Sheecago

is too many months to not be home

I just realized that despite not having a wireless network in my apartment, I can, while sitting in bed, get onto my neighbor’s. You don’t realize how amazing hazy, lazy and unfettered time on the WORLD WIDE WEB is until you’ve spent the whole summer without the luxury. Tonight, the book goes down and the mindless TV watching swoops in.

Journey: thoroughly experience the yellow line, everything along the way, and get to Skokie.

Reflection: Very, very boring. Got off the train, walked around for less than an hour, got on the train back to Howard, took the purple line to Davis and spent the day reading at Northwestern, trying to glean a feeling of intelligence through osmosis from all the other studious college kids. For the time (too much) that I was in Skokie, I observed lots of Jewish stores, eateries and bagel markets. Not friendly to single girls walking around anchorless, direction-less and without conviction. The coolest thing was a car dealership that sold pimped out minivans for disabled people.

I need to stop taking the train to nondescript suburbs hoping for some epiphanic moment. It never happens.

The 36 is a Broadway bus. It runs through Lincoln Park, starting downtown, and goes north up to Harrison. It’s a nice line, I suppose, that does the things city buses are intentionally (get you places) and unintentionally (allow you to harmlessly observe a little mobile ecosystem of strangers as you travel) supposed to do. The other day though, when friends and I were helplessly lost trying to find the Windy City Rib Festival, a driver of the 36 north said something interesting to me. He said:

You never know how long a ride on this bus is going to take. This is the bus for wackos. This is where the crazy people ride. You never know what to expect on this bus, only that you should watch for yourself.

He said these things from behind a thick plastic shield, a wraparound, sturdy force field against projectiles, assaults, spit and other things passengers feel compelled to toss around. He wasn’t particularly happy, this man. He didn’t give off that proud bus driver vibe that many often do.

The idea of a route being characterized by the class of people that frequent it seems hard to do. So many people — different, similar, sane, insane, rich, poor — ride the bus. What makes a good one, a bad one? But when you do think about it, it’s hard to deny certain personalities of particular bus routes. The time of day and direction matter a great deal, but there are ostensible attitudes within different buses. The 151 Express southbound on weekday mornings is a quiet, efficient bus full of pencil skirt wearing women, suit and skinny tie wearing men, newspapers and Time and Newsweek and Starbucks cups. The 146 southbound towards the Museum Campus all times of the day is a bus of families, strollers, bus backlog, crying and screaming, big clans, wiggly kids, child leashes and sippy cups and big maps. The 152 Addison is a Cubs bus and it’d be seemingly unwise to wear Sox gear aboard this one. These are all pretty positive attributes though, right? There’s not a real aversion to riding any of these routes. It makes sense why they are what they are – the 152 goes around the field, the 146 goes to all the museums, the 151 takes people who live up north down to work in the mornings. But why is it that the 36 – the wacky – bus is the way it is? How can a bus that runs parallel to the 22 from downtown, up through a nice part of Lincoln Park, through Boystown and up north, how can this bus be the crazy bus?

I’m trying to figure out why. Why is this bus so distinct? And why does it get such a negative review by its own driver?

The 36, northbound, southbound – any direction you ride it, is a wild trip. It’s a smelly 7-mile sitcom on wheels, revealing at each stop a new plot twist. There is, most noticeably, a scent. Rolling up and down the aisle, there is a ubiquitous tumbleweed of body odor so pungent that it assaults your olfactory senses. It draws from the farrago of personal smells of the passengers, many who appear homeless, many more of who appear to not wear deodorant. It’s a sensational thing really, the individual odors from everyone tangled together and permeating the fabrics of the seats. If the smell doesn’t get to you, the social stimulation will. The peculiarities of the riders are amplified by their utterances, their myriad baggage, bags of cat litter, piles of goods, dramatic clothing. The seldom moments of total silence on the 36 are punctuated by outbursts and bodily expulsions. People snap, grab, roll around. Eventually, as a rider of this route, even with headphones on, you become oblivious to the aversion of screaming and shouting. People aboard the 36 like to make noises, make things uncomfortable, say things that in most other settings would be rendered entirely inappropriate. But somehow, in this closed little capsule of CTA invincibility, it’s all okay. Rider Randomness is just something you accept. And too, spacing is a peculiar thing here. Usually on buses, seats are filled, bodies consume spaces, and emptiness is rarely a thing. There’s bus etiquette that dictates leaving seats empty for handicapped people and moving towards the back to vacate the front area. But aboard the 36, even during rush hour, something interesting happens. Seats are left unfilled. People avoid each other. For fear, perhaps, of osmosis by closeness, the “wackos” have a wide berth of space around them. I feel almost radical when I ride the 36, wearing deodorant, keeping to myself, not carrying a ton of baggage – literally and figuratively.

Why are we scared of these things? Why did the bus driver, in a jaded and depressive tone, have to say he was like a guinea pig driving the 36?

The people on the 36 are different, right? But when you ride the 152 as a Sox fan, do you cower to yourself in a seat in the very back and try to stay clear of passengers who radiate Cubs pride? Do you make a lavish production of holding your purse and trying to inhale through your nose when you ride the 146 because, as a single rider, you are most certainly unlike the other people riding? No you do not. Because you think to yourself that they have enough in common with you where you can still feel safe. They’re different, but they’re not that different. They’re not wacky.

I think we have an inborn reticence to admit to differences between ourselves and people who look, smell, act, dress like us. We avoid people who are so blatantly unlike us, and seek the comfort and security of our demographic because it’s easy to assume that everyone riding our bus, living in our building, shopping at our stores is enough like us where we can trust them. But who is to say that the man in the business suit sitting next to you on a commuter train isn’t a pedophile, a new dad, a porn star, a baseball agent, a man addicted to gambling? The woman dressed in rags and smelling of stale urine who is huddled in the back of the bus isn’t a new mom, a huge fan of Twilight, a liar, a thief, a vegetarian?

Safety is one thing, and one that cannot be understated. Buses can be (are sometimes) dangerous, so is the city itself and so is being alone. This isn’t an issue of trying to inject yourself into positions where you’re the obvious minority and celebrating diversity by laughing and drinking a beer with the homeless man on the bus beside you.  It’s not a call to arms to ride the bus late at night, to avoid what’s comforting and seek out what’s dangerously uncomfortable.

But what buses make evident is that diversity is everywhere. It’s easy to say that you have the 36 and the 151, the wacky bus and the professional bus. But I think that with enough time, enough rides, enough points of engagement and interaction, you realize that you have me and you and them and us and we. And you have that everywhere, on every route, in every neighborhood.

Journey: thoroughly experience the pink line, everything along the way, and get to 54^th/Cermak.

Reflection: Kind of like Rancho Cordova. A lot of brick, smokestacks and chimneys; so much so that, that one almost expects to see Charlie Buckett’s dilapidated home at the end of the line. *Only served by a two-car train, which implies low rider ship, which suggests minimal attraction and safety, which should have been a signal I heeded to. One of the three times this summer I’ve felt unsafe and uncomfortable. All free publications print in at least two languages. Nice Czech restaurant. Snarky bus drivers. Unreliable public transportation. Despite being at the end of the pink line, this was not at all an area that fits the color pink; it’s probably more of a dark gray, dark brown, violent orange kind of place.

It might have been hot and probably a dangerous day, but the line on my map is now extended to the end of the pink line.

*When I told the train driver what I was doing, going to spend the day on the pink line, he replied with “I think there’s a Dunkin’ Donuts and a gas station in Cicero, and maybe a Kmart. But that’s probably it.”

They add new words to the dictionary every year. It’s a big production to christen words that have newly been integrated into our everyday vernacular. An English major might not get me far career-wise, but it does allow for an appreciation of words. Which is why I propose a new word for us.

Whynot. It would be a verb.

How did you spend your day today?

I was whynotting. I went on a run; I rode a bus to the end of the line, didn’t really like what was there, tried reading a Spanish newspaper but failed pretty miserably; got on the bus to come home and then spent the afternoon at a three-story no-kill cat shelter even though cats can be pretty gross.

Why did you do those things?

Why not?

It can be used in the present tense, in the past tense, it can even be used in the future tense (as in: All I really want to do is take the day off work and whynot for 9 hours instead of sitting behind a desk.) And it can even be condensed into one word, to save the cumbersome space between why and not. Whynot, right?

If we’re not working or studying or making money or writing or achieving tangible points of accomplishment, we’re wasting time. That’s how we’ve been groomed, right? We’ve been trained to fear existence. When existence is nothing but existence (and not growth, improvement, training), then it’s a bad thing. We need to do things for a reason. And Why Not is not an acceptable reason. When you reply with a Why Not when asked about why you do what you do, you sound callous and arrogant. You sound like you’re brushing off responsibility. But that’s not how things should be. That’s not what whynotting is about.

Whynotting should be what you do when can do whatever you want. When you have time. When you aren’t tied down at all. It should be what you personally want and need and are excited about doing. Why do we need a reason to do the things we do? Why can’t we just do without feeling our behaviors and actions must be propelled by an overarching goal to progress ourselves?

When you don’t know a lot of people and don’t have a lot of commitments, it’s easier to whynot. Independence and whynotting go hand in hand, mostly because when you’re alone, you feel less pressure to do the things other people want you to. Ride buses, read bad books, go to bed early, cook food and give it to homeless people, walk home in the rain, admit to feeling down when you’re feeling down.

Don’t feel you need to justify what you’re doing. Just do it.  Do what makes you happy and see where it takes you.

Why not?

Chicago, like many big cities, has something called a City Pass. For about seventy dollars, you get a booklet that includes tickets to six of the cities most popular attraction. It’s sold as a “Convenient Ticket to Everything” type deal, and gives tourists reason (and a compelling one at that; they’ve spent money already) to see Navy Pier, the Field, the Shedd, MSI, the Adler and a few other big, impressive buildings that hold within their doors some big, impressive things to take pictures of.

They are neat things for a few reasons: primarily, they bring myriad landmarks to the average city tourist; they make that daunting obligation of feeling you need to see everything, everything, and everything! in a vacation easier to fulfill. It’s price effective; using the three tickets on the Museum Campus (Field, Shedd, Adler) alone makes it worth the booklet price. They provide an anchor for daily planning, as tourists often mold an entire day around the tickets within the book. Everyone deserves to see these things, and perhaps would be too intimated to indulge in their touristy glamour if it were not for the City Pass.

But there’s a big problem with these “Problem Solving” books. They’ve become too effective.

It’s the Season Pass Phenomena. The very thing that made your mother furious when she bought you the Sunsplash Summer Pass in seventh grade; the same reason you only ski until noon when you have a season pass at a ski resort; the same reason you find yourself eating at weird places that are totally out of the way when you buy an Entertainment Book every fall. You have the tickets, so 1) you don’t need to spend the whole day getting your money’s worth and 2) you must redeem every discounted ticket included in the booklet.

So instead of spending an entire day (which is less than it deserves anyway) sauntering around one of the coolest natural history museums in the country, the Field, looking at the dinos, the fossils, the evolution exhibits, the shells, the animals, the fish, the Native American stuff, the shoes, all that…instead of giving one building the time it deserves, families with the City Pass feel compelled to hit the Field, the Shedd and the Adler in one afternoon. It’s a no-win situation really. Then the next day might be spent at Navy Pier, on the Water Taxi, in the Hancock.

What this does is one of two things. It either: piques the interest of kids at one museum (Wow, Mother, look at how the coral reef actually is alive, as opposed to being dormant like I once that it was) and then before there’s enough time to let it all absorb, the parents drag the family (often sweaty, sometimes identifiable by 37 strollers and child leashes and gift bags with overpriced stuffed animas) to the next museum in the queue. And as much as I love educational opportunities, see the value in exposing kids to a variety of stimulation, I can see no benefit in giving them a periphery, very, very shallow introduction to these museums, thereby depriving them of any real connections.

Education needs to be internalized. We need to feel like we discovered something, that

we own a little bit of the museum, that we read something, learned something, saw something that makes our newly acquired knowledge extraordinary. But when an eight year old is up from 9-6 (to maximize time and money, of course) sprinting from buses to museums to new, special exhibits to shows to gift shops to cafes to bathrooms it’s more disastrous than it is effective. That kind of internalization does not happen. Instead, we have cranky kids, cranky parents, a brief introduction to a whole bunch of stuff, and more likely than not, touristy snapshots taken in front of some statues and plaques that mean nothing to people. It makes sense why it happens; parents want to be the best parents they can; parents have tickets to everything; everything is so convenient, we don’t have a lot of time in this city. But slow down. Take a breath. Don’t feel obligated to do everything. Why order a buffet and walk away feeling bloated, when you could get by on soup and a salad?

I work in a museum (and one that is at the end of the Museum Campus, which means that we usually get a rush of people at the end of the day who visit as the last stop on their whirlwind museum tour). And I can securely say that nobody deserves this chaos. It’s admirable, parents, to want to treat your kids to the most and the best and to teach them smart spending by utilizing fully the City Pass. But kids don’t need all the stimulation…in one day. It’s too much. Slow down. Saunter instead of speed walk. Read plaques, touch things, take museum tours, sit and look and breathe – and dedicate a whole day to one place. That’s when the learning happens.

There are a few things that I was not expecting this summer in Chicago: rats at night, extraordinarily high taxes and rain storms that have such powerful currents that they seem to paralyze the entire city. There are lots of other things that were unexpected, for better or worse, but mostly these three stand out right now.

The rats. They’re weird. They’re everywhere. They’re unafraid, they’re blatant and they most certainly are not confined to dumpsters and dives and dark barrios. They scurry around when the sun goes down — around good apartment buildings and bad ones, too — and just exist without the humility that’s often associated with finicky rodents. But they’re easy enough to get used to.

The taxes are pretty lousy and annoying. The Tribune printed an article the other day about how outrageous taxes all over the city are. From sales taxes, to traveling tax, to all those other myriad taxes that are tagged onto important and unimportant things — Chicago is one of the highest-taxed cities in the country. But considering all the good things that go on in this place, it’s justified and easy enough to get used to.

The rain though. That’s what’s most remarkable to me. Maybe to admit surprise to weather patterns here in the Midwest is a statement replete with naivete. It rains a lot here? It pours and pours and pours, and the skies rumble with such tremendous chaos that tornado sirens can ring, and buses can stall and you can literally be trapped inside wherever you are because the doors are unable to open because of wind currents? Those big spires and spikes sticking on top of the Sears and Hancock and Trump Tower — those are lightning rods to protect the city against the magnificent lighting shows that break out more often than not? These questions, I feel, are kind of asked in that same annoying tone of pillowed shock people express when you tell them that California isn’t all Beach and OC. Yup.

Yup. Yup.

I had no idea it rained/stormed/pre-tornado-ed/lightning/whatever-elsed so drastically here in the summer. Somehow I was tricked into believing it was all sun and games and mild summer humidity and tickles of occasional sweat droplets. The winters were the extreme time, but the summers. The summers were perfect. Oh lord. No.

The rains here — whether these of late are an aberration or not — are incredible, they’re outstanding; they, like those in New Orleans, captivate you, hold you, suffocate you, drench you, make you horribly annoyed and entirely enthralled at the same time. Storms like the one that happened today victimize people. It makes you helpless, hopeless against staying dry. Umbrellas, rain boots, jackets — all rendered totally useless once the winds kick in and the sheets start falling. And how remarkable is that? It’s a cool perspective thing, I think. To realize something as organic and pure as weather patterns can disrupt our daily lives so makes us feel a lot smaller than we tend to inflate ourselves to be. That’s cool.

In California, I always associated rain with gloomy winter and fall days. Rain is what happened on the days where it was perpetually dark and cold and you wanted to wear flannel and drink something hot. But here, and in New Orleans (and in so many other awesome places too), rain has different connotations. It’s a hot thing. A summer thing. You can feel it coming. It’s personified as an ‘it’ because it’s so darn controlling. It doesn’t always linger, as it does on those blue October days in California. It bursts in and tears around violently, usurping all control from the clouds and then the sky. And then it’ll clear. Just like that. Gone.

Everyone at school has rain boots, and they do serve a purpose. The streets flood when it rains in New Orleans and you usually have to wade to class when it gets bad. They’re in storage now, away, because who would think to bring rain boots to Chicago? (probably not the same people who ask if you can see the Hollywood sign from Sacramento…) I’m glad I don’t have them though; glad I never have an umbrella when I should, or a rain coat when it’s pouring.

To be caught ‘naked’ during these storms has an incredibly powerful effect. Because nothing is more refreshing than nature — rats and rain included.

is so much cooler now, after an Adler work party. It’s also sad that for the one time in my life that I’m truly, really interested in star-gazing, the only thing you can see in the night sky is the glow of downtown and the John Hancock’s red rings. Lake Tahoe summer nights seem so much more magical!

Also, whatever little insulated bubble of metropolitan invincibility I thought I was living in was popped today. There was a robbery at Mamacita’s tonight. A woman wearing a fanny pack was swiped and robbed and for some reason, I was the only witness. The fact that perhaps this was an inevitable punishment for her fashion choice is a detail that is being withheld.