August 2010
1 post
Eight months
is too many months to not be home
July 2010
9 posts
Honey, I'm 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.
The Skokie Swift kind of sucks
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...
All aboard the clue train
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...
Pink line party
Journey: thoroughly experience the pink line, everything along the way, and get to 54th/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,...
Why not
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...
Stop and smell the museums
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,...
On rain and rats
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...
Astronomy
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...
June 2010
5 posts
You know
those moments where you find yourself entirely and wholeheartedly satisfied? The times where if, by some inexplicable force of power, your life was frozen in an exact second, you feel like you could remain content for the remainder of your life? Sometimes they are acute instances, other times it’s an hour or an afternoon or a day - but regardless of the time frame, there are some times when...
Today I learned
that camote, a Mexican sweet potato side dish, is also a slang sex word in Spanish.
The Chicago Public Library
on State Street smells like urine, body odor and stale salted pretzels. But there is free Internet, and lots of people watching to do. Now that I’ve got a library card, I’m proud to call myself a regular at this happening hot-spot.
On spaceships, living alone and serving "the best...
Today my 30-day CTA pass expired as I was trying to get home from Addison after work. Which means that I had to walk home in the rain. It also means that I’ve been in Chicago for a month. Maybe it’s because I like timelines and reflecting and fragments of things, but it seems like a pretty monumental milestone. It means summer is one third over; it means that in thirty days I’ve...
May 2010
6 posts
Contrary to popular belief
the Northern Star is not the brightest star; nor is it anywhere close to holding the title. It is the 41st brightest star in the night sky
Nothing like
a Jewel Osco preferred card to make you feel like a Chicago resident
Contemplating Chaos
Between my first day at Adler and then the dinner shift at Mamacita’s yesterday, I worked eleven hours — with a forty minute break that was spent trying to get from all the way downtown to Lincoln Park in rush hour, which was probably worth more stress than the entirety of the day’s work. There were a lot of things that I did wrong, and a lot of reasons that the day could have...
New Plot Twist
Working as a waitress at a Mexican restaurant that claims to have a unique approach to casual dining: “We serve fresh food”
Working as Mission Specialist at Adler Planetarium, which is less like a Disneyland Space Mountain job, and more like an educator meets museum curator job
Ruminations of the Holy Day
Today I ran to the Bean and then took a bus back. Spent the afternoon at the zoo with very good people. And tonight, I movie hopped alone while eating a dinner from Trader Joes that I inconspicuously snuck in in a grocery bag.
Since I’m not really working full-time and since there’s no real justification for taking a day off, perhaps this kind of lackadaisical Sunday is undeserved....
