something, the Karl says something to the effect of, “Well, if I had a girlfriend who was talking about sex with her ex all the time, I’d be mad.”

So that statement sent me into my old “OMFG I’m going to eff it up!” mentality straightaway. Since the Jeremy and I became “facebook official” a couple of weeks ago (I use that term loosely, since mostly it refers to a blog entry I wrote and never posted, but I feel like all my readers should know the connotations of it anyway), I haven’t felt like that at all. In fact, one of the things I like about the Jeremy is that there is a complete ease with him. I’ve never had that “check yoself!” reaction after conversations we have, I never feel like I’m going to fuck things up by simply being me.

I spent the remainder of the evening drunkenly asking this boy if I was fucking things up between us. Because I’m smooth like that.

Turns out, I’m not.

Anyway, here’s my what caused my angry face. I put in my SD card, expecting to transfer the many awesome pictures from the past week, and especially those from this past weekend, and my computer didn’t recognize it. So I put it back in my camera, who then told me that there was something wrong with my SD card, should it attempt to format it? No, camera, you most certainly should not. So if course it proceeded to do it anyway. So I took it out and looked at it. And it looked something like this.*

*Anger may have distorted actual damage.

Yeah. That’s why there are no pictures from this past week. I can tell you what they all would have been though. Last Wednesday was a picture of the bagels I’d bought, Thursday was from inside the car wash, Friday was the awesome dinner that this one boy made for me, Saturday was pictures of drinks with friends at the Broho, and Sunday was a picture of my glass from the Red Hook brewery.

Eff. My world seems hellbent on making sure that I don’t finish my 365. But I’m going to kick my world’s ass. By taking 2 pictures a day until I’m caught up, because I’m not falling behind again, damn it. I’m already like 2 weeks behind. I will conquer this project, believe you me. And that’s 215/365 I guess.

A week’s catch up.

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We all know how weird and happy I’ve been, which is another way of saying I’ve been distracted and preoccupied with balancing work with spending all my time up and down the I-5 corridor. But here are my pictures from the last week.

208/365

Watching the primary results roll in by me onesies last Tuesday. I’m a nerd.

209/365

Helping out some friends. They were shooting a commercial, and needed a nose-pierced, awesome blonde secretary. I, of course, totally fit that bill, so I wore this and was pretty super awesome. I was like, the only one with a line. I’m so rad.

210/365

Went to a Rainier’s game with Jaime and her sister and company. This is awesome because I am super good at heckling, and judging the players and picking out my marry-boff-kill roster. Much fun.

211/365

Mmmmm. OK. This is the best best best sushi I’ve ever had. Saburo’s in SE Portland with the cousin. 29 huge, delicious pieces of sushi, an awesome spicy tuna salad, $26. Best ever. I can’t get over it.

212/365

I bought new sheets. They are really green. Really, really green. And I love them.

213/365

After work beer times in Seattle. Mackenzie, the Jeremy, and I spent the gorgeous day in the sun drinking delicious beers and later went to see Inception again with Nick and Louis and Maria. Very good day.

214/365

So I had a meeting in Lakewood – on the most gorgeous lake I’ve been to in a long time. I like that my job basically pays me to drive around the state and see it. I’m seriously lucky.

On naps. Especially the scary kind.

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207/365

After work beachy times. Got impulsive and went to hang with Mackenzie and her seester Kiersten and Jeremy. Lake Washington + fizzy delicious juice drinks, followed by grillin’ burgers and Arrested Development while we hid from mosquitoes made for a most delightful summer evening.

So like anyway. Damn yo. Onto the subject of this post.

Me and my freshmen roomie in college had a very specific afternoon schedule: put in earplugs and sleeeeeeep. Naps were the coolest, most awesomest thing ever. We would wake up in a completely different mindset. We called them life-changing naps because your entire perspective changed after one of those naps.

That’s not to say they were perfect – there were times that the life changing nap would turn on you. You’d awake in the midst of a really strange, unexplainable dream and have to deal with an even scarier reality. I remember one time waking up after a long game of hide and seek in an empty middle school with the IN crowd (whoever THEY were at the time). In the final scene of this dream I still remember vividly, I was hiding under the stairs of the auditorium stage while Chris Carabba of Dashboard Confessional played “For You to Notice” to the empty space. And shut up, yes, I used to like him in high school. I ADMIT IT. Anyway, I woke up because I had to pee, so I stumbled to the bathroom – they were working on the plumbing, so all I remember is seeing this huge maze of copper pipes instead of the usual mirror that was there.

I immediately forgot about having to pee and ran back to my room and sat in the fetal position while listening to anything but Dashboard Confessional. It took hours to recover.

Anyway, I just had a very similar nap experience, only the dreams started with obscure ex-boyfriends meeting me in hail storms to tell me they loved me but wanted to set me up with someone else and ended with me cradling a toilet, completely drunk and sopping wet in some seedy bar while I cried my eyes out.

Not something fun to wake up to. I’m still weirded out and I’ve been awake for over an hour now.

My dad just called. My parents are coming over tonight.

A cleaning shitstorm is on the horizon.

Selfishness/three.six.five revival.

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So here’s some basic Jami truth for you: I’m a people pleaser. It goes back forever, so there’s really no point in me explaining it or where it came from. I like people to be happy. A lot of times I’ll do absolutely everything that I can to make them so.

But not right now. Right now, I’m not living to make any one happy. This is incredibly weird for me.

But incredibly liberating. Before, I would or wouldn’t do things based on how other people felt about it. But for the first time, I feel like each decision, from what I eat for breakfast (bagels, usually) to how I spend my weekends (with new friends that I adore) to future plans (Chile!) are all decisions I’m making for me. They aren’t the most responsible, or the most sensible decisions, and there are a lot of people who have been or will be disappointed in them, and, by extension, me.

Right now, I don’t really care.

I’ve spent enough time wallowing in mistakes that were more about failing to make people happy than they were actual mistakes. But I’m done with that. I’m sorry if I hurt you or disappointed you. I truly am. And you know it. But I’m not extending any more wasted energy into people who fail to reciprocate.

And it hurts. And I’ll probably regret it at some point – in fact, a part of me already does, that part that looks every day at the photo of you and me, cracked down the middle from when I carelessly knocked it off my mantle. I refused to believe that it meant something, but maybe it did.

But right now I’m living for me for a change. And I’m surrounding myself with people who are excited and supportive of the decisions that I’m making, even at the risk of hurting themselves. I hope I don’t let them down, but it stands to reason that I might. Because when you’re being selfish for a change, that’s a risk you run.

But it’s a risk I need to take. So anyway. 365.

I think I left off at 201. So I present you with three sixty five’s triumphant (if anti-climactic) return.

202/365

Some Twain reading. Preparing for his 100-year delayed autobiography to be released in November. Love love love.

203/365

Dying of the hairs. Just a touch darker and redder. Still a blonde, though. I think the fixation on dyeing it darker has officially passed in my life.

204/365

So I needed a new phone for the works, yo. One with a highly capable browser and whatnot. At first I was like, whatevs. Now I’m kind of in love with my Droid. It’s ridiculous. And mine to keep after the election. Because my job is awesome like that.

204/365

Preparing some at home Jaeger bombs with Jeremy and Karl. This later led to whiskey-cokes (from which I abstained…best idea I’ve had in a while, I think partially because I haven’t recovered from my Jack Daniels night back in May), Arrested Development, and watching some stars fall from the sky. Goodness, on every level.

205/365

On my way back in from way too long in traffic. There were like 4 spider webs in this tree. I also found a piece of paper on my door that said “Hey! You’re lease is up next month and to show you how much we value you as a tenant, you can resign your lease for just a $160 monthly hike in rent!”

So basically I have to move.

206/365

Finally went to see Inception with Jaime and Scott. It was awesome, and I got a free movie ticket from Regal Cinemas. I’ll be using it to see Inception again.

This is a political post about my political crush.

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Ye be warned, you are about to wander into the arena of political jibberish. If you have no interest in Washington Republican politics, skip it, “mark as read,” and remember to not judge me … do whatever you have to do to ensure that I don’t lose any followers over the fact that I promised to post this. KTHANX. If you have trouble believing that I work for Republicans (most do) refer to this post and STFU.

Jaime Rowland, myself, and my political crush, David Castillo.

OK. Primary’s next week, guys. I hope you’re looking at your ballot thinking, oh man! I have NO  IDEA who to vote for in Washington’s 3rd Congressional race! Because that would make this whole transition thing really easy.

Well, let’s be honest here: I live in the Republican world, so those are the candidates I can tell you about. There are two front-runners. Before I name names, let me give you a rundown of these two front-running candidates and you can tell me which one YOU would vote for.

First – it’s important to note that the 3rd Congressional is something of a swing district. The seat is being vacated by Democrat Brian Baird after serving six terms.

Let me tell you about Candidate A.

Candidate A decided to run in April of 2009, before Baird had announced that he was going to retire. A decided to run because the America A knew just wasn’t looking the same – from a person that grew up in rural Lewis County, A was one of four kids to a single mom. A‘s family utilized government assistance programs, watched their mom work jobs for which she was underpaid, and listened to her and their teachers saying, “look, if you’re willing to sacrifice and work hard to educate yourself, you can succeed, regardless of the circumstances you were born into.” That was taken to heart, and candidate A has gone from a poor kid growing up in Lewis County to sitting across from the President of the United States. A decided to run to ensure their son has the same opportunities presented to him.

Candidate A has an impressive resume, but has never held public office. But what is on the resume? A worked in the Department of Homeland Security, is a Navy vet, has been a small business owner, and has plenty of private sector experience.

Side notes about candidate A : not a career politician. Very warm, inviting personality. Listens to voters, neighbors and friends. Owns a home in the district, and has a vested interest in the community because A‘s family is completely invested here. Does not intend on bringing family to DC. A can sum up their ties better than I can:

Look, I’m a Rotarian, we helped plant a church here in the 3rd Congressional district, I belong to a VFW and a Legion Hall here. I’ve volunteered throughout Southwest Washington on efforts – from lowering taxes, to sand-bagging to save my mom’s house in Lewis county. I am truly invested, and I’ve spent the bulk of my life here.

Now let me tell you about Candidate B.

Candidate B was one of the first Republicans to announce candidacy for the seat in the 3rd…directly after Baird announced his retirement.

B’s experience in primarily – oh, wait, I’m sorry – is solely in the public sector, having served as a Senior Legislative Aide for Cathy McMorris Rodgers from 2005-2007. When a vacancy arrived in the district B grew up in, B was appointed, after being nominated by McMorris Rodgers. B served the half term, ran the election in 2008 and won in the easily Republican district.

Of course, in three years, B has been an effective legislator, right? Well, in three years she has sponsored a bill that got passes…emphasis on a bill: singular.

As for ties to the community, B doesn’t really have any. Lived outside of the district for 11 of the past 13 years. Never worked in the private sector or owned property or served in the military.

Soo…which one would you vote for?

I really hope that you said candidate A. Because Candidate A is David Castillo, and I have a huge political crush on him. Now, here’s the thing about me and politics: I have a tendency to judge candidates by character rather than strictly going down the list of “I agree with this, I don’t agree with that,” kind of thing, because first of all I would NEVER find a candidate who stood on both sides of the fence the same way that I do, but also because where a candidate stands on issues becomes secondary once you’re in the political arena for real. Then it becomes a question of who will still stand for those issues once elected.

David Castillo will stick to his guns. I had the pleasure of sitting down with him and the other Jaime (Rowland) last week, and he was just as great as I remember. Here are some quotes from the interview that made my political crush get out of control:

People understand that it’s high time we quit sending career politicians to Washington DC. We need servant leaders – men and women of character and consequence who are only there to restore America, they aren’t there to hold on to the job for dear life.

Yes! And that’s what’s wrong with Jaime Herrera, the establishment backed Republican candidate B. Her appointment to the 18th district House seat was influenced by her old boss, Congresswoman McMorris Rodgers. And! McMorris Rodgers is STILL throwing her hand into this race!

I’ll go on the record with this – you’ve got a member of Congress from the 5th Congressional district, who is trying to affect an election in an unprecedented way. In a district that is nowhere near her own. It has a totally different demographic, and it’s totally based on the fact there is someone running who used to work for her. Never mind that the person who used to work for her is totally unqualified to be a member of Congress, by every reasonable measure.

He also mentioned that member of Congress has been calling promised donors to Castillo’s campaign and asking them to rescind their support of his candidacy.

Herrera is owned by the establishment and, to an even greater extent, by a member of Congress. Her votes will align more with establishment interests and McMorris Rodgers’ own votes than with the interests of the 3rd congressional. I guarantee it.

Castillo is owned by no one. He is not a career politician. Jaime? She is. She’ll vote enough to ensure that she gets reelected.

Basically, it comes down to trust. I’d trust David in a heartbeat. If you want the status quo, then hell, Jaime’s your girl. She is the “fresh new face” of the Republican establishment, after all. (You know, kind of like Sarah Palin was the “fresh new face?” I certainly hope you got the sarcasm in that. Because that’s essential.)

In 2008, the establishment Republican was defeated in the primary by a Ron Paul guy. Of course he couldn’t win – but David can. Let’s make him our candidate and restore a little sense into DC, because regardless of party affiliation, can you honestly say that you trust your Congressman? I’d bet not.

Jaime Rowland posted the entirety of our interview over on Palousitics.