Prairie Landing
Oh, to be a Lap
This
exhibit in Lapland made entirely of ice blocks is really cool!
Sparkly socks -n- sparkly sex!
Yesterday we went thrift shopping in Boys Town, which is the gayest neighborhood I've ever been to. We stopped in a store that was booming Madonna. They marked everything down 50% because they were moving and I got two pairs of sparkly socks for only $4 apiece! I yelled at the owner, "Why are you moving?" He looked at me like I was crazy and yelled back, "Well, it's not exactly a retail street." I asked him what he meant, justifying my ignorance along the way, and he said, "Let me put it this way. 44 stores have closed here in two years. Five new porn stores have opened in this block. We sell to ages 16 to 40. When you were 16, would your mom have let you come here?"
I said I understood. But the truth is that my mom would've let me go there. The problem would've been keeping her out of the sex shops. The store owner said, "You were lucky."
Pictures of our neighborhood!
I found this nice little
slideshow online. It makes our neighborhood look so pretty! Leaves, flowers, and no filthy slush. M-spot just ordered a digital camera so perhaps there will be some real photos from us online soon.
It may help for me to explain that slides 1-7 are Lincoln Square, a neighborhood that is not ours, but where we plan on looking for a condo someday, if I ever get a job. (The houses look just like ours, though.)
Slides 8-15 are from Lincoln Square to our neighborhood, Wrigleyville.
Slide 17, the "infill," provides a most excellent example of what's wrong with Chicago architecture (other than the Prairie crap, which by the way is not uniformly as bad as I thought). When someone wants to build a new condo, they build a townhouse that is so square, so cut-off, it looks JUST like it was built out of Legos! Here's a
front view of one. The new condos in Baltimore and Philly may look yuppified, but at least they're designed to imitate and blend in with the older homes surrounding them. Oh me oh my, I don't even know where to begin on this.
The infill is about a block away from our house, as is Wrigley Stadium.
Corporate annual reports can be fun!
In my idleness, I'm taking an online investor relations course. Our end-of-term project involves poring over 7 companies' annual reports. We got to pick the companies, although you had to pick 3 from every industry because you could pretty much bet at least half the companies would be slack and never send you the report. Why anyone invests in them, I can't imagine. (Yes YOU, Coca-Cola!)
It's a really, really boring project, but here are some nuggets of amusement:
- Tiffany's manufactures most of its jewelry in Rhode Island. Who knew?
- In the part where you have to list risks that could damage next year's revenues, Halliburton cited the risk of getting sued if that
stolen radioactive material ever, ahem, turns up. Other risks noted by Halliburton included sanctions against Libya; war; peace; a negative outcome in the asbestos lawsuit the company is fighting; and getting investigated for accounting irregularities.
- The key to profitability in the porn industry is to recycle content. Push it online, push it through cable, and dub it for international distribution. (Do you
really have to dub porn?)
- Motorola's inside cover features an all-American family of four watching TV while the dad aims the remote. Dad is hogging the couch, the kids are sitting on the floor, and Mom is kneeling behind the couch. Everyone is having the goddam time of their lives, like they never watched a TV before. Oh, and the daughter and mom are blonde, son and dad brunette.
- The next photo in the Motorola report features a Japanese kid using his cell phone.
- It's true, everyone is incorporated in Delaware. Except Bacardi, which I wasn't allowed to use because it is incorporated in the Bahamas, and Vanguard, which has some sort of Communist ownership structure that apparently includes myself.
Ugh
Apparently Urban Outfitters isn't just an apostle of hyper-PoMo consumerism and sweatshop supporter, but also a big-time contributor to
Rick Santorum. Interesting
story in Philadelphia Weekly, brought to my attention courtesy of
YoungPRPros. (They're abuzz about the U.O. t-shirts that say "Voting is for old people.")
Yesterday I went to do laundry and someone’s clothes were still in the washer and dryer. I moved everything out of the way, started my laundry, went back up and realized, “I live in the Midwest now, so I don’t have to be an asshole. I could actually knock on my neighbor’s door and make sure he didn’t forget all about his laundry.” It also helped that only one other guy besides M. lives here, so having glimpsed the clothes, I already knew which door to knock on.
So I went down to the basement and knocked on the entirely wrong door, generating in the process lots of weird squeaky noises which occasionally emanate from the water heater. My neighbor
scared the bejeezus out of me by returning to get his laundry while my ear was pressed against the door trying to figure out if the squeaks meant someone was coming.
It turns out that the noises, which sound like a bird trapped deep within in the water heater, are actually the sounds of his roommate’s bird trapped in her bedroom and wanting conversation. I had been wondering about this for some time.
It also turns out that my neighbor, Greg, is a
web designer. He is also a DJ, which I knew because his mailbox says “DJ Greg Haus,” so I figured I should check out his web work too. Man, what a jackpot!! His sites make me want to
start wearing a yellow feathered cape and calling myself Zazoo! And dye my hair with
leopard spots! And not
tape my nipples with duct tape!
Did you think Chicago was a pale and cheerless place in the winter? Wrong! How could it be, when
the club down the street offers $2 Chocolate Pussy Martinis every single Wednesday?
“I have found paradise, and it is a grocery store”
Last Thursday I wandered around Uptown, a neighborhood near mine with a sketchy reputation (which seemed quite undeserved, but my good friend Mister McFoolery tells me it changes at night). It turns out Uptown is home to a Southeast Asian neighborhood complete with Thai jewelers, DVD vendors and (I kid you not) neon sign makers.
I found a shopping center with this hokey pagoda archway over the parking lot entrance. There was a HUGE grocery store with everything from squid bits to chow fun noodles. They had bottles of fake soy sauce so heavy you could concuss someone with them ($4!!). Plus about 20 kinds of mystery greens, vats of 4 different animals' blood, and a cardboard box of sausage with a pair of scissors in the box so you could take the length you wanted.
Today we went back and in one aisle I found something called a Moon Cake whose ingredients were so ridiculously incompatible that I had to try it. Here they are: Winter melon candy, sunflower seeds, almonds, cashew, sesame seeds, lard, pork sausage, dry pineapple, corn oil, eggs, wheat flour, sugar, baking powder, honey, potassium carbonate. This was not in the refrigerated section, btw. I ate some and needless to say it was weird.
The Asian experience follows other recent discoveries of an amazing Middle Eastern market (frozen kibbeh, labneh and sacks of fresh warm pita, sigh!) and an entire street full of Indo-Pak stuff (nothing as good as Not Just Spices in Providence, but I’ll keep looking).
Never again will I want for cheap shiitakes or pomegranate concentrate!
All about my job search
The short version of my job hunt status is that I'm supposed to have a 4th interview sometime soon with a PR agency. In many countries, after four meetings our children would not only be engaged, but the exchange of donkeys would have been negotiated and the bridal veils sewn. But there you go.
I don't mind, though, because I'm enjoying my time off, especially now that I feel no panicked obligation to apply for every job out there. If they offer me the job -- and I will be very surprised if they don't, after all that -- I'll almost certainly take it. It's the kind of PR I want to do more of, an opportunity to build a new part of the business, radda radda radda. Plus it's not a multi-hour trek into the hinterlands like my sister's job. And after three interviews, I've now met all of my potential coworkers. They seem competent and friendly, which are the two basic things you look for in coworkers.
The only circumstance in which I would not accept this job is if they tell me I have to wait 6 months for my vacation time since
no employer is going to stand between
me and
my beach trip. I want to be very clear on this point.
So that's the current status. Over the past 2 months I've applied for maybe 40 or 50 jobs, talked with about half that number of people, and interviewed with six companies.
My other interviews: Weird, weird, weird
I interviewed with one agency that had moved into their office space right behind a collapsing dot-com. The dot-com people had fled, leaving all of their pricey industrial-chic furniture, so the agency didn't need to redecorate. I went in there and seriously felt like it was 1999. I didn't get that job because I don't know enough about natamycin spores and whey protein, if you can believe it.
Another place, a big financial information company, smelled like chocolate because of a nearby factory. The HR person I met lived near her work and said, "It's actually kind of gross to wake up to the chocolate smell every day." I managed to restrain myself from telling her what you wake up to when you spend your childhood next to a mushroom farm.
For that interview, they had me sit in a conference room and every half hour on the half hour someone new would come in to interview me. This went on for 2 1/2 hours. None of them appeared to have coordinated with one another, so every conversation was the same. "I don't know if K. told you anything about the position, but here's how I would describe it . . ."
At another place, the HR person made me fill out a 4-page application form including the name of my high school principal. I was about 75 percent through and suffering badly from hand cramps when she said, "Oh, don't worry about the rest" and whisked me away to her office. It was snowing outside and her office was nearly dark. She sat, silhouetted against the window so I couldn't read her expression, and fired about 50 questions at me in maybe 25 minutes. She would cut me off if my answers were too long. I didn't get that job, but as you can imagine I don't mind too much.
The quiet end of the job-hunting spectrum
When I was looking for jobs last year, it was more like, go online, look for anything remotely PR-related, do some searches. Something would come up that was a two-hour commute, and something would come up for door-to-door vacuum cleaner sales. And most sites would come up with zip. I'd call people to network and everyone would say, "Well, you know, CVS is headquartered in Woonsocket. Maybe you should try them." I'd be done with my job-hunting by 11 a.m. and say to the cat, "Oh, what shall I do with the rest of my day?" Much more laid-back, though much more frustrating. I was very lucky to get a job so quickly, AND have it be someplace I really liked.
Welcome to my blog! We begin with the customary explanation of its name.
Before I moved here, people told me, "You're gonna love Chicago -- the food, the architecture, everything about it. It's not all filthy and mean like New York. And sure, it's in the Midwest, but it's cosmopolitan." I.e., no need to buy suspenders and ConAgra stock.
About 60 percent of this was true, including the cosmopolitan part, but I was in for a shocker when I got here and saw things with "Prairie" in the title. I was like, what, I live on the prairie? Prairies have howling blizzards and Michael Landon. The prairie is where you die from diptheria on the Oregon Trail (as played on the Apple 2e) and prairie dogs pop out of holes in your dirt cabin floor.
Yup, it's the prairie all right
So I go back and forth. Sometimes I feel like all's right with the world and Chicago is just a remote outpost of the East Coast Megalopolis that is my native habitat, and other times I feel like the city is just an encrustment on a sprawling, alien continent.
The city is laid out in a perfect grid; after an hour here, I was no longer able to get lost (except in the suburbs). One of the streets north of us goes east to the Lake and west to Montana. It's as if the grid was formed along with the Earth, and the city just showed up with an asphalt truck and paved it over.
Did you ever read the book "Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions"? It's this book, I guess you would call it Euclidean political satire, written a hundred years ago when presumably readers were more bored and less repelled by nerdy puns. Anyway, Flatland was Chicago before they built Chicago.
Grids Gone Wild
Unfortunately, people here are so inspired by their grid-making success that they have applied its theories to every object made since 1906. This is called the Prairie School, aka the Chicago School.
Imagine your city burned down to the ground, five square miles of it, and you got to rebuild from scratch. And somebody says to you, "OK, you can do whatever you want, but you can only use horizontal rectangles. No colors, just brown. And nothing flammable, just bricks and cinderblocks. Hey, what the hell are you doing with those red bricks!" That's what everything looks like: squat, brown, and rectangular. Much like public school architecture circa 1960.
Here's a page with lots of pictures, mostly Frank Lloyd Wright stuff, and
here's a row of these houses (which, by the way, you get historic tax credits for restoring).
I actually don't think these houses are ugly all by themselves. But fill a whole city with this style, add some bare trees, clouds and gray slush to the picture and damn, it is a bleak, depressing school of architecture. But see, that's the whole point -- the architecture's supposed to be "naturalistic."
What I find truly over-the-top is that the Prairie doesn't stop at the front door. I saw this glossy interior design magazine and it was brown wood, brown furniture, rectangles everywhere. You're supposed to buy accessories to match. It's like some kind of Hell constructed with me in mind.
I should probably stop now before you grab a pike and start marching. I'll leave you with these two conclusions for today:
1. I love Chicago.
2. Frank Lloyd Wright was my nemesis in a previous life.
