Mad Max, if Mel Gibson had been from Amsterdam

There's a very smart grid of bike lanes in Portland. To get from my apartment to my yoga studio, I follow a major bike lane that crosses the river over the Hawthorne Bridge and heads south east. At 5:30 pm, I sit at a red light with 12 other bicyclists.

I tried to explain this to the boyfriend, about all these cyclists heading home from work or to the yoga studio.

He quietly replied, "You mean, it's like the future?"

He defends tomorrow. Wish him luck.

The Scent of Cluelessness

Last time the boyfriend returned from a trip abroad, he brought me a nice, duty-free bottle of Shalimar. He gets huge points for this because it demonstrates that he listened to me rattle on for weeks when I was reading Perfumes the Guide by Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez. The book is brilliant fun, but I had to read it twice. After the first 25 pages, I finally confessed I could not relate or comprehend; I had never inhaled perfume in my life, except for the Opium my mother once bought as a financial protest after her divorce.

So I asserted my scientist self with research. I began to smell perfumes at malls and drugstores and through on-line samples: Light Blue, CK One, Tommy Girl, Chanel No. 5, Jicky, Stetson, Euphoria, Unicorn Spell (yes, really), Timbuktu, Let it Rock, Derby, Azzaro, Mitsuoko, Black, Lime Basil and Mandarin.

And Shalimar. Very pretty Shalimar.

I read the book a second time, and began to understand words like "smoky," "woody," and "powdery": the once foreign vocabulary used to describe what one smells when our nostril detects the shape or vibration of a molecule.

The book is hilarious, almost heartless; sometimes I feel like I'm reading the equivalent of mean research paper reviews for the perfume industry.

Can Can by Paris Hilton. 1 of 5 stars. "Can it, by all means."

cK IN2U His. 1 of 5 stars. "IM IN UR BOTTLE BORIN UR GF."

Valentino. 1 of 5 stars. "Interesting dissonant floral-vanillic accord, marred by what smells like bargain-basement execution."

After read two, I now pay more attention to my nose and the layers of scent I detect. I now ask people, often salesmen at J.Crew and Banana Republic, "What scent are you wearing?"

* * *

Dedicated readers might realize I am now a professor at my own undergraduate institution. I'm on week 4 of Being Mediocre At My Job. I've plowed through three weeks, staying just hours ahead of the students. After defending just two months ago, I'm a little burnt out, a little lonely, but still quite happy to be out of GradShitTownVille and back in a proper city with bike routes and Thai food.

My brain's perception of time is bizarre. Being on campus everyday, I feel like college was yesterday, but graduate school was 100 years ago. Walking around campus is a memory trip. I snuck into that dorm once, but now my students live in it. I yelled at that professor once, but now he is my colleague. But above all, smell is what has dusted the grey matter off my forgotten college memories. The smell of a tree near the baseball stadium reminded me that I never could afford to park on campus. The smell of Buckley Center unlocked my feelings of total cluelessness as a naive freshman working at JC Penney to pay the tuition that my Stafford Loan didn't cover.

Buckley Center houses much of the core curriculum on my campus: math, philosophy, foreign language, and English. I spent 90% of my freshman year in that building; my very first class on campus was in that building. Walking back into it three weeks ago to find the print shop, my nostrils were burning and I was suddenly the 1994 version of myself. Scared, but weirdly confident despite having no idea what I am doing.

How might Luca and Tania review the scent of Buckley Center? At first, mold. That's the high note. Then a heart note of dust mites followed by a freshly sawed pressboard dry down. All together create an accord that plays, "I have no clue what I'm doing here."

They promise me it gets better. Until then, I think I will try Chamade.

Another Lesson in How to Speak "Big Dog"

The engineering building for my university is currently under construction, so all of the faculty are temporarily housed in cubicles in the basement of the 9-story women's dorm. It's not as bad as it sounds, except that one can hear everyone else's conversations.

There's an old cartoon. It has a big bulldog named Spike walking down the street. Another little dog hops around Spike saying, "What are we going to do today Spike, huh? Are we going to get us a cat today? Huh? Huh?" Spike doesn't say much.

Big dogs like Spike remind me of what I admire in so many of my academic heroes. They don't say much, but they have a presence in the room, and what little they do say is definitely heard.

From my cubicle this week, I overheard a big dog and a little dog chatting about an experiment. The little dog was racing,

"We could do this, then that, then that, which does this..."
And the big dog said, "woah... ... ... let's get some scratch paper."

Lesson: Big dogs still say, "I don't know."

Welcome to Portland, Part II

Yesterday was awful. Up at 7 am to take the strangely energetic fourteen year-old dog for her morning walk. On the way back, twenty feet from our front door, she was attacked by a stray. I screamed. I kicked. She fought. Until the stray's owner, a homeless man, tore them apart.

It was at the vet that I finally started sobbing. Just after I had explained to the secretary that I had just moved to the city. "Welcome to Portland," she said with the perfect mix of empathy and sincerity.

Now the dog is stitched up, stapled up, shaved and drugged. But she's a fighter. Even last night, only hours after surgery, she insisted we walk all the way to the park to do business.

Welcome to Portland, Part I

It took a while to get settled. Four days of driving across country. Fighting the stack of boxes in the new apartment. Watching the dog go from exhausted and despondent to strangely energetic for a fourteen year-old. Or is it thirteen? Only two boxes left to unpack now, and I have settled into my new office at my new campus.

Hello everyone, I am Dr. T., and I am back in Portland.