doughnuts of late

Portland is quite probably the best vacation city in the United States. You can literally spend hours just browsing bookstores, drinking coffee, sampling food trucks--all of the things you enjoy doing in your own city, without the guilt of doing stuff you do in your own city. Portland culture is that of cultural aesthetes, a collective of our type of people doing stuff we like to do. Zinester/animal portrait artist Nicole Georges, whose Portland zine anthology Invincible Summer I am currently enjoying very much, describes it as "a city of seasonal affected disorders and kids who never grow up," and every time I visit it gets harder to leave.

On that note I've been eating a lot of doughnuts at work lately. And I don't like doughnuts. To me they're like arcades, alluring and charming, only insofar as I understand they're supposed to be. Things for which other people's abundant excitement has often swept me up, though I have no particular interest in them myself. Jonathan Taylor Thomas was another such popular fixation. [In third grade I bought a Tiger Beat magazine because I assumed it was another part of being a girl my age I didn't yet understand. Like bras.]

Voodoo Doughnuts in Portland meets every criteria for a necessary vacation visit--small, local, weird. These are qualities I seek out tirelessly in other cities. And yet, during our last trip, I started walking over to shop, after a perfect vanilla latte from Stumptown, located conveniently down the street, and at the last minute I decided to keep walking because I didn't want a doughnut. This probably seems insignificant, I know, only it wasn't. In my own city I do and eat things that I don't even like. And why? Maybe it's easier and less exhausting than a life of amazing things all the time, less emotional. Is that why Portland is such a special place to visit, because it encourages you to behave like a local and live exactly as you would if you didn't worry about money and failing and the future. That's what it does for me.