Prairie Landing

What happens in the alley, stays in the alley

2007-05-26T14:44:00.000-05:00

Like the desert in a Discovery Channel program, the alley behind our house looks bleak and uninviting, but is actually teeming with life. When it snows you can see the tracks of 4 or 5 different creatures. Rats predominate but there are also rabbits, squirrels, pigeons, cats and raccoons. This year there's been a bumper crop of bunnies, which the Trib explained is due to West Nile Virus.

We also have a regular troop of dumpster divers, who range from enterprising to visibly mentally ill. And then there are the graffiti artists. We learned that the city has a crew of "Graffiti Blasters" when some graffiti showed up on the garage door one morning and by afternoon it had been covered up by some hastily swiped, mismatched paint.

Apparently the city won't take care of privately owned dumpsters, though. This one has been around for a few weeks at least:

And I don't know how to explain this fist-sized ball of crud on the garage door:

Joint Custody

2007-05-26T13:03:00.001-05:00

A few weeks ago, in a burst of houseguest-inspired energy, my mother-in-law and I planted some flowers out front. Pansies are really the best (maybe the only) bet for April, so that's what we planted in the flower boxes.

We also bought a pot of pansies and planted them in this green pot that had been sitting with some dead weeds in front of the porch for at least a year.

Our neighbors all expressed overwhelming gratitude that someone finally planted something, especially since 3 (half!!) of them are trying to sell their condos.

Then, when the weather got warmer, I went out and bought some lantanas:

While I was repotting them, one of my neighbors from the front building approached me. She said, "Did you know that this pot [pointing to the pansies] is actually ours? It's part of our patio set." All the evidence had been that it was no-man's-pot so I just apologized and said, "These pansies'll die by June anyway." She smiled but said nothing.

A few days later the pansies moved 5 feet away, to rejoin the patio set (as pictured). The next morning they were back to our porch. Then back to the neighbor's and back to our place. Finally they settled into a pattern: On weekends they stay with the neighbors and during the week they come back.

Last Monday they came back and I started bitching, "Look at this, all these dead blossoms and I don't even think they've been watered." That was when I realized I was the divorced mother of pansies.

I think a second neighbor might have been involved in the initial tussle. He and Patio Set argue about everything at our association meetings and I don't think he was pleased about the move.

2007-05-15T22:13:00.000-05:00

The weekend before I went to Argentina, I threw a party for Darling Angel and her friend K. The DA had just finished her last CPA exam and K took the GMAT, so a party was in order for all. And to make it sweeter, I provided personalized snacks.

The party was at Matilda's, right by our house. Great party venue because it's free, free, free! No specific drink minimum and they play whatever music you want. Thanks to Colliculus for decorating the currency cookies.

Warning: More gross medical stuff

2007-03-05T22:14:00.000-06:00

On Thursday I had a fibroadenoma removed. It was no big deal, just local anaesthetic, but still it was the whole surgical routine: a sterile OR where I couldn't even wear a ring, painfully bright lights, and a sizable audience. (There was a brief period in my late 20s when it weirded me out that the students, residents and fellows were all my age, but it passed.)

They covered me up from head to toe in those green paper sheets so I couldn't see a thing. After a few minutes the student and the surgeon stopped talking and it was quiet. But not completely quiet. I could hear something very quiet and very cheesy. I asked, "What is that?" The surgeon first told me it was the cautery. I said, "I guess that explains the burning smell, but I meant the music." He said, "Oh, it's '25 or 6 to 4.'" Mistaking my curiosity for enthusiasm, someone turned the radio way up, and I was just stuck, because how can you not laugh at that song? And how can you laugh when you're having thoracic surgery?

The Straight Dope says the lyrics are about being unable to write a song:
Staring blindly into space
Getting up to splash my face
Wanting just to stay awake
Wondering how much I can take
Should I try to do some more
[Refrain]

Chicago was followed by the almost-as-funny "Jesus is Just Alright with Me" and Steely Dan's "Black Cow." Until this minute I thought the lyrics said:

Take your big black cow
And get outta here

So that was no good either.

By the time they'd moved on to appliance and lottery commercials and into a Pink Floyd block, the tumor was out. The nurse asked, "Do you want to see it?" I was kind of afraid I'd freak out, but I also really needed something to distract me from the radio, not to mention the stitches. She used forceps to nudge a little jar under my sheet, just a couple inches from my eye for me to look at. She held it there for a while, then said, "You know, you really can't see it very well in the jar." Next thing I knew, this tumor was out of the jar and 2 inches from my eye, and if I were going to freak out that would be it. But I didn't. With the same surfeit of helpfulness that probably inspired the loud music, she told me I could take it home if I was willing to pick it up from the lab this week. I passed on that one.

Every surgery should be painless and this amusing.

More benefits of education

2007-02-26T22:57:00.000-06:00

From the Boston Globe Magazine, 2/18:

According to sociologist Virginia Rutter of Framingham State College, surveys show that educated couples engage in more variety in their sex lives. They are, for example, more likely to participate in oral sex, and educated women are more likely to receive oral sex as well as perform it.

Overheard at the dentist's office

2007-02-19T14:50:00.001-06:00

"Her father's a physicist and her mother's from Missouri."

It's the New Leprosy

2007-02-18T21:13:00.000-06:00

I do a lot of work with psoriasis and one of the challenges is getting people to understand that it can be a really serious problem. People joke about the heartbreak of psoriasis, but when it's all over your body and you can't even get a haircut, or go to a picnic, or leave your house, it's a life-altering problem.

My clients keep telling us we're not making it sound dramatic enough. So they put their heads together and came up with a more compelling phrase: "a modern-day leprosy." We thought that was . . . a little over the top. We said no dermatologist would go along with that. But they persisted.

Fortunately, I was scheduled to meet with a top researcher. So I gave it a test run with him.

Me: You know, we've really been trying to tell the story of how serious this disease can be.
Dr. M: Yes, that's so important. The comorbidities, obesity, cardiovascular disease . . .
Me: Yes, well, I've even heard it referred to as, oh, something like "a modern-day leprosy."
[His eyes light up.] Dr. M: Are you familiar with the John Updike? The American writer?
Me [Not sure where this is going]: Yes . . .
Dr. M.: He had psoriasis. He wrote an autobiographical story about it. It was called, "Journal of a Leper."

Score one for the client. I told everyone about it and said I'd see if we could find the story.

Today I checked the book out of the library. (My favorite library ever, the Sulzer Library up in Lincoln Square, which is so great it's even open on Sundays.) It's so old the hardcover price was $10.00. As in, it was published before prices ended in 99. Its 15 pages include breasts and erections and the Hancock tower and Art and false, codependent love, in addition to psoriasis. I was going to copy the story and pass it around my office and the client, but now I'm not so sure.

Snow day!

2007-02-13T23:24:00.000-06:00

I've long hated February 13. When I was 8, it fell on a Monday -- which, as everyone knows, is far scarier than Friday the 13th -- and my guinea pig Izod died. The day before Valentine's Day. Ever after, I've viewed this date as nothing good.

Today started out much like that. I woke up bright and early, ready to go run some fun-filled errands before work, but it turned out that there was no hot water. I woke up my ever-handy husband and we studied the manual, but to no avail. So I called the furnace company and prepared for a day of pure suckitude.

From a financial standpoint, nothing good happened today. But overall, I can't complain. Nothing much was going on at work, for once. The furnace guys showed up well before they said they would. They fixed the problem, at least for the moment. (It involved a cookie sheet and a lot of carbon monoxide.) And by the time they left, it was almost noon and it was snowing so hard I blissfully sent out an email -- "Whereabouts: Working from home today."

My office closed at 3:30 because of the weather. This has never happened before, and really it didn't quite happen today, seeing as how all of my coworkers were still there 2 hours later. But I quit work at 6 and read a book until 7:15, when I walked out into the "blizzard" to see my friend Gordon play.

(As I told him, "Cue: 'When I lived in New England . . . '" Because the "blizzard" is only 6, maybe 8 inches tops. I don't think Chicago gets a lot of snow, but the furnace guys begged to disagree. It used to get a lot of snow here, they said ominously. All I know is, it was maybe 15 degrees and the snow was so fine and so fast that the back of my throat was scraped raw and my cheeks were red for an hour. And that's pretty cold, fossil fuels or no.)

But I stayed home from work, and it was half-price wine night, and my sis and her friend and Queen of the Maye came out, and who's to argue with that?

So for once, a 2/13 turned out OK.

We'll see how 2/14 turns out, post-half-price wine night.

Yeah, it's cold

2007-02-12T21:54:00.000-06:00

Did you ever have to read Jack London's "To Build a Fire"? This guy is walking in the Klondike freezing to death and at the end of the story he actually freezes to death. I think about this story often.

If you wear enough layers you can stay pretty warm even when the temp hovers around zero, as it has the past 2 weeks, but your fingers still get numb. Sometimes when I'm standing outside the front gate, fumbling with my keys and my clumsy frozen fingers, I think, one of these days I'm going to die out here. I picture myself peacefully drifting off amid the footprints and salt -- they use mountains of salt around here -- with the lights of my home and the Chipotle just out of reach as my sight gently, inexorably, dims to black. Just like the guy did after a big pile of snow snuffed out his fire and he ignored his dog's warnings to turn back.

Here's a picture of the view outside my window at work now.

That big white expance on the left is Lake Michigan, which is covered with snow (over ice, of course).

2007-01-18T22:12:00.000-06:00

We're heading with my parents to Palm Springs next month. Should be a redux of our trip to Tucson with them last spring, except not 102 degrees and with black widow spiders instead of mountain lions. A little hiking, a little vegging by the hotel pool, lots of eating, some mild sightseeing and basically getting spoiled rotten by my parents, despite the fact that we're all at least 10 years too old for that.

Part of the hiking is in Joshua Tree National Park. Anyone been there?

I'm trying to sell my parents on a visit to the Integratron:

My dad looked at the website and said, "I think this is a little wifty. Are you sure you want to go there?" He also tried, "Does Colliculus mind going?" I think pomo hippiedom might be a Gen X thing.

2007-01-05T21:46:00.000-06:00

This site has everything I love - bright colors, animation and of course a gross-out factor. Pages and pages of puking rainbows. Thanks to ilovero-bots for bringing it into my life.

Spideys

2007-01-04T22:27:00.000-06:00

I've mentioned before that every late summer, Chi-town turns into Spi-town. The window of my office is the most up-close-and-personal display of this. I have no idea how so many spiders get up to the 63rd floor or what they eat when they get there. Must be generous portions, though, because they get pretty hefty by the time winter rolls around and they all vanish.

I would hate to be a window washer.

Here's another view from my window where the spider didn't come out so well:

My job can be a pain in the ass sometimes, but I have a hell of a great view.

Which Seinfeld character am I?

2007-01-02T21:46:00.000-06:00

On Thursday I had lunch with my old coworkers in B-more. I called up the office and a woman answered who I didn't know. I left my name and told her when I'd be there and she said, "Hey, are you the person who ate pizza out of the trash can?" I didn't remember doing that, and I denied it, but the more I thought about it the more I remembered being mocked for it, if not actually doing it. When I arrived and we sat down to our tasty pizza lunch my ex-boss confirmed that yes, I ate pizza out of the trash and yes, a certain very memorable coworker of mine had been shocked by it.

I later pointed out to Colliculus that the pizza had been IN A PIZZA BOX, on top of the other trash, and he reminded me of the eclair episode on "Seinfeld." That's probably my saving grace, otherwise I might have ended up in Larry's act.

So very pensive, little dog

2006-11-13T22:31:00.000-06:00

Here we have more charming, though inappropriate, use of the thought bubble. Note also the "bottlewater" tag. Has anyone else noticed this new made-up word? I see it regularly.

BTW if anyone wondered what a Chicago dog looked like, now you know. Poppyseed bun, pickles, peppers, onions -- all it needs is a side order of Prevacid.

Letter from my dad

2006-11-08T22:49:00.000-06:00

My sister and I recently gave my dad some new music to check out, since he's looking for something beyond Scott Joplin, REM, and yodeling (Western-style only, please). I got the following reply:

I can finally report on the CD’s you guys gave me. The CD’s I don’t care for are P.J. Harvey, The New Pornographers, Elvis Costello and the CD marked “XTC Mix”. The ones I like are Arcade Fire, Belle & Sebastian, and the one marked “Mix 2”. The music I really liked on the last one was by: Death Cab for Cutie, Badly Drawn Boy, The Postal Service, and Dar Williams [note that these all came from Darling Angel, NOT me]. If you have entire CD’s by any of those, I’d like to hear them. I’d also be interested in hearing more from Tyler Hilton, Ben Fold Five, Vanilla Sky and Bare Naked Ladies [more Darling Angel]. By the way, I’m still working on that box of tapes you left [in the house many many years ago]. You know I love the Kimball Collins United DJ’s of America.

He loses points for Ben Folds, but gets quite a few back for Kimball Collins.

2006-09-14T21:41:00.000-05:00

BusinessWeek has some good news on the peak oil front -- though it's of the "everybody gets to live" variety, as opposed to "finally the stupid people get their comeuppance."

Rockin' the suburbs

2006-09-12T22:43:00.000-05:00

A couple of weeks ago I went to the suburbs with my sister and her friend. They always go out there (when they can get a ride, hence my involvement) to go to the pool in Morton Grove. I learned a number of things on this trip.

First, Morton Grove isn't that far away. I deem it Least Annoying Suburb to Drive To at about 30 minutes door to door.

Second, neighborhood pools have changed quite a bit since my swim team days. Darling Angel and I had a hell of a crazy time on this water slide, which is apparently nothing special by suburban pool standards:

Finally, suburban caterpillars have also changed quite a bit. Check out this one:

I wear a size 7 shoe. Still, the picture doesn't do it justice. Really I needed a video to capture the rippling of pale green as its skin stretched to accommodate its movements. What's this thing going to metamorphose into, a gopher?

The CIA thinks I'm an Impressive Mastermind

2006-09-05T23:01:00.000-05:00

I was startled to see, in the middle of the Simpsons, a recruiting ad for none other than the CIA. Yes, they are an Equal Opportunity Employer, one of the 5 Best Places to Work, and hiring for the National Clandestine Service.

The only unsurprising aspects of this commercial were the quality, which was right around corporate training level, and the fact that it aired on Fox.

I went online to learn more and found this great personality quiz, complete with techno spy music, that seeks to debunk many myths about working for them. For example, "Your friends and family will still be a part of your life."

The quiz told me I was an Impressive Mastermind. A disclaimer at the bottom promised me that my answers had not been saved by the CIA and would not affect my application.

Elsewhere, the site invited me to "Step onto the campus at the George Bush Center for Intelligence." A worthy enterprise, no doubt.

2006-08-27T22:57:00.000-05:00

Since Colliculus is effectively on hiatus, time to catch up on some photo-posting!

We went to Seadragon's wedding Memorial Day weekend, which was an awesome, awesome time. The wedding and reception overlooked the Hudson River, the day was beautiful, and we hung out with our friends for something like 7 hours. It was a long, drunken reception to say the least.

The night before the wedding, we stayed at our friend's parents' house, which had *the coolest*, the most retro decor. Photos did not do it justice but here's a sample:

The night of the wedding, we stayed at the nastiest motel I've ever set foot in. We shared the room with 3 of our friends, one of whom had to sleep on the floor. He's lucky he didn't get infested with anything because I'm fairly certain I didn't hallucinate the critters I saw running around at 5 in the morning. There was an A/C unit over my head and it made loud clanking noises all night. It was like having my head under a dishwasher. Imagine my surprise when the next morning I discovered that wasn't the only thing it had in common with a dishwasher:

2006-08-26T13:55:00.000-05:00

This is my favorite graffiti in my neighborhood, on the Trib and Sun-Times boxes:

The world is small

2006-08-23T21:58:00.000-05:00

. . . when you work at a big agency.

Today I was about to get off a plane and the guy next to me piped up -- as people often do right after landing, when it's safe to talk because you're not going to get stuck in a conversation that's boring, irritating, or fine except for the lack of socially graceful exit strategies. He saw my be-logoed bag and said, "You work for Agency E?" It turned out he worked there for 4 years, in the New York office.

Then on the jetway I was behind another guy, who was really slow and kind of blocking my way with his bags and such. When we got into the gate he turned around and said, "I used to work for Agency E too, here in Chicago."

BTW I was unimpressed with the "no liquids" thing. There are a lot of signs up but not a lot of enforcement. I could have bought a bottle of water (or anything else) at the gate and brought it on the plane, without anyone at the gate even *asking* passengers if they had liquids. I mean c'mon, at least lay the guilt trip on us!

I got a blackberry last night. Today I noticed that 100% of first-class passengers were operating either a phone or a blackberry when I got on and trooped back to the cattle lot.

2006-08-21T22:28:00.000-05:00

Oh, how I love idiosyncratic, expressive homemade signs!

Lately I've seen a bunch where people abuse the "thought bubble" clip art, so that items for sale are thinking about stuff they totally would never think about, if they had thoughts at all. This one takes it a step beyond.

This is in a tea shop, by the way. They sell tea drinks, really expensive loose tea, tea pots, and the provocatively named Yummy Buns. Make sense?

There's another one in our neighborhood where a hot dog is contemplating its tastiness, but I don't have a picture of that yet.

Homemade bank signs are a little harder to come by. I like the CDs and the little flame that is just THAT excited about a 5.35% APR.

The Magic Captain

2006-08-15T22:26:00.000-05:00

I read this week that commuting via public transportation induces stress just like driving at rush hour.

Witness:
I'm riding home today and this mushmouth behind me is making a commotion. He's bumping me with his newspaper and trying to get the attention of the girl across the aisle by yelling, "Hey! White Girl! What's that picture you got?" White Girl is studiously -- very studiously -- pretending not to hear him, which is bugging him more and more. Finally he taps my shoulder. I turn around and he asks, "Why won't that white girl talk to me? She pretend she don't even hear me!" I said, "Well, first of all, it's kind of rude to call someone 'White Girl.'"

(This is not the first time I have stepped into the role of CTA Conductor of Etiquette. As in, "People might have pens, but they might not lend you one if you start by asking them, 'What the fuck is wrong with you fuckers? Don't nobody have a pen?'")

Anyway, Mushmouth insisted he didn't mean it that way. I understand, right? "And besides, maybe she doesn't feel like talking right now."

This shut him up for about 10 seconds and then he was at it again, shouting about the picture while she forcefully, now, ignored him and everyone else looked nervous. He said that there was something he was going to do to her with the picture, and eventually got up, walked around so he was facing the picture, looked it over and then threatened to break it. Still, she refused to look at him.

She got off right about then at Fullerton and three DePaul students got on. Immediately he greeted one of them, saying, "I'm the Magic Cap'n. What's your name?" She introduced herself and they got on like old friends. Tension disappeared. He became a harmless, friendly CTA rider and nothing more.

A gem!

2006-07-29T17:59:00.000-05:00

Has anyone seen R. Kelly's "Trapped in a Closet" "hip-hopera"! Hilarious! Who Gives a Shit brought the DVD to the beach and it changed my life. Wikipedia has links to all of the segments online.

Apparently it's even funnier if you watch the commentary - something about a cigar with fake, computer-generated smoke. Not to mention intense gravity.

Some things I learned when I went to DC on Tuesday for work, and Pangaea's birthday

2006-07-27T22:33:00.000-05:00

Beer, wine and cocktails are $5, and exact change is always appreciated -- even on a 7 a.m. flight.

At the core of Starbucks' brand is something that very few local, independent places offer: no complaints about the person who comes in, spends $1.50, and sits at a table for the next 2 hours.

All those things I attributed to urban life circa 2000 are in reality permanent features of DC. Like Eurotrash club music and spoiled-rotten college kids yakking on cell phones in a combination of street slang, Valley Girl, and Turkish. Also random violence and velvet-swathed lounges with a chill-out DJ, but those were from other recent visits.

Misadventures in home repair

2006-06-19T21:56:00.000-05:00

Ever since we bought this condo, the upstairs bathroom has been stinky. Colliculus can't smell it, guests claim they can't smell it, but I sure can. It smells like the cat pissed in a pot of mildew. We suspected the bathtub needed to be recaulked, which was confirmed by a) my mother and b) the fact that large quantities of bleach would defeat the smell for about a week. Also the fact that the caulk itself was nurturing giant black colonies of flora.

It took more than a year for us to get around to it. By "us" I mean "me," mainly because I could smell it and Colliculus couldn't. We went out and bought the caulk and the caulking gun and the scraper, and I diligently downloaded an article from the Internet, which advised that I could save $100 in 15 minutes with this simple home repair.

Step 1 was to prepare the downstairs bathroom for us to shower in it for a couple of nights (heh). This involved booting the cat's litter box upstairs. I decided the time was ripe to wash the shower curtain, producing the following result:

Step 2 was to remove the old caulk. This took about 2 hours and produced the following result:

This hole was a teaching hole. It taught me that an entire portion of the wall was teeming with water and life.

The hole spent its next 4 days under the assault of a box fan. Eventually the wall congealed. Then, after many consultative calls with my dad, I patched up the hole.

It was somewhere in this period that the big G decided he was pissed off about the litter box relocation and took a big fat dump on the carpet outside our bedroom.

After 9 days of patching and sanding and painting and caulking and recaulking where I fucked up and (mostly) waiting for the different things to dry, we have a recaulked bathtub!

Overall it still wasn't much harder than hiring someone to do it. Hiring people to do things is a big pain in the ass, because I'm willing to work on weekends and they're not, and because watching to make sure someone does a decent job is that much harder when you don't know jack about the job yourself.

That said, doing the job myself was also a big pain in the ass.

2006-06-11T22:29:00.000-05:00

The Monsignor suggested last night that we use the word "hoopla" more often, for example in place of "hijinks." While his point is valid -- one word really isn't enough to include all of the antics he discusses -- I must bring up this counterpoint:

By the way, this is the album that contains the classic rock ballad, "We Built This City on Rock & Roll."

Return of the farmer's market!

2006-06-07T21:21:00.000-05:00

And return of Prairie Landing. We've had visitors or been on a trip every weekend since mid-April. That means all the weekend chores have to get done during the week, and that means no time for blogging.

Yesterday was the farmer's market. I purchased a live catnip plant, spring garlic (which looks kind of like wild garlic and maybe that's what it is) and cheese curds. All were successful with the possible exception of the catnip, which the big G was initially excited about but seems to be losing its novelty.

My coworkers clued me in to the cheese curds. I tried to round up a farmer's market posse and one of them said, "I wish I could go and get some cheese curds!" I was like, "What the hell are cheese curds?" Everyone was astonished that I a) had never eaten cheese curds and b) had obviously never been to Wisconsin.

I asked: Are they dry?
No.
Are they wet?
Umm . . . . kind of, I guess. The main thing is they squeak.
Ok . . . so are they slimy?

No one argued that they *weren't* slimy. Meanwhile the non-Wisconsinites rolled their eyes. But the tables will be turned next month when the Michigan blueberries and Indiana corn and downstate grass-fed beef comes in. (No worries about Ohio, though. As far as I can tell nobody raves about anything in Ohio.) It's just like Jersey tomatoes, which I have always been skeptical about.

Slimy or no, I decided to give the cheese curds a shot. They actually seem to just be fresh cheese, like fresh mozzarella only instead they're fresh cheddar or monterey jack or whatever. Who wouldn't like that?

They do squeak on the teeth a little more than mozz, no doubt about it.

2006-04-24T20:59:00.000-05:00

Last week a city high school teacher got busted for blogging about the bleakness of his place of employment. I found the Trib story fascinating because of its portrayal of a totally FUBAR school. Sez the Trib:

He labeled his students "criminals," saying they stole from teachers, dealt drugs in the hallways, had sex in the stairwells, flaunted their pregnant bellies and tossed books out windows. He dismissed their parents as unemployed "project" dwellers who subsist on food stamps, refuse to support their "baby mommas" and bad-mouth teachers because their no-show teens are flunking.He took swipes at his colleagues, too--"union-minimum" teachers, literacy specialists who "decorate their office door with pro-black propaganda," and security officers whose "loyalty is to the hood, not the school."

Needless to say this pissed off a whole lot of people. The writer stopped going back to work because he said he feared for his safety.

I spent some time in the K-5 version of this, back in (you guessed it) B-more. The part about the security guards really hit home. One of the sadder experiences I remember was when we had to cancel a Halloween party because one of the parent aides (they handled security, maintenance and all sorts of odd jobs) stole all of the refreshments. His soon-to-be-ex-girlfriend later saw him hawking 2-liter Pepsi bottles out on the corner.

So while his description is mean-spirited and unfair, I wouldn't call it made-up. Also familiar were the students' and teachers' objections:

"Although many of our students adopt tough facades and insist they are grown, they are still children: sensitive children who still crave guidance, encouraging words and positive reinforcement," wrote teacher Gina Miski.

They used to say this about the second-graders I worked with. That's pretty bad, when you have to sell people on this idea and you're talking about 7-year-olds.

At the gym

2006-04-17T21:46:00.000-05:00

My work got less crazy about a month ago and now I can actually go to the gym again.

I go to the gym next to my work. So there's always the risk of being naked around all the people I work with. On the one hand, I really don't care, and I certainly don't want to be all weird about it. But then I can't be sure if they're all weird about it, and I don't want to make them feel weird, especially the people who report to me. So I avoid getting dressed anywhere near them, and if I avoid it then there's definitely weirdness being generated.

There are some people who are totally not self-conscious at all, and around them I'm not bothered because there's no feedback loop of weirdness.

Whenever I can, I go to step class. Until recently I was completely in awe of the steppers. They're stringy, they're face-lifted, they all have 2 or 3 steps stacked up, and they do the most amazing combos without any trouble whatsoever. I'm like, WTF is wrong with me that I'm 30 years old, I've been stepping for years and still can't pick up the combos like these crazy oldsters? I'm not the only one, either -- no one from my work EVER goes to step class. One time my boss went and the instructor actually kicked her out for being a beginner.

Then one day I got there and everyone was totally clumsy. They didn't know what the hell they were doing and for once my pitiful, out-of-shape efforts made me the big prodigy. That was when I figured it out. There are only 3 or 4 different routines, and all the regulars have them memorized. They're complicated, hourlong routines, and they take weeks or months to learn. So on this day, the instructor was trying to teach everyone a new routine. Take that, oldsters!

UPDATE: I just looked at Blogger to see if my blog would be one of the scrolling blogs they featured. It wasn't -- that thing is totally fixed! -- but I did come upon this entertaining find: http://monchiii.blogspot.com/

What a gem!

2006-04-09T22:58:00.000-05:00

Thank ye, Ianqui, for sharing this gem. When Chevy asks people to make ads for their incredibly honkin' new SUV, subversive inspiration is the result.

What else is new? Spring has come to Chicago. It's just like winter, but the days are 13 hours long and the birds sing all the time.

I finally managed to get contacts. Woo-hoo!!

I became the freak-of-the-week

2006-04-04T22:26:00.000-05:00

I was leaving the gym, heading toward Michigan Avenue a half-block or so away, when the light turned green. How could I miss the light? I was wearing gym clothes, after all! So I sprinted for the light.

I had a big plastic bag of my work clothes on one arm, a bright green suede jacket on the other (full of bezippered '80s style), and an orange-and-black backpack on my back. All were bouncing around like mad. But I would not, could not slow down.

I had meant to tighten my drawstring pants at the gym, but forgot. Now they began making their way down my ass. They were maybe a third of the way down as I entered the intersection. I extracted two fingers from my belongings so I could hold them up. My bags and my half-bare ass now all bounced together. Still I ran.

Topping it all off, by the time I was halfway through the intersection I was grinning like a maniac because I just knew I had to look completely, completely ridiculous.

Transit follies

2006-02-21T22:50:00.000-06:00

On the way to work today I got stuck in a jam-packed car next to 2 high school kids. For the 20-minute ride, the boy was telling the story of how he invited a bunch of friends over and they paid another friend $5 to drink an entire bottle of laxative. If $5 seems too low, let me say that said friend didn't know he was drinking laxative. He thought they were paying him $5 to drink a Diet Coke.

The girl insisted that she would've thought it was hilarious if she had done it, as long as it wasn't at her own house (as in this situation). Not wanting to seem like a downer, she finally conceded, "Well, as long as you had more than one bathroom."

At one point I saw one of the passengers involuntarily twitch backwards and mutter, "Oh Lord." That was before the conversation wandered off onto how morning-after pills make your uterus explode. Also how the kid wished he had given his friend laxatives plus Viagra.

On the way home, on another crowded train, there was a baby crying. No, laughing. No, SCREAMING. It was creepy as could be. The kid would laugh, normal at first then harder and harder going into hysteria, transition into screaming which then turned into crying. The cry would devolve into a kind of sobbing, choking and then we were right back where we started.

I couldn't actually see it so I couldn't verify the transitions, but it sounded a hell of a lot more like "The Exorcist" than a regular baby. I think it was actually worse than the Ex-Lax couple.

Valentine's: Test of willpower

2006-02-14T23:35:00.000-06:00

Within 1 block I encountered the following on my way to work:

West side of Michigan Ave: A besuited reindeer with feathered angel wings, handing out fistfuls of Hershey's kisses.

East side, Michigan Ave: A red-sweatshirted radio promotions street team, handing out even more chocolate.

In the lobby of my building: A wall of women, one per security gate, in red blouses handing out giant shortbread hearts, with nothing to indicate who was sponsoring them or why. (Go Red for Women!)

Between my office and the water cooler: 2 dozen Dunkin' Donuts.

Between me and the donuts: 2 boxes of Munchkins.

I would like to say I resisted these things. Or even one of these things. Yes, I would.

Our Fortress of Solitude

2006-02-07T22:33:00.000-06:00

Last Saturday at 9 a.m., Darling Angel moved out to her very own, very nice condo. She stayed with us for 5 months. Keep in mind Colliculus and I had only lived in this place alone for 3, so it's kinda weird. In fact I feel kind of like . . . snif . . . the nest is empty.

Also she bakes cookies whenever she needs to relax, which is at least every week or two, so now we're missing out on some o' that action.

Overall, though, it's damn good to have the house to ourselves.

Would-be Chicago travelers, book your trip ASAP! We've already got 3 weddings, the beach trip, a trip to Philly and 3 weekends of visitors booked for the season and it's only February! Savvy visitors will be sure to consider Chicago's oft-overlooked shoulder season happening RIGHT NOW.

The WTF of air travel

2006-02-02T23:02:00.000-06:00

I was in a cab today, thinking, "That's funny, there are two cars with Maryland plates," and then I remembered it wasn't funny because I was in Manhattan. Lately I go there all the time and I still can't get over the weirdness of spending the day there just like it was a longer-than-usual commute. I mean, I left home at 6:30 and got home at 9:30, but that's only a couple hours longer than my regular workday.

Call me naive, but WTF.

It's never a good sign

2006-01-24T21:58:00.000-06:00

. . . when a member of your household emerges from the bathroom laughing so hard her face is red and she can barely turn on the fan and slam the door shut behind her.

I was in the airport security line the other day and the guy behind me had an industrial-size tray of ham sandwiches. He ran off for a second -- there was no line, I have no idea why -- so I asked the TSA guy, "Um, should I put those through the X-ray?" He said, "He is coming back, you know, don't think you can take some." I explained that I just didn't know sandwiches needed to be X-rayed. He told me, "Anything that goes on a plane, goes through there. Unless it's alive." So in the sandwiches went.

It's been record-warm here since Christmas. I mean it's gotten above freezing every single day, and nearly all of January has been ice-free. I've even gone jogging twice. Crazy!!

She's STILL laughing.

Strangeness

2006-01-11T22:32:00.000-06:00

Blogger has this scrolling marquee that lists blogs that were just updated. I clicked on this one randomly:

http://loudprison.blogspot.com/

All it is is a series of entries made up of a sentence or two of history pulled out of an encyclopedia, or something. The most recent update is in March (not today, as billed). Weirder, each title of each entry leads to another blog of the same type.

Colliculus says someone must have written a blog-creating program to do this. Any other insights?

Neutral-Blind

2006-01-05T18:27:00.000-06:00

My sister has been living with us since Labor Day. The developer who is allegedly rehabbing her condo is very elusive, but on those rare occasions when Darling Angel's lawyer can track him down, he says it'll be done in about a month. For example, when asked in late July: "It should be done by the end of August." And here we are.

But! There appears to be light at the end of the tunnel. This week, the DA appeared in my room with paint chips. Actual paint chips that the developer had told her she could choose from!

The colors she picked include Snowy Owl:

Voile:

And my personal favorite, Starfish:

I asked her, "How did you pick those colors?" Because honestly, I can't imagine how anyone picks three neutrals out of a universe of neutrals. It's like choosing among flavors of spring water, when there are 416 soft drinks to choose from, half of which are spring water.

When Colliculus and I were looking at paint colors, we skipped all that and asked ourselves, "What color should this room be?" It just seemed alien to spend any time looking at neutrals. Hence our paint color of choice, Landlord White. I'll be interested to see what the DA's condo looks like.

The irony of her living with us is that she bought a condo in order to live alone.

UPDATE: Tonight she came home and said, "Good news. My lawyer called and said he got some paperwork from the developer. He says that probably means I'll close within [you guessed it] a month."

The vet: Pottery Barn meets Toone-town

2005-12-23T17:13:00.000-06:00

I forget if I've mentioned my vet before. He got into some kind of dispute with the veterinary hospital and struck out on his own. As a result, the last time I went to see him it was in a single concrete-and-cinderblock room containing nothing but a metal exam table, a folding table with a laptop and a credit card machine, and a few folding chairs occupied by patients and their owners. The setup ensured a maximum of noise, since the yowling of whoever was being examined would set off all the other animals. Also the owners would make spectator-sport comments like, "Yeah, THAT's gonna be cold." So much for HIPAA.

He assured me that he was building a new hospital. What he didn't mention was that the construction would be in that very room. So today I went over there and was met with a handwritten sign encouraging me to pick my way through the scaffolding and Slavs with jackhammers, ending up, surprisingly enough, in someone's condo. Now, instead of concrete and folding chairs, there are all the trappings of Christmas in Lincoln Park -- blonde hardwood, stainless steel, and one of those open bookshelves from Crate & Barrel loaded with family photos and Hill's prescription products. Wandering around were 6 or 8 cats in various states of well-being, all the way from an arthritic oldster with renal failure to two hyper kittens wearing red-and-green feather collars. It reminded me of my friend Toone's house, happy home to a dozen or so kitties.

I like my vet a lot. He was the first vet ever to successfully treat G's stomach problems, plus he's always rattling off the latest studies from the University of Colorado or wherever. I can only assume that a lot of other people feel the same way -- not only because of his office vagaries, but also because it took some sleuthing just to figure out where he'd gone.

As your reward for reading that pointless description, here's a picture of the little bugger himself, on his leash:

Guest commentary from Cousin Vino

2005-12-20T21:44:00.000-06:00

My cuz, a reluctant Michigander, is coming to Delaware for the holidays. He writes:

i must say that when i mention my DE destination for t-giving and post-xmas, all my MI friends/co-workers are always like, "what the hell?" and then ask me things like whether i actually like going there, or if i was forced to go. and i can't help but wonder if they actually like MI or were forced to live here.

Multi-drug-resistant media stalking

2005-12-17T14:27:00.000-06:00

I'm at ICAAC in DC this weekend. ICAAC is the biggest infectious disease meeting. The last C stands for chemotherapy, but I'm not sure why.

You may wonder what I do at medical meetings. I'm supposed to take advantage of the onsite presence of ID media and ID experts to pitch stories and arrange interviews. In effect, this means trolling the DC Convention Center, stalking reporters. Through an inconvenient twist of fate, the organizers made the name tag type really small. So I've given up on my usual approach of roaming around the poster session, trying to spot recognizable names, and instead I just lurk outside the press conference room.

This is not exactly a well-respected activity. The words "stalk" and "lurk" probably clued you in to that. And when I say lurk, I mean practically blocking the door so I can squint at as many name tags as possible, smiling in a proprietary way since that seems slightly less foolish than not smiling. I've got no right to look proprietary, especially since the actual proprietor of these press conferences is always nearby. Shockingly, he puts up with this. Usually that person's job is to shoo me and my ilk away, and he in particular is well known for that. I guess the holiday spirit and associated low media attendance at this meeting have made him pretty easygoing.

As you might guess, I am not the only flack engaged in this pastime. My brethren are easy to spot. They all look like me: blonde, besuited, and bearing enormous bags of paper. And between the ages of 25 and 35. 80 or 90 percent female. Plus they all hang back so as not to take up the best seats of the press conference. And they (we) all have that look of saleswomen in a department store, carefully gauging where to strike next.

Meanwhile, our quarry is also easy to identify. Hair is unstyled and freely graying. Lots of turtlenecks, sweaters and bulky outerwear. Basically, the Michael Moore school of fashion and grooming. These are all print and radio reporters, of course. Most move quickly down the hall -- the media ghetto is always a dark, out-of-the-way hall with no seating -- and avoid eye contact. Some go so far as to avoid leaving the media lounge, where we're not welcome, without a cell phone attached to their face.

I actually don't mind all of this as much as you'd think. Most of the people I want to pounce on, actually don't mind hearing from me. I just wish they'd make the nametag type bigger, so I could pounce more accurately and with less awkward squinting.

Also, I'm not convinced this is worth all the planning and all the expenses I'm incurring for my client. But apparently this is the way everyone does it, everyone being the big drug companies. I finally started chatting up the other hallway flacks, out of boredom. Between the 4 or 5 of us, we managed to generate enough gossip to fill up the daily report to our clients. Competing clients, but what's the difference when most of the media are avoiding us anyway?

Happy birfday, Noise Footprint!

2005-12-13T23:25:00.000-06:00

I was in your grand town today again, for a one-hour meeting.

Time for the annual rant about winter

2005-12-08T22:31:00.000-06:00

People try to tell me, "Oh, it's not usually like this in December." But that's a bunch of crap. It was like this last December. Why should I believe them?

Worst things about Chicago winters, in order:

3. The cold.
Last night Colliculus and Vivs and I went out to see Zoolights. It was 7 degrees outside and the world was paved with ice. My coworkers told me I was crazy, but what are you gonna do? Not see Christmas lights?

Bright side: Today I went to work and it felt springlike, like who needs a hat and gloves? I looked at the thermometer on Michigan Avenue and it read 22. And all senses, including my mental sense, relaxed as if I had gotten off the plane in Florida.

2. The ice.
It snows around Thanksgiving. Then the snow freezes and slicks over and stays that way for three or four months. Today it snowed 6 inches so now there's snow on top of the ice.
Bright side: Months and months of rain-free weather. It sounds like a joke, but it's actually kind of nice to put away the umbrella and wear khaki pants whenever I want.

1. The clouds.
It's like I don't even have a window at work, because my office is in a cloud all the time. How did I ever quit coffee, a year ago tomorrow?

This is really the worst. A bright side can be found only via schadenfreude, so here goes: I'd rather have three months of clouds and six months of cold than nine months of clouds, like Seattle. And when all else fails, there's always Buffalo.

TLC, who visited from the Queen City last week, won't believe it, but she missed this particular boat.

There are a lot of cities that call themselves the Queen City, Google says.

Attack of the Appliances

2005-11-18T21:33:00.000-06:00

About two months ago the dishwasher broke. Now we are locked in battle with the repair people, who fucked up the repair and want another go at it tomorrow. At our expense, of course.

Sunday night, I heard a gushing noise coming out of the walls, which turned out to be related to our washing machine. What to do, but buy a new one? I grabbed a tape measure and a few minutes later, determined that the laws of the universe did not permit us to remove or replace the machine, and the condo must have been built around the existing appliances.

While measuring, I saw a peeling sticker with a phone number. It must have been 15 years old, since that's when the rehab was done. I called it anyway. At first, I got an error message, but I realized that could be because Chicago now has more than one area code. I tried one of the "new" area codes and someone actually answered! On a Sunday night! And he remembered our washing machine AND he volunteered to come out the next day!

He looked at it and said, "Oh yeah, I remember now. This is way too much of a pain in the neck for me to deal with." He wrote down a number for Colliculus to call. Another guy answered and came out less than an hour later.

Result: Tomorrow we have to deal with the dishwasher guy AND go out and find a new washing machine. One that defies the laws of space and time.

(Current washing machine's smallest dimension: 25.5 inches; dimension of laundry room doorway, with door removed: 25 inches.)

The problem with choosing your optician randomly

2005-11-12T14:26:00.000-06:00

I'm trying to get contacts again. I've tried 6 different kinds over 2 years, and I finally found a pair that doesn't hurt. However, I couldn't actually see with them, so I went back today.

The scene: A tiny optician's office facing Broadway near Belmont. The front of the store is cluttered with eyeglass display cases and a chair occupied by a Pekingese. Behind that is the counter, then a little "doctor's" office. (He's not a real doctor, right?) Then a flight of stairs leading to a dark bathroom with a toilet that runs constantly and no paper towels.

The actors: The owner, a middle-aged Asian guy with an accent; his blond, teenage son; the employee, Nicole; and the "doctor." Everyone had just ordered Thai food.

The "doctor" told me to put the contacts in, so I sat at the counter by the cash register, filthy hands and all, and stuck the right one in. For some reason, the left one just did not want to go in -- it just kept sticking to my finger. So I spent a half hour or so sitting by the cash register, poking myself and yelling "damn!" occasionally while store patrons handed their credit cards over my head.

Eventually I got grossed out by my fingers and the contacts. I ran upstairs to the bathroom and worked at it for a while longer next to the son, where at least I could use stronger language. Then I stumbled back down stairs (the son told me to watch my step, which doesn't help someone with contacts that don't work). The "doctor" told me the owner could help me get some better lenses.

Fine, except the owner was busy yelling at the customers. The woman said there was a scratch in her glasses. The owner said he didn't see anything but he would send them back out, and could she come back Thursday? The woman told him she didn't have time for that, she'd already been a number of times, and she didn't know why she had come there.

Eventually I saw the eye doctor, who told me to wait for the owner to help me find some different lenses. When I stepped back out, there was a full-blown shouting match going on. "You must be blind," the woman was saying. "You call me blind? You want to insult me right in my own store? I'll call the police!" The man said, "Don't you be rude to her. I wish we'd never come in here." On and on.

I looked up from the paper when I heard, "Why don't we go to court, then?"
"I could punch you in the face instead!" This was the owner.

Surprisingly, after that exchange, I heard silence. (There was a display blocking my view.) They continued examining the glasses.

"Let me examine you and see if the prescription is right."
"If you can't get my glasses right I don't want you looking at my eyes!"
"Well, fuck you then."
"Fuck you!"
The police and courts were invoked again. Nicole and the son fled.

By this point, I really didn't want to buy glasses from these people, and the last thing in the world I wanted was to seek the owner's wise counsel on what kind of contacts I needed. Eventually the owner took the glasses upstairs to work on them. I waited and waited and waited. Meanwhile I could hear the couple working on the other customers in the store: "I want to take him to court, but I think it would cost more than the glasses."

Finally the "doctor" came out, now with overpowering pad thai breath, and gave me the new lenses, which I then had to put in at the register by the argument again. Luckily they went in easy this time, I said I thought they were good but would call otherwise, and got the hell out of there.

Superior Eye Care, 3164 N. Broadway. Don't go.

2005-11-07T10:46:00.000-06:00

Saturday the Monsignor and I went out for some bhangra dancing. This was a prominent feature of Providence life, but not here. One bar in Wrigleyhell, Spot 6, just started a monthly bhangra night. That's about it.

Spot 6, it turns out, is divier than most of its W-hell kin. It's dank and small and devoid of furniture (or, most of the time, a bartender). I ordered a vodka gimlet but received an 8-oz glass of vodka with a slice of lime. "We don't have any more Rose's," the bartender told me. Nobody was there except for a half-dozen Indian guys more committed to their suits than the dance music, plus two aging bleach-blonds reminiscent of the Vegas hookers from the Simpsons. Meanwhile, the TV in the back was showing the Notre Dame game. Some of the local junior Trixies showed up and I began to give up hope.

Things suddenly improved, though, when a massive family appeared and all ages started dancing up a storm. Also, it turned out that one of the junior Trixies was actually an expert bhangra dancer.

We stayed out as long as our ears could stand it, then moved on to Johnny O'Hagan's, where our ears were assaulted by all-too-expert covers of "Space Cowboy," "Sweet Home Alabama," -- during which the girl in front of us yelled "YES" after the "does your conscience bother you" line -- and "What Should We Do with a Drunken Sailor."

I am so glad I don't live there anymore.

The problem with cabs

2005-10-31T22:10:00.000-06:00

I went to New York on Thursday for some meetings. East Coast meetings are brutal. With the time difference, you have to leave the house by 6:30 to make it to a 12:30 meeting, and God help you if you actually have a morning meeting.

Despite my general manager's cheapness, I was allowed to take a cab to Midway. Naturally, I get some guy who's 10 minutes early. I call the dispatcher, yell about how I'm not coming out there till the appointed time, think I've made myself clear, only to have the phone ring 5 minutes later. More phone calls, more yelling, I miss the cab twice, they call him back twice. By now Colliculus and Darling Angel are both wide awake in the dark, full of alarm that I'm going to miss my flight, but I'm so full of righteous anger I'm ready to stomp out and catch the train.

But the driver eventually came back. You'd think he'd be thoroughly sick of me by now, but noooo, he's chipper as can be. I guess there's only one way to be at that time of day, which is completely saturated with caffeine. So he tries to talk to me. A sampling of conversational openers:
-Reasons why people miss cabs
-Where I'm going
-What I'm doing there
-The pros and cons of ATA
-Ditto for other airlines
-United's pension plan
-Which airlines go to Las Vegas
-Why it is that some airlines have a longer flight time than others, when going to Las Vegas
-Reasonableness of fares to Las Vegas
-The Sox won the World Series last night

This actually woke me up, since I hadn't been paying any attention. "I don't follow sports," I said. Long silence. Hooray! But it turned out the silence was merely stunned.
"You don't follow ANY sports?"
"Nope," I said triumphantly.
More silence. Then:
"So, the clocks are going back this weekend."

And that was when it officially became the longest trip to Midway, ever.

2005-10-20T23:15:00.000-05:00

So I'm still at work ALL THE GODDAMN TIME. I got through 3 horrific announcements, covered a medical meeting on the West Coast, and came back to find that a client publication that was slated to hit next spring, hits Sunday.

But going to the medical meeting wasn't all bad, not by any stretch. In the first place, I learned the reasons why San Francisco is really great (the weather) and really awful (filthy dirty, overpriced, full of insane people). Here is something interesting I saw when I was walking from my hotel to the train to Berkeley:

I also got to see my long-lost friends from B-more, then Seattle, now Berkeley, whom I will call by their professional titles, Dr. Ding-Dong and Bird Brain. Equally exciting, I got to meet their kids, who did not exist the last time I saw them. (Well, I guess one was about half-baked the last time.) I'll call them Horn (age 3 3/4) and Sushi Monster (15 months). These kids are hilarious. Also exhausting. I got there Saturday and BB and DD were completely beat by 10 o'clock, even more than me with my jet lag. By Sunday at 2 I understood. Horn and Sushi Monster get up at dawn and then run, run, run, run all day. They alternate between squealing with joy and screaming with annoyance. They get into everything, which is a cliche, but the part that isn't is that you the grown-up caretaker have to spend every waking minute getting them out of everything.

Horn is so named because he ran around the house with a cardboard rhino horn on his head shouting, "Daddy! I got a horn! I never got a horn before!" His parents were just about crying they were laughing so hard.

All in all an enjoyable weekend. And I haven't even mentioned the many fascinating talks I got to hear (and utterly revolting pictures I got to see) about fungal infections and MRSA!

2005-10-17T22:04:00.000-05:00

At long last, my theories about Chicago’s crappy cloudy winter are proved:

http://www.wunderground.com/tripplanner/index.asp

It is twice as likely to be cloudy here in January than it is in Philly. Or in Wilmington, at least, since the site seemed to have some problems with Philly.

On the other hand, it looks like I might've been wrong about Chicago not being windy -- compared to the East Coast cities I checked, it is definitely windier. Also windier than Omaha or Denver, which I figured were shoo-ins for windiness. Nope.

I have been in Work Hell for the last month-plus. It seems to be subsiding, though not as much or as rapidly as I'd like.

Colliculus and I are on a new quest to identify and research Mystery Bars. These are bars that have a beer sign (usually an Old Style sign) but nothing else, i.e. they don't appear to be called anything. Nor do they ever advertise any specials or attractions such as a pool table. The most intriguing of these has a Duvel sign.

I'm also on a Capital Letters Jag.

The Constant Gardener and Your Friends in the Pharmaceutical Industry

2005-09-11T20:29:00.000-05:00

We went to see The Constant Gardener with Colliculus's folks yesterday. Now, I'm up close and personal with the evils of the pharmaceutical industry every single day. (Yes, even weekends. Another story. Grr.) I'm not some blind defender of theirs. But I would like to speak up and explain why the storyline in that movie would not happen. Don't worry, I won't give anything away that you couldn't tell already. And it was a good movie, so you should go and see it.

1. Pharmaceutical companies are not interested in sweeping deaths from their clinical trials under the rug by doing their studies in poor, corrupt Third World countries. When their drugs kill people in clinical trials, it doesn't do them any good to just hide the data and then market the drug anyway. Even if nobody cares about poor Africans, when they market the drug, Americans and Europeans will die and then their relatives will sue them into bankruptcy and beyond. Look at Vioxx. Look at Tysabri, an MS drug which has only killed three or four people but it was more obvious than Vioxx what the problem was so that manufacturer got slammed a lot faster.

2. It's pretty hard to hide your clinical trials data in the first place, if you ever want to get approval. Most countries, including the U.S., require you to report data on everyone who has ever taken your study drug. Sure, maybe you could bribe officials in Kenya or wherever. But in order to be taken seriously, you have to do studies in many countries, with a lot of academic medical centers that have international standing and can't risk getting caught fudging the data. Nobody's going to approve your drug if you did all your trials in some kind of sketchy-ass open marketplace using paper cards and a giant mob of poor people. You also don't get to do all of your studies on people who have HIV.

Most of the other bad things they said or implied about drug companies are at least possible. They're definitely in bed with all kinds of politicians, all over the world. But I heard someone say as he was leaving the theater, "As if I wasn't depressed enough about what corporations get away with," and that's not really warranted. This isn't new territory. But maybe he was on a first date and needed something to say, or something.

That said, run out and see it . . . The Constant Gardener!

2005-09-03T20:59:00.000-05:00

This hurricane stuff seems like a preview of the coming apocalypse. You know, like if Ianqui and her peak oil pals are right. One interesting learning from this experience is that being able to grow your own food, maintain a generator and all that is completely worthless unless you also have some weapons.

When I first heard about New Orleans being a big old mess, I pictured Baltimore and what that would be like in a disaster, because both are pretty dysfunctional cities that basically coast on the fumes of their past glory, funded by convention and tourist dollars. Immediately I thought of piles and piles of guns and tens of thousands of junkies. So I kind of wondered if this was going to happen.

Today's library adventure

2005-08-29T23:18:00.000-05:00

Today the New York Times did a photo shoot with me at the library. My cheapness, bred and nurtured in me by my parents, is finally receiving its due. What happened was, a writer was doing a story on the high price of textbooks and how students are dealing, so I volunteered my many techniques, which included: Buying used copies on Amazon, getting Colliculus to hunt them down at his university, getting Colliculus to seek them out at another American college through interlibrary loan, and, as the program progressed, not buying books at all on the grounds that I would never read them. And, the point of the photo shoot, getting them at the public library -- as soon as humanly possible so that my classmates couldn't beat me to it. Although it always turned out my eagerness was completely unnecessary -- nobody was ever like, "I tried to find this at the public library but some asshole had it checked out!"

In the interest of journalistic truthfulness, I had to find an actual book from an actual course. I couldn't remember which ones I'd gotten out of the library, so I just pulled a name from memory and found an early edition of it on the stacks. The photographer took all kinds of shots from all kinds of angles. The oddest thing about it was that no one looked at us oddly. That, and there was a can of Copenhagen on one of the shelves that we had to move. Yes, in the marketing section.

Tis the season of moving

2005-08-28T11:50:00.000-05:00

Everyone's moving this weekend. The Monsignor's Florida-motel-style dwelling is being demolished and he's moving to a brighter, happier, demolition-free apartment a couple blocks away. Across the street from his new place, Pangaea is moving to Takoma Park. I went to her going-away party and was heartbroken, once again, that the vagaries of academic life introduce me to so many awesome people who are destined to leave within a year or two. Queen of the Maye is moving to Pangaea's place. The Coxies are moving to Taylor Street and Buffalo, respectively. T-Bent is moving to Indiana, but that's not quite as bad. (I mean bad for me, not her.) Her 2-bedroom apartment with parking and a pool is something like $500 a month! I won't even get into the East Coast shakeup going down these days.

Last but most significant in my life, Darling Angel is moving in here, to Appliance Lane. She bought a condo but construction isn't done yet and she needs a place to crash for a month or two. When I was a child, having my sister live with me would have been my worst nightmare. I may even have had plans to move to an opposite coast. Now, though, we get along just fine. Yesterday I moved a bunch of stuff around in the guest room and discovered half a closet that's free, with proper use of under-the-bed space. Half a closet! Plus she's a really really good baker and a good cook in general. G the cat loves her, even though it's only because she's allergic to him, so the four of us should have some happy (if crowded) times ahead.

Note to prospective visitors: We'd still love to have you visit this fall, but you won't get your own room until sometime in October. We do still have a comfy, unoccupied couch. We may even have to reclaim our second shower from closet to usable bathing site.

2005-08-11T23:30:00.000-05:00

It has been such a long time since I posted! Work has been crazy, crazy, crazy. I go in early, I get home around 8, I work some more at home. Plus last week I went on three trips. Over the first weekend I went to Minneapolis to hang out with dermatologists. Then I went to Seattle to interview a rheumatologist. Then I went to Atlanta to visit my friend from forever ago, whom I will call Hard-Core.

This week I didn't have to go anywhere except Skokie, to interview a dermatologist. His wife is a gastroenterologist, so he identified with my office debate about whose job is grosser. His wife always wins.

I won't tell about all of them right now. But I will tell about Seattle.

In addition to the rheumatologist, we had to interview a woman who had a horrible rheumatic disease. Her job was to talk about how awful her disease was, followed by how my client's drug had changed her life. That's the actual quote we look for: "ZEROVAX changed my life." That holds true regardless of what drug we're talking about -- unless it's an antibiotic or a cancer drug, in which case what we really want is, "VAROZEX saved my life." I don't know why drug names have to be in all caps, but they do.

The place we interviewed her, Washington Park Arboretum, is like something out of a movie -- lush and green and full of exotic trees, with lots of water and birds. And Seattle in August couldn't be nicer.

Our heroine, A, gave us one shot where she had to walk up from the pond wearing a heavy backpack. As she walked up the bank, I noticed that the ducks swimming around looked . . . disappointed. They kind of followed her, and when they got to dry land they retreated and swarmed about irritably.

Later, when we were waiting for the camera guys to set up, we all sat on the grass. Bad move. Next thing we knew, the ducks had stormed the beach and invaded the lawn. They circled us, pecking at bags and equipment and generally looking pissed off that we had dared to show up without food.

Nor did our video interview slow them down. The shot was close-up, so you couldn't see them milling around A's feet, but they were there, milling around A's feet and the tripod and everywhere, for 45 straight minutes. Every so often, during some poignant part of A's story, you'd hear them loudly insisting that we throw down the grub. The sound guy had to stop us a couple of times and say, "Y'know, we got a 'quack' in there," and we'd debate whether it could pass for ordinary ambient noise, like you would get in any outdoor shot, or if we needed to redo that part of the interview.

Since I wasn't actually doing the shoot, just overseeing it, and since I wasn't the client, my job was to scare the hell out of the ducks. But they were unflappable (heh heh), and some kayakers advised me not to scare them too bad or I'd risk a fine.

Needless to say I'm looking forward to reading the transcript.

Oh, and then we went to the doctor's office and found that in the previous hour and a half, he had developed a hopeless case of laryngitis. He obviously felt really bad about it, and no amount of sound adjustments or lozenges helped. So the video producer is going out there again today to re-shoot.

Luckily my client didn't insist on my being there a second time, because this weekend Little Guest is coming to visit! I bought some fine-looking hot-smoked Copper River Salmon when I was out West, so he's in for a treat.

2005-07-19T22:53:00.000-05:00

I've been at the beach for many blissful, idle, drunken days! Yes, last week was the annual beach trip to Delaware. We had the greatest house yet - 5 bedrooms, 2 decks, a screened-in porch, and only 1 house away from the beach! We lazed in the sun, played bocce ball, drank, played drinking games, and purchased alcohol. On Thursday when Bee-yatch Chef and Pshaw and I went to the liquor store I overheard a woman say, "I hope that's for the whole weekend!" But her hopes were unfounded, since we were merely purchasing the 4 cases of Yuengling plus hard liquor that represented the majority of our daily sustenance.

Anyway, that's about all I can remember. This picture pretty much says it all.

Next year I'll take notes.

Back at the ranch, I've been discovering the wonders of container gardening. I bought 7 kinds of seeds and about a gross of tomato plants. (I didn't realize there were 16 per container. Oops.) Many people have told me this is idiotic, because it's July and at this point in the season I shouldn't be fucking around with seeds. They may be right, but carrying home a few packets of seeds seemed like a hell of a lot more fun than carrying a bunch of full-grown plants home from Home Depot in addition to the zillions of tomato seedlings. Also cheaper.

I planted 7 kinds of seeds but only 3 kinds of plants came up. It's possible that others came up but I mistook them for laggards and threw them out. (This is what happens when you plant your seeds -- and thin your seedlings -- in the dark.) Most mysteriously, one entire window box was full of hundreds of seedlings that did not resemble anything I planted there. I figured they couldn't be weeds, and just needed some time to get their act together. But they sure as hell are acting like weeds. They're ugly and grow out instead of up. If you let the seedlings take root even a little they get hard to pull out. Also a couple of them found their way into the adjacent window box. But how the hell could one single window box get completely filled with them, unless I planted them? So I just kept on watering them and hoping they would grow up to be something.

Here are some pictures of my mystery seedlings:

Not to be confused with these orderly, predictable marigolds and zinnias:

As you can see, all care of these plants, including photography, takes place in the dark.

So today I'm at the farmer's market and what do I see but a bunch of big, green-and-pink, leggy plants for sale that look an awful lot like my mystery seedlings. The guy told me it was some kind of plant with a long name beginning with P that could be used in a salad or stir-fry. He said it's just about the only vegetable that is high in omega-3 fatty acids. I tried a bite and it was kinda lemony, kinda bland and kinda snotty, in the way that okra is snotty. I said, "I have a bunch of seedlings that look like this," and he said, "Oh yeah, they're probably p------. It's a weed, it grows everywhere." So when I got home, I tasted Mystery Seedling and sure enough, it had the same lemony-bland-snotty taste. The only thing I can figure is that maybe one of my seed packets was tainted.

I might use a little of it in a salad - I think it would be tasty in small amounts. But there's something weird about eating a mysterious alien plant that just shows up in your window box.

You go, Li'l Rhody!

2005-06-29T22:30:00.000-05:00

Amid the shitload of health news that comes into my email box -- and it really is a shitload, I mean at least 30 news-related emails a day -- I noticed this happy development: Medical Marijuana? Rhode Island Says Yes. I notice that although old Governor Don plans to veto the law, the G.A. has enough votes to override him. That is so Rhode Island -- when funding's not involved, they say "Fuck you, Republican federal government!"

A second article I read deals with one of my pet theories, that there is some reason why practically everyone is nearsighted. Turns out not breastfeeding is at least one of the reasons. I actually have no idea whether I was breastfed or not. My mother-in-law thinks that's crazy, everyone should know. But I am NOT asking.

My real theory, which is hardly original, is that people are nearsighted because of too much time spent surfing the Net. All I know is my eyes were pretty good until we got DSL at work, and it's been downhill ever since. I found these yogic eye exercises that seem less freaky than usual. I might try them even though Colliculus will make endless mockery of me.

In high school I dated this guy for a month, who then stalked me for about 6 months. Two or three years later, in college, Noise Footprint and I visited a palm reader in a bad neighborhood in Wilmington (the Indian restaurant next door where we had planned to go was closed). She had a storefront that was her apartment -- plate glass window with a neon sign, but if you looked past the sign you saw wall-to-wall carpet, a big-screen TV and her noisy-ass kids sitting there with a million toys underfoot. She told me there was someone with the initials JD who was a major force in my life. I couldn't think of anyone, but when I got home, J.D. Stalker Dude called me out of the blue and apologized for being an asshole. Anyway, he swore by yogic eye exercises, which is probably where I got the idea from.

The head doctor

2005-06-15T21:54:00.000-05:00

Here's a post that's still on a healthcare-type topic, but at least it won't gross you out.

Every six weeks I go to the neurologist about my headaches. If you've never been to a neurologist I should explain what that's like. You'd expect them to be some of the freakier, more intimidating medical specialists, but it's actually just the opposite. They usually wear street clothes, sit behind a big, official-looking desk, and have relatively few medical-type items around, so you feel like you're getting your taxes done or hiring an architect. Maybe interviewing for an especially stringent day care program is more accurate, since they invariably have a lot of stimulating decorations.

This guy, whose name is Dr. Ho, has pen-and-ink streetscapes of Chicago all over his office. In the waiting room is one of those 24-by-36 posters of the Earth from space that was probably popular around 1980, plus a picture of the brain with the caption, "Technology has yet to improve upon . . . the world's fastest supercomputer." Every time I walk in there I want to laugh at these ridiculous posters. But I make an effort to be inconspicuous, because I feel like such a complete imposter surrounded by the people who must have a million more horrible afflictions than mine. Neurology is an incredibly bleak field, I think. All of the diseases are incurable and most are degenerative.

Every appointment, he asks a bunch of questions about the drugs I take. (Luckily he never bothers to ask if I'm still not drinking, because I gave up on that back in February.) Then we do a round of drunk driving-type tests in order to prove I haven't recently caught one of the degenerative diseases. This most recent time he asked me, "Do you have a stiff neck with this headache? A fever?" I'd had enough and said, "Look, there is no way I've had spinal meningitis for six months."

After we've ruled out a sudden case of meningitis, MS, Alzheimer's, or whatever other horrid disease he has in mind, he invariably expresses puzzlement and amazement that none of the things he's recommended have worked. I do not find this encouraging, especially once I hear his next recommendation, which is always . . . higher doses of the same stuff he's been prescribing me all along.

As you can see, I should probably try seeing someone else. I was going to try acupuncture, but my insurance doesn't cover it, and equally important, last month a large placebo-controlled study came out in JAMA showing it was no better than placebo. Interestingly, the placebo group did very well - a lot better than the people who got nothing else. Apparently having pins stuck into you randomly is just as effective as having a trained professional do it correctly, and more effective than nothing.

2005-06-14T23:13:00.000-05:00

Colliculus's parents came to visit this weekend. Once again they spoiled us rotten, buying us dinner, the aforementioned grill, admissions to stuff, and literally everything else except train fare, which they no doubt would have insisted on buying if we didn't have fare cards already. They also helped us wash a couple of windows and plant some tomatoes I had been neglecting on the deck. They even bought the potting soil for the tomatoes. Damn, I married well.

I was thrilled that we were able to persuade them to go to BodyWorlds. This is a new exhibit in which almost every item on display is real, plasticized human tissue. It's not as gross as it sounds and really amazing. There are whole skeletons in which everything but the circulatory system is stripped away, or the nerves, or the muscles -- you get the picture.

A disturbing thing was that every so often, something about the setup would remind you that this wasn't just a display; it used to be a live person. Like the lungs would be black from smoking, or the person would have a knee replacement. The most unnerving one was the pregnant woman with fetus. She looked perfectly healthy and fit, as did the fetus. But I guess they weren't.

At the end there was a museum docent with a couple of random, plasticky organs you could pick up. A guy came over and started squeezing a lung with both hands, like a stressball, while he chatted with her about how the display was made. He asked, "So these are replicas, right?" She had to explain three times before he understood that no, they were real organs that had gone through the same process as everything else. The moment he got it, he put the lung right down. I poked it. It did feel just like a stressball. I didn't want to pick it up either, though.

2005-06-08T23:33:00.000-05:00

I'm super-busy at work again. I used to just have one client -- the drug that treated all the autoimmune diseases -- but now I'm on two new accounts. We had a competition at work to see whose account was the grossest and I DOUBLE-won. I'll spare you the horrific links but Google Image these infections if you dare:
Invasive aspergillosis
MRSA
Diabetic foot infection

There's no question that winning these contests is partly about luck and partly about desire to win. I've got the zest for the gross-out, no question. Then again, my coworkers who work on allergies, low testosterone and whatnot just can't hold a candle to fungal infections, inflammatory bowel disease and the other stuff I work on.

Colliculus's parents are coming to visit this weekend. They're going to buy us a grill!

A story from Raleighwood

2005-06-02T23:00:00.000-05:00

In NC we got to see the Militant Nudist's little bro, who still seems little even though he's 8 years older than I was the last time I saw him. MN tells me that Little Bro lives in a house belonging to a cat named Radar. Apparently the woman who lived there before moved away and Radar wouldn't leave, so instead of selling the house she decided to rent it out on condition that any tenants agree to live with Radar. They don't have to take care of him, they just have to live with him and let her come in and feed him Chik-Fil-A sandwiches and waffle fries three or four times a week.

Radar is a really filthy beast. He's big and fat and mean, and he stinks because he rolls in the sewer all the time. In addition to the Chik-Fil-A, Radar also tries to eat everyone's food. When he jumps on the sofa Little Bro uses his toe to shove him off, that's how gross Radar is.

But the rent's less than $500 for a big 2-bedroom house in Greensboro, so it's worth putting up with Radar's shit.

Denizens of Raleighwood

2005-05-30T18:19:00.000-05:00

This weekend we went to Raleigh for the first time since February 2003, when Colliculus and I got trapped there for 6 days by an East Coast storm and he almost missed his Chicago job interview. That signaled the permanent end to a streak of annual February visits to the Triangle area that began around 1986, when my grandparents moved there, carried on uninterrupted through high school, contributed to my choice of colleges, and continued even after my moves to Baltimore and Providence. But February is a terrible time to drive to NC and an even worse time to fly there. I think May may become the new tradition, because the weather differential is just about perfect. It was warm and sunny there, whereas it's still cool and fall-like here. In fact I'm just about fed up with the pleasant autumn-type weather here.

On this trip we got to see the Militant Nudist's grand house, meet her special friend J and spend many hours drinking in her backyard, which is possibly my favorite activity. We also got to catch up with Lauramander and Morphis and see plenty of TLC (MN and TLC were my roommates pretty much all through college). We also visited my grandparents in Burlington and saw some trailer parks and so on, but nothing really photogenic except this company near MN's house:

The angel looks kind of like a bad-girl Tooth Fairy to me. And I have no idea what angels have to do with mulch.

I didn't know until this trip that shrimp and grits was a traditional Southern dish, but TLC enlightened me to this point. Sooooo good. We're going to have to learn to cook this one.

2005-05-21T10:11:00.000-05:00

Our cat received a letter from the vet reminding him that in his aged decrepitude, he should see the vet twice a year instead of once. It pointed out that seeing the vet once a year is comparable to seeing the doctor once every 7 years for his owners.

Colliculus read the letter to me and asked, "Isn't that kind of like throwing good money after bad?"

I told him he should write "Good money after bad!" on the letter and mail it back to the vet.

The reason I have more time to do things like read the cat's mail is that I finally finished my marketing program. I cannot tell you how happy it makes me to have my Mondays, Wednesdays, and Saturdays back. Night school totally sucks. I don't know how Tim has managed to work on his MBA for all these years without showing any noticeable signs of strain. It was a good program, though, and I used up the money I got for doing AmeriCorps.

I hope I don't make my academic friends paranoid when I say that in class, I reverted to my teenage self and found myself studying the instructors. These are just regular professionals like myself, so it's not really fair, but when you stare at someone for 2 1/2 hours twice a week it becomes like a TV relationship; you know so much more about them than they know about you.

The last instructor I had, in Direct Marketing, was so nice - total "Dad" manner - but so passive-aggressive. Whenever anyone talked during the lecture or didn't settle down after the break you could tell he was about to lose it. He never did, but the tension bothered me enough that I'd choose my seat to avoid sitting next to any of the habitual offenders.

The guy before that was bald and named Dome. He taught integrated marketing communications. His co-instructor was a woman younger than me who used to work with him but had moved on to another agency for reasons she never said. We later caught a glimpse of them together in a picture with his kids.

The class before that, which was internet marketing, I don't have anything remarkable to say about the instructor. He was nice, about our age, and lived down the street from me in Wrigleyville. That was the class where I made a spectacle of myself by carrying the enormous umbrella all the time.

The class before that, branding, was taught by two guys named Alan and Ilan. Alan was client-side, B2B, and from the Midwest. Picture John Cusack with a Powerpoint deck. Ilan had worked for a number of agencies all over the world. His accent was impossible to identify. He wore jeans and taught through videos and stories of past ad campaigns in Africa and Europe. Picture one of those old foreign guys who seduces art school girls.

The class before that convinced me never to go into market research. Our instructor had to miss two meetings to fly to Atlanta to run focus groups in which participants had to sort a giant pile of similar sponges and discuss their feelings about the different kinds.

There was one before that, Principles of Marketing, which involved ancient case studies of products such as a new kind of pile driver and an industrial adhesive that never made it to market. Nobody wanted to get this instructor because he was such a complete, dyed-in-the-wool fuddy-dud who said things like, "If you do that, you'll be on your way to Joliet!" [pause for effect].

Next weekend we're going to NC to visit my grandparents so I have to take some pictures of the house, which I will post. Also going to see TLC and CryingBabyJebus, happiness!

Some things that happened

2005-05-18T21:04:00.000-05:00

Yesterday I went to the library and on my way in I passed a pack of guys in suits handing out Christian tracts. Not the lurid Jack Chick kind, just the regular "You're only a heartbeat away!" ones.

The downtown library used to bother me because it seemed so plain and boring compared to the big downtown library in Baltimore. Here's a picture:

On the outside, of course, it's completely insane. I don't know who decided this was a good idea:

Unfortunately no pictures are readily available of the completely over-the-top, gilt-coated Baltimore library. I guess my tastes have changed over the past year and a half, because I now think that baroque public architecture bespeaks urban decay and is therefore kind of sad and tawdry. (I also LOVE bungalows, which I bitched about in my very first entry on this blog, I think.)

Anyway, the librarian wouldn't let me check out any books because I didn't have my library card. I told her it was stolen and she asked three stupid questions:
#1. "Is it at home?" No. I just said my wallet was stolen. (In fact, "stolen" was only one of many possibilities. What actually happened is, one day I forgot to zip my backpack all the way and my wallet just disappeared.)
#2. "Have you registered the stolen card with us?" Um, no. Who calls the library when they're missing their wallet? What, was I supposed to call the video store, too? The grocery store?
#3. "Well, then, do you have a police report?" No, I didn't have a police report, and if I did, I doubt I would've brought it with me to the fricking library.

As punishment for not having followed the rules, I have to pay $1 for a replacement card. But they don't process cards after 6:30 p.m. Instead I had to come back another day and fill out one of the forms behind that lady -- "I mean, that gentleman," she corrected herself -- of which there were none.

I went back outside and a gray-haired, Volvo-hippie looking woman was gesturing to one of the Bible guys, making a rectangle between her index fingers and thumbs. She was saying, "Now where I'm from is right here, over near the Massachusetts border. . . " The guy was riffling through his tracts and clearly trying to figure out an exit strategy.

2005-05-14T12:56:00.000-05:00

Now, Marci really has a rat problem. Those pics are something else.

I don't know why someone in Baltimore had one of these -- though this building looks suspiciously like my old apartment building -- but when I was in Providence the local liberal activist group had one of these. They paraded it around at all their protests and accused the protestee of the day of being a rat, ratting out the low-income residents/minorities/union workers/fill-in-the-blank, allowing rats to thrive in their substandard housing, etc. It made for great sound bites and never failed to make it into a newspaper photo or B-roll (PR lingo for TV footage).

Ratitos

2005-05-12T22:52:00.000-05:00

We have little rats in the alley. Tiny, scurrying little rats the size of the ones you see in pet stores or labs. It makes Colliculus and me think of the rats in Baltimore, which were the size of dachshunds but less sprightly. Those rats were so big, you never saw them full-on. You only saw their asses in retreat, and those asses were slow-moving and rocked side-to-side, jiggling, like miniature hippo-asses.

Except for the rapist in our vestibule, every urban ill in Chicago is just like the rats. It can't hold a candle to anything I saw in Baltimore. The rats are cute and harmless. I don't think I've seen any roaches, and I certainly haven't seen them seething all over the sidewalks like I used to in Fells Point in the summertime. Even our friends from Philly were horrified by that. Philly!

The beggars start in on their stories of needing 22 cents to catch a bus, no doubt thinking I look like a soft-hearted girl from Wisconsin or someplace. They don't know I once joined a pair of security guards to chase a drug addict all over the Rotunda shopping center after she successfully impersonated a teacher at a local school (she even had the cardigan and canvas tote bag), a Johns Hopkins nursing assistant complete with ID badge, and a suburban mother of three with a flat tire.

The beggars here just ask for change. Nobody shouts about the monkeys or throws their keys at me after asking what time it is. Also, shit that happens on the train or bus is annoying and gross, but never really frightening. You've seen my CTA stories (and there are some even better ones at CTA Tattler) but I haven't heard my seatmates talk about how many times they've been shot and featured on TV for it.

So there's not a lot about urban life here that can really get on my nerves. Other than the traffic, since for obvious reasons, that wasn't really an issue in Baltimore.

PS As Ianqui has no doubt noted, "Ratitos" does not mean little rats in Spanish. But what the hell. It's kinda cute.

Back from the dead!

2005-04-19T21:33:00.000-05:00

For the moment, anyway.

Two weekends ago we painted. All Friday night, all Saturday, all Sunday, and at 5:30 Sunday Colliculus announced, "I am never going to feel bad about spending money on painters. Ever." And we cleaned up our stuff and went to Sheffield's, which has one of the greatest beer selections and beer gardens in America. By then it was too cold to sit in the beer garden -- but what a statement that is! Whether you live here or not, can you believe it's been in the 70s for most of the last two weeks? Anyway, the next morning Colliculus called the painter and told him to do the rest and let us know how much it would cost. The painter was fine with this; he and his crew did the entire rest of the house in two days flat, it was a beautiful job, and he and Colliculus shared some Old Style at the end.

Our weekend of work, which probably added up to about 50 person-hours, saved us about $800. That's not all that impressive, but I'm OK with it. Especially when I put on my self-employment hat and remember that $800 out-of-pocket was more like $950 in pre-tax income. The pre-tax calculation, which I learned about when I was self-employed, is a great justification for all kinds of stinginess.

Last weekend we packed. The weather was more problematic. 80-degree sunshine is heartbreaking when you have to stay inside, but it's just plain hellish when the house next door is a factory of dust, chainsaws and Spanish curses from sunrise to sunset and you have to keep the windows closed and the music turned up. Even earplugs at the highest rating CVS offers (32) are not enough unless you're really sleep-deprived, which I'm working on. I am going to be so glad when we're out of here. I feel sorry for our landlord who has to lead prospective tenants to our apartment through a pile of discarded ductwork and sawdust (and cursing).

That brings us to next weekend: the move, featuring a pair of guys named Tom and Roland. Tom is the one who speaks English. More eventually.

Our condo looks SO much better now that it is white (not mustard, no checkerboard squares -- sorry to the surprising number of you who liked it) and the carpet has been cleaned (which I don't think happened in the previous 14 years).

Scene from painting:

Further painting-related deliberation

2005-04-05T22:57:00.000-05:00

Sunday we got the expert advice of Pangaea, whose main qualification is that she loves to paint (colors only). She said, tactfully but with great certitude, that we could not paint the bedroom wall red. First of all, there was no way to sleep soundly in a room with walls painted red or orange. Bedrooms should be painted green, blue, or other soothing colors -- maybe a nice terracotta if we really wanted red. Second, a giant red wall amid all that white would be jarring.

I didn't buy the first argument, since nothing stands between me and my sleep, but I could definitely see her second point. We had been afraid of that too, in fact. In the end, notwithstanding all those helpful suggestions you all had (plus the Saab idea), we decided to paint everything white with an eventual plan of getting red shades (a dream of mine since I was 15).

Today I met with the painter, who happens to be our realtor's husband. Our realtor is an apple-cheeked, sweet-tongued Midwestern matron. Her husband on the other hand is a lanky, unsmiling Irishman, daubed in various shades of white, who does not mince words. He gave me the revised estimate, then some advice about the downstairs, which Colliculus and I and other willing and friendly parties are going to attempt this weekend: "Don't fuck it up." He then expounded on this theme. People think, "Anyone can paint." It's not true. Everyone fucks it up. Why, just look at this shitty job the previous owner did. (Points at smudged Grey Poupon in the corners, which I hadn't noticed before.) Couples call him, threatening divorce, asking him to come over and fix the crappy job they did. Anyway, he wasn't trying to get me to hire him to do the downstairs too, because in the end he offered me a tutorial on how not to fuck it up, insisted on buying all of our supplies at a discount and delivering them for us ("Everything they sell at Home Depot is absolute shit"), and urged me to call his cell phone at any time if the shit should hit the fan.

It's like having my dad around, if my dad used four-letter words and a cell phone. This should be fun.

2005-04-02T18:52:00.000-06:00

Happy days, Ianqui and Super G have come for a visit. It's not a visit to us, strictly speaking, since they're here for a wedding, but they're crashing here so we still get plenty of q-time.

This week was all about painting the condo. No actual action was taken, just deliberation. The big question was whether to paint it ourselves or hire someone. Inevitably, our two driving motivations -- cheapness and laziness -- have come to war, as we knew must happen with homeownership. In the end it looks like we're going to compromise and hire someone to do the upstairs but do the downstairs ourselves. This all has to happen ASAP, before we move in, which has gotten to be impossible, so I finally had to call Tom the moving guy and beg off moving for another week. So on tap for the next three weekends, we've got painting, packing and moving. Woo-hoo!

Also, we've been dithering about how to paint the master bedroom. We could leave it all white, but that seems kind of boring. All the colors have problems, though. Bright colors are too dark. Pastel colors are too wussy and unlikely to match anything we ever own, since we never buy anything in a pastel color. Blue and purple are too cold. We thought long and hard about a bright, golden yellow, which has none of these problems, but rejected it. I can't link to the exact color, but I had something like this in mind:

Nothing matches our comforter. But we never make our bed anyway, which means what you usually see is a bunch of hand-me-down, holey blankets that are 4 mismatched shades of green and blue, and of course nothing matches that.

The latest theory is that the great big windowless wall will be cherry red, the rest will be white, and we'll get red window treatments to match. Which means we've got to get our asses in gear to pick out the window treatments and the paint, because we can't change our move date again. It's all kind of scary, though, because if we don't like it, it's really gonna suck to have a wall that's 14 feet high and cherry red. And what the hell kind of pictures can you hang on a cherry red wall?

Any thoughts?

Michigan, Napa Valley of the Midwest

2005-03-28T23:24:00.000-06:00

About a month ago, when I was tumbling around the school/work vortex and was not keeping up with blogging, we went to visit my cousin Vino in Ann Arbor. Colliculus posted some pictures. This weekend, V. returned the favor for a most delightful visit, so it seems meet to discuss the significance of Michigan.

If you live on the East Coast, you probably don't think much about Michigan, unless you're Chesapeake Explorer who grew up there. However, it occupies a weird spot in the Upper Midwest mind.

First of all, there's the hand thing. You know, where people hold their right hand palm up and draw elaborate, invisible pictures of where they're from and where they went. Unless they're from the UP, in which case it doesn't work. But nobody's from the UP. Just like nobody's from sLower Delaware.

Everyone goes on vacation in Michigan. It's got the attractions of California with the climate of Maine. You go there to go skiing. To go on a wine tour. (There are DOZENS of wineries there.) To pick your own cherries and apples and strawberries. To go on a romantic getaway. To visit some adorable, unspoiled lakefront town -- so unspoiled, in fact, that you'd never dare actually go in the water because it's so frigid even in July. To go to the beach without all the fecal coliform warnings and other ickiness associated with Lake Michigan on the Illinois, Wisconsin and Indiana sides of things. Also, the sand is supposed to be softer but I don't believe that -- the sand at Chicago beaches is already unimaginably soft. It's like flannel.

So what the good people of Michigan want you to know is, if you think you need to leave the Midwest for a vacation, you're just not trying hard enough.

Vino actually brought some Michigan vino with him. I didn't try it because I'm still not supposed to drink wine. By all accounts, this was a most enviable blessing. Now there's a bottle lurking in our fridge, along with a bottle of normal wine I bought back in November when Binny's was having a sale.

Forbidden lyrics

2005-03-23T22:05:00.000-06:00

Here's my list of words that bands are NOT ALLOWED to rhyme anymore. You know, the lyrics where as soon as you hear the end of one line, you know exactly where the next line's gonna end up:

school, cool (Early rock bands did this one in, but Scholastic and Peanuts really turned the knife)
hips, lips
night, all right (also, "so right")
together, forever
city, pretty

To the prairie!

2005-03-21T23:38:00.000-06:00

Yesterday we wanted to go for a walk, but we couldn't think of anyplace to go. Not Uptown, not Ravenswood, not Lincoln Park, not by the lake. Finally I realized what was missing: non-city walking options. Colliculus and I had not set foot on ground that was not city, highway rest stop, or the suburbs and beaches of Delaware since a drive to Massachusetts in November 2003. Yes, a drive.

Our ignorance of Chicago hiking options was complete. We didn't know if there were any hiking trails nor how long it would take to get to them. Another thing we wondered was, if we did find a place to go hiking, would it have trees? Or are we too far west for that?

I can't believe we went this long before wondering about this, especially since in Baltimore and Providence, we used to go hiking pretty regularly.

So Colliculus did some Internet research and found the Argonne Nature Preserve, which has something like 9 miles of trails. Not bad, considering it's just southwest of the city. We drove out there and what did we find but trees! Lots of them! Pines and maples and sycamores (which I misidentified as birch trees, but Bitter Orange, who was equally citified in the matter of Chicago hiking but otherwise significantly more knowledgeable in the ways of the woods, corrected me), and creeks and even some gentle rises. I wouldn't go so far as to call them hills, but there were definitely slopes. Also a lot of prairies. Not all of the prairies were called that on the map -- there was at least one that was called a savannah -- but I for one was not fooled.

There was also a waterfall:

Something really funny about this jaunt: The people I invited to come, plus the people I told about it afterwards, all said the same thing: "Hiking? Where?" They had this incredulous tone, as if you can't go hiking, or at least it's not something that anyone would ever suggest doing. If I had suggested skydiving, I'd have gotten a less quizzical reaction than that. Because at least everyone knows where you go skydiving.

Except one of my coworkers, who said, "Isn't that where they have buffalo?" I said I doubted it, seeing as how it's crammed between a railroad and a highway with a research center dedicated to alternative energy smack in the middle, but she was pretty sure they did. I'll let you know if I find out about that. All we saw was a hawk.

2005-03-20T00:20:00.000-06:00

I must apologize for being such a blog deadbeat. One of my coworkers quit and they're not replacing her so work is permanently crazy. At school, my group project went so completely to hell that I spent most of our presentation time today mentally composing my grade-grovelling email to the instructor in which I plan to throw myself on his mercy while throwing my group-mates under the bus. (One got called away unexpectedly on business for the last 2 weeks of class, and had to email us an MP3 of his PowerPoint voiceover; the second missed the last week of class; the third did so little that I just gave up and assigned him tasks, and he didn't do them until last night. Just call me Group Asshole.)

And last of all, we closed on our condo Tuesday and are now proud ho-moaners. Hey, did anyone who looked at the pictures notice that one wall of our bedroom is fluorescent spring green? We didn't! And it's in the pictures, so we must've just been blind.

Now begins the process of talking to vendors about our various renovation projects, such as extending the green wall. Also painting it. Also refinishing the floor. Like adopted babies, Chicago home-improvement guys come from all nations except the U.S. Also, they're weird people. One of them sized up the floor, said, "No cooking's been done here," and the next thing we knew he was trying to buy our fireplace off us. "I won't even charge you for the removal," he said. We said no thanks.

Here's one reason why we need to paint:

I mean, I like creative painting as much as the next girl, but I can't ID a single attractive color in that palette, can you?

Don't Blink

2005-03-09T23:12:00.000-06:00

I was at work and had an argument with my coworker about whether Malcolm Gladwell was the author of The Tipping Point. She saw this picture:

And she said, "No, that's the author of Blink. The Tipping Point guy is sort of a nerdy looking guy." A Google search resolved this later. Here's a picture of "the Tipping Point guy":

Apparently Gladwell decided to grow himself a Fro in between books.

You can tell I'm really really busy with work and school and everything else, because I don't have time to write a real post. Next Tuesday we close on the condo.

Just what I needed

2005-03-01T23:34:00.000-06:00

Today I received the following email regarding a new client of ours:

Subject: Kingly Burger Buttons
Our new Kingly Burger clients are going to be in the office most of the day on Thursday. To give them a royal welcome, we've planned a number of surprises and some of them include you!

We want to show them how much we love KB -- please wear the button with pride all day Thursday so our client can see that not only the team, but the entire agency is behind them!

***
Who knew you could combine the best of both worlds featured in "Office Space" -- cubes AND "flare"?

What's great about the condo

2005-02-21T20:21:00.000-06:00

Since you asked, and since I like to make lists:
1. I already mentioned the great commute. But it is sooo much better for poor train-crossed Colliculus. And a little bit better for me.
2. It's in an awesome neighborhood. Possibly the best neighborhood in America. You might think I'm exaggerating but I'm not. It's quiet and leafy and happening at the same time. (Before the Monsignor pipes up, I'll admit that his hood might be equally rad, but it has a longer commute.)
2a. It has 3 superb beergardens within a 10-minute walk.
2b. It's also within a 10-minute walk of the "European" grocery store, the regular grocery store, the Whole Foods, and the liquor castle/catacombs.
2c. Also the intersection where you go to buy cheap shoes and used CDs.
2d. Also the L stop that goes everywhere (Belmont).
3. It has 2 small decks, one of which has a skyline view, when it's not overcast like it was the day we took this picture.

The other deck, you won't get rained on!

4. It has hardwood floors downstairs and berber carpet upstairs. I know wall-to-wall carpet is tres unfashionable, but I really like it in the bedroom so that's just what I wanted.
5. It has a downstairs and an upstairs.
6. It has a 130-year-old mantelpiece and a working fireplace.
7. The bedrooms have skylights and crazy cool beams and slanty ceilings.

8. In-unit laundry (Colliculus's favorite) and a decent amount of closets (mine, but Colliculus is the real beneficiary since right now his closet is a corner capped with a door).
9. A garage that does not allow rain or snow to come through the roof, unlike our current garage.
10. No Cubs.

So yeah, there are some problems and some weird things about the layout, like no bathroom or closet in the master bedroom. Also the kitchen and bathrooms were designed back when plaid flannel was still in style. But that's all A-OK, because otherwise there's no way in hell we'd be able to afford this place.

2005-02-18T20:05:00.000-06:00

At work I took a class on writing, about an hour of which was devoted to grammar.

The instructor passed out a sheet listing the 8 parts of speech, plus some finer points about verbs. The guy next to me, who the instructor kept calling by my name, asked, "Do you think we in America have problems with grammar because we speak American but write English?" I think he was serious.

Next the instructor asked everyone to define the parts of speech. The class did OK with noun. Also verb. With adjective there was general agreement though not a word-for-word shared definition. But after that, all bets were off. Adverb? "Any word that ends in ly." I was the only one who could define a preposition, and by the time we got to transitive and intransitive verbs the entire class was looking at me like I was possessed by a 19th-century demon. They all took detailed notes.

After class, the instructor held me back to ask where I went to school. I told her the name of my college. Maybe she was expecting me to say Europe or something, because that obviously didn't shed any light.

A couple of hours later, I ran into someone in the bathroom who expressed amazement at my knowledge of grammar and said she'd had to study up back when she thought she was going to be a high school English teacher. She graduated from high school in '98 and had never been taught any grammar. So maybe that's why I knew and nobody else did -- they were all younger than me.

Update

2005-02-15T20:51:00.000-06:00

We got our condo. It was sort of a struggle, and I'm sort of pissed off at the seller, but I think she's pissed off at us too so maybe that means we got a fair deal.

Here's why I'm pissed off. Last Monday we did the inspection. A number of things were wrong with the house. Probably that happens with most condos that were rehabbed 14 years ago, I don't know, but some of this stuff was ridiculous. Item 1 for your consideration: The decks, which don't have enough bolts fastening them to the wall. In this here Chi-town we like our decks securely attached. Item 2: Someone, the developer I assume, had the brilliant idea to install the furnace and hot water heater in a bathroom closet. Does this sound legal to you? No? Not surprisingly, it doesn't to the inspector, the city, or the gas company either. There's some other half-ass shit along these lines. Plus the furnace, A/C and roof are all on their way out.

Meanwhile, during the inspection, the seller's realtor is encouraging us to make an offer on her belongings -- "She's just looking to unload a few things," he says when I ask if she's moving out of the country -- and otherwise emphasizing her dire poverty. Afterwards, he tells our realtor that he meant to write the contract to say she's selling the house "as is." Which is a bunch of crap.

Then the seller leaves the country, telling no one, so our lawyers have to extend the contract review period. Then the seller gets back and tells us we can either pay for all of the repairs ourselves or the deal's off. I was half tempted to say "Screw you, your place was on the market for 4 months and you're lucky you haven't died of CO poisoning in your bathroom yet," but we decided it wasn't worth it.

So hooray! As of the Ides of March, we have a condo! If you want pictures, email me.

A second, less happy update is that I'm back on the wagon again. My neurologist says the non-drinking thing wasn't an experiment, it was more like a controlled environment in which to test all the other things. Now I'm way, way more concerned that one of these headache treatments should work. Before I didn't care if it took a year, but now I'm 100% business, asking him, "Six weeks till my next appointment? Sounds like five will be plenty," and so on. Argh. I will say that I am OFF the wagon when I go to New York for the March Mega Birthday Party. If you're reading this and want to come to this party in NYC, email me. Ianqui said I could invite friends!

Two L stories

2005-02-06T15:03:00.000-06:00

Story #1: Gross
There's a really fat, really crazy woman who takes up two seats and covers herself with a big dirty quilt. She smells awful and gibbers to herself. Every so often she clears her throat or coughs or something and it's so loud everyone on the car jumps, even at rush hour. I mean it'll really scare the shit out of you if you're sitting near her. One time it was clear from the sound of things that she'd coughed up something really big. I looked over and saw her slowly finger-painting on the window with it.

Story #2: Eerie
When I take the train home from school at night, there are usually some DePaul students coming home from their downtown performances. You can tell by their bulky instruments, unceasing cell phone conversations, or evidence that they were just on a stage, such as their ability to make their voices carry throughout the car when they shout random lines at each other or the "audience."

Two students were sitting behind me singing to each other. Their voices were soft but powerful - obviously trained, not like if I were singing a song to somebody. I was like, "Prima donnas," but it didn't really bother me since it was quiet and I just kept on reading. But their duet was impossible to ignore. It was intricate, in a minor key, and went on and on. They sung it just above a whisper but intensely, and so close to my ears, I got shivers. I only pretended to read about rheumatoid arthritis until we got to the DePaul stop. They got off and I heard from outside a final operatic holler from the guy.

***
We picked our condo primarily on the basis of its location relative to the L. Sometimes now I walk down (or up) the stairs to the train and I'm just amazed that something so prosaic could be worth so much money to me.

Cranky as she goes

2005-02-03T23:49:00.000-06:00

Two months ago I gave up caffeine and wine and set my alcohol limit at 2 or 3 drinks a night. Then, four weeks ago, I quit alcohol completely. At this point I feel lucky the Mormons haven't come by in the Teetotal Wagon to take me to Provo.

Sobriety has been an educational experience, one I'd like to share in the hope that others never have to go through it. Here are some things I've learned about drinking and sobriety:

1. Driving home at 3 a.m. is challenging even when you haven't been drinking.
2. Office holiday parties are a minefield for indiscreet comments, overly enthusiastic public dancing, and next-day regret, even when you haven't been drinking.
3. Parties and dance clubs are 99% as much fun sober as not -- at least until about 1 o'clock when everyone else is too drunk to relate to anymore. Concerts, maybe 75%.
4. Bars are the dullest human institutions there are. Especially the bars I go to.
5. Not drinking is kind of like dieting. At first it's fine. You feel good, clean, like your body's absorbing all the health you're providing.
6. Then you try and compensate. In my case I go out to dinner and brunch, with predictable side effects that far outweigh (heh) the caloric benefits of avoiding alcohol.
7. Then you get pissy and resentful about your martyrdom, realize you're unfit human company, and start watching movies and blogging.
8. Being able to drive home in a warm car at 3 a.m. in January is absolute bliss.
9. Being the Station Wagon Mom for all your drunk-ass friends is gratifying -- at least initially.

Here is what I learned about drinking and headaches: They actually don't have much to do with one another. Thank Cthulu for His many-armed blessings.

Why I've lost any sense of the world outside of a 7-mile strip along Lake Michigan

2005-02-01T22:25:00.000-06:00

UPDATE: Looks like we got our condo. Now, onto the wild world of home inspections, attorneys, and closing costs. Ho-moaners we shall be!!

Since New Year's I have (or we have):
1. Started another marketing class that meets two nights a week
2. Hosted 3 weekends of houseguests
3. Gotten preapproved for a mortgage, found a realtor, looked at a bunch of condos and bid on one
4. Become responsible for 2 new diseases at work since one of my coworkers quit (They're totally gross and horrific too; here are some photos)

Also the following tasks which take up energy but not time:
1. Brandishing the golf umbrella
2. Not drinking - which merits discussion in a future post; don't worry, it will all be over before redrum redrum

I hope we get the condo. Technically money, not hope, is the operative factor there, but I don't want to pay much more than we bid so that's where the hope comes in. It's in a fun neighborhood a little bit south of here with no baseball fans. It has two small decks and lots of closets.

One interesting thing we learned while house-hunting: Almost everyone has better stuff than us. At one point, I for one felt proud of our furniture. I guess that was four or five years ago when we lived in Baltimore. Since then, we pretty much stopped upgrading. Other than some nice things my dad built, all our stuff is hand-me-downs from the '80s and Ikea, some of it hideous. Hideous!

I also learned we're supposed to have framed clippings, mirrors, bulletin boards, etc. boasting of our schools' athletic prowess. Colliculus's alma mater of Hotpants won't do the job, but mine would be OK and the place he teaches now would probably cut the mustard as well. We'll just have to see what's in the budget after the mortgage gets paid.

Hemlines

2005-01-29T23:46:00.000-06:00

What's up with this?

I think I like it, but I'm too lazy and timid to do it myself. Also it probably looks best on tall slim women, like most fashions, and would make me look like Yosemite Sam minus the beard.

Then there's this. How exactly does this look good?

I have to fight with tailors all the time about this. Everyone but me seems to have their pants about 1/8" from the ground. As I result I probably look like I bought all my clothes in Europe. In a special store for Europeans who eat at McDonald's, since I don't wear a size 21 or whatever the hell their sizes are.

Side note: Can Banana Republic really get away with charging $168 for these?

The real problem with butt-ass cold weather

2005-01-23T22:52:00.000-06:00

You may remember that in December, I was wandering around the neighborhood in single-digit temps in an effort to get rid of a headache. I mentioned that the sidewalks contained nothin' but me and the snow-tumbleweeds, and that contrary to my understanding of criminal behavior, a couple of local rapists had decided to take advantage of this situation by attacking women. One got caught but one didn't.

I realized that, while the hobbyist attacker might operate in nicer weather, bitter cold is really ideal for the dedicated predator. First, he has an excuse for being wrapped to the eyes. Second, the streets are deserted. And third, the few windblown pedestrians are also wrapped to the eyes and hunched over just trying to get the hell back to their warm apartments, i.e. not likely to see a stalker.

Well, it got super-cold again last week, plus it snowed every day. The other rapist decided to ply his trade in our vestibule. He jumped our neighborh, who luckily fought him off. We heard screaming but wrote it off as the usual Wrigleyville woo-hoo nonsense until we heard sirens, doorbell-ringing and door-pounding from the cops. Now the inside of our front door is covered with fingerprint dust and this morning a TV crew was out front interviewing girls about how scared they were.

I don't know what the hell to do about this. Last Wednesday when I came home from school (around 9:45) I got Colliculus to pick me up at the L stop. But I have class twice a week for four more months and that just seems ridiculous. Plus it's not all that much better the rest of the week when I get home at 7:45. I could get pepper spray but what, am I going to walk around with my finger on the trigger and wave it around to demonstrate my badness?

What I really want is a nightstick. Something that is simple but visible and says don't fuck with me. It has to fit in my backpack, too, or they probably won't let me on the train. I wish I still had the tire thumper given to me by Lauramander a few years back.

About the weather

2005-01-17T21:28:00.000-06:00

This weekend The Chief and his new friend V came to visit us. Apparently you can get cheap flights to Chi-town in January. They did the Mag Mile thing and got so cold, they were saying things like, "Let's check out this store!" and ducking into Walgreen's.

On Saturday we all went to a party thrown by one of Colliculus's colleagues. Someone was trying to explain the term "Californication" as the disillusionment that happens to people when they move to LA and their dreams are dashed. The Chief said, "I always thought it meant titty-fucking." The room emptied in less than 20 seconds.

Anyway, about the weather, I feel like some explanation is in order. First and most importantly, Chicago is NOT called the Windy City because it is windy. There's plenty of debate about why it's called that, but meteorologists will tell you that there is no more wind here than anyplace else. Normally meteorologists are full of crap, but this time I'll back them up. If anything, there might've been more wind on the East Coast, and I'm quite sure Kansas and places like that are windier.

A more sophisticated myth is that we get lots of snow due to the lake effect. First of all, we don't. People here are just as upset about 4 inches of snow as they were in Baltimore, because mostly it just flurries. Second, lake effect snow generally blows east. The prevailing westerlies do their thing, they get to a lake and pick up moisture, then they dump it on the unfortunate residents of western Michigan or upstate New York. Kalamazoo, eat your heart out.

Regarding the belief that it's ckin-cold here . . . OK, I'd like to argue with this one in the interest of promoting tourism, but I guess there's no point. Right now, weather.com says it's 4 degrees. The Chief said it was so cold, it felt like cold from another planet.

I don't actually mind that it gets so cold. It's supposed to be cold in January. My beef is entirely with the month of April. In Maryland, April is sort of a mixed bag of nice, unseasonably horrid, and in-between days. Here, it all just sucks, and any unexpected blizzards get pushed back to May.

One additional myth that I myself promulgated last winter is that Chicagoans are hard-core about the weather. Disappointingly, that only goes so far. On Friday, a bunch of my coworkers were trying to share cabs and saying things like, "I'm not going out this weekend in this" and "You think I'm going on public transportation tonight??" Others have assured me that this sentiment is not universal.

Transgenic goats, unite!

2005-01-13T22:42:00.000-06:00

My client is holding something called War Games for which I had to research a bunch of drugs. The most interesting of these is made from transgenic goats' milk. Apparently that's a cheap way to produce complex biologic drugs. I just googled "transgenic goat" and 102,000 entries came up.

I never knew before this job that there are all kinds of new drugs that are not technically drugs, but proteins and antibodies and the like. People synthesize them out of human and mouse proteins. The FDA doesn't even really consider them drugs, since they're not chemicals but free agents that wander around your body acting like they belong there. I find this stuff fascinating and am glad I didn't have to go to grad school to enjoy it.

Recently I read Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake, which is an "in the near future"-type dystopia that I highly recommend. In that book drug companies lord over the world. Corporate employees in all industries live in isolated compounds, but drug company compounds are the best. I find that creepily true to life.

Proof that I live in a real city

2005-01-11T22:48:00.000-06:00

You know how in New York, the downtown stores do up Christmas with outrageously glam window displays? They do that here too. This was a novelty for me since in Baltimore, no one bothered except the library, and in Providence, I don't even know what you'd "do up" other than the Blue Bug on I-95. So I got that warm and fuzzy 1950s feeling of living in a city where people actually give a damn and will consider doing their Christmas shopping someplace without free parking.

Here are several photos from around my L stop. Marshall Fields had a "Snow White" theme of some kind.

I guess this is Snow White's mom. That window has an assload of iridescent glitter.

No explanation necessary.

Hail, hail the gods of commerce! Make straight their path!

So bad! But sort of good

2005-01-03T21:46:00.000-06:00

One of Colliculus's students went to Raleighwood for the holidays and presented C. with a country-bluegrass cover of "The Wall" by Luther Wright and the Wrongs. It's not as bad as I thought, mainly because it's faster than the original. Plus the lyrics' hokiness seems a little more comfortable in a country album.

Said student also rode a mechanical bull. Apparently R-wood now has some big new corporate country palace downtown. Which, needless to say, is exactly what that town needs.

2005-01-02T21:31:00.000-06:00

We spent half of our week away in New York, visiting Noise Footprint, Ianqui, and others I am too lazy to make up pseudonyms for. They've both posted accounts of our doings there (as has Colliculus), but highlights for me included two new chocolate experiences: Brooklyn Chocolate Stout and MarieBelle hot chocolate. Be still my (alternately suppressed and stimulated) heart!

We also saw a photo exhibit on whiteness which was good though small. Not surprisingly, for some of the installations I had to read the explanation to figure out what the point was, since it just looked like a picture of some girls doing normal things. The same museum had a large exhibit of a photographer named Meatyard who seemed remarkably well-balanced, for a photographer named Meatyard.

I totally love New York. I see Chicago as New York Lite, with almost as much going on and almost as many endless blocks of wild and perplexing decor, odd individuals bred to survive only in their neighborhood, and stores of uncertain sustenance. New York is of course inferior in the areas of urban planning, manners and bar bathroom cleanliness, plus it's expensive as hell. These things are a comfort when I fly home and am again separated by the prairie from the Great Megalopolis in which I was reared.

But Delaware . . . I really don't miss that place. We went out for drinks with a group of girls who had never heard of The Onion.

Next up: New Year's! Or maybe Christmas in Chicago. I've got some great pics, whenever Photobucket is working again.

Casimir celebrates Christmas

2004-12-30T22:07:00.000-06:00

When we lived in Providence we had this cat-sitter, Ashlee, who charged $17 a day and was the most disorganized person I've ever met. In the year we dealt with her she lost two Palm Pilots and one paper organizer, which she bought after giving up on the Palm Pilots. Sometimes I'd call her up and she'd say, "Oh, I'm glad you called. I couldn't remember what weekend you were going away and I lost your number." So in retrospect it's not surprising that over Memorial Day she just never showed up. We came home and poor G was frantic and starving. (What is surprising is that we hired her one more time. Less surprising: He bit her.)

We hired a new cat-sitter in Chicago and, with horrific visions of another Ashlee incident extended over 9 days, I called our new sitter "to make sure everything was OK." As a result, for the last 3 days I've gotten daily voicemails listing everything our cat ate, played and shat. Yesterday's message recounted an hour and a half of play in the bathtub, living room and office, rounding off with some lap time until finally G dragged his butt under the coffee table and conked out.

She doesn't get his name right, though. Instead she calls him "Casimir," as in Gen. Casimir Pulaski, a popular figure in Chicago. We're obviously getting our $15 worth, but still, who the hell would name a cat Casimir?

Xmas joy

2004-12-26T21:06:00.000-06:00

We're out East for the week from Xmas to New Year's, which is most relaxing and warm. In Wrigleyville it has been in the single digits, so upper 20s sounds pretty good.

The headaches, described a couple of entries below, have become akin to a serious hobby. Avoiding caffeine and wine, "minimizing" alcohol, managing the drugs and their side effects, and then actually having the headaches -- these all add up to the equivalent of a part-time job. If you've ever been on a really structured diet you probably know what I mean.

Part of the time sink is that the Stupamax gave me a two-week headache. The only thing that helped was walking around in the bitter cold -- which, luckily, we had in abundance. So every day I trudged around Lakeview in the coat I have that's so thick that my arms stick out like a little kid's. Last Sunday it was 8 degrees and the wind chill was around -20. There was NOBODY out there on the sidewalks. Cars, yes, but none of the usual street people, punks or Gap-clad locals. (Yesterday I found out there was also a rapist out, which surprised me. Shouldn't they be inside in that weather?)

The other thing is that when I gave up caffeine, I discovered what a big timesaver it's been all these years. After a week of highly un-Christmasy crankiness toward my coworkers and Colliculus, I started going to bed earlier and earlier, until last week I got 8 hours of sleep every night. I bet I was 10 years old the last time that happened.

Apart from that and missing the coffee buzz, though, I kind of like not being hooked on caffeine. When I wake up in the morning on a weekday I only resent it for maybe 15 minutes, not an hour and a half like before. And going to bed is a lot easier than it used to be. That's certainly worth something.

2004-12-12T21:41:00.000-06:00

Happy birthdays, T & M! Hope you celebrated in style as always. And tomorrow, Noise Footprint. Though I always think of your birthday as less special when it fails to fall on a Friday.

Spanksgiving!

2004-12-08T23:00:00.000-06:00

I'm pretty late on this but should report on Spanksgiving, as my good friend NFPJ likes to call it and I do too. It's possibly my favorite holiday. (Though that has a familiar ring to it; did I say that about July 4th, too?) It's always excellent because:

1. A whole bunch of my favorite people are there, including the entire Delaware crew plus my cousin Vino and 'rents, perhaps my fave blood relatives, and D-Murder always throws a party.

2. I never have to do any of the work because my mom always tells me, "Y'all are too busy." What this really means is that Colliculus and I are widely regarded as inferior cooks compared to my mother, sister, aunt, and Beyotch-Chef, but that works for me.

3. I never have to drive.

4. Even when I lived within driving distance, Colliculus shouldered that ugly, ugly burden.

Advantage #3 diminished somewhat this year as Colliculus, my sis Darling Angel and I spent 3 hellish hours sitting on the floor at Midway Airport waiting for our plane to show up from God knows where. It became imperceptible an hour and a half after we got on the plane, when de-icing was complete and the plane was still sitting on the runway. We were sitting behind literally 10 full rows of toddler families. (This, we got for being the very first ones in Group A on a holiday weekend.) One after another, the kids had to pee, the parents tried to take them, the flight attendant pleaded with them not to so we wouldn't lose our spot in line, and everyone else glowered. Finally a guy jumped up, shouted, "My son has to go!" and trotted his son to the bathroom. By then no one blamed him. Meanwhile, Darling Angel noticed, the original kid was quietly peeing into a Dasani bottle across the aisle. A low point in air travel.

Eventually we took off and flew, circled Philly for an hour or so and finally woke my dad up at the terminal around 2:30 a.m. So basically #3 is now more of a disadvantage in my book (and my dad's), although Colliculus disagrees.

So much for why Spanksgiving rocks. The actual dinner (my family's) was at Beyotch-Chef's family's house. Notable was the blessing said by her grandmother. It covered not only heaven and earth, but also hell, all continents of the earth, Democrats and (mostly) Republicans, missionaries, everyone at the table, everyone not at the table, and some other topics so varied and sundry that her own son was rolling his eyes and sighing. I was just glad to be drunk. Also to have long hair that I could hide behind.

Did I mention that no one has EVER said a blessing at a meal with my family there?

Pills, pills, and more pills!

2004-12-04T13:59:00.000-06:00

I saw a new doctor for my headaches yesterday. Like the last neuro guy, he told me to stop drinking. Unlike the last guy, he didn't call me headstrong and immature, or refuse to refill my happy pill prescriptions, when I refused, and we didn't have the awkward endgame: "I guess there's no point in my coming back here." "I guess not." Instead he just said to avoid wine completely and minimize the rest. So I think me and this new doctor are going to be just fine.

He told me to stop taking antidepressants and move on up to the anticonvulsants. Now I have two bottles of something called Topamax, which epileptics call "Stupamax." It has a little picture of a brain stem on it.

2004-11-29T21:33:00.000-06:00

Today I had to go to my client site up in BFE. I was at the visitors center getting a pass and this was the conversation:
#1: Got a puppy this weekend.
#2: Oh yeah? That'll come in handy when you go hunting.
#1: I don't hunt.
#2: [speechless]

You have to drive a long, long way to get to BFE when you live in Chicago. Once you get there, there is absolutely nothing except my client, which consists of countless low brick buildings sprawling across miles of close-cropped prairie, with all the style of municipal back offices. Less, actually, if last year's trip to the Providence building board meeting is any yardstick.

Inside, it's supremely Midwestern in that there is no guard station -- if you've ever been to a drug company HQ you know this is positively "X-Files" -- but there are sans-serif brown signs covering the walls. Every department, room, cube and individual is clearly listed on the wall. So you can find your way anywhere just by following the signs.

Leaving the world of Mulder and Scully, the actual offices are out of "Being John Malkovitch." All of the interior walls are temporary and they're squeezed so close together that you almost have to turn sideways to get down the hall.

There are also lots of signs informing you of ways to "SAVE [client] $$$." Nothing is free except water, toilet paper and parking. Although they look at you funny if you drink too much water, and in the bathrooms other signs urge you to wipe the washbasin as a courtesy to the next colleague. There is art on the walls -- on the ground floor, that is -- but it was clearly painted by some descendant of the founder. Also, they pay me 11 cents a mile to drive up there.

It's a long, long way from the beautiful campuses of my younger days, with dazzling science photos and 270-degree ocean views.

But I guess there are better ways to spend the money you get from desperately ill people. Like paying your shareholders.

2004-11-21T13:01:00.000-06:00

Thank you, readers, for your interest in and queries about fistulae. If you were too fearful to look at the pictures, I will simply say that a fistula is a complication of Crohn's disease in which a hole forms in the intestinal wall, often leading to some other body part.

Here's something else that's gross: The Chicago River is the cleanest it's been in decades. However, 60% of its flow consists of treated industrial and sewage wastewater.

I read so much health stuff for work that my brain is overflowing with random facts from clinical studies. Sometimes when I'm trying to sleep all the facts start swarming around in my head, chattering and mating with each other. Last Saturday I was out at Guenther Murphy's, a most excellent bar, and someone mentioned a little girl who was just diagnosed with epilepsy. Despite my many Guinesses, all the facts related to epilepsy swooped down and proclaimed themselves:

OK to swim if supervised . . .Girls should be prescribed lamotrigine or carbamazepine, not valproate or phenytoin, because the latter two cause birth defects and 50% of women with epilepsy (WWE) remain on their first antiepileptic drug (AED) for life. . . but an acne-like skin condition caused by lamotrigine is more likely in children. . . strongly correlated with depression and suicide. . . Certain AEDs can also be used to treat . . .

It goes on and on and on!

More sunshine and flowers

2004-11-16T23:28:00.000-06:00

Class was tedious tonight. People kept asking stupid questions or "sharing" their experiences -- a frequent objection of mine in marketing classes. I used to wonder if the problem was me. But then I noticed nobody at my JOB asks an assload of tiresome questions mainly designed to show off how incredibly perceptive and knowledgable they are, and how we all have something to contribute.

Instead, they all bond over Oprah, the Bachelor, baby pictures and "Under the Tuscan Sun." (There are 7 guys in my department of 44.) And, of course, Big 10 football which knows no gender lines. But soon, they will figure out I'm not a real girl.

I got to spread the Good Word of Saint Etienne today. One of my coworkers really likes Britpop so I copied her a CD. You know you've heard St E from me or Colliculus before! And you know you love their incredible British hyper-sweetness!!

Also I've been learning a lot about fistulae. I was going to post a link to a picture but it is just way too gross.

2004-11-08T22:42:00.000-06:00

School started again, which has slowed my blogging pace even further. The class is on branding. At my previous agency, when someone used the word "branding" I always wanted to pantomime shoveling. Invoking "The Brand" (cue heavenly host music) was usually the precursor to incredible twirling fancies of nonsense. There was one person, "Chucklehead," who was the main twirler. When I'd try and ask questions about what the hell he was talking about, he'd get this benign instructive look on his face and spin 10 times more crap. I finally learned it was easier to nod and look thoughtful for one minute than 10.

I'm not saying all of branding is BS. I mean, if you judged PR by some (most? all?) of its practitioners you'd get the same impression. But I've got the bullshit detector on high and am already wary from the first class, when we learned the term Brand Stewardship. Not! -- our teacher winces -- brand management. I didn't write down the whole definition but it involved the word "nurturing." There's some article, "It takes a village to raise a brand." Vomit sounds . . .

Your first instinct might be to blame all this cutesiness on women, but all the Brand Stewards I've ever known were men. Now, a client of mine has numerous brand managers. They're all women.

2004-10-29T23:08:00.000-05:00

Today me and the 43 others in my work group went out to lunch at the Phoenix, the dim sum place I've been to twice. I liked the dim sum, but this time I just felt ill. There was a pile of what looked like thick, clear noodles, which turned out to be jellyfish. This had the texture of greasy Gummi Worms, or maybe real worms; eventually I gave up and just let it all slither down my throat. Also some BBQ pork that, try as I might, I could not find any non-fatty bites of. A dish of shiitake (or as my coworker said, "Shit Take") mushrooms looked promising, but featured a flavorless, colorless sauce with the consistency of saliva. In the sauce the shrooms bloated like Cheerios in water.

Also, there was a stuffed chicken and I couldn't tell what was the stuffing and what was the chicken (in my mind I couldn't get any of it to be chicken). The entire thing had been deep-fried and the head sat on the platter, beak open, tongue poking, eye opaqued by the breading.

What with all of that trauma and little actual eating, I probably drank more than my fair share of wine. Even the waiter was surprised when I wanted my red and white glasses filled up.

I saw on Noise Footprint's Journal that you're not supposed to blog about what you had for lunch but think this justifies an exception.

2004-10-21T23:34:00.000-05:00

The Riverwalk in San Antonio definitely could've inspired Providence's, per Gene's comment, but there is simply no comparison due to the climate difference. When I left yesterday, it was 94 degrees and the humidity was swirling. So what do you do with a Riverwalk in that situation? You build it below grade, so it's nearly always shady. Plus there's a profusion of tall, muggy-loving, flowering plants everywhere along with the smell of something clean and green that's rotting. And everything is in Spanish, with the English translation in smaller type (sometimes). In short, the experience is nothing like the comparatively sterile Waterplace Park of Providence.

Ah, 94 degrees! It made me dizzy, since I haven't experienced that in over two years, but goddamn was it wonderful. (I've only fainted once in my life, when I first went to N.C. for college and was covering the rededication of the un-air-conditioned law library for the school paper. In case you're wondering, it's kind of like a head rush at first -- my vision was staticky. Then orange, then green, then purple and I managed to find a carrell to collapse quietly in. Then of course black.)

Part of what made it wonderful was that I was in air-conditioned splendor every single place I went, the entire week I was there. I only had to experience the heat when I chose to. God bless the largesse of the pharmaceutical industry. I was in town for a humongous rheumatology conference. They had poster sessions every day and I believe my friends in academia would be amazed by the quantity of posters. The aisles of posters went on and on, farther than the eye could see, much like the file cabinets or beehives of older episodes of "The X-Files." They were numbered from zero well past 1000.

And of course, I have a story. I went to a bookstore because I had nothing to read on the plane and there was this amazingly irritating girl who worked there, talking on her cell phone. I could write some of the things she said, but you wouldn't get the grating voice. Suffice to say she was on the phone just because she, and presumably the person she was talking to, was passing time at work, and not because there was any actual conversation to be had.

Finally she got off the phone and that was when I heard a quieter conversation closer to me. "The only way to get rid of God is to read these books. Yesss. Yesss. The seraphim -- trinkets -- yesss. They make people believe. Yesss." Needless to say this guy did not work there and did not have a cell phone, let alone someone to talk to about these topics.

2004-10-10T23:29:00.000-05:00

Anyone see the conspiracy to-do, primarily reported by Salon.com, alleging that Bush has been channeling Karl Rove (or some other sinister mind) via a wire? That would really explain a lot. I thought Bush was actually pretty coherent and cogent on Friday. I should've known to be suspicious.

Went to a charity dinner for a client yesterday. Those things aren't getting any less boring, but the food was definitely better than expected.

Saturday I'm going to San Antonio for work. Everyone says it's beautiful. They all go on about the Riverwalk, which is a river with shops, restaurants, and other tourist bait alongside it. "Sounds like Providence," I thought. And in fact, I heard from someone that Providence's Riverwalk, or whatever the hell it's called, is modeled after San Antonio. Who knows if that's true, of course. Just like the "prairie cliff spiders" I heard about from an unremembered someone.