Portland is the best city in America

To hear little jokes made at Portland’s expense is relatively common. People say, “Oh, you live in Portland? Why don’t you put a bird on it (it being anything from your bicycle messenger bag to your personal checks to mowing a bird into your front lawn)?” or “How’s your retirement going?”  The savvy youth know these references began with the popular IFC tv series Portlandia, which the youth probably also realize is widely available for streaming through various internet outlets. (Big ups to free media!) During the opening credits of the show, one character states: “Portland is a city where young people go to retire.”  

I’ve been living in Portland for almost four months, and I see where the jabs at Portland are coming from. Youth culture is alive and well. It is not uncommon to meet someone (age <40) who’s seriously underemployed. If you don’t care about recycling, getting into everything LOCAL and ORGANIC and  GREEN, you’re a minority, perhaps an outcast. If you don’t have a bicycle, you’re a minority. Hipster dive bars and coffee shops exist on nearly every corner. Bird art is HUGE (although this may have more to do with the tv show than anything inherently Portland).

The jokes are usually funny, in which case I will laugh, because I laugh at funny things. Self-deprecating humor is good for the ego, after all. But now that I’m becoming a Portlander, experiencing it all from the inside, I’m realizing that all that PDX humor is a lot more complex, less surface-level than I’d thought. The thriving youth culture, who could complain about that? (Not me, I’m 26, and I want to live it up as much as possible.) Yeah, there are hoards of people under forty who are underemployed, undereducated (formally, anyway), and don’t seem to care to do a damn thing about it.  Or at least, that’s how it might appear from the outside. I see it another way, having met handfuls of Portlanders since I’ve been here. Lots of people are underemployed, but many of them are engaging in projects and activities that they actually care about more than they care about money. They make enough to pay their rent and eat and buy tallboys of PBR or Olympia at the bar, they ride a bike so they don’t have to worry about gas prices and car maintenance. What I’m saying is they are saving time for what is actually important to them—art, music, welding, poetry, bicycle events/races, hiking, zines, or whatever. I don’t think this ideology is given enough credit, really. There are people in this world whose passion is more important to them than money??! They don’t lack ambition, they just lack ambition for getting rich. And to be honest, there are plenty of people working fulltime jobs and still making time for a 60 mile bike ride to the coast to camp for a few days, or dj at a bar/club once in awhile, making time to work on their comic strip or short story collection.  Maybe someday, the evils of capitalism will catch up with Portland, but not yet, and I’m grateful for that.

When I was living in Buenos Aires, I met people from Australia and the UK who were in their mid-twenties, and were just about to start “university.” Much different from in the US, where if you’re not finished with college by your mid-twenties, something went wrong. The reason for their delayed school track, I think, has a lot to do with the way their versions of western culture have adapted to changes in youth perception and development over time (which I bet has a lot to do with our prolonged lifespan and projected length of employment in the course of a lifetime). In other words, what’s the rush? Why push kids (yes, kids) to make big decisions about their future when they know nothing about themselves or the world yet, and when they have so much time to make such discoveries? Why push kids to take a bunch of classes they don’t care about, the information within those classes only to pass quickly through their brain, never retained? While I love my life, and I’m happy with the outcome so far, I am a little jealous of my peers who only now, at my age, are taking classes and actually learning things in them that they will remember forever, not doing it for a grade, but for the genuine betterment of the self. In Portland, this is exactly what’s happening. People in their mid-twenties and thirties are working on Undergraduate degrees, and obviously getting a lot out of it. When they graduate, they’ll have more knowledge and skills than they know what to do with, and it will probably be easier to get a job, because they ACTUALLY LEARNED SOMETHING by going to college. Portland, with its youth that are passionate, ambitious about their passions, making good decisions about education (not paying six figures for a useless degree in which they crammed for every exam and forgot all the information the next day), living modestly and earnestly and aware---these people aren't retired, they're just living the dream, and loving it. 

What else? It goes without saying, I think, the benefits of living in a place where people care about the production of local, organic food and products. (Health benefits, large-scale economic benefits, quality of life benefits).

And I mentioned earlier that I’d met handfuls of people since I’ve been here. I don’t want that phenomenon to be missed. It’s easy to meet people in Portland. All you have to do is go out and be friendly, and suddenly, you have friends! Every time I go to a pod of food carts, or a bar, or an indie show, or an organic beer festival, or to hang out in the park, the opportunity to meet new people is seriously aplenty. This is probably true in many cities, but it feels easier in Portland. I think this is because young people who act like young people see the advantages in being open to new experiences, which often starts with meeting new people. While the stigma is that Hipsters are too cool to talk to you, new to Portland, standing in line (alone!) for a savory crepe at your favorite crepe food cart, you'd probably be surprised by what happens. Talking to strangers is a Portland pastime. One of my BFF’s in Portland (a girl I met here in May), goes out by herself at night and always ends up with a bunch of new potential friends. At the very least, they’ll be inviting each other to cool events, and maybe if they hang out once or twice more in the next few weeks, they’ll form a more intimate friendship that progresses beyond acquaintanceship. I always thought that life after college would make it difficult to meet people, given that in the world at large, there are less built-in social networks, but I love Portland for proving me wrong.

I could probably go on forever about how Portland is the best city in America right now.

-cost of living is low (especially for the best I mean west coast)

- thriving art/music scene

-brewpubs per capita

-dog-friendly as hell (most restaurants/cafes allow dogs on their patios, some even allow them inside)

-bike-friendly as hell (SHARE THE ROAD is for real)

-summer weather

-winter weather, for that matter

-open-mindedness of inhabitants (I don’t like the phrase Keep Portland Weird, though)

-food-carts!
-food-love in general (taco fusion, especially)
-mountains, rivers, Pacific ocean, beaches, it’s all here

Ok, that’s enough. But where do I fit into all of this? What better place for a self (me, myself), a mid-twenties, dog-loving, overeducated server working 30ish hours a week at a fancypants restaurant that grows veggies and herbs in its garden out back and gets all of its meat and cheese and produce as locally as possible, also a writer, with an MFA even, still working on getting my first book ready to send out for publication(and only a few days ago I submitted some poems to a contest with a huge cash prize, that I could afford to submit to because of my awesome job), also in the whirlwind of the quarterlife existential crisis at times (I’m STILL a server, shouldn’t I have a REAL job???) but thanking Portland immensely for showing me that I have lots of time to pursue MYSELF before I need to worry about that REAL job in this horrendous economy, and I’m single, and did I mention how easy it is to meet people, lots of wonderful, interesting, passionate people in this city, and soon I’ll have a bicycle, because I’m moving to the Mississippi neighborhood on the east side of the river, out of the unbikefriendly West Hills which are gorgeous but useless to me in every other way, and I can’t forget about the friends I’ve made here, I love them already, and I can’t wait to keep meeting more people and loving some of them too.

Portland is the best city in America right now, and I feel so lucky to be living here, experiencing it, becoming a part of it, putting a bird on it, even. 

i didn't take this picture.