ja gerne

Just recorded another song. It's my first attempt at writing doo wop (I'm in a doo wop band! And mysteriously, I am singing lead!) and my first attempt at singing in falsetto. I am clearly in need of a lyricist, too - the song is currently a song for furries - so if you have any ideas please write me.

just as well as i do

I put a new song up on my MySpace page.  A rough recording, but it is my first country blues song, so what.  I am forcing Olympia to learn fiddling so maybe I'll put up a second take sometime.

devil in a woodpile

I biked in 70 degree weather tonight to a little bar near my house to hear this band. Everything from this record label I've liked. If anyone would like to teach me how to play the washboard, please write.

As often happens, somebody decided he wanted to talk me tonight, which I didn't mind. That's one nice thing about being more or less single, not minding when people want to chat. I squeezed onto a barstool between him and an old man at this little bar, and settled in to watch the band. When I sat down, I caught his eye and said hi.  This sort of greeting is something I do quite regularly now that the economy is so bad that it makes me think that natural disasters or terrorists with Kalashnikovs or roof collapses could happen at any time, and it's always better to acknowledge strangers so they feel less inclined to trample you when it comes time to rush for the inward-opening exits. He was wearing a single earring in his left ear that was five pieces of chain maille linked together. It was also our entry point for conversation. He offered me a beer, I politely declined, then I asked him if his earring was chain maille. He didn't seem to understand that I was testing for the medievalist geek connection - I did after all spend an afternoon last week browsing websites for war hammers; I am in the market - and instead said he'd had the links in his ear for twenty years. It still didn't give me a clue to his age, since his face was youngish and bright and he wore a black cowboy hat that hid all (if any) evidence of hair loss. He said he owned the photography studio that did all of Crate and Barrel's catalogue photography, and I made some stupid crack about coffee press glamour shots that was mercifully swallowed up into crowd noise.

We got started talking about bikes and you know where that always leads, for me at least. He had recently purchased a low racer recumbent and a three-speed English cruiser from the estate of an Internet bike personality whose website I've often visited. So I listened to this man explain the mechanics of an internal gear hub in that patient and patronizing way that men talk to women whose brains they don't want to hurt. It wasn't offensive; it was just interesting to observe from a half Corona hazy distance this thing called masculinity. It also wasn't entirely undeserved since I made some stupid comments about post-and-beam construction and then referred to sprockets as "thingies." I liked him, anyway. 

My favorite story of his involved his job long ago as the caller for pig races at county fairs.  I only knew what he was talking about because I happened to see a pig race this fall:

He said that he had traveled around with this county fair and taken care of the pigs. One day one of the pigs got sick because it had eaten up a bunch of woodchips with its slop. The pig got bloated and cried, and was obviously in pain. The only way to help the pig was to (he said this euphemistically) reach into its lower intestine and pull the woodchips out. So he did. And then, "because like dogs and people, pigs die alone when they're sick," he slept in the shed with the pig for three nights. After that, the pig followed him everywhere, like a dog. Once it sat in his lap as he sang karaoke. At the end of the job, he left the county fair.  The pig was transformed into bacon. 

We got to that slushy point where you lay your hand on someone's arm to emphasize what you're saying but you're not really doing that because what you're saying needs to be emphasized.  I decided to leave because I was not prepared to explain to the man at the bar why I was not willing to get beyond that point.  About 3% of the conversation had involved me talking about myself, mostly about my occupation, so it wasn't as if I was ready to discourse about my recent aversion to pussy/interest in only Germans/accumulation of emotional impedimenta and my long-abiding paranoia about the oral transmission of herpes. These things, suitors, are the dragons you slay en route to your broad-shouldered princess. Nor was I prepared to explain in Denglish to a Bavarian man what "It didn't mean anything" meant. So I drained the lime pulp from my Corona and left before the second set. I said, "[Bar Man], it was nice to meet you but I am turning into a pumpkin" and a left with the vague promise of taking him up on a $5 bet to ride his low racer recumbent. He was disappointed that I didn't stay longer, and then he gave me a powerful hug that reminded me of when I was on the boy's wrestling team in high school and accidentally matched with the 265-pound sophomore who bent my elbows in the wrong direction and compressed me like a panini into the Ensolite.  Bar Man is on Facebook, so maybe he'll join the other 343 people whom I barely know but whose profiles I can view. 

The air was chillier for my bike ride home and I nearly got swiped by a black SUV.  Despite this, I got to thinking that Chicago won't be too bad when the weather finally heats up for good.  The live music is cheap and nearby, the pool down the block will have adult lap swim hours every evening, and I have dropped the personality-clashing band for another, better band exclusively devoted to doo wop covers.  I think I found a bike gang and maybe even a girl to, in time, have a crush on.  (A different story.)  Maybe now is the time for the thaw. 

all rise

I just went into the courtroom to deliver the jury list to the courtroom deputy. She thought I was the judge coming into the courtroom so she announced, "All rise!" when I walked in. And everyone stood there for me. When the deputy realized that it was just me, she said, "It's [Bananarchist]. Well, y'all can rise for [Bananarchist], too."

IT WAS THE BEST MOMENT OF MY LIFE!!!

[Bananarchist] likes to

[This is my 666th post on Bananarchist. I was hoping to find something more diabolical to write about, but oh well...God is love! Here's a recent document RK sent me listing the top 10 Google hits for "[Bananarchist] likes to."]

[Bananarchist] likes to mountain climb and dance all night; if you're lucky you may come across this wildflower on the dance floor.

[Bananarchist] likes to do this in front of some of her girlfriends who sometimes take it in turn feeding him, which embarrasses him terribly.

[Bananarchist] likes to eat, / Dishes odd, like candied cod and peanut buttered beet.

[Bananarchist] likes to party hard.

[Bananarchist] likes to maintain harmony in the relationship and treats peers in a fair, sincere way.

[Bananarchist] likes to share her experience in to show like-minded creative people to use the best tools available to make their dreams materialise.

[Bananarchist] likes to read when she has the time.

[Bananarchist] likes to invent culinary delights for her boyfriend, Jonny; whine about her declining fitness; do viral marketing projects for her favorite apparel company, Vanderkitten; and make jewelry.

[Bananarchist] likes to shake her ass all dirty 
and shit-right in yer face fartin' up tha 
jams wylde style!!!

[Bananarchist] likes to hang around with her friend Pandy, a wise but fun panda bear from China.

revenge

I am reading Obama's second book. What a mensch! It may be the case that he is not actually as temperate and empathetic as his book makes him seem, but what an attractive persona he has created. I am about fifty pages in right now. The stories I like so far are (1) young Barack learning that it was better to abide by his grandfather's nonsensical rules in order to make the man feel respected in his own home, rather than to use his gift for rhetoric to argue the old man into knots, (2) newly-elected Senator Obama not being able to take care of himself alone in his new bachelor apartment, and having to huddle against the wall when taking a shower on his first morning in DC because he forgot to buy a shower curtain and didn't want to flood the bathroom floor. So far the overriding message of the book is: YES WE CAN be nice to one another.

On the one hand, I feel very inspired to be nice to other people. It makes other people feel better, it makes you feel better. And sure, it is a utility calculation too, because e.g. drivers are less likely to mow you down in a rage if you wave thank you from your bicycle, customer service reps are more likely to help you if you speak softly and control your temper, strangers are less likely to disembowel you when you accidentally press the emergency button on the subway if you smiled nicely at them when you first boarded the train. Republican Representatives may even someday vote for your legislation if you personally serve them enough oatmeal cookies at enough Superbowl parties.

On the other hand, I am feeling not so nice right now. At the moment, I am having mean thoughts about a mean girl who once posted a mean comment on my blog, several years ago, after I had just broken her best friend's heart. The comment went beyond mean. It was cruel and invasive and it threatened violence. I was pretty sad about it at the time, but it happened three years ago and now I just feel weird and a little angry whenever I think about it. Just now, I entered "When I have the opportunity, I will destroy you" and "When your time comes, I will destroy you" and "I will rain ruin upon you" into Google, just to see whether others have had these same obsessive thoughts. And then I engaged in this little flight of fancy wherein I am some powerful person and the mean girl is in a vulnerable position - seeking employment, stranded at the side of a desert road, running for public office - and then I blow lightly on her face and she disintegrates like seeds lifting off a dandelion head.

"How I can be a better person?" is going to be my next Google entry.

This is my #665th post on Bananarchist. I should've saved this thought for #666.

lottery

[I started this post last week but didn't get around to finishing it until tonight! Not that anyone cares.]

I bought a lottery ticket at O'Hare Airport on Thursday night. The lottery kiosk was right next to the newstand where I stood reading People, Us Weekly, and Entertainment Weekly cover-to-cover while waiting for my flight to DC, so I thought, Why not? And threw my dollar away. I played five numbers all somewhat related to Bavarian Boyfriend; the lottery was to serve the dual purpose of making me rich and helping me know whether God wants this bizarre intercontinental relationship to continue. The draw was on Friday night. I WON!!!

No, I didn't win. Nobody ever wins, I know that, but that knowledge did not prevent me from laying sleepless next to CH's perfectly inert sleeping body on Friday - thanks for being the best, most motionless sleepover companion ever, CH! - and daydreaming for long hours about what I would do with $120 million. I decided that I would take care of my parents and brother, of course, then set aside 98% of the income for future security and for cloning myself and piano/dance/fine arts lessons and midsection liposuction for the clones, but then with the discretionary 2% I would start some sort of farm or colony that produced just enough income through beets or alfalfa or chickens etc. to pay for property taxes, WiFi, instant ramen, and peanut M&Ms, the things one cannot grow. There would be plenty of land for my friends to build huts on when they wanted to abscond from their incomes and careers and join me in scratching out a safe little life of good hard labor and nice people. It would be good for snowy walks in cold weather and swimming holes in warm, and everyone would play a percussion instrument and smell like the first day of summer all the year round. I guess what I really want to do is start a community center? I kept myself sleepless thinking about this next to inert CH for maybe five hours, before finally shutting off my brain near 5 a.m.

I just got back from a most lovely weekend in New York. It's always hard to return to Chicago after these short spells away, not because the second city sucks - if I can't say anything nice I will say nothing at all - but because of how much I have to leave to come back here. I return and my utopian fantasies get more urgent. I will be probably be useless at my job for the next few days. How can I concentrate on the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act when all I want to do with my life is make good people meet and like each other? Can a life be made of this? Before we started dating, I asked one of my exes what she wanted out of her life, and she responded so: she always wanted to be surrounded by people who inspire her to do the right thing. Maybe it seems a little cheesy in the retelling, but I believed then and still believe now that there is no better answer to that question.

What did I do? On Thursday, I flew into DC for my seasonal board meeting for the nonprofit board that I (accidentally, through no merit of my own) sit on. MM met me for drinks at the Fox and Hounds on P Street, and she told me how her boyfriend narrowly escaped death this year, after three heart surgeries, and she advised me on how to turn to friends for banter/wit when one's partner is stoic, Germanic, older, and perfectly content to not talk at all. The television alternated between images from the Tour de California ("Excuse me," MM said when her attention lapsed, "But I cannot resist men in spandex.") and stories about Octomom and the chimpanzee that had torn a Connecticut woman's face off. Friday I attended my meeting and learned what happens to organizations during economic depressions. (Furloughs.) The chair of the meeting thanked the outgoing student members for their contributions while everyone else, including the student members, grinned through that bald lie. My only contribution to this board thus far has been my boundless appetite for miniature croissants.

I took a nauseating Peter Pan bus up to Port Authority in time for dinner with CH and SL at a Vietnamese restaurant. We talked about how I would beat SL by six minutes at the next day's 5k race, CH's fondness for plain white rice, and the optimal number of traveling companions (one or three, since two just encourages 2-on-1 bullying). CH was leaving in the morning for a weekend getaway to the Baseball Hall of Fame, because she is just that awesome. SL encouraged me to eat more of my pho even as she pecked at her bird's meal, which I correctly saw as her effort to sabotage my race time. CH and I retired to CH's apartment to play several rounds of Rock Band. She played guitar at the "Expert" level; I played the drums on "Medium." She insisted I not bring my dirty clothes into her bed, so I changed into freshly laundered running clothes and then lay next to her inert sleeping body for five hours daydreaming about winning the lottery and feeling anxious about my bizarre and unfulfilling yet still romantic intercontinental flight of fantasy. The poster of George Washington that CH keeps on her bedroom wall (!) looked down upon me with disappointment. 

I was such a wreck in the morning that I left a bunch of important possessions, including my glasses, on CH's nightstand. I worried that I would be too dizzy to demolish SL in the 5k.

My worries were unfounded, because I demolished SL in the 5k. It was 28 painful degrees on the walk over to Prospect Park, but at least we had the companionship of SL's hilarious round co-clerk, his custom designed running shoes, his tall deadpan boyfriend and his friendly Midwestern friends. At the starting line, as a cloud of dust obscured my already blurry form, I pointedly shouted over my shoulder to SL that the weak suffer what they must. And then I creamed her, finishing at 23:59, or a 7:44 mins/mile pace. Not too shabby, all things considered. SL finished only three minutes later. I didn't tell her this at the time (because CH had told us about the Obama Effect the night before, where visualizing your success actually helps you become successful, and I didn't want SL to be successful at beating me), but SL's speed was totally astounding given that she has been jogging only five months. I am secretly afraid of a rematch because I think she's going to win. But this time around, I demolished her, then stood waiting for her at the finish line and feeling my sweat evaporate into hypothermia while watching the crowds of trotters, now gnawing cold bagels, file by. SL and I were only reunited with the unexpected assistance of our most beloved clinic professor, who was there to cheer on her teenage daughter.

We ran from the chill back to SL’s Park Slop apartment. All I wanted to do was inspect every decoration, design decision, consumable object, storage system, secret space, and book that she kept in her tidy leasehold estate for one. How was the face soap chosen? Is the toothbrush always laid at that angle, on top of that thing? If only one half of a lemon is only used for the veggie roast, does the other half shrivel dry in the dry goods bowl before there is another chance to use it? What is the ugly framed beach scene doing hidden behind the bed? What holds the other curtain back, if there is only one blue sash? Why these photography books, and not others? What is in the “IMPORTANT” file? Does one memorize the capital of Burundi while on the toilet? There was not enough time for these questions to be answered. Why is it so gratifying to know a person down to her fillings? I fell asleep as a tidy tray of vegetables roasted in butter and honey in a tidy little toaster box.

BFF picked me up an hour later, after her Bikram yoga class. SL pledged to devote her afternoon to Younger abstention, which nobody in the room believed. I met BFF on the street, where she immediately declared that she was in her “atrocious” outfit and that she had sweat clean through the shirt she was wearing. She was wearing a blue Brooklyn Industries coat (she confessed that she likes to talk to strangers who own the same coat, but they shun her), black tights, hot boots, and Jane Fonda 9 to 5 glasses:

In short, awesomeness. We decided to cut through Prospect Park to BFF’s apartment. She repeatedly tried to carry my duffle bag for me, but my grip on my butch identity is already so tenuous, given recent events in Bavaria, that I couldn’t bring myself to allow it.  We walked to the Audubon Center, by the lake, which BFF said had recently spearheaded an effort to count all the birds in Prospect Park in one particular moment, employing hundreds of volunteers with binoculars.  BFF speculated that the only way to get an accurate count of the birds would be to kill them all.  In the Audubon Center, we bought hot beverages and walked around trying out all the kid's exhibits - the child-sized bat and mourning dove wings, the 15' "nest" in which BFF pretended to bite the head off a stuffed bat - generally preventing kids from trying them, went upstairs for a screening of the Planet Earth series but did not even stay long enough even for the DVD to load, and then left to sit (BFF) and accidentally sit in mud puddles (me) by the lake sipping our teas and ciders.  

At BFF's apartment, fifteen minutes later, I was too much of a zombie to do anything except toast her wheat-and-spelt free rice flour bread five times in sequence (rice flour bread does not toast! and has the consistency of tamales!) while BFF sloughed off her Bikram grime in the bathtub and BFF's roommate compared people we knew in common who had attended Stanford between 1995 and 2000. (Answer: none.)  I heated and ate six vegetarian chicken-like nuggets and then BFF served us heaped up lentils in tiny bowls the size of maybe dollhouse satellite dishes.  BFF's roommate told us about a sale at Duane Reade on Valentine's Day peanut M&Ms, $.59 for a big bag.  We could not resist this, so after lunch we went shopping. The first stop was the finest $.99 store in Windsor Terrace, where the floor-to-ceiling merchandise almost convinced me, in a consumerist tear, to buy a completely useless tube of cocoa butter. BFF saved me from this purchase, although I did buy the $1.99 set of dominos and almost bought the 18" pen that was shaped like Disney's Cinderella, a $3.99 wisely saved. At nearby Duane Reade, we bought M&Ms and earplugs. On impulse, I bought a brown sugar and almond face mask that later caused me to break out into cauliflower face everywhere it had touched. The M&Ms, being not $.59, and not peanut, and pink and white, were likewise disappointing, but BFF forced me to bring them to the bar later and they were devoured by the end of the night. BFF showed me all the weird and wonderful knick-knacks she had collected in her thirty years of being a crazy lady, but even miniature Japanese living room sets and plastic axes ("It's a LABRYS! What kind of a dyke are you?" she admonished) could not keep my eyes open. I napped.

At 6:30 it was time for BFF to go off to work and for me to walk the 2.2 miles to RK's house. I circled the word "gay" in BFF's dictionary and left her apartment. My walk through the park was chilly, brisk, dark, quiet, and laden with luggage, and I enjoyed every minute of it. I was late to meet RK. We walked over to Flatbush Barn with RK telling me how a cost-benefit analysis had led him to choose the cheaper, worse, and more enthusiastic banjo teacher over the more expensive, more professional one. RK is very analytical like this.  We met IB, his girlfriend C, and SL at Flatbush Barn. C and IB were panicking because C's wallet was missing, and it looked like they were so anxious that they might not be able to join for dinner, but they soldiered on and ordered beers. SL and I enjoyed weighty burgers - eat more, SL, eat until you are too fat to outroll me! - but RK mistakenly ordered a $9 platter of birdseed and pecked unhappily and hungrily at it with his aquiline nose and handsome Groucho Marx mustache. 

Some folks joined up with us after dinner.  AO showed up and told amazing stories of moving to Colombia to do research for her dissertation and instantly becoming a "social node" in that country's community of hip young things.  CY and AY came, and CY got deeply involved in a conversation about graphic novels with RK, and then told me how having a dishwasher and washer/dryer in the house has dramatically changed the way he lives.  LL broke off the firm manacles for a few precious hours and brought his talent for talking about everything. I learned that TF and LL and SD are too immoral to pass their upcoming moral fitness evaluations, and then I lectured them senselessly about bar exam preparation techniques. It does not seem possible but TG's cheekbones were even higher and more stunning than I recalled them to be. BFF came around midnight and endeared herself immediately to my friends, pounded three glasses of white wines and took forty pictures of the inside of her pocket, the ceiling, or her index finger while attempting to take pictures of the pushup contest that RK won by a landslide. DR succeeded in doing only three, but excused her feeble attempt by saying that she had only done enough to sucker the rest of us into getting on our hands and toes on the filthy floor.  C announced with delight that her wallet had been found and turned over to NYU.  People came, and then they left, and then it was just me and RK and BFF in the bar taking photographs of RK's chest hair while BFF lolled her drunk head on his shoulder. I looked up and noticed suddenly that all the chairs had been stacked on the tables around us, and then it was time to go. 

I stayed the night at RK's - I mean, of course I did, we are bed brothers, I bought the exact same bed that he bought - and in the morning I said goodbye even as RK half-dozed on.  Then I caught the G to the 7 to the Q33 to LaGuardia to O'Hare to the Blue Line back to Division and Milwaukee, and walked the last four blocks to Cleaver Street.

Oh, I miss all you lovely brilliant weirdos, and wish you were all with me at all times. I have a nice new concrete-hard bed that fits at least forty. Please come, and come quick! That is all.

some things

When I looked out the window this morning, snow was blowing horizontally at about 20 mph down Cleaver Street. It was so cold and so windy that nothing stuck to the street until about noon; it just kept blowing away. Sideways snow is not so weird. It consistently snows up on State Street between Adams and Jackson, what my office looks out on. Canyonland weather patterns, I guess.

So I stayed in the whole day, spending 4.5 hours making the "meat pie" (is there no better name for this?!) recipe from last week's Times magazine. I left the house today only to buy more meat for the "meat pie." I broke my own rule and trusted the Times and ended up with THREE POUNDS OF BEEF to "serve six." WTF New York Times are we cooking for GIANTS?!?!! One serving of meat is a deck of playing cards, not a car-washing sponge!! There is an entire lasagna tray of leftover meat pie. I am hoping Olympia, my new roommate, will eat all of the leftovers because if somebody's colon must be blocked, better hers than mine.

Despite the beefsplosion, I had a pretty good weekend. Friday I went down to 79th and Ashland for a musical put on by a consortium of black churches. It was called "Unconditional Yes," and it was about godly people (with nice clothes) vs. evil people (who wore gangsta clothes). There was lots and lots of excellent singing, and some very rousing gospel numbers.  It tells you more about me than about the event that my closest point of reference for this is its parody in The Blues Brothers. There were maybe 700 people in attendance and exactly two Asian people, me and Olympia, and maybe a handful of non-black people, including Bridget, my community organizer friend who heard about the play through one of her community contacts, and her fiance Raul.  It was a world - South Side, black community churches, evangelical fervor - I don't know if I'll ever see again. Except in skin tone it was not too different from the Billy Graham revival I had gone to in New Orleans; it was a spectacle of music and histrionics, it was entertaining, and it made me uncomfortable in the same ways, with the moral absolutism of good Christians against caricatured forces of evil.  And at the same time one thinks, Oh, but it is the second Great Depression, and things are falling apart, and what is given the uncomfortable name "evil" is genuinely destructive violence and criminality in the black community, so it makes a lot of sense that people find guidance and redemption in organized religion. And you can't really begrudge that. And then this line of condescending, judgmental by way of saying "let's not be judgmental" kind of thinking carries you to what Barack Obama said about bitter people clinging to guns and religion, and then you are in hot water.

Yesterday I did yet another lonesome self-guided tour of Chicago's free art, first stopping in the photo and design galleries at Columbia College, taking a break to eat an avocado with a dagger just outside the Columbia College computer lab, and then going to the Art Institute, which is free for all of February, so it's totally okay to go just for twenty minutes and run directly to that weird 16th c. front-on portrait of a woman by some Flemish painter that the curation says is supposed to be "arrestingly erotic" or something but just looks kind of weird. When art is cheap you don't feel obliged to stand in front of the Renoirs nodding knowingly (while secretly suppressing the urge to vomit...why did I pay for this...splotchy paint...motion sickness...). At night Bridget and Raul and I reunited for a show at the Hideout that the Chicago Reader billed as awesome dance music + political dub/punk but was actually none of those things, and instead just drums and bass playing in synch and then one crazy man shouting nonsensically and arrhythmically and atonally over it, and sometimes singing in an operatic baritone. The opening act was electronic music. Who thought it would be interesting to watch a person on stage click a mouse once per song?? I will be so happy when this dark stage of music the 2000s is as historic as the rap breakdown in the middle of the pop song by vaguely ethnic singer that was so popular in the early 1990s.  (Thanks to Raj for completing the second half of that sentence. He goes on: "like in bobby brown songs or 'mc scat cat' or whatever in the paula abdul song. it was like an effort to lend cred to the pop star, and that part of the music video would inevitably involve footage of said star folding arms in MC fashion and nodding. i think michael jackson did this in at least one song, too.").

Anyway, I saw some lovely things this weekend I would like to share with you. 

Bettina Hoffman at the Museum of Contemporary Photography. This is such a simple but fascinating idea. I am not good at describing art so let me just quote the pamphlet accompanying the piece: "Bettina Hoffman uses a slowly panning video camera to present multiple points of view on human subjects who are absolutely still.  As the camera circles the periphery of the people, the effect is one of traveling through the space of a two-dimensional photograph. It is as if the space of a still photograph has opened up for the viewer to navigate from multiple points of view, while the subject themselves remain frozen in time." (Kudos to curator Karen Irvine for writing such simple, unnauseating prose about art!) It really is mesmerizing and cool! Click the link above to see some samples.

Lorna Simpson. Again from the pamphlet: "Simpson used James Van Der Zee's photographs as her inspiration for 9 Props (1995).  Made while she was an artist-in-residence at Pilchuck, a glassblowing school in Seattle, Simpson had artisans re-create the elegant vases that appear in Van Der Zee's pictures. She then photographed the glass objects and printed them onto felt accompanied by simple texts" [and here the curation fails to describe that what makes it so great is that the "simple texts" are just her literal descriptions of the original photos. And that James Van Der Zee's subjects were affluent African-Americans on the bubble. The effect is that the vases come the represent the entire scene of rising prosperity. It's not just a simplistic critique of consumerism because the felt fabric and the directness of the texts makes you feel a little wistful, like this is something that was once good and has been lost. At least that's how I felt.]

The text: "A man stands on the far left of the room with a pipe in his mouth. He is dressed in a smoking jacket with a shirt and tie, with his right elbow resting on a dresser and ring on his finger. The bed has a satin cover with a small stuffed animal positioned on the center of the pillows. Behind the bed hangs a rug, off the backboard of a fringed lamp, and above hangs a chandelier.  In front of a curtained window, a standing lamp shines on the portrait of a full figured woman. On the right side of the room is a dresser with an ashtray, small boxes, a candle, and a vase."

John Coplans' photographs of his old naked body. Nothing too spectacular, but I liked the composition of this tiny little photo (maybe 3" square) and his grossness. It looks like a slug!

Graffiti in a bathroom at Columbia College. It is just standard bullshit: "Pooping in public bathrooms feels embarassing [SIC, stupid!] but eating in public feels normal. Why is the exit of waste less acceptable than the entrance??"

The question is funny to me because I have never heard anyone describe eating as "the entrance of waste." But what made this graffito so great is one of the many responses to the question:

If you can't see, let me transcribe.  First, the writer wrote: "A#2: because your butt is often a sex organ." And then perhaps thinking it through again, the writer underlines "sex organ" and writes in "connected to." As in, "your butt is connected to a sex organ," or "your butt is a sex organ connected to"...? Then there is a second revision, adding this final, most plaintive thought: "You uncover one you uncover the other." What??!

Here is a nice little sign that was funded by Chicago's public art coffers: "My love for you is a like a shiny heart-shaped metaphor about the sea."  Synesthesia and recursive metaphors, courtesy of the city of Chicago!

Here is a nice marquee for a dry cleaners just down the block from my house. It's not a clear shot because I was on the Milwaukee Avenue bus when I took it, but you can see how impressively well-maintained the lights are, and how interesting the typeface is. 

Here is a pregnancy test on the sidewalk outside my front door.  The garbage cans are on the backside of the apartment building, 200' away. So how does a pregnancy test find itself on the sidewalk? I imagine someone wanted to get it out of her hands in a hurry (an adulterous wife? an evangelical teen hiding her boyfriend from her parents?) and just chucked it out the window, which means I could've been struck in the head with this urine stick if I had been walking by. The label says "Clear Blue," but the indicator strip must've faded out because there were no blue lines or pink dots or anything else.

This is just an ad I ripped out of SkyMall.  I just don't get it at all. 

It's selling Yahoo Mail. The caption "Your inbox understand some of your friends only speak IM." The picture is of a pretty girl in glasses kneeling in front of a credenza. She is typing on a laptop and there is a cup of espresso nearby. In the background is a living room, possibly hers. She is a poor decorator, choosing mismatched dark floral patterns and antique radios, decanters, and a Rolleiflex camera for her space. There is an empty espresso cup and a tabloid newspaper on a coffee table behind her.  The bad floral print of the furniture is echoed in the girl's garish fist-sized flower pin and what appears to be a monarch butterfly or quail wing stuck behind her ear. The composition of the photo is imbalanced so your eye travels left to right, first panning the furniture and the espresso-drinker who is not there, before reaching the girl, who is looking down at a screen, with her hands (and your attention) converging at the lower righthand corner on a laptop that is not even in the frame of the photo. The brightest spot in the photo is the girl's right temple. The text above the photo is topheavy and hangs above the girl's head. All of it makes you feel like someone is behind her, and it makes you nervous that someone might pounce on her. The caption below (describing Yahoo features, such as "chat" and "email") is no help either. Designer friends, help me. What is this ad supposed to make me desire???

And that is all. I hope this post has made your Monday a little more bearable.

memory foam

I bought a memory foam topper for my new bed, which is apparently made of steel I-beams and ex-girlfriends’ hearts, because it is hard as shit. Because I am 28 and have no savings, like a grad student, and am to cheap to throw away more of my income on things like heat (the apartment stays a steady 58 degrees – who needs heat when all that money saved can pay for the 10-12 cups of hot tea I have to drink each night to stay alive?!), like a good frugal immigrant, I live in a building without a doorman. My deliveries come to my work address instead.

(My mattress did not come with this lady.)

I bought the queen-sized four-pound viscoelastic memory foam topper even though I have a full-sized bed because it cost the same and I figured I could just trim it and make cushions or life-sized foam companions with the excess. “Four-pound” is a measurement of density meaning either that (1) each square foot weighs four pounds, (2) it takes four pounds of pressure to depress a square inch of foam X number of inches, or (3) you must hammer your head into the foam four times in order to create a depression that is the inverse of your own greasy coconut. What it means is that a queen-sized “four-pound” density foam mattress weighs five thousand pounds and comes in a box the size of a mini-fridge. I bought the discount version on a discount website rather than pay $170, as Raj suggested, for a slightly more recognizable brand. This is the part of the story where you should start wagging your finger in disapproval. It was delivered to my office yesterday. And because I am cheap/immigrant/etc., I decided to ride the rush hour subway home with my five thousand pound, mini-fridge-sized box rather than pony up $6-7 more dollars for a cab ride. Continue wagging!

I’d biked to work, so my first task was to move my bike from the outdoor bike racks to the secured indoor parking garage to leave overnight. Rather than leave the mattress up in my office, move my bike, then return to my office to fetch the mattress, like any reasonable person would do, I decided to move everything at once. I looped some tape around the box to make a “handle,” then tried to hold this “handle” (for a 30 lb., mini-fridge-sized box) in one hand as I wheeled my bike a block and a half with the other to the parking garage. The tape broke immediately, so I had to do a combination of kicking and shuffling to get the box, now itself also broken, to my destination. This process took about twenty minutes, much more time than it would have taken for me to leave the box in my office and retrieve it after moving the bike. But these are life lessons one learns the hard way! Eventually, I struggled through the handicapped entrance at the Jackson stop and brought my hefty box down onto the platform. The CTA attendant in the kiosk arched an eyebrow at me and said, “You must have some muscles there.” Was this an insult? I didn’t know, so I said, “Thank you!!!”

The train was waiting on the platform so I pushed in with my Real Doll-sized box and scraped passed five pissed off people to the end of the car. It was rush hour. The train was stalled in the station for five minutes, and after it started moving again, it started running express. I had to scrape past all those people again, immediately, to get out of the car. The next train came five minutes later. Within a few stops it was doubly packed because the car ahead of it was running express, but I had successfully rushed past the other commuters to the handicapped space in the car – no seats, so room for me and my cadaver-sized box – and I felt pleased as punch. I leaned against the wall of the train thinking “I AM SO AWESOME FOR SAVING $7 IN CAB FARE” and generally just feeling like a sophisticated urbanite for claiming a little space in my city.

As we traveled to the next station, the conductor’s voice came on the PA and said, Who’s calling? I exchanged some bemused glances with my commuting companions. Conductor’s gone off her rocker! said these glances. A minute later, the conductor came on the PA again. Who’s calling?!? Ha ha, our glances said this time, She’s drunk as a skunk! The conductor’s voice came on a third time. WHO IS CALLING? Ha ha ha ha! Mirth train!

Then one of my new commuting friends suddenly looked at me funny, and then said, very slowly, “Oh, you’re pressing the emergency button with your backpack.” OOPS! I turned around. Yes, I was pressing the damn button. My backpack had a button-shaped protrusion that was perfectly aligned with the big red emergency button, and I had been leaning into it the entire ride. OOPS x 100!

The train came shuddering to a halt in the next station, and the conductor again got on the PA, announcing this time that she had to stop the car to investigate an emergency situation. I hope that’s not me! I chortled to my new best friends. No, of course not! they chortled in return. I had congratulated myself for having the courtesy to bring my bulky item to the very last train car, but it soon proved to be a bad decision for Chicago’s commuters. Five minutes after the train had stopped, the conductor finally finished trekking down the length of the train to my car. She came into the car and demanded, WHO CALLED??!? No one said anything. I raised my hand and said, SORRY!!!! MY BACKPACK!!!! AN ACCIDENT!!!! Then I said SORRY SORRY SORRY! to everyone around me. SORRY x 100,000!!

My new life partners were all very kind to me. Ha ha, we are just happy that the emergency system works! they said. It’s good to know!! My God, sometimes I love these fat polite Midwesterners, they are as docile as cabbages. If this had happened on the L train you know those skinny hipsters would have strangled me with their striped deep V-neck shirts. Or done this to me. In any event, my stop was the next one, so I pushed past all the commuters and said SORRY!!! again really loudly and then struggled the five blocks home with this five thousand pound, tapir-sized box balanced on top of my head. I was sweating like a peasant when I got home.

The moral of this story is I AM STUPID. I managed to delay not only the 400 or so commuters in my packed train, but also the 20,000 or so commuters waiting on the platform at stations ahead of us or in trains behind us. Today my muscles are sore and my back is hurting. The best part is that after I got home and opened my package, I found that the mattress topper was not what I wanted it to be. It is too thick, and it smells so badly of chemicals that when I tried to put it in my room, I became light-headed in minutes and was barely able to drag the heavy piece of shit into the living room before passing out on my now-chemical-smelling bed in a druggy stupor. It was like huffing gas (or so I have read). So I think I am either going to have to find a way to return this monstrosity (perhaps via a return trip on the CTA!) or just suck up the hundred bucks and the time, and the time of 20,000 Chicagoans, that I just wasted. You were right, Raj, I was wrong. Every single decision I made in this story was mistaken: HOW CAN MY JUDGMENT BE TRUSTED TO INTERPRET THE LAW!?!?!?!?

tastes

Since I have become more or less single, I have plenty of time to obsess over my daily habits. Three such habits and obsessions are (1) saving money, (2) metrics and (3) finding the optimal balance between nutritional bang-for-buck, ease of preparation, and tastiness in my daily meals. So you see how I have spent the last ten minutes at work:

item	servings/unit	cost/unit	cost/serving	cals/serving
1/3 c. oats	70	$3.00	$0.04	120
2 T raisins	40	$4.50	$0.11	35
1 tsp flax seeds	80	$8.50	$0.11	20
1/2 oz. almonds	35	$7.50	$0.21	60
choc chips	70	$3.50	$0.05	40
tea	16	$5.00	$0.31	0
1.5 oz. half and half	24	$3.50	$0.15	60
yogurt	1	$1.00	$1.00	120
banana	5	$1.90	$0.38	110
TOTAL			$2.36	565

This is what I eat every day for breakfast, though the yogurt and banana are often omitted on days I don't run after work or are eaten as a late-afternoon snack. I bring the tea to work in a thermos and sip it until mid-morning. I bag up the first five items the night before and then once I get to work, I heat up some water in an electric kettle and stew my oatmeal and eat it around 9:30 while reading news and blogs. It takes a while to eat because the flax seeds are whole and one must chew them individually in order to unlock their secret magic. It costs $2.36 a day (but only $.98 without the oft-omitted yogurt and banana) and is sufficiently tasty to have sustained me for 47 consecutive days with only slight alterations.

I need to get out more often.

But you know, I don't want to go out! I prefer the company of my self-obsession (and also books, guitars, German language movies, and Rachel Maddow) to the company of the people (1) I know in Chicago, (2) I could potentially meet in Chicago, or (3) I could see performing in Chicago. I have come full circle from the initial feeling of bewildered glasnost that accompanied my autumnal move to the lonely midwest to a sense that I know what I want and should therefore excise unwanted clutter from my life: e.g., I'm quitting my band after our show next Sunday, I've told the Bavarian to shape up (his poor social skills - more on this on a later date) or ship out, I've stopped eating and preparing legume-based gruels because they make me want to vom, etc. And the opposite is true, too: I know what I want and I try to appreciate it when I have it. So thank you, friends, for giving me your time and your hilarious emails; thank you, Chicago, for giving me different views to explore and a freezing cold winter to clear out the walking paths for strolls alone; thank you, bicycle; thank you, Bavarian Boyfriend, for being calm and drama-free and devoted; thank you, Loretta Lynn; thank you, my occasional dog, for your fuzzy head that smells like feet.

You see, SL, I am single, at least in the same way that I am not literally but metaphorically thirty years old. For me, single and thirty means becoming a caricature of yourself - I guess you could also call this becoming more secure in your identity. I'm only going to get worse with time, and soon I will be counting out the number of oat flakes that go into the breakfast gruel. Lord knows my tendency toward schmaltz has already transformed this blog into a journal alternating between stupid stories and sentimentality and navel-gazing. But you know what? Fuck you, world! C'est moi! Eat it, trees!

what i just saw in my inbox - the pathos kills me

From: X
To: ILNDml_Eastern Division
Subject: Please Note
Date: 03:14 PM

I'm aware there is a typo in JESUS, but JUSUS is the way it was sent.......


From: X
To: ILNDml_Eastern Division
Subject: Thank You
Date: 03:08:19 PM Today

. . .

I like to share with you an e-mail from Y sent to her Mom.... These are my sentiments too.......

“I have just deposited Love and Blessings into your bank account,

and the best part is that it will cost you nothing. I ask that you just
use it in abundance. Your Pin Number is J-U-S-U-S.

**IMPORTANT NOTICE**

If you lose your PIN, you lose everything. Make a deposit in someone
else’s account today! May your troubles be less, your blessings be
more and nothing but happiness comes through your door.

Love Y....

bits

Just some favorites from the day. New recipes from a dear friend:

For salad dressings, I generally wing it. My absolute favorite includes olive oil (the slightly more expensive trader joe's variety), rice vinegar, grated sweet onion (like vidalla or walla walla), grated apple (using the small holes of the box grater), soy sauce, and a touch of sugar. If you're the type that requires exact breakdowns, here's my best guess: 1/4 cup rice vinegar; 1 tablespoon grated sweet onion; 1/4 cup finely grated peeled Gala apple; 4 teaspoons soy sauce; 1 teaspoon sugar; 3 tablespoons olive oi. An easier one is olive oil, rice vinegar, white wine vinegar and then a squeeze of lemon over the salad and a sprinkling of sea salt. If you make your salad the night before but don't dress it until you eat it (hence the nestling ikea containers), you won't have soggy salad. But of course, you know this.

Wow! GRATED APPLES! Then some lessons in anatomy from a pervert doctor I know:

i love mnemonics too! but, yes, they don't stick at all. i DO remember the really scandalous and sexy ones though... ah, my ABSOLUTE favorite one... the 12 cranial nerves in order: OOOTTAFVGVAH... Oh, Oh, Oh, To Touch And Feel eVery Girls Vagina, Ah, Heaven. i bet you'd learn your cranial nerves real well too after that one... (olfactory, optic, oculomotor, trochlear etc) i know them all, i swear.

For lunch I ate (1) one Krispy Kreme chocolate glazed donut covered in heart-shaped jimmies, (2) two s'mores, (3) part of a cheesecake that oddly had been cubed instead of sliced into wedges, and (4) a Dunkin Donuts munchkin powdered sugar jam donut that was in many respects indistinguishable from a golf ball. It's funny how Valentine's Day office treats are designed to break your heart - I mean really break it!

I just talked to two workers in the apartment next door to get my landlord Rod's cell phone number because he (the landlord) has been hiding from me. They indicated that they only spoke Spanish. I said, "Oh, NO PROBLEMO! Uhhh...tengo...el nombre...de Rod?" One worker wrote it down on a piece of paper so I felt very proud of myself for my mad Spanish skills. I plugged my little phrase into Google Translate to confirm that I had said

I have the name of rod?

Have a good George Washington's 277th Birthday, mein Pupse!

bed

Today there is a new 6’ by 7’ area of wadded batting and individually-pocketed 13-gauge springs in my bedroom. I have pushed the lonely old twin mattress into the guest bedroom and now there is half the space there used to be in my room. I am glad to be rid of the twin mattress not only because I saw its narrow berth as direct evidence of the end of my partnership but also because it smelled slightly of cumin when I bought it from a 24 year-old South Asian man who was on his way to New York after graduating from business school – am I racist? I aired it out for a few days but the tang remained embedded in the fabric. I said none of this on the Craigslist posting, of course. Also going on Craigslist is the cheap-ass Ikea futon whose slats you can feel on your butt through the cheap foam mattress – also something I am not planning to advertise on Craigslist.

I decided to go with a Chicago mattress dealer that practices a unique business model. There is no showroom; they come to you. I set up a time online for the store to come to me, and lo, at 7:30 p.m., a man named Michael called me and said they were waiting for me outside. He would come meet me at my door. Seconds later he was standing on my stoop under a golf umbrella. We walked together to a truck parked on the end of my block. There was a trailer that looks like a box truck on the outside but has sliding patio doors on one side, and is set up to look sort of like a bedroom on the inside. There was bad ambient jazz playing quietly on speakers, and a flatscreen mounted on the wall with a female voice that droned on about the details of the mattresses in stock.

Michael chatted with me about the composition of my mattress choices (I had pre-selected three) and then drew a curtain to reveal about fifteen mattresses standing on end, like books on a shelf. He pulled one selection onto a rolling box spring, then said he would wait outside while I tried the mattress and I should take my time with it. Then he and Lou, the silent sales gnome, waited together on the corner under the golf umbrella while I lay on plastic sheeting on three mattresses in succession. There was no discernible difference in the mattresses other than the price - well, the second mattress was clearly unsuitable, as I sunk immediately into the thick layer of batting on top and could already feel my spine twisting into a garlic knot even in the thirty seconds I lay on the mattress. I tested the mattresses by laying in almost all possible configurations of laying. I bounced a little. I did not lay on my stomach because I did not want my face to touch the plastic sheeting.

After a few minutes, I called Michael in from the rain and asked him if he had another, firmer, cheaper model. Miraculously, he did. I knew immediately I would buy that bed because it was the same model as Raj’s, and I like Raj’s bed. I am Chinese so I tried to wheedle, but Michael had none of it. “U.S. Mattress is selling this model for cheaper,” I said. “You are welcome to buy it from U.S. Mattress if you want,” Michael said. I said why not and bought the bed. Michael and Lou moved it immediately into my bedroom, taking off their shoes at the front door because, Michael said, "Dog poop." It cost me as many dollars as years between the birth of Christ and five hundred and six years before the creation of the Magna Carta, which made my heart catch in my throat, but I don’t really care anymore. In September, Jason said these are investments amortized over the lifespan of the furniture. He’s in business school; I only have the vaguest idea of what that means. It is comforting nonetheless.

I lay on the mattress last night practicing my German pronunciation for forty-five minutes. This entails reading the dialogues from my German language learning book without making any effort to understand them. The dialogues are stupid anyway. In one, Frau Clark goes to the supermarket and demands to know: “Wie viel kosten die Eier? Wie viel kosten der Aufschnitt? Wie viel kostet das Brot? Wie viel kosten die Steaks?” While this is a very efficient way for a student of German to learn grocery-related vocabulary, it is sort of implausible that a polite hausfrau would go into a store and scream HOW MUCH ARE EGGS HOW MUCH ARE COLD CUTS HOW MUCH IS BREAD HOW MUCH ARE STEAKS??? Die traurige Verkäuferin! I find the pronunciation of the words much more fulfilling than my comprehension of them. German is a fun language, because its guttural sounds encourage one to act as angry as possible when speaking. I sound brutish when I speak. "Justizgebäude" is my favorite word to say in German - yoo steets gay boy duh - and it means "courthouse," which is my favorite place to work in America.

German made me sleepy. I had a series of vivid dreams on my new bed last night, including one about three office workers struggling with a man in a trench coat. I watched them struggle to a standstill before turning away. Then the workers gave up and walked away also, and it became clear that they had been trying to wrest an assault rifle away from the man. The man pointed the rifle at the workers' backs and killed them with an arc of gunfire. I ran away. Everyone ran away. The gun was oiled and black and glistening all over. A hero tried to rush the gunman but was killed instantly. What happened next was skipped in the dream. Then analysts explained on the evening news how one could disarm a man with an assault rifle: come into extremely close range, grappling range, so that the weapon could not be pointed and fired. These were empty words, because everyone had already died. I woke at four with my Homer Simpson slippers filled with sweat. I had another dream which I don’t remember. I will try harder tonight.

toilet tips

1. Check the toilet seat for blood before sitting down.
2. Close your mouth when flushing.
   

the best thing i have ever read

WOW READ ALL OF THIS NOW!!!

1. What
2. the
3. fuck???

fingernudeln

Here's an awesome thing that just happened. I like to do things in an impatient huff envn though it doesn't seem to make my tasks go by any faster because that's how i roll. So I washed dishes in a hurry as my dinner bubbled n the stove (GRUUUUUUUELLLLL). And I grabbed the vegetablepeeler with my right hand, scraper side first. Into my finger it went! And then I screamed! OWWWW owwww OWW aaaooooo!!! Dipthongs and tripthngs! AAAoouuuu!! And then I beld all down my forearm because it went really deept into my right ring finger (didn't need that one ANYWAY oh SNPA) and then I grabbed it and continued hollering. It bled and lbed and bled and I immediately soaped it up and rinsed it (which Google says is the WzrONG thing to do, oops) and then pressed on it for half an hour until finally the bledding slowed a bit, then I tried to butter some toast by holding the toast against my stomach and applying the end of the butterstick to it but I accidentally spread butter all over my sweater and then I finished myaking my horrid dinner and scraped it into my face whilst holding my right hand over my head. Now I am drinking beer and watching Rachel Maddow, and I am drunk and my finger has bled through its second bandaid I AM AWESOME!!!!

cello scrotum

I haven't written a while! Sorry. The most exciting reportable thing that happened to me today is that my co-worker noticed that the Wikipedia entry for the Northern District of Illinois listed an anime character among the district court judges. Also, I got a new pair of "Bordeaux"-colored glasses that makes the world look unpleasantly hazy when viewed through any part of the lens except the dead center. There's a lot I'd like to say about what is preoccupying me - the Bavarian, of course - but since he is vehemently opposed to all forms of surveillance and traceability, I'd feel bad writing anything more in my blog. (Not that he'd ever know, since he doesn't have Internet at home and only steals fifteen minutes online here and there at work, and he still types with two fingers in hunt-and-peck style, and has no MP3s, and will never "poke" me on Facebook, and doesn't wear fast-drying plastic clothes when hiking or comprehend what a water bladder is, and uses one light fluorescent bulb at a time in his apartment, and has VHS tapes stacked up on his floor, and falls asleep with powdered sugar-coated lozenges in his mouth...among other primitive, technophobic habits, which would mos def never include reading my shiny, 21st century blog.)

There is one thing I will say, though, about how dissatisfying it is to be interested in a non-native English speaker. Even though Bavarian Boyfriend's English vocabulary is startlingly good (e.g. referring to a rained out camera as having been "capsized," or using words like "melancholy," "whereas," and "precondition" deftly), there's a big difference between saying "It is very hot in this old bus!" and "IT IS HOT AS BALLS IN THIS RUN-DOWN SHITWAGON." There is a difference between getting in a friend's car (on the way to buy single-ply toilet paper in 24-roll packs at Target) and saying, "I'm so excited for our errand!" versus screaming, "SPRING BREAK!!" and throwing up devil horns. Die difference ist Nacht und Tag. (Also that is something unpleasant about German, the capitalized nouns and the absence of possessive apostrophes. Compare "donkey's balls" and "Donkeys Balls" e.g.)

Okay that is all I have to say.

fun moments

I had finished cooking myself a shapeless dinner last night and was preparing to eat it when I got a phone call on my land line. I answered. The woman on the other end said, "Hi, good evening, my name is Gina. How are you?"

Now many people, when receiving obvious telemarketer phone calls, just hang up the phone. It seems kind of impolite to me, and I don't see any reason to be rude to people doing their horrible jobs, so I try to be a little more human. So I said, "Hi, I'm doing fine, but I'm just about to sit down to my dinner, and I'm not interested in any commercial services, so thanks for calling." A perfectly polite and firm way to dodge an unsolicited pitch.

Gina pauses. Gina then says. "Woooow. . . you're retarded." Like that, with the accent on the "you're" and not the "retarded."

I said, "Excuse me? Who are you, and where are you calling from?"

Gina responds, "Who are you? Who are you?"

I am in shock because a stranger has just interrupted my dinner to sell me something, and has just insulted me with an incredibly juvenile and nasty insult, so I say, "Wait a minute, honey, you called me, and you're asking me who I am? Who are you?"

Gina says, "Oh, now I'm a honey, I see."

I start to give some response along the lines of "What the hell is going on here??" but get to "What the...?" before coming to my senses and just hanging up on the bizza.

WTF!? How do I get insulted by random strangers in my house?! BARACK OBAMA I THOUGHT YOU WERE SUPPOSED TO MAKE AMERICA A BETTER PLACE WAHAHHHHH!!!

Anyway, that was totally awesome, and it ruined my mood for a few minutes, to the point where I really wanted to be high or drunk so that I could just forget it. I don't think I've had that feeling before! But now I just think it's really funny.

Also, I fell off my bike yesterday whilst trying to ride my bike home in a snow storm. It was a silly, slow-motion fall on a snowy sidewalk, so all the injury I suffered was some light bruising on my left shin. But I had left work early to go to the Museum of Contemporary Art, to see Jenny Holzer's installations of large arrays of electronic tickers spelling out statements about the war in Iraq, which uses a medium reserved usually for journalism or advertising for discomfiting second person addresses ("I watch you / I breath you / I touch you") to recreate the experience of standing in Times Square and reading the impersonal news but this time implicating you in the events announced. But God does not care for people who choose art over work, and he punished my sloth by causing my wheels to slide out from under me. I also saw an interesting exhibit by a deaf-mute artist, Joseph Grigely, whose art consists of the post-it notes he uses to banter in writing with people in bars. I also read the opening and closing sections of "Song of Myself" yesterday, and cried lightly thinking about this homosexual romantic dying a hundred and twenty years ago: "I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love / If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles." Can you tell I was having my period?

Let us not be capsized by our loneliness, R! It is sunny here.

du hast mich

Hier ist das Ende der welt. 

In this outpost at the end of the world, you see only frozen untilled land and this one lonely tree on the horizon. There is a bench under the tree that you can sit on and face the heavy old sun as it traces its winter afternoon path in the far tired north of the northern hemisphere. Then you walk further, and you realize that you are in some sort of recreational area for old German couples wearing matching 3-in-1 technical jackets, speedwalking with hiking poles. But for a long minute, you can believe yourself to be alone on this frontier at the end of the world.

Here is the Bayerische Wald, which is an entirely different story. It is secret and safe and quiet and soft. You can walk all day on a wide, combed path and find yourself still on the backside of a small Alpine foothill.  You sit in the snow off the path and drink a Winter Traum beer with your lover, who puts the unfinished bottle into his coat for sipping during the rest of the walk, have some caraway seed bread and chocolate, and watch the shadows move left to right in the slow hour you spend sitting almost perfectly still. Just across a political boundary you will find the Bohemian forest, but the trees don't know the difference. 

These are two landscapes I saw during my nine days and eight nights in Bavaria. You can probably find in them some metaphor for emotional terrain or landscapes of the heart, etc., but it's 5:44 a.m. on a Tuesday and I will let you draw those illiterate sentimentalist comparisons yourself. 

I'm in a way, folks. My time in Germany was phenomenal, but it was secret, safe, quiet, soft, frozen, untilled, and lonely. I left Harry's house before dawn on Friday to start the arduous trip back to Cleaver Street, thinking I was in love with him. I still think I am in love with him. I'm almost sure I've lost my mind. 

ein gutes neues jahr

I am back in Chicago. I slept eight hours upon my return and now it's 2 a.m. and I'm about to walk to the supermarket to buy groceries. The last blog entry was written during a nadir in my trip so it is not representative of what happened. There were excursions and adventures to document, but documenting seems pointless, and there was a romance to comprehend, but I'm having a hard time finding the words. I will try to find them and post them later. Right now, it's time to make Irish soda bread.