Bend, OR Part 3

You should not move to Bend if 

1. You don't want to see your UPS guy out at the grocery store

2. You want to spectate professional or collegiate sports

3. You don't want to see your FedEx guy out at the bar

4. You want to be a homeowner

I am not trying to convince you to move to Bend. I think a lot of you would hate living here. What I am trying to convince you to do is confirm whether it feels natural to make plans with other people (not animals) where you live, or if it brings you stress and/or requires that you isolate for at least one day, ideally two, before attending. 

Some of you may think I'm being dramatic. If that's you, it sounds like you're in the right place and that's fantastic! I'm not even being sarcastic. 

For a lot of years I lived subconsciously preparing to socialize, exhausted by the potential of burning through eleven topics without finding something on which to carry a meaningful conversation; of probably having to scream "WHAT?!" every other sentence as the sounds of 54 other interactions ricochet off the walls; and of enduring bar-hop limbo where the only ticket out of being peer-pressured to continue is to vomit on your friend. ON your friend. In a bathroom stall isn't enough. ON your friend's skirt was the only way to escape home. Skin-to-vom contact may even get your ride home paid for by the group. Ka-ching!

Selfishly, I feel comfortable here because no one has travel plans to countries I'm not even sure on which continent they are. I can finally close the 'map of the earth' tab I used to have handy to save face with the worldly travelers of cosmopolitan places. "Oh wow Romania! I know their lettuce well. One second I have to use the restroom I'll be back so fast." If people from Bend are traveling, it's probably by car and when they arrive, they will probably eat beans from a pouch and sleep on a sack of their own bean breath.

I fear I've oversold Bend because and now people are visiting me. When my visitors send me their flight information, I type and re-type a response imploring that they reset their expectations, otherwise Bend is destined to be an underwhelming place and you'll feel like you wasted your PTO and airline points. Unless of course you've experienced the exact sequence of life events I have (God, what we wouldn't give to play The Sims for hours on end again...). The people that visit enjoy it but I can't say they love it like I do, and that's perfectly okay. I don't know if it's because you have to fork over a bunch of cash to rent a bike in order to experience the best parts of town, or that "the best parts of town" are only a 7.4/10 on the rating scale and when you travel somewhere with at least one connecting flight, you want to be hitting high 9s. 

I don't like the airport situation either. When I lived in Chicago my friend invited me to Ireland (it took a while to find IRELAND on my map of the earth and not EYERLIND). Flying to Ireland from Chicago is the same round trip travel time as from Bend to Milwaukee. Same travel time, similar level of inebriated populous, different degrees of Instagrammable moments (I think, I didn't end up going to Ireland... or Eyerlind for that matter.)

I can't deny the effect Bend has had on me. Now I am someone who asks the person squeezing literally all the oranges at Safeway if they can find me a good one? I don't even eat oranges. I only eat clementines that have been peeled bald of every single white string. This is an innocuous personal fact that a random middle aged man at the grocery store now knows about me. I'm sure I'll see him out on the trails in a few months, probably snacking on an orange, and we will wave to each other and remark how effective oranges are as fuel. If only we had orange trees in our yards! I don't even have a yard...

I also can't deny the effect that Bend hasn't had on me. Inevitably at 7:30 PM as the most beautiful sunset known to the Pacific Northwest unfolds a 20-minute walk up the street, my phone is two inches from my face scrolling Facebook marketplace for a canoe I'll only use two times because "I am so exhausted after a very full day of streamlining enterprise systems and facilitating synergistic communication" that I simply cannot be bothered to go to the river five minutes away. 

Then there are things that are the same but different. Now I have a tab of the human musculoskeletal system always open so I can identify which muscle that is that I've never seen before on the person that just dusted me up a climb. My pants still don't fit but because of a budding vastus medialis which I dislike almost as equally as visceral fat but figure it may increase my chances of riding horses into my 80s. I'm actually the one peer pressuring people to spend their weekends away from their dogs and cats and in some cases, goats. Call me a hypocrite, call me a Bendite, call me on the phone... I might actually pick up now!