How I spent my autumn vacation, part 4
Nov. 4th, 2001 09:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rivkaMonday, October 29
Monday it was raining again, and we got a slow start to the day. We went to breakfast/lunch at Cup & Saucer, another of my old Portland haunts. The cafe looked much the same as it always did, but had somehow acquired decent service. In the early '90s they sold Cup & Saucer T-shirts with the slogan "same day service" on the back, and they weren't particularly joking. I had the grilled veggie sandwich, which was a bit heavy on bitter-tasting vegetables but was otherwise good. Misha had the apple pancakes, filled with big chunks of apple.
We visited a costume/thrift shop near the Cup, unhappily. I'm not good at shopping for clothes at the best of times, and thrift stores can bring out the worst of my problems. The sizes usually aren't marked and I'm not good at estimating whether something will fit me, so I wind up in dressing rooms trying to squeeze into something that makes me feel hideously enormous. This place was also filled with hip thin trendy people who could fit into the clothes. I came out feeling sad. Misha didn't find anything either, but that seems to have much less emotional content for him than it does for me.
We went on to a store which I knew would have something that fit me: Powell's City of Books, the largest new-and-used bookstore in the world. It's a 68,000 square foot store with a million books on the shelves, and that's just the main store - the technical bookstore is around the corner. Powell's is one of my top 10 physical locations on the planet. (You all may know them as an online bookseller, but the link above is to their bricks-and-mortar store in downtown Portland. There's an entertaining online tour.) I really like the new-and-used store concept: right at the shelves you can decide whether you care enough about a book to buy it new, or you can search through the piles for the cheapest used copy.
We spent about four hours in Powell's, meeting occasionally to compare notes. My shopping technique there is to fill a basket with books as I wander from room to room, and then sit in the coffee room and sort them more critically. Misha picked fewer books off the shelves, and thus probably bought a higher percentage of his picks. He wouldn't let me get any new books, because he (rightly) pointed out that he can use his Borders discount to get them cheaper. My haul was still pretty good, though: Kara Dalkey's Steel Rose, Edmund Crispin's the Gilded Fly and Holy Disorders, Maureen McHugh's China Mountain Zhang, Ken McLeod's the Stone Canal, Diana Wynne Jones' Chronicles of Chrestomanci, Midori Snyder's the Flight of Michael McBride, George Gmelch's Inside Pitch. I also have my eye on two books of Misha's: John M. Ford's the Dragon Waiting and Susie Bright's Sexual State of the Union.
From Powell's, we went just up the street to Spartacus. I remember Spartacus as being a fairly serious leather store, but they've changed their focus quite a bit: there was one wall of floggers/clips/restraints, and a back room with some sex toys, but most of the store was given over to fetish- and goth-type clothing. There were lots of teenage girls shopping for Halloween costumes - that sort of thing. They did have some cool stuff: big black angel wings, for example, which would probably have been an impractical purchase. In general, things seemed to be higher-quality than you'd see at a Hot Topic, and pitched at a higher age and a wider range of body types.
I bought a corset. Black glossy satin with a subtle floral pattern in matte black, and a heavy black floral lace border at the top. They wouldn't let Misha into the dressing room with me ("Sorry, we've had problems"), so I had to leave my jeans on and come out into the store to have him lace me up. Even over jeans, it was... wow. It certainly does interesting things to my shape. I really, really like it. I shall have to ask![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
saoba to look out for a tuxedo jacket for me... or there's the swingy velvet coat I wore to the dance at a.p.7, but I'm not sure that the corset wouldn't mess up the lines of the coat.
We finished up the evening by having dinner with another old friend and former roommate of mine, Diana. She's always an interesting person to listen to - a trans activist who founded Survivor Project, for intersex and trans survivors of domestic and sexual violence. She was the person who helped me realize, many years ago, that it wasn't MTF transfolk who bugged me but a set of mannerisms adopted by a subset of MTF transfolk. We ate at Wild Abandon, a funky little neighborhood gourmet place. I was torn between about a half-dozen menu items, and wound up with the free-range breast of chicken, stuffed with, um, prosciutto, spinach, mushrooms, and some kind of cheese I'm not remembering. Gorgonzola, maybe. It wasn't as good as I was hoping for, alas - the filling was pureed, and I would've rather had the textures. Michael's cioppino (seafood stew in spicy tomato broth) was a lot better. He was kind enough to give me an enormous oyster, which just goes to show that I married well.
We got sleepy early. I think we were in bed by 10:00.
Monday it was raining again, and we got a slow start to the day. We went to breakfast/lunch at Cup & Saucer, another of my old Portland haunts. The cafe looked much the same as it always did, but had somehow acquired decent service. In the early '90s they sold Cup & Saucer T-shirts with the slogan "same day service" on the back, and they weren't particularly joking. I had the grilled veggie sandwich, which was a bit heavy on bitter-tasting vegetables but was otherwise good. Misha had the apple pancakes, filled with big chunks of apple.
We visited a costume/thrift shop near the Cup, unhappily. I'm not good at shopping for clothes at the best of times, and thrift stores can bring out the worst of my problems. The sizes usually aren't marked and I'm not good at estimating whether something will fit me, so I wind up in dressing rooms trying to squeeze into something that makes me feel hideously enormous. This place was also filled with hip thin trendy people who could fit into the clothes. I came out feeling sad. Misha didn't find anything either, but that seems to have much less emotional content for him than it does for me.
We went on to a store which I knew would have something that fit me: Powell's City of Books, the largest new-and-used bookstore in the world. It's a 68,000 square foot store with a million books on the shelves, and that's just the main store - the technical bookstore is around the corner. Powell's is one of my top 10 physical locations on the planet. (You all may know them as an online bookseller, but the link above is to their bricks-and-mortar store in downtown Portland. There's an entertaining online tour.) I really like the new-and-used store concept: right at the shelves you can decide whether you care enough about a book to buy it new, or you can search through the piles for the cheapest used copy.
We spent about four hours in Powell's, meeting occasionally to compare notes. My shopping technique there is to fill a basket with books as I wander from room to room, and then sit in the coffee room and sort them more critically. Misha picked fewer books off the shelves, and thus probably bought a higher percentage of his picks. He wouldn't let me get any new books, because he (rightly) pointed out that he can use his Borders discount to get them cheaper. My haul was still pretty good, though: Kara Dalkey's Steel Rose, Edmund Crispin's the Gilded Fly and Holy Disorders, Maureen McHugh's China Mountain Zhang, Ken McLeod's the Stone Canal, Diana Wynne Jones' Chronicles of Chrestomanci, Midori Snyder's the Flight of Michael McBride, George Gmelch's Inside Pitch. I also have my eye on two books of Misha's: John M. Ford's the Dragon Waiting and Susie Bright's Sexual State of the Union.
From Powell's, we went just up the street to Spartacus. I remember Spartacus as being a fairly serious leather store, but they've changed their focus quite a bit: there was one wall of floggers/clips/restraints, and a back room with some sex toys, but most of the store was given over to fetish- and goth-type clothing. There were lots of teenage girls shopping for Halloween costumes - that sort of thing. They did have some cool stuff: big black angel wings, for example, which would probably have been an impractical purchase. In general, things seemed to be higher-quality than you'd see at a Hot Topic, and pitched at a higher age and a wider range of body types.
I bought a corset. Black glossy satin with a subtle floral pattern in matte black, and a heavy black floral lace border at the top. They wouldn't let Misha into the dressing room with me ("Sorry, we've had problems"), so I had to leave my jeans on and come out into the store to have him lace me up. Even over jeans, it was... wow. It certainly does interesting things to my shape. I really, really like it. I shall have to ask
saoba to look out for a tuxedo jacket for me... or there's the swingy velvet coat I wore to the dance at a.p.7, but I'm not sure that the corset wouldn't mess up the lines of the coat.We finished up the evening by having dinner with another old friend and former roommate of mine, Diana. She's always an interesting person to listen to - a trans activist who founded Survivor Project, for intersex and trans survivors of domestic and sexual violence. She was the person who helped me realize, many years ago, that it wasn't MTF transfolk who bugged me but a set of mannerisms adopted by a subset of MTF transfolk. We ate at Wild Abandon, a funky little neighborhood gourmet place. I was torn between about a half-dozen menu items, and wound up with the free-range breast of chicken, stuffed with, um, prosciutto, spinach, mushrooms, and some kind of cheese I'm not remembering. Gorgonzola, maybe. It wasn't as good as I was hoping for, alas - the filling was pureed, and I would've rather had the textures. Michael's cioppino (seafood stew in spicy tomato broth) was a lot better. He was kind enough to give me an enormous oyster, which just goes to show that I married well.
We got sleepy early. I think we were in bed by 10:00.
