little bavarians.

Happy 27th, Marlo A. Hartung!  As usual, you are full of great ideas: escaping the rainy city for the vibrant leaves and peaceful fog of the mountains to celebrate your old age?  Sign me up.  A girl could really get used to sleeping in a beautiful cabin all snug as a bug and waking up to this view with her coffee:

Yes, PLEASE!

I would also not complain, not one bit, about drinking wine all night and espresso all day, wandering Leavenworth and practicing our German (but only amongst ourselves, let's not get too cocky here), visiting the cheesemonger and the antique vendors and spending autumn time with the laaaadies.  I don't ever want to leave, but someone must return to civilization to introduce lederhosen and 10 foot horns and Ricola to the unwashed masses.  Das sigh.

sometimes.

Sometimes it's Friday at midnight and you need to go play.

 Sometimes you end up on the Jose Rizal Bridge taking too many jumping shots because you are overjoyed at the view.  If you live in Seattle and haven't played on the Rizal Bridge, what are you waiting for?  It's the most breathtaking view of the city one could possibly imagine, especially at sunset.  Just look at how happy Dower is!  Look!

Sometimes you end up getting 1 am dim sum in the middle of the International District, the only whities in the whole place, wondering if it's better to order pig skin or cow intestine or both.

 Sometimes your "friends" wake you up at the crack of dawn to go for a walk, only to reward your efforts with even more cracks of dawn.

 Somtimes you just need to keep playing, because it's autumn and the leaves are all waiting to be scooped up and thrown somewhere.

 And sometimes you decide that even though it's only been 7 hours since you last had it, you need more dim sum for breakfast.

Sometimes I wish all days could be sleepless, uneventful, and somehow exactly what I want to be doing.

expats.

A Vancouver birthday weekend with the girls is just good clean fun, and the mere fact that we aren't in college anymore, heading up with frat brahs for morning boozing and "formal dances," completely revolutionized the experience.  Three cheers for trying to be grownups!  We stayed right downtown in the fancy Westin like big girls, ate good sushi like big girls, spent too much money on clothes and booze like big girls, and had an incident with a crow at the border that will become our new meal ticket once the video goes viral. 

Things about Canada that have changed since we were heading up there for countless fratty trips in college:

1.  Added stress of now having to show your passport at the border, like Canada thinks it's a different country or something and not the 51st state.  It's like sorority rush because you reeeeeally want the border guard to like you, even though HELLO, you're CANADA; it would be your great honor and pleasure to let us in.

2.  There are things to eat there that aren't pitchers of beer or street cart hot dogs at 3 am (even though those items still haven't lost their luster).  In fact, they have entire other food groups available for consumption, some of which are even on the food pyramid!

2.  They have daytime in Vancouver!  I literally never knew this.  Previous experiences led us to believe there is only rainy nighttime spent trying to avoid your date, who is geting a leeetle too handsy after the aforementioned pitchers.  Observe, the city from a sunrise walk on a lovely bridge:

  We crossed back into the US of A with renewed hope for our northernly sisters.  A beautiful autumn weekend in one of the world's most gorgeous cities, surrounded by maple leaf paraphernalia at every turn?  We don't mind if we do, happy birthday Shauna! 

"no pain, please."

Peter taught us this phrase in Thai on Saturday morning and I scoffed at it, like the naive child I was at that point.

We thought we were being sooo clever with our plans for the day. What a wonderful way to unwind together, we thought! Who could resist meditation in the park followed by an hour and a half of hot yoga and two hour Thai massages? Why wouldn't people ALWAYS spend their Saturdays like this?

24 hours later, it dawned on me, when I mysteriously woke up as a hobbling 90 year old woman with the flexibility of petrified wood. I spent the entire next day loudly ruing the moment I ever thought I could handle intense yoga followed by a small Thai woman putting her whole body weight on my poor, unsuspecting individual muscles.

Luckily Peter is really nice and in an effort to shut me up, took us to the State Building overlooking Bangkok and bought us dry martinis. This building is PHENOMENALLY BEAUTIFUL and to prove it, will kick you out if you aren't up to dress code (case in point: a man was turned away on the first floor for wearing Crocs. Now I am of the mindset that unless you are a surgeon or an elderly gardener, you shouldn't be wearing Crocs anyway, but that's neither here nor there).

Peter really made us love Bangkok, but since he took off for Manila like the fancy businessman he is, we followed suit and headed north on a sleeper train to Chiang Mai. This is us rounding out a lovely weekend by basking in the glow of the city from it's most impressive building and taking too many dorky pictures that didn't turn out anyway.

hello bangkok!

I'm too tired to think of a played-out joke about the word Bangkok because we just spent an entire day cavorting through the streets of this city with the suspected drug-czar, and my good friend, Peter Fotheringham.
Just kidding about the drug-czardom, he wanted me to say that. He's actually a really upstanding citizen who knows Bangkok like the back of his hand, lives in a fancy apartment with a pool, and is willing to put up with us. Peter is one of those people who will drop comments like, "Oh, and then after the World Cup we went on a surf trip to Mozambique, which was amazing!" without sounding pretentious in the least.

So today we visited beautiful wats and ate gorgeous food and hopped into water taxis and drank thick espresso and talked about Thai royalty and Noam Chomsky and photography and language and Peter slowly opened our eyes to the intrigue of a place like Bangkok, a massive city with a thousand stories on every corner. Days like today make me feel like I could just travel and travel forever just to see a new face or hear a new prayer.

mawwage.

Drew Moore: gentleman, scholar, married man.

On my first day of 4th grade, I got on the bus for my new school after having spent a summer being suuuuuper nervous about being cool. I had friends and boyfriends and I knew where all the classrooms were at my old school, and I really wanted to be awesome at Voyager too. THEN this short punk got on the bus two stops later, made fun of my Blossom hat, and literally did not cease to mock everything I did for nearly twenty years. Not kidding. Luckily, I am a saint with a heart of gold because I withstood the pressure and Drew became one of my oldest and best friends. You know, the kind where you can go a few years without so much as speaking and then pick up exactly where you left off.He's so cocky that he WOULD get married on our nation's birthday, but once we all got over that, we had an awesome mini-reunion of GHHS Class of 2002 where my main take-away lesson was that everyone I know is going through some phase of med school or becoming an ambassador to Serbia while I'm still making butt jokes. However, there was enough love and dancing and sparklers and Hendricks gin to make everyone okay with that, and as it turns out, a 4th of July wedding with some of your favorite people isn't so bad after all.

bollywood calling!

Excuse me, I have to take this.

ATTENTION EVERYONE: I AM INVITED TO AN INDIAN WEDDING.

Hitha is getting married in Hyderabad in December (look, there she is at her engagement party, looking all pretty) and I'm invited. I've only seen Monsoon Wedding half a dozen times! I only rented the VHS copies of Lagaan from Blockbuster like, whenever possible because I thought it was the best story ever! It's like The Universe, by way of Hitha Palepu's engagement, has extended it's starry hand my way and beckoned me towards a real-life version of the weddings I'm obsessed with-- the kind where everyone wears saris and has henna on their hands and plays cricket and sings a lot with really beautiful voices and their cups overfloweth with joy and HOLY BRITISH IMPERIALISM ESCAPEE will I make it to that wedding if I have to scrape together the meager scraps of what's left of my bank account and live in a box in Belltown upon my return.

birfday!

The birthday came and went and unlike the big backyard bash for 25, this one was more wine-soaked, more personal, way more amusing and ended with a handful of my favorite people in the world sprawled out on every inch of my living room floor. I can think of at least 26 reasons why I'm so LUCKY to have this motley crew* for my best friendskis. They make everything so much more fun, ridiculous, and heavenly.
For those who were wondering, Dower and Ashton did indeed wrestle shirtless until 4 am.

*(crue? Which one is the phrase and which one references Tommy Lee?)

three glorious days in washington.

No work. All play. Three days of my favorite kind of travel-- at home, with people I love.

Poulsbo and Port Gamble with dad. Coffee, books, and laughing like we used to when things were a little different... a little time capsule of being happy and simple together.

Oh, yes please.

Seattle dinner with three of my favorite girls. Lots of wine, lots of food, lots of love.

Mukilteo with my best friend at his new condo. Big windows with nothing but water and mountains and the ferry behind them. Ice cream like in elementary school. Diamond Knot brewery growlers. Magenta sunsets. Picking out midnight constellations from the hot tub and late night poached eggs before bed.

Puyallup with the boy. Sunny day reading in the park, Mexican cervezas at dinner, and tricking him again into antiquing with me.

I am so, so home and it feels so, so good.

life together.

Observations on community, from a quiet observer just passing through.

debating together

working together

praying together

being young and loud together

being old and silent together

being. together.

upsidedownmotive

www.upsidedownmotive.net

The brainchild of my friend Peter Drennan, upsidedownmotive is a growing collection of thoughts on faith, social justice, and seeking after a "life in full." We're just starting out; contributors welcome :)

marlo.

Whenever my travel partner opens her mouth, I have no idea what's about to happen. As I was trying to tell her about the new Robin Thicke/Cudder jam, she proudly declared:

"Any son of Alan Thicke is a son of mine."

It just doesn't stop with this chick.

roomies.

How do I love my roommates? Let me count the animal-socked ways.

meet alex.

Alex wears a lot of hats-- UW business school grad, violinist extraordinaire, thoughtful observer of the world-- but she impresses me more every time I am fortunate enough to spend time with her. Recently, she turned down an offer from the Gates Foundation (who does that?! has it ever happened before?!) to raise her own salary and work for Mars Hill Church in the UDistrict. She's following her passion of serving college kids, even at the cost of sacrificing something that she (like many others) has dreamed of doing. And she's humble about it, too, which is why I want to brag about her. If you have a heart for UW and/or ministering to college kids, and have a few cents to spare, let me know. I'll send you Alex's way.

There's more: she's also helping start up a brand-new microcredit organization in Ghana called Lumana Credit (http://lumana.org/), which provides loans along with skills training for underserved people, giving them the tools to pull themselves out of poverty. Please take a look; it's pretty exciting to be on the ground floor of a sustainable development project. If helping support a college ministry isn't your thing, but helping rebuild economic viability for families in Africa is, this would be a really good place to start.














postscript: the delicious coffee in our hands is from All City Coffee in Georgetown, hands down the best coffee in Seattle. They serve Caffe Vita, have bypassed Fair Trade by trading directly with farmers (ensuring even better prices for the growers), roast locally, and their doppio espresso with a dash of simple syrup MIGHT be the closest thing to ambrosia that mankind has discovered... Go there. Be transformed.

wuv. twu wuv.

In 2004, Malia and I stood at a roundabout somewhere in Northern Ireland and met a dozen people for the first time.

Five years, several cross-Atlantic moves, a few disappointments and frustrations and joys later, Malia is married to one of the random Irishmen we met that day. That summer changed the path of our lives-- we wanted to go to Africa but we got sent to Ireland ("First World?! Aw, no wayyyy"), found out that actually we loved Ireland, and now neither of us would have changed it for anything. The summer we first spent on the Emerald Isle caused our hearts to expand in directions we didn't expect (or always really want), and it brought Malia to Peter: a quietly hilarious boy who loved trees and dreamed of arriving at our doorsteps in America driving a wood-panelled station wagon. And on Saturday, after five years of chasing each other down, Peter slipped a ring on Malia's finger and they became permanent boyfriend/girlfriend!

When Josh got up to read during the ceremony, I was overwhelmed with gratefulness for having a tight little group of four that has made it half a decade and will hopefully make it for many more, for being a part of Malia and Peter's intersecting lives from the first minute, and most of all for genuine love.

this is my friend ryan.

The trajectory of our friendship has gone like this: at age 17, we were watching Being John Malkovich and I was in love with him. At 19, we became best friends ("we're just like sisters!" a drunk Ryan grinned at me that New Years, which I guess meant "siblings) as we navigated the first months of college together. It's hard not to bond when you share a small section with a painfully emo English TA who was personally living out Kafka's "The Hunger Artist." We learned firsthand that life indeed imitates art as we scribbled draft after draft of critique-- on the essay? On the TA? We lost track.

Now, Ryan goes to MIT and is technically the smartest person I know. We shared time together last week on my front porch-- tea in hand, elbows tucked between our knees as the creeping chill settled around us, recatching up and remembering all the things that hold people together even after much distance and time separates them temporarily.

Ryan and I have many memories, and the thing I love most about good friends is that they are living, breathing insurance against the forgetfullness of time. They carry pieces of our memories around for us-- the things that would slip away with our own unreliable recollections are buttressed by the minds of the people we love. And I am so thankful that little bits of my memory and heart are wandering around all over the place.

What we have done.

I met Haley freshman year in the dorms when she moved in late. Our first conversation, she will tell you went like this:

Me: We're going to play some tennis, do you have any extra tennis balls?
Haley: (dripping sarcasm) How convenient, I have this whole drawer full of tennis balls right here!
*pause*
Me: So do you?

Since our first awkward conversation, we have done a lot of things. I bought a ticket to Guatemala, spurred on by her mysterious existence in Central America that I knew nothing about and my urge to speak Spanish next to her again. I started thinking about the things we have done since we met. And we seem to have spent quite a lot of time sitting outside and talking about things that break our hearts.

When we first became confidantes, she was shedding copious tears on our dorm room balcony over a high school love that was ending without her permission. I brought a blanket and some silence.


A couple of autumns later, we sat outside on a dusty brick ledge in the middle of Spain, carefully eating falafel and trying to wrap our minds around the fact that Kyle was dying.

I like us because we talk about things that are true and things that are real.

Being Really, Really, Ridiculously Good Looking Is a Full Time Job

December had already started off on a fortuitous foot when Tara and I snuggled into our seats at Joe Bar on Capitol Hill, steaming up the paned windows with our foamy cappucinos as we watched Blizzard 2007 draw the movie-like qualities out of life: as a soft white began to cast the outside world with a gentler tone, passerby got cuter and people became visibly nicer to each other. A middle-aged couple, appropriately clad in Danskos and Teva gear, opted to take their lattes outside and let the massive flakes settle onto their hair and eyelashes as they sat together on a lazy Saturday morning date. People grinned at each other as they entered the cafe, stamping their boots and shaking their wet hair. Somber dogs peered through the glass as their best friends warmed themselves on coffee and crepes. Joe's provided the jazz-heavy soundtrack, and Tara and I kept hugging ourselves and beaming about how perfect the world was at that exact moment.

(Later, as we tromped through Broadway, we found a bookstore I'd never been to that had, quite possibly, the world's most perfect cards. One summarized our day succinctly: "I bet snowflakes wouldn't be quite so lovely if they were shaped like prostitutes." So true.)

So the blissful beginning of December meant that, despite not feeling my greatest (5 am bedtimes and too much Three Buck Chuck will do that), I had a good feeling about Studio 54 Lives Again. My high school friend Ryan, who works for the Seattle Models Guild, had invited me to this fundraiser for a school in Kathmandu and obviously, despite the fact that I hate people (especially kids) with a passion, I wanted to go to see what the craic was all about. I donned a one-piece pantsuit (tight in the waist but loose in the crotch, for maximum awkwardness in the lower torso region), brushed my hair into a serious white girl fro, and headed out into the snowy night to see what I could find.

The first thing I found was a homeless guy who mumbled to me as I passed him outside the Last Supper Club, "I'm tempted to stab you for no reason." This was, perhaps, the scariest thing that's ever happened to me, besides the time I got groped on the street in Alicante. I chalked it up to him not appreciating the lace tube top portion of my pantsuit and hauled ass into the club.

After tromping ungracefully down a plush red carpet, the second thing I found was: myself, right in the thick of Model Central. Apparently, Studio 54 is a yearly phenomenon in which the big three Seattle model agencies put all their people together in the same room so they can stare at each other and write fat checks for poor kids while getting beautifully drunk (unfortunately, my drunk can more accurately be described as "Bag Lady"). To the untrained eye, watching shirtless guys with bow ties wander around flexing their oiled chests and asking for dollars in exchange for beads seems like a scene out of a skeezy Miami back alley, but to a professional model, this is what "fundraising" looks like. Cover your eyes, kids.

I clutched my free drink tab and headed straight for the bar, desperate for a higher gin:blood ratio before I could face the gorgeous hordes head-on. The bartender winked at me in a non-sexual way, which brightened my mood, and I turned back to the dance floor, sucking on a lemon and looking for a short redhead I could relate to. I scanned the room: giants. Lush-lipped, smooth-skinned, eight foot Glamazons. Not a split end or zit, as far as the eye can see. What an annoying crowd.

I made a personal goal of being purely observant for the entire night, but having at least one entertaining conversation. This is when Ryan popped up, and insisted on taking me around to his various circles and introducing everyone at length ("this is Sergio, he's a photographer..." "Daria, model..." "Francisco, agent..."). After the fourth or fifth blank stare I had to forcibly stop Ryan from continuing on his social rampage and let me stumble around in my own awkwardness. He dragged me to one last circle, and rambled off a few more models' names. One of the guys I recognized from my gym, so I attempted a little friendly chitchat with the most basic of commonalities-- "Haven't I seen you somewhere?"

KIDDING!! I didn't say that. As Mike Birbiglia would advise, what I should have said was NOTHING. What I did say was something sarcastic about not only knowing where he works out, but knowing where he sleeps (trying to make light of my already semi-stalkeresque comment... you know?). My joke went over like the Hindenberg. "So how do you know where I live?" my new friend asked me a minute later.

I'd like to pause narration here for a second to mention that this gentleman was named BLISS. That was his God-given name. Write that down, it becomes all too applicable later on.

As I backpedaled my way out of my overly sarcastic "new friend" test, Bliss became even more confused about whether or not I was actually his stalker or not. Let the records note that the only reason I recognized this guy was because he was awkwardly flexing in the weights section and not because I thought he stood out as a paragon of male attractiveness. As I kindly helped him get over himself, he relaunched the conversation in a new direction that sent me even deeper into my G&T. "So tell me something interesting about yourself," he said, apparently competing for "Biggest Cliche of the Evening." I mentioned something about my near-obsession with travelling and seeing how other people do things, which brought up his recent travels.

I was so excited to have something in common with this vacant-eyed dolt, but when I asked him to tell me more, he just rolled his eyes. "Well, I told you a few minutes ago, but I went to Southeast Asia for a month." I looked around, trying to figure out who exactly he had been speaking to previously that looked remotely like me, but let it go in favor of hearing more... the story already sounded suspiciously drug-induced.

"I went to Asia to search... for bliss. And I found it, right here (points to heart)."

Oh my good God. He just made an analogy with his name. This is gold. I'm leaving this conversation while it's at the peak. Fortunately, Whit showed up and pulled me away to dance at that exact moment.

Ah, Whit. How to describe a person like Whit? He is more of a force of nature than a person, a tornado of random inappropriate comments and stories that are better than fiction. Throughout college, I could always rely on Whitney to bring a heavy dose of the unusual to my life. He would call on a Monday afternoon from outside the sorority, waiting to take me for a spin in his new ride; a massive, gas-guzzling farm truck that looked better suited for central Wyoming than the middle of Seattle. One week later, he would call again, but this time the ride was in his shiny new Audi. Whit had mullets, he had rat tails, he had a joie de vivre that some saw as annoying but which I adored. He worked as a sandwich delivery guy on a bike, as the captain of a massive ship, as a model in Thailand. He came up with elaborate plans to buy Thai property and become a music television VJ. He showed up in random magazine fashion spreads we didn't even know he had done. He always makes me laugh.

Whit was there as one of the Beautiful People, but also bridged the gap as one of the sarcastic people who didn't really try too hard, so we danced in a very aerobics-friendly, non-sexy manner for quite a while. At some point in my Jazzercise endeavors, I got pulled away by Latin Lover Jorge with a minor ponytail who matched my rhythm (miraculously, because after a few more of those drink tabs, it didn't really "sync up with the music" per se) and stuck by my side for the next hour or so. After throwing a few stray dollars into the direction of one of the ubiquitous bare nipples, I closed the night out, content. I think I had more fun the pretty people in the end, anyway.

Happy Birfday, Boo!

Last weekend was meant to be a celebration of all things Schlosser: the 5 roomies all together at last, welcoming the first "mid-twenties transition" amongst us, blatantly and pointedly ignoring the looming figure of Father Time with a well-poured drink, a non-Europop song or two, and a few misplaced dance maneuvers. All of the above happened, none of them in the context we'd pictured. The timeline went as follows:

8 pm: one mattress careens through the front window, shatters the ancient glass and slices Aimee's right shoulder open.
9 pm: Aimee, Marlo and I are situated in Swedish' ER. People watching.
10 pm: the non-Europop songs begin (plus). They are on the Fashion Rocks Awards (minus). They are sung by Fergie (big minus).
10:27 pm: the misplaced dance maneuvers begin. They begin with Fergie and end with the hugely overweight woman we are sharing the ER with who has been violently screaming for 45 minutes that her tarantulas are eating her legs and that amputation is imminent. The social worker attempts to convince her otherwise. Fails. Woman calms down long enough to perform a complicated body roll upon observation of Fergie. We are stunned.
10:59 pm: another, much smaller but equally as crazy, woman appears carrying what may be the world's most well-stocked bag of salted goods. Places Doritos in front of her, crackers next to her, and Pringles in her lap. Eats Pringle after Pringle (she'd popped and couldn't, in fact, stop) until she began to lose track of where she had placed all of them and they began to accumulate on the floor below her as well as wedging themselves between her thighs. At this point realized we had spent much of our evening staring at the thighs and bosoms of fellow ER guests (visitors? victims? sociopaths?) and turned a newfound intensity of focus back to the TV.
11:05 pm: Aimee gets stitches to the sounds of tarantula woman, who had ostensibly been granted her one phone call, screaming that the hospital was going to kill her. At that point, I am fairly convinced that they gladly would have, especially considering the fact that a nurse, upon our departure, rolled her eyes in Madame Arachnid's direction and shrugged, "She's a regular." Good god. You couldn't pay me enough.

So we had, blessedly, escaped massive blood loss and gotten our dose of fluffy pop music and awkward dance moves, which is about all you can ask for in your average Friday night, I suppose.
You may be wondering about the well-poured drinks... we found them, in the form of the Silver Bullet, surrounding our two drunk roommates who had sprawled out in the living room with a case of Coors Light to wait for our return. God Bless the Rockies.

Happy Belated Birthday Schlossmo, if there is a sign that the universe loves you and wants you to be happy, it has got to be in the fact that for your big 2-4, it got you the cleanest glass cut Swedish has ever seen! Love you.

(ps. this event hit us a bit harder than it otherwise would have because it forced us to realize that it could have happened to ANY of us, which is fine, except that not all of us have medical insurance and stitches don't run cheap. Which is why I was thrilled a few days later to hear about this: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/14/business/14cnd-mayo.html?8au&emc=au)