Grocery Shopping:

• Lifehacker: How To Ditch your Junk Food-Filled Pantry, and Reboot Your Diet
• Grocery List Templates for Healthy People
• Whole Foods Market: Health Starts Here

Accountability:

• FitDay food/diet journaling online
• Weight Watchers
• MyNetDiary smartphone apps

Set Goals:

• Set S.M.A.R.T. Goals
• 43things

Charity Training Programs:

• Team To End AIDS – marathon, half-marathon, cycling, triathlon
• Team In Training – marathon, half-marathon, triathlon
• Team PAWS – marathon, half-marathon, triathlon
• Team World Vision – marathon
• American Cancer Society DetermiNation – Shamrock Shuffle, marathon, half-marathon

Events:

• Shamrock Shuffle – 8k (5 mile) run, March
• Avon Walk – Walk a marathon (26.2 miles), or a marathon and a half (39.3 miles) in 2 days, June.
• Bike the Drive – Bike 15 or 30 miles on Lake Shore Drive, May.
• RAGBRAI – Cycle 470 miles across Iowa in 7 days, July.
• Illinois Tour de Donut – Cycle 30ish miles in Staunton, IL (near St Louis), July.
• Chicago Triathlon – Swim/Bike/Run .5 mi/13 mi/3.1 mi or .9 mi/25 mi/6.2 mi, August.
• Apple Cider Century – Cycle 5, 25, 37, 50, 62, 75 or 100 miles in Michigan, September.
• Chicago Marathon – Run 26.2 miles in under 7 hours, October.

Books:

• Slow Fat Triathlete: Live Your Athletic Dreams in the Body You Have Now, by Jayne Williams
• The Non-Runner’s Marathon Trainer, by David A. Whitsett, Forrest A. Dolgener, and Tanjala Mabol Kole
• Ride Your Way Lean: The Ultimate Plan for Burning Fat and Getting Fit on a Bike, by Selene Yeager

Online Resources:

• Active.com – Articles and signups for races and team sports nationwide
• Chicago Park District – sign up for classes and sports programs
• Chicago Area Runners Association – learn to run and take training programs, city and suburbs
• Beginner Triathlete
• The Couch to 5k Running Plan – go from not running at all to running a 5k with this complete plan
• Mayo Clinic: 5 Steps to Getting Started

]]> http://ziggurat.org/blog/?feed=rss2&p=2615 0 http://ziggurat.org/blog/?p=2499 http://ziggurat.org/blog/?p=2499#comments Sun, 24 Oct 2010 01:28:17 +0000 http://ziggurat.org/blog/?p=2499 So I’ve been working on my ethics debate paper, and I was thinking I’d kind of like to use a parable in telling part of the story. So I went off and started looking up parables about short-sightedness.

First, I found Luke 19:11-27, which I shall paraphrase for you:

So this guy, this nobleman, wants to be king, but he has to get permission from Emperor Daley first. So he plans to go off and get permission from the Central Kingship Authority to be king. Before he goes, he calls several of his slaves to him and gives them each ten bucks and says, “hey, go into business for yourself while I’m out, do something useful, make me some money.” And he goes off on the long trek to City Hall.
Meanwhile, the Committee for Not Being Ruled by Schmucks sends off letters of protest to the Central Kingship Authority, saying “hey, this guy’s a total schmuck, don’t make him the boss of us.”
Time passes, the Central Kingship Authority rubberstamps his application, and he comes home, ready to get his crown. But first he first calls a meeting with his slaves to get an accounting of what they did.
The first slave says, “Well, I bought some S&P 500 futures, and the market did spectacularly well, so my ten bucks earned back a hundred more.” “Excellent,” says the king. “You get to rule over ten towns, one for each time you made ten bucks.”
The second slave says, “Well, I invested in bonds, and they made fifty bucks.” “Nice job,” says the king, “you get five towns.”
The third slave says, “well, honestly, Your Highness, you’re kind of a schmuck, you’re well known for taking things you didn’t earn, and I was worried what you would do to us, so I just put the ten bucks in a safe-deposit box.” The king goes, “that was clearly faithless of you, so go give the first slave your ten bucks, so now you have nothing, and you’re not getting any towns.”

Now, the king in this story is of course Jesus, who had to go run some errands, as you know, and the third slave represents the Jews, who are being punished for not believing in the messiah.

But the parable ends with the third slave and the Committee for Not Being Ruled by Schmucks being totally right, because the king goes on to conclude, “I tell you, that to everyone who has, more will be given; and from the one who does not have, even what he does have will be taken away.” And furthermore, “But bring here these enemies of mine, who did not want me to rule over them, and slaughter them in my presence.”

So that’s nice. Ripping off the poor and slaughtering your enemies, always a good time. Way to turn the other cheek, Jesus!

But lest I be accused of unfairly singling out a single religion, let me relate a Buddhist parable also.

So there’s this guy, we’ll call him Fred, who lives in a hut in the woods, and worships fire. Life is good for Fred, so long as the fire keeps burning.
One day a bunch of hippie protestors show up in the forest near his hut and have a protest, like they do, and then they all go back home at the end of the day. Fred goes over to where the protests were to see what sort of mess they left. He finds an abandoned boy alone in the clearing, and he thinks to himself, “well, I can’t just leave this kid here alone, i’d be a real shithead to let him die of exposure when I could save him.”
So Fred takes the boy home, feeds him, and raises him. Life is good for Fred and the kid. Until one day Fred runs out of coffee, and has to go to town to go grocery shopping. He says to the kid, “ok, all I need you to do when I’m out is watch the fire and tend it and make sure it doesn’t go out. If it does go out, no big, just light it again – here’s a hatchet, and some sticks and a fire-drill. See ya in a while.” And he takes off.
The kid does what kids do, building forts in the woods and pretending to play cowboys and Indians, and stuff, and he doesn’t pay attention to the fire, and the fire goes out. When he realizes it, the kid goes “crap! This was my only responsibility. Well, maybe I can relight it.”
So he takes the hatchet, and the twigs, and the fire drill, and looks at them. And he takes the hatchet and chops the fire-drill up, saying “maybe this will light the fire!” But sadly, no. He keeps chopping… reduces it to a hundred pieces… still no fire. he pounds the pieces in a mortar… no fire. He winnows them… still no fire. He hasn’t given up, but he just can’t seem to figure out fire.
And now Fred comes home, and he goes, “oh, the fire went out while i was away?” The kid goes, “yes, I’m sorry, I was playing, the fire went out. I’ve been trying and trying but I just can’t get it rekindled.”
Fred thinks to himself, “how foolish this boy is!” and picks up a fire-drill, and says to him, “This, my son, is the way to produce fire; not as you, a foolish, short-sighted boy, tried to produce it, by seeking otherwise than in the right way.”

The lesson there is supposed to be that any time you go about trying to do something any way other than the right way, you’re being a bonehead. But it seems to me that Fred was the bonehead, because he’s the dumbass that didn’t tell the kid how to kindle a fire in the first place. Or maybe Fred’s just an MBA, I dunno.

Maybe Jesus was an MBA too. That would explain the the hookers.

…

And that is pretty much why I fail at religion forever.

Of all the Amtrak trips I’ve taken, there are really only two stations that stand out in my mind: Washington DC Union Station, and Chicago’s Union Station. Texarkana is a room with a television in it; Flagstaff, Arizona has a room with a bench and a car rental desk. Atlanta and Bloomington/Normal are just anonymous waiting areas that could be confused for a Greyhound station; St. Louis actually is also a Greyhound station. The name of the game now is economy, for there are so few remaining passengers, and, outside of the Beltway routes that they use personally, Congress doesn’t see a point to rail transit. Why would anyone choose take a slow, bumpy train when airplanes are so much faster and more modern? Even a fan like me must admit that the golden age of rail transit is behind us, and there is no longer much reason to have a landmark building to send passengers to faraway places. But a few of these old grand buildings still stand, clinging on to their intended roles.

Daniel Burnham is a regular player in most stories about building Chicago in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. It is he who gets credit for the eponymous Burnham Plan, the 1909 “Plan of Chicago,” though it was co-written with another author; and it was he who forcefully drove the design of the 1893 World’s Fair, Chicago’s White City. Both of these projects are still in evidence today, 98 years after his death.

One of the six stated intentions of the Burnham Plan, the radical proposed redesign of the City of Chicago that was intended to provide for improved conditions of city life for all its people, was to improve the freight and passenger rail transport in the city. At the turn of the century, Chicago was a major rail hub, for both freight and passenger traffic. Everyone knows that, but what is less well known is that it wasn’t entirely by happenstance. There was no magical confluence of population and waterways and commodities that just meant that Chicago was clearly the only place a rail hub could develop. As is only right and just, given our traditions of civic governance, there were machinations involved to make this happen.

The first railroad in Chicago was chartered in 1836 and laying rail by the late 1840s, kicking off a mad rush to grant land and bring railroads in. Fifty years later, over twenty-two rail companies served Chicago, ferrying people, livestock, and goods in all directions. The independence of all these new rail companies meant that the train stations went where there happened to be room to put them, at the time. A passenger might arrive on an Illinois Central train at Chicago Central Station, at Roosevelt and Michigan, then have to walk over to Harrison and Wells to catch an outbound train at Chicago Grand Central Station. Scattered elsewhere throughout the Loop were Chicago Northwestern Station, La Salle Street station, Dearborn Station, and the first Union Station. They could have made it a little more decentralized, but they would have had to work at it.

The Burnham Plan proposed to consolidate these six passenger terminals into new multi-company complexes just to the south and to the west of the Loop. To this end, Daniel Burnham was commissioned to design the new Union Station. From Clinton Street on the west to the Chicago River on the east, Union Station sits between Jackson on the south and Adams to the north, bisected by Canal Street – two full city blocks. But Burnham never saw a train arrive at the station; he died thirteen years before its completion.

Burnham was a fan of the Beaux-Arts tradition, which was a neoclassical style that had originated in Paris. He was such a dedicated adherent that, after the 1893 World’s Fair, he invited another up-and-coming local architect to go to France and study at l’École des Beaux-Arts on his dime – luckily for the Prairie School, Frank Lloyd Wright declined. Undeterred by this, or by Louis Sullivan’s vocal discontent with the White City of the Fair, Burnham continued in this style and, when several railroads banded together to commission Chicago Union Station for their needs, this is the style he used for Union Station’s design.
The Great Hall of Union Station, a cavernous room nearly a full city block in size, is the crown jewel of the station. The exterior of the building is neoclassical Greco-Roman: tall, with a grand arcade at the entrance, fronted with massive columns. It is imposing, but not particularly stunning. That happens once you get inside.

Inside, the ceiling is lofted a hundred feet overhead, creating a huge echoing chamber topped by a skylight that bathes the room in light on a sunny day. Decorative fluted columns with elaborate capitals border the walls and entrances, and tall lamps with standards in the same elaborate style are dotted around the edges to provide light when the sun fails. Galleries, ideal for people-watching, surround the room on an upper story on three sides. And when it comes time to catch your train, your walk to the concourse is watched by two statues: one figure, holding a rooster, represents Day, and the other, with an owl, represents Night, and together they stand guard over rail travelers at all hours.

Entering the Great Hall from the entrances on Canal Street, one descends one of two Grand Staircases – everything is grand, at Union Station – into the huge waiting area, set with benches. This area is timeless: instead of seeing a commuter make her way down this Grand Staircase, step back and see a flapper instead, with cropped hair and a scandalously short dress, descending with high heels clicking on the steps, laughing and planning to hit a jazz club later that night. Or see a solemn man in uniform carrying a canvas duffel, on his way to France, Korea, or Viet Nam. Look at a family, and imagine them just arriving, carrying bags up the stairs instead of down – they could be some of the 7 million Black Americans who left the South in a Great Migration that began after World War I and continued until the 1970s, some half million of whom chose to remain here and create the Chicago of today.

Whoever you see in the Great Hall, see them walking. It’s not a place for sitting still. There’s no real need. Metra commuter trains operating out of Union Station don’t even require advance ticketing, so you can run through the station at the last minute and jump on before the doors close. Amtrak trains require buying a ticket in advance, but unlike airlines with tedious security checkpoints and required advance check-in times lest your overbooked seat be given away, arriving fifteen minutes before departure is plenty of time – as long as you have the time to get through this vast station and down the platform to your train in time, you’re good. Even though the Great Hall is for waiting, only a few people actually do so.

The dramatic architecture of the old Union Station is there, and has been there for 85 years, boldly stating that in Chicago, things are so great and so grand that we can go to these exaggerated lengths to create a dramatic theatre, just for any old person to spend a few minutes walking through. But the human drama taking place in the newer part of the station is no less impressive for its lack of splendor or its transience. The Concourse of Union Station, where passengers go to board their trains, is confusing and cacophonous. Metra commuters on autopilot head directly for their customary platforms, not even bothering to check the departures monitors to tell them where to go. Passengers just off an Amtrak train haul wheeled bags and luggage through the disorganized crowds, just trying to find someplace with a sign to tell them where they should go. Signage is in short supply in some areas, so the smart bet is to follow traffic that looks like it knows where it’s going, and hope they’re not heading for a train to Libertyville. Caught up in the current, sooner or later you’ll wash up on the concourse’s shore, and because we all know what you’ve just gone through, there’s a bar waiting to greet you with cheap beer on tap and, best of all, a clear route to the exit.

So, was Daniel Burnham’s goal, to simplify rail in Chicago, both worthy of his attention, and achieved through the design of Union Station? Arguably, no. While he could not have foreseen the fall of rail travel in the second half of the twentieth century, a fall which effectively wiped out the need for efficient intercity passenger handling in the Loop, he also could not force the hands of the railroads to join together under one roof in the first half of the century. Today, Union Station is the only intercity passenger rail station left in Chicago, but that is due to lack of demand; if Union Pacific decided tomorrow to start hauling in passengers from Wisconsin, it could just as easily terminate trains at Ogilvie. In fact, intercity service remained at the other terminals until traffic died down and the different railways got out of the passenger business.

Some of those terminals still remain, in various configurations: the original Northwestern Station, another neoclassical station, was demolished and replaced with a modern office tower, with Metra commuter rail service in the first-floor Ogilvie Transportation Center. La Salle Street Station takes commuters from the base of the Chicago Board of Options Exchange building to far-flung suburbs. Dearborn Station still stands, but its rails are gone; today, it’s a shopping center. Other stations are long since gone: Central Station remains in name only, as a tiny slice of a neighborhood between the Museum Campus and Lake Shore Drive to the east and the South Loop to its west, bordered by Indiana Avenue. And an empty lot sits next to the river at Harrison Street, where Grand Central Station was until it was demolished in 1971.

That said, I’ll throw my hat in on the side of success for Burnham. Because Union Station remains, and it still serves over fifty thousand passengers daily, shuttling them in to and out of the center of town. The Loop may or may not be the beating heart of Chicago, depending on where your geographical loyalties lie, but it’s certainly a close enough approximation, and it is fitting to greet people with such a fine reminder of why making grand plans is worthy, and how to do so still has the power to stir the heart of man, even a hundred years on.

I don’t think I’m very good at writing short stories — for starters, this is 3,462 words, which is roughly 2000 more than the assignment called for. So I missed on the “short” part, but it is technically still a story. Though I’m not convinced it’s much of one. But that’s okay, I’m not very practiced at writing fiction. As a matter of fact, I think the last time I wrote any fiction was one time like eight years ago I was goofing off and a friend was refusing to tell me why he dropped out of college, so I started writing this epic tale of battles on the quads with vicious squirrels terrorizing undergrads, and fires and explosions and, you know, all those good things that pretty much never actually happen in real life at the University of Chicago, except for the squirrels. I kind of wish I still had a copy of that one, actually, I remember it fairly fondly. Stupid jerkface transient medium of e-mail. SQUIRRELS ARE FUNNY! GIVE ME MY STORY BACK, MAGIC INTARWEBS!

…Ahem. Anyways. Without Further Ado, I present: “The Strange Case of the Goat and the Paperboy.”

“I heard it was a paperboy.” Bill reached under the bar and pulled a brown bottle out of the cooler, then slid it in my general direction.

I’d just come into the Billy Goat Tavern after kicking off from work a few minutes early. It was early May, raining out, and pretty chilly, and I’d felt like an alley rat, dripping and miserable-looking from just my short walk over from across the street. My coat and umbrella were dripping, from the seat on one side of mine. On the other side, my buddy Rick pulled up the stool next to me and plopped his enormous, awe-inspiring ass down on it. My mom always said if I ate my vegetables I’d grow up big and strong, but I don’t think she meant I should aim for that. Still, he managed to not look like he’d just been pulled out of the lake, and we’d walked over the same way, so maybe he did have something I didn’t. And that was when Bill decided to kick off the evening’s entertainment with his opening salvo.

I picked up the bottle and took a sip. The tavern was relatively quiet, just a few people in this early. I thought maybe I’d go get a cheeseburger, but Bill was still hanging out by us expectantly. He was wearing his little white apron and sitting there behind the bar, bracketed by all those bottles of booze, looking a little more inquisitive than normal – but then again, it was still early afternoon, before most people came through here to fill up the empty space with smoke and conversation. But I do my part, so I pulled out a pack of smokes and stuck one in my mouth, lit it before answering. “You did, huh?”

“My byline, front page, above the fold. Bill, that calls for a celebration,” Rick said, stretching his arms out over the bar in triumph. “No beer today, I think you’d better pour me a Scotch.” He pulled out a cheap cigar from the pocket of his ratty old sport coat, and started fighting the plastic wrapper. I sighed, and held out my hand. “Give it here.”

He passed me the cigar. “Above the fold,” he said again, admiringly. “You know how long it’s been since I got something like that? Been a long goddamn time.” I returned the cigar, having shimmied it free from the wrapper, and Bill slid over a ratty old trimmer along with a rocks glass with two fingers of whiskey straight up. Maybe it has been a long goddamn time since Rick’s gotten a good scoop, but it’s been an even longer time Bill’s been putting up with him, and they’ve got the after-work routine down to an art. Rick puffed out an enormous cloud of blue smoke, and as it settled into a haze, he settled in to the role of victorious storyteller. He cleared his throat, the clear sign that the night’s tale was kicking off.

“Two weeks ago, Sunday, a desk sergeant over at District 8 takes this call, from a woman, real distraught. Scared out her mind, can’t hardly string ten words together to make a sentence makes any sense. Says she went to see her neighbor and found her on the floor. Nothing obviously wrong, just an old lady dead on the floor, but this broad is off her rocker on the phone. So the sergeant gets a patrol car to swing over.”

Rick paused for thought, puffing cigar smoke like a steam engine. “Well, they didn’t know it for sure just then, but this was the third recent unexplained death in West Lawn. That was yestday. The patrol car gets over there and goes up to check it out. Nice little subdivision over by Midway, on South Kenneth, single family houses with little yards and garages and kids playing outside. First thing they notice is there’s a pile of papers at the door, nobody took ’em in. Nice maintained place like that, they don’t leave the papers outside to get rained on. Second thing they notice is, they go inside and the table’s all set for a nice little tea party! She’s got this china teapot with flowers on it, and a sugar bowl and two cups with saucers out on the table, even a little plate of cookies. One cup’s fulla tea, the other one’s tipped over and spilt all over the tablecloth. Little old lady, nice lace tablecloth. Sugar bowl with a little silver spoon sticking out.

“So they call it in to the station to get the coroner over, and when he gets there, the guy notices that she didn’t just fall off her chair, like the patrol cop thought. You know, he thought she had a heart attack and fell over, knocked over the tea cup and the chair on her way down, right? But the coroner, he says no. He says she went into convulsions, he can tell ‘cos of the way she’s got her arms and fingers, and the way the chair’s moved over like she was kickin’ it. And he says she puked, only she just hadn’t eaten so there wasn’t nothing real obvious for the patrol cop to see. So now he’s thinking it looks like murder, not just a little old lady expired from natural causes. Like maybe somebody brought some arsenic to go with her old lace.” Bill groaned.

I had drunk most of my beer while Rick was getting warmed up, and finished off the bottle, which is about the only thing that can explain my tilting at this particular windmill. “You know ‘wasn’t nothing’ is a double negative, right? And ‘arsenic and old lace’? Grammar school kids speak better than that, and they’re not writing for the Tribune.” I always was a lightweight.

Rick smirked at me over his Scotch, as another bottle of beer replaced my empty one on the scuffed bar, and his cigar trailed a lazy line of smoke toward the ceiling as he gestured vaguely through the air with it. “That’s what copyeditors are for. That, and coming up with stupid headlines.” He frowned, and the enormous caterpillars of his eyebrows squeezed together to emphasize his disapproval, as he continued, “‘Death by Delivery,’ that’s what they said was going on my piece. It’s like it’s the friggin’ National Enquirer, is what that sounds like.” He stuffed the cigar back into his mouth and puffed irritably.

The tavern was starting to get a few more people trickling in, since the deadlines were 6 for tomorrow’s edition, and about everybody had their pieces turned in by now or had given up on them, and the noise levels were going up just as the air’s transparency was going down. I thought some more about that cheeseburger, but I knew if I got up, Rick would just keep spinning his story, to thin air if no one else, and I’d miss it. The grease could wait. I reached for another cigarette instead. Outside, some jokers were exercising their anger through free and liberal use of car horns, out on Lower Michigan. All things considered, it was still quieter in the Goat. As long as Rick wasn’t talking, but then he put the cigar back in the ashtray.

“So, anyways. This coroner, he got called out a few months back, same neighborhood, two blocks over, on Kostner at 57th, just north of that park they got over there. Now this one was different. They got the call from a neighbor, hadn’t seen this guy leave his house for a few days, but he left all his curtains open. ‘Parently he always closed them at night, always, ‘cos he was kinda paranoid. So the curtains was open, but no lights was on, at night, so the neighbors got suspicious and called in the cops to investigate. Patrol went over and found him dead in the front room, just by the entryway. Couldn’t see him from the front window. Door was locked from the inside, so they thought it was a heart attack. Only thing was weird, was they couldn’t find his wallet.”

Bill stepped back up over to us from where he’d been pulling beers for other folks, and because Rick’s not the only person who he’s used to having around, he brought me a glass of Coke rather than another beer. He fumbled under the bar for a straw and said, as he slid it in the glass, “What was that ruled, natural causes?”

I stared at him. “You run a bar, listen to us jerks every day, and you don’t have anything better to do than egg this guy on?”

“Like you said, I listen to you jerks every day. What else have I got to do, other than notice you being cranky tonight?” Bill shrugged, and topped off Rick’s Scotch. He eyed me for a second, and then shouted over to the grill, “Double double!” The cook shouted “double double!” back, then Bill tipped me a wink and said, “You shoulda told me you were hungry. I’d’ve cut this guy off ’til you had a minute to get a burger.”

“Yeah, right,” Rick said. “You’d never cut me off, it’d cut into your tips.” He re-lit his cigar and puffed away some more.

“Okay, so, go on. Old man, heart attack in West Lawn, followed by old lady, apparent foul play, also in West Lawn.” I half turned in my chair to keep an eye out over to the grill, because now that they’d been ordered I was suddenly obsessed with all things cheeseburger. I could practically taste the pickles.

“Well, so two unexplained deaths of old folks in a two block radius is something that makes people talk. Much like we’re doing here.” Rick snorted at his own joke, and turned to eye the grill too. “One of them doubles is mine, right?”

I laughed. “Sure, Scheherazade.” Bill rolled his eyes.

Rick picked up his drink, and gestured with it, almost splashing Scotch on Bill, who glared and wiped down the bar with a rag that’d seen better days. Rick kept on talking. “So this policewoman hears all this talk round the station, and she comes up to the guy, my buddy’s buddy who was investigating the old lady’s death. She tells him, there was a third weird death in the area. This one wasn’t an elderly person though, this was this young married couple, both of them only in their thirties, but no kids. The wife died. The husband called the police one Sunday morning and said she just konked out while reading the paper. That was about a year before the old man died, though, and it was over on Kildare, up by 56th Street. The policewoman said she remembered it ‘cos her partner had been cracking up about it because the lady had been reading the sports section, and apparently the Cubs were in first place. So her partner kept joking about how he knew it was the Cubs and all, but it shouldn’t make nobody die of shock!

“So now we’ve got three weird deaths, in this tiny area, in the span of just under two years. The dead folks didn’t know each other, on account of they all lived on different streets. One was a recluse, one was a working woman, and the other was a retired lady. Two sudden heart attacks and one suspicious…something. So somebody started trying to connect the dots.

“Turns out they had brought out the forensics boys to the old guy’s place, just because, although they didn’t do much more than take fingerprints of the door and right around where the body was found. They only found two sets of fingerprints, the dead guy’s, and some unknown person. Didn’t turn up on any searches at the time. But when they took the fingerprints from the old lady’s place and ran them, they had a match on the unknowns from the dead guy’s place. Still unknown, but it was a lead, at least.

“Now, they all went back over the notes from the dead guy’s case. In the entryway, where the body was found, they didn’t find much. They never did find the guy’s wallet, but there was his keys and some mail on a little table by the door. The mail was a bill from ComEd, and a note about his newspaper subscription, saying someone’d be by for the weekly fee, a couple days before the concerned neighbors raised the alarm. So nothing real int’resting there. Except there was also a receipt for the newspaper subscription – you know, one of those little dated tabs the paperboy gives you, tears it off the sheet when you pay? So that was dated the day that the coroner figured he kicked the bucket, which was a Sunday, incidentally. So they went back to the coroner who’d been on duty for that one and got him to look at his notes, and turns out he saw something with the guy’s eyes, during the post mortem. Apparently there was signs that he maybe didn’t really have a heart attack but got smothered instead, like with a pillow. But the coroner couldn’t find any evidence to back that up so he ruled it a coronary and called it a day.”

The cook shouted over by the grill and I was off the bar stool like a shot. I could smell that cheeseburger from across the room, and all this talk of heart attacks or not, I was going to inhale it as soon as humanly possible. I paid the guy for both burgers and added a couple bags of chips, salt and vinegar, then went to load mine up with mustard and pickles. It was sitting on a piece of plain wax paper like a beautiful piece of art waiting to be framed, and it smelled like the best burger man had ever crafted. By the time Rick lumbered past me to pick his burger up at the grill, I was halfway back to the bar, and by the time he got back to his stool, I was half done with the burger and well into the chips. Bill raised his eyebrows, so I swallowed my mouthful, and said thanks. “Good burger, Bill.”

“Brown-noser,” Rick muttered. I just waved my hand at him, mouth full again.

“Anyways. That woman who died reading the paper? Turns out her husband was so broken up about it he left the dining room alone, didn’t go in it anymore after they took her away. Real tragic. Everything was exactly the same, when they went back to talk to him again. So the forensics boys had a field day with that. They came in and looked for prints and even checked out the drinks on the table and the newspaper. Which is when one of the forensics boys broke out in hives, right there in their dining room. The newspaper had something in it. But it was only the sports section, the rest of the paper was fine. They even sent it off to the state guys and the FBI to see if they could figure out what it was, but they couldn’t identify it, probably on account of it being two years old, and covered in dust, or something. And the guy with the hives, he’s allergic to everything except air, ‘parently, so that’s no help. But that was enough to reclassify the death as a homicide and reopen the case. So now that’s one murder, and two suspicious deaths.”

“And what linked the murder up with those other two,” I said, “other than it all happening in a two-block stretch of West Lawn, unless you’re going to tell me they found the same fingerprints at that scene that they did the other two?”

Rick made a pistol gesture with his hand, and pointed it at me. “You got it. They found the fingerprints. But not just that, they found the fingerprints on the murder weapon.”

“What, the newspaper?” Bill asked, in that gently skeptical way all barkeepers learned, from humoring drunks and their stories over the years. “I didn’t think you could get fingerprints off newsprint.”

“Well,” Rick said, “you prob’ly can’t, off newsprint. But cardstock you can. And guess what those newspaper subscription receipts are printed on? Cardstock.” He sat back and crossed his arms triumphantly.

I put the last bite of my cheeseburger down and stared at him. “So you have fingerprints on newspaper receipts at two of the scenes, which proves, what? They have the same paperboy? Not really a stretch there.”

Rick looked contemplatively at his cheeseburger, and ripped open his bag of chips instead. He ate chips for a good two minutes while Bill and I watched, and I broke first. “C’mon, Rick, finish the story.”

“I dunno if I wanna waste the rest of my story on you,” he answered primly, tone at odds with poking through the bag for the last of the chips. He crunched one last chip and dropped the bag down on the bar. “Okay.

“This is almost anti-climactic considering it’s been almost two years that these people have been dying in. They called up the subscription office and got them to give them the name of who was the paperboy for those houses, and it was definitely the same guy. So they get his information, and a patrol car goes over to knock on his door. He answers the doorbell, and just kinda stands there while the cops are asking him if he knows these first two victims. He’s all polite, right? And he goes, ‘Yes, I knew them. Yes, I knew him.’ The cop goes, ‘And did you know Mrs. Such-and-such,’ the old lady, and the kid’s face falls – he can’t be much older than 17 – and he goes, ‘Yes, she was making me tea, but I didn’t want tea, I wanted her to pay her paper bill!’

“They pulled him in to District 8 headquarters and got a full confession out of him, even after the court-appointed lawyer turned up. It turns out, this kid was some kinda nutjob, living in a fantasy world. He thought he was in this arcade game, where you go deliver newspapers but you have to hit bystanders with papers or they’ll come beat you up, or bees come attack you, some such BS. So he was thinking that everybody was out to get him and if he lost subscriptions, he’d lose all his lives. Like, three lives and then that’s it, you know, ‘game over.’ The one guy was talking about canceling, so the kid poisoned the sports section, only it turned out the wife liked baseball too so he got the wrong one of ‘em. The old guy was two weeks behind and that was almost an automatic cancellation. And the old lady had decided to take the Sun-Times instead. Anyways, it was some kinda wacko thing. I don’t play video games so I don’t know what the story was, but my kid plays that paperboy game too down the arcade. So he knocked off all those people just to keep ‘em from canceling the paper.”

Bill picked his wet rag up again, dumped out the ashtray, took Rick’s Scotch glass away, and refilled my Coke glass. He looked like he was thinking. Finally, he wiped off the bar in front of us, and said, reflectively, and in the most sincere voice I have ever heard from anyone outside of a nun sitting in the chapel during Sunday services telling me I would go to hell if I didn’t stop kicking the kneeler on her pew, “Rick, that is the biggest cockamamie horseshit story I have ever heard you try to sell anybody, and I have heard you shovel a lot of horseshit in this bar over the years.” He put another glass on the bar and filled it up with ice, then with Coke, then he slid a straw in it, and put it in front of Rick. Then he crossed his arms and looked at him.

Rick tried to look serious for a minute, but then he broke, and his whole body shook with his glee. “Yeah. I guess it was pretty obvious. Nobody would have made that arsenic and old lace joke unless they was jerking your chain, not even me.” He elbowed me. “But it was good way to spend a couple hours keeping out of the rain, right?”

I looked at him, and I looked at Bill. And I just shook my head at him. “Rick, if you’re not going to eat that cheeseburger before it gets cold, I am!”

~~ THE END ~~

I did have some worries, while writing this.

First, Rick’s dialogue is written quasi-phonetically (e.g., “yestday” instead of “yesterday”), which is something that irritates me a lot when an author does it excessively, but I thought it was important to convey the conversational tone as well as the type of character we’re listening to. It’s hard for me to break up the subject-verb agreement thing, and leave various words out wholesale, as well. I think I may have started out with more dialect and tapered off toward the end, but OTOH, maybe it’s OK to taper, like once you make da point at da biginnin dat dat guy tawks like dis, den you go back to normal. So. Consistency may be a virtue, or not writing really annoyingly may be. Not sure, there. (Also, Word’s grammar checker about had a heart attack over the dialogue. Poor tortured Word.)

Second, there was way too much dialogue. If I were better at finding plots I could have probably written something more succinct, but I had come up with this idea of the crazy paperboy killing his customers, and that was the best plot I’d come up with so far at that point, and the two guys bullshitting each other after work was how I wanted to convey that story-within-a-story. So, Rick the revered storyteller perches on a chair, our narrator is consumed with lust for the fabled Billy Goat cheezburger (no fries, cheeps!), and the background bartender (yes, named Bill after Bill Sianis, though no historical accuracy was intended at all in putting him there) humors them patiently, as he doubtlessly does night after night after Our Heroes put in another hard day’s toil at our city’s answer to the Grey Lady.

And last, the story was supposed to be set in a particular place, and the place was supposed to drive the story. That was sort of why I talked about West Lawn so much, but really the place I wanted the story to be about was the Goat. But while writing, I was having trouble putting in details about the Goat without it sounding overbearing or irrelevant. (“Bill listened patiently, as the bottles of liquor glistened dully in the dim overhead light, perched on the wood shelves on the mirrored wall.” Which bit is important, the back wall or the bartender? It’s the Goat, so it’s not the furnishings, okay? I love the Goat, but I don’t go there for the architectural significance.)

Anyways. It felt kind of nice to write a short story, which is one of those things that I have basically no confidence in my ability to do, because I never ever write fiction. I’m just not that sort of person. I like to blather about my life. (Hey look, ma, my short story was in the first person!) As the emergency backup, I’ll write something instructional or informational. But I think I did OK with this. Not great, it’ll never go down in the annals of great bar-related murder mystery fakeouts, but I think it was readable.

Oh, and last: credit goes to Kim, for the idea of the Atari “Paperboy” game. Yes, you really get attacked by bees if you screw up in the game. It was the 80s, man, don’t ask me.

1157 words. 1158 self-doubts. Roughly.

I moved here in August of 1995, to live on campus for my first year at the University of Illinois at Chicago. It was straight out of high school, and I moved three hours away from my entire family and all of my friends. I made new friends at school, but trapped in a tiny dorm room living with someone who hated me and whom I hated equally in return, wore on me.

This situation was not much helped by my peculiar surroundings: the east campus of UIC was designed and built by one modernist architect, in the once-popular Brutalist style, and because of the tendency of UIC students to live off-campus, these indistinguishable buildings would stand like foreboding sentinels around a bleak, nearly deserted campus by 3:30 PM daily. I’m sure that Walter Netsch didn’t intend the school to make undergraduates weep with the despair of four years imprisoned in concrete, but he did a good job of it nonetheless.

I made a friend with a classmate who lived down the hall from me in my dorm, and every so often, we’d head to the lakefront, just a couple of miles away, to watch the sun come up behind the Adler Planetarium, to reclaim a tiny bit of beauty to take back with us to the wasteland. There is something cathartic about watching the sun come up over Lake Michigan. It’s quiet, except for the splashing of the waves against the seawall, or any wildlife that’s sharing the space with you. The quiet and the peculiar light can stay with you for far longer than the few minutes they last in reality.

I went to the lakefront to watch the sun come up recently, for the first time in many years. The sun rises earlier in July than January, so I set my alarm for the unholy hour of 4:30, and after I blearily shut it off and sleepwalked through brewing a travel mug of coffee, I biked down to the lakefront. Behind the Planetarium, the ground was littered with a handful of bright purple napkins with Hebrew lettering, the remnants of a celebration the night before. I dumped my bike in the grass and sat down on the staggered concrete wall and watched the clouds airbrushed over the pinkening sky.

It’s quiet on the lakefront at just past five AM, though not deserted. The spot I’d chosen for my vantage point was about thirty feet away from someone who had come down for a morning meditation session. A bicyclist passed on the path behind us, and two joggers passed, heading in opposite directions, on the lowest level of the pavement. The other watcher began to do yoga, and verbalized her exhalations, while I lazily sipped at my coffee.

There’s a funny effect if you stare at the lake long enough in this light. It’s almost like one of those pointillist optical illusions, where you can see the hidden pattern of a cat or a number inside a jumble of colored dots if you relax and unfocus your gaze. While looking at the light reflected off the silvery lake, the slow waves pushing toward the shoreline formed a gently rolling white static like an untuned television. There were no cats to be found in it, but it was a visual equivalent of white noise; easy and calming. I had gotten up to watch the sun, but the frame of mind it left me with would have been just as well suited to the end of the day.

The sun rises over the lake constantly, though it seems like it happens in stages. First an angry red-orange sliver slides up over the edge of the horizon, spilling red and gold on the clouds. It grows slowly, until it finally passes the halfway point and starts forming a circle. As it rises, the top part becomes harder and harder to look directly at: the density of the atmosphere protects you for a while, but as the angle gradually changes, the color grows lighter and brighter and begins to make your eyes water with the sharp sting of light. By the time it has fully risen, and a line of sky separates it from the lake again, it becomes too difficult to keep your eyes trained on it, though you may struggle to keep trying.

It’s easier to watch it make progress by the reflection on the waves. The red sparkles, starting like Dorothy’s ruby slippers, widen and grow orange. They grow more dense, until it seems less like sparks scattered at random, and more like a sequined fabric floating on the waves. It gives up its red color bit by bit, transitioning through shades of orange and gold until it turns to a lemon yellow. By that time, the clouds are no longer lit in an ethereal pink and gold, but just ordinary white water vapor again.

After the sunrise had faded into daylight, my yogini companion folded up her mat and, as she was walking away, jumped on her cell phone. I heard her explaining as she walked toward the city – “Today is going to be super busy. I have so much to do.” In comparison, I had nothing to do. My coffee cup was empty, and I walked back to my bike through the grass, my canvas sneakers dampened by dew.

It seems like a very precious thing to have this place. Sitting on those stairs behind the planetarium, at such an early time, it feels secluded and almost secret. Surrounding you for miles to your back are millions of people sleeping or eating or leaving for work, but in front of you there is nothing but water. If you turn your head in one direction you see acres of skyscrapers, only half a mile away, but if you turn your head to the other direction, it’s water without end. If you don’t turn your head at all, you exist simultaneously in the middle of a major city, but also in the middle of nowhere at all.

The difference of fifteen years from sunrise to sunrise is significant, but in some ways not at all. I am still a college student. I still drink too much coffee. I still don’t understand the appeal of religion, and I still don’t watch much television. I have retirement savings plans now, but fundamentally I remain the same as the girl who went with a friend to watch the sun come up in early spring of 1996. I still hate Brutalism, and I’m viscerally glad, nearly gleeful, that they are rebuilding the east campus of UIC with glass and natural materials, so that new students won’t have to feel the same isolation and disconnect that we did back then. I can still see, in my head, the handfuls of scarlet glitter sparkling on the water’s waves, and I can take that with me regardless of my physical space.

One class is just so bad I don’t even want to talk about it because it’ll wind up devolving to the point where I’m writing in all capital letters using far, far too many exclamation points. I will say, however, that since about week 3, my notes from class have all been about what I am going to write on the end-of-term feedback form. It’s unfortunate, because I really thought the class was going to be helpful and I was going to take away a lot from it; sadly, what I am going to take away from it is that I just spent about $1800 for no damn reason.

The other class… man, I dunno. I thought it was going to be sweet. I emailed the prof for the syllabus months before the quarter, so I could see if I wanted to take it. I had planned to take another class to address the credits this one does, but I thought this class sounded better and so I went for it. The first problem was when it turned out to be a hybrid — half online, half in person — course. I took one of those previously, and I didn’t like it at all. It felt really distant, and there was no feedback, and although I did like that other course well enough despite the hybrid impediment, I decided that I wouldn’t take any more hybrids. I swear this class was not listed on the timetable as a hybrid when I signed up for it. But the first week, we got an amended syllabus and the professor announced it was a hybrid. My heart sank a little bit, but I decided to stick with it rather than drop it and find another class at that late date. This was possibly a strategic error on my part.

But I still thought the class was going to be pretty cool, I really loved the topic (writing about Chicago! I can write! I love Chicago! I bet I would love to write about Chicago!). I did all right for the first two weeks, though I wasn’t entirely happy with the first assignment. I rocked the second one, and read it out loud in class — the class was structured to have four essays with one to be read aloud in either week 5 or 9, student’s choice, so I chose week 5 to get it over with early, which was a really brilliant move because… well.

The third assignment absolutely broke my head. It was to write about a liminal or sacred place (though it was set out as “liminal/sacred” space, so I thought that meant both), and since I would say I don’t actually have any particular “sacred” places (or even “reasonably special” space), I tried focusing on liminal, but the explanation really cut me off at the knees. In class, liminality was explained as a “border” or invisible place, or “a place where heaven and earth meet.” I’m sorry, I tried, but that means literally nothing to me. Heaven does not exist, ergo heaven never meets earth. That sounds like something that I would find on a Hallmark greeting card. There’s a reason I don’t buy greeting cards and I just hand-write notes to people: I hate cornball, nonsense greeting card sentiments.

So I tried to be a good student. I said to myself, ok, so go do some research, read about it, it’ll clarify it. This was a mistake. Reading about liminality just confused me more. For example, according to Wikipedia:

Liminality is…a psychological, neurological, or metaphysical subjective, conscious state of being on the “threshold” of or between two different existential planes[.] … The liminal state is characterized by ambiguity, openness, and indeterminacy. One’s sense of identity dissolves to some extent, bringing about disorientation. Liminality is a period of transition where normal limits to thought, self-understanding, and behavior are relaxed – a situation which can lead to new perspectives.”

What? Are you kidding me? And I gotta go find some place in Chicago that embodies this and write an essay about it? Oh, hell no. But I tried. One of the parts of the hybrid course is that we have to post our ideas for the places we tour to Blackboard, and so I brainstormed and came up with three ideas — three ideas that I thought were really stupid, but they were all I had, so I posted them. But it’s not like you get to have a real discussion about the ideas, so that was basically that. I still hated the ideas, didn’t see how they worked, and now I had less than a week to pick one, tour it, write it up, and then write an essay on it. Grrrrreeeeeat.

In the end, I punted. I tried to flip over to the “sacred” angle, so I thought more about places where something special happened. Other folks were doing ideas like writing up why their car was a sacred space to them, or why fishing is sacred, and honestly I don’t get that at all. But hey, at least they had something, which was better than me. I spent way more time on this than it deserved, and wound up thinking back to when I was living in the dorms at UIC, and me and my friend R. would sometimes go to the lakefront, behind the Adler Planetarium, to watch the sunrise over the lake. I thought, okay, that’s sort of a special, transient time and place. So I looked up sunrise times, set my alarm, and biked to the lakefront to watch the sun come up on a warm, clear morning. I wrote an essay, which I immediately hated, and which I couldn’t actually relate to the assignment because I didn’t frigging understand what the hell I was supposed to be doing. Hated it, hated it, oh, hated it so very much. It gutted me, too, because I was so frustrated by this abstract concept that made no sense to me, and I am really unaccustomed to things not making sense to me. I actually was so pissed at one point I was sitting there going, “This is stupid!” like a five year old throwing a tantrum because math is hard. I very nearly threw my laptop, which is saying something because I really like my laptop, and I don’t actually wish to smash it into bits. I just wanted to smash that godforsaken assignment.

Class came around, and I dragged myself there though it was the last thing I wanted to do. And then we were talking about it, and someone mentioned the ideas I’d posted and was curious which one I’d gone with, and I said something like, “Actually, I didn’t go with any of them…,” and then the floodgates opened, and out poured all this frustration and “I DON’T GET IT” and “I HATED THIS ASSIGNMENT” and “NO YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND, I DON’T GET IT” and “I ALMOST THREW MY LAPTOP” and raaaaaaar and splah and I kind of think I really surprised the professor with the amount of frustration towards what she probably thought was an easy project, which I feel moderately bad about. But sadly, I still just don’t fucking get what the hell we were supposed to write about. And then class was over, for two more weeks.

This week’s assignment I thought would be a fun one — it was to pick a place and then write a short story set there. I knew immediately where I wanted to set my story. I thought about what the plot was, and first it was going to be a heist movie sort of story, and then it was going to be sort of noir, and then it settled into a tale of crime. And I worked out the basic plot and whodunit and all that, and as I was merrily writing along, I realized I don’t actually have the stomach to kill little old ladies, even in a short story, and that shifted it into a sort of gag thing. I dunno if it really worked, and it was much longer than I’d intended — something like 3300 words — but I was at least OK with handing it in, which made it light-years ahead of where I’d felt about assignment 3. Except…

The last assignment for the class is to turn in a portfolio of your collected essays from the class, with one seriously revised and lengthened. No problem. Except…you have to submit it to a publisher. Like, not, you have to prep it as though you were going to submit it to be published, but you have to actually go out and find someone who accepts submissions for pieces like yours, write them a cover letter or email or whatever, and submit it, and in your portfolio, you have to turn in proof that you have done this. And here we reach another oh hell no moment: while I really don’t have much problem blathering happily away in most any other situation, and while I would have no problem at all writing up a whitepaper for a conference and submitting it, or writing something for a technical magazine, what have you, … the idea of turning one of these things in to some anonymous capital-letter Publisher just makes me feel this really unspeakable dread. I’m really not kidding, it’s visceral, and it makes me physically cringe – my shoulders curl inward, my arms cross, I hunch over. I dunno why this is, it’s not like some literary editor is going to come pluck all the limbs from my body and then light me on fire if she rejects my submission, it logically should not be a big deal, but. Just take it as writ: I do not want to do that. Full stop.

And so in tonight’s class, the last class, after we get done with other people’s readings and we’re talking about the project, and the professor is talking about all kinds of places we can submit to, and I’m just getting wound up tighter and tighter and I can feel myself tensing up, and I’m fiddling with my pen like I’m singlehandedly generating electrical power to the entire city of Chicago each time I flip it over. And frankly, it’s really unpleasant to be there feeling like this. And the professor says something about how blogging is really scary and personal, but submitting to publishers is nothing, and so I finally spoke up. I said something like, “No, I don’t get that, it’s exactly the opposite. I can blog about whatever, no problem, doing it for years, but the idea of submitting to a publisher fills me with so much horror that I’m pretty much at the point of deciding it’s OK to blow off that part of the assignment rather than do it.” And I think I totally shocked her, again. It’s like there’s some sort of bubble she is in, and maybe the other people in my class, where writing is easy and impersonal and artistic, whatever, share it with the masses, life is good, no fuss no muss, just submit to a publisher, no big. And I am standing on the outside of that bubble, looking in, confused, going, “Why is this so hard? What is my problem? I know I’m a good writer, what the hell is going on? And why do I suck so bad at this?” The problem is that talking logic to yourself doesn’t really work — saying “they’re not going to light me on fire, chill the hell out” — doesn’t actually do anything at all to relieve illogical anxiety, it basically just makes you feel like an even bigger failure because now not only are you feeling helpless for damn near having a panic attack about something lame, but now you’ve just called yourself a moron for doing it.

And I really feel let down. Because I thought this class was going to be awesome, just a chance to explore places that I love and write up about how fantastic they are. And there are really so many places I love, I feel like I could have written some good stories. But it didn’t turn out that way at all for me, and I’m at a loss to explain why. Maybe it wouldn’t have been so bad if my other class hadn’t been such a soul-sucking disaster (ironically, I expect to pull an A in that class, no problem!), and I’d had something enjoyable… but it was, and I didn’t, and it’s really disappointing because all my other DePaul classes have been virtuous if not enjoyable, and mostly they were enjoyable, so this summer has been just terrible on the school front. I kind of hope it’s just the frigging curse of my doomed 2010 continuing, because that means it’s got an expiration date and I can go back to liking school soon. I liked school for a while there, I was really getting into it, and it’s really bumming me out that this summer quarter has been so bad to me. Anyways. Screw you, 2010! Man, when 2011 gets here, we are going to completely rock this place out and you’ll be all wishing you’d been good to me back when you had the chance!

So, anyway. I dunno. The professor did give us an out, and allowed that we could publish our pieces on our blogs if we have one. So maybe in the next few days you guys will get to read one of my little essays, and nobody will comment because after reading this you’re probably worried I’m going to completely wig out if you point out I dropped a comma or something, but that’s okay. (I probably won’t wig out. I may respond in a lecturing fashion as to why I chose to leave that comma out as a stylistic choice, but if you’re throwing down for grammatical/syntactical pedantry with me, you should see that coming.)

Or maybe I’ll just post some other inane bullshit, and trick you into thinking that you’re reading my homework – ha, ha!

I write like
Chuck Palahniuk

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

Unfortunately, the only one of his novels I’ve read was Diary, and, entertainingly slash embarrassingly, I only grabbed it because I got him mixed up with Chuck Klosterman, so imagine the dissociative shock when I actually started reading it.

(That said, of course I finished reading it. It’s a good book. Maybe I’ll go re-read it now and figure out what it is about his style that I also share that should make random interwebs strangers point out similarity. Does he also abuse parentheses ruthlessly like I do? (I’m seriously trying to quit it, at least in my academic writing. You don’t know how hard a habit it is to break, dudes. I don’t even realize I’m doing it until I look at a printout of the first draft and go “what the shit is this?”))

I need to go write something right now, as a matter of fact. Having completed my walking tour of Union Station and writing up my notes about that, I have a homework assignment to write 1500-2000 words on it in a historical context. The instructions for this class’s assignments are pretty freeform, so paradoxically, that paralyzes me: in the absence of actual instructions, I throw my hands up in the air and stare at a blank Microsoft Word document page while a blinking cursor whispers, “j’accuse!”

Specifically, the direction for today’s assignment is: “Historical places: A discussion of significant venues and how they characterize a city and its people.” So. Yeah. How does Union Station characterize Chicago? Well, all the people in the food court getting bad takeout after 3PM are in a big fucking hurry, and god help you if you’re between them and the escalator. Does that say something about us? What would Carl Sandburg or Nelson Algren have to say about that? Or maybe it’s just a lesson for me; I can ramble on quite happily and (relatively, if you forgive the parenthetical asides) coherently for a couple thousand words on any random bullshit that strikes my fancy, but give me a vague topic and I’m a helpless fourth grader struggling with a book report for Where The Red Fern Grows. Bit sad, honestly, for someone who likes to yap so incessantly. Also, I’d like to introduce it with a line of verse about trains or something, but all I can think of is “Hog Butcher, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, Player with Railroads and Freight Handler to the Nation,” and that feels a little dirty, like cheating due to complete obviousness.

Worse yet, though, than the prospect of turning in another shitty essay — I turned in my first essay with the comment that “this is stream-of-consciousness crap, and I’ll happily revise it if you give me some feedback on what you want” — is the fact that I have to get up and read it in front of the class tomorrow night. I don’t mind public speaking, and I think I’m even halfway decent at it, but when I’m going out in front of people like that, I prefer to say things that are not crap. So if this essay is crap as well, then, well, bummer. My mad spelling skillz are great in print and have served me well in my academic doings thus far, especially contrasted with others’ pieces that didn’t benefit from use of spellcheck, but I’ll lose that slim advantage in speech. Unless I can create some sort of imaginative piece (what? Comparison essay? Short story? Dry historical recounting of the building? Continued ranting about the food court?) I’m going to be stuck out there talking about the fact that the lamp standards in the Great Hall are really neat, and leaving people wondering what the hell a balustrade is.

Of course the reading in front of the class is only step two. For our final project we’re supposed to prepare one of our homework pieces and send it off for publication somewhere. So, no pressure, then. I’ve got two more assignments that will have possibilities to use for that: the “liminal and sacred spaces” assignment, wherein we’re supposed to write about a place “where heaven and earth meet,” and the “a place for art” piece, where we’re supposed to either watch a place-related film or visit a distinctive location and write a short story set there. You know, I read the syllabus before I even registered for this class, and I said, “Yes! This is the class for me! I love Chicago, and I am a decent writer. I can totally take a class that is all about writing about Chicago, for it will rule.” But now that I’m actually in the class? Everything seems like this crazy difficult undertaking. It’s not the length requirements; they’re not even that much. (Hey, this blog post is about half the required length of the essay so far, and I’m not even trying.) It’s, like, wanting a perfect execution of what is assigned, to get that delicious, delicious A grade — only, without specific instructions I’m sort of hacking away at a guess and hoping for the best, and I hate that.

It is entirely possible that I am just blathering on here as a way to avoid actually writing the stupid essay. I should probably stop doing that. But first, I need to just polish this post a bit before clicking “publish”… .

The first thing I said in our small-group discussion was, “I can like figure skating without having people assume I’m gay.” Which is true. Figure skating is totally safe for women to watch or participate in without it casting any homo-aspersions on their character, regardless of the amount of sequins. But a guy who wants to wear said sequins and twirl about on ice is pretty much just assumed to be, as they say, light in the loafers.

(Incidentally, what the hell does “light in the loafers” come from, anyways? Gay men have teeny dainty feet as they flounce down the street? Here, let me introduce you to my friends, at Bear Pride. There will be very little flouncing.)

Much of the other suggestions in class were along the lines of — “As a white man, I’m privileged that I can go walking around in Englewood and people assume I’m a cop and don’t mess with me.” (That particular student is, in fact, a CFD fireman.) There was a brief digression about whether or not it’s “privilege” for women to have doors held open or be allowed to board elevators before men, with one female student vehemently disagreeing, saying that it’s not privilege so much as it is etiquette. (Really? It’s not a privilege to have an entire section of the proper-behavior standards written, and actually enforced by the subservient class (as a man in class emphasized his negative opinions of men who do not let women go first, and as I have seen men lecture other men about at work), just because we have a particular set of chromosomes? What on earth is privilege, then?) Then there were the obligatory gags, like, “I’m privileged that my wife allows me to sleep with her!” (That from a dapper gentleman who works in theatre, who is likely more qualified than I am to speak as to what irrelevant qualities make people assume men are gay.)

By the time the whole-class discussion rolled around I’d refined the figure-skating line a little. I said, “as a woman, I can wear makeup or not wear makeup, dress up or not dress up, and whichever way I roll does not automatically make me gay or not gay.” I mean, really. It’s a privilege men don’t have. Show me a man who wears product in his hair and I’ll show you a “metrosexual,” which is a term invented just to identify grooming with homosexuality. I can go around in steel-toed boots and it makes me a goth; I can work on cars and that makes me either cool or sexy depending on who’s asking; I can work in a male-dominated industry and that just means I’m smart ‘cos I can keep up with the menfolk. But put a guy with nice hair in ice skates and sequins, and watch the instant transformation to someone that Deadspin is going to have to create an entire section about people euphemizing his gayness. (Bad example, perhaps — yeah, yeah, I know, it’s Johnny Weir, and hell yes I watched this and loved it! — but, really, people. Quit being little bitches about queers on ice.)

As I was walking home after class, I was extending and polishing the argument a little more. Basically it boils down to: Women can do non-traditionally-feminine things with little likelihood of it affecting their perceived sexuality or status. Men who do non-traditionally-masculine things have their Friend of Dorothy Club membership card handed to them after, like, the second offense.

So here I was getting all wrapped up in my excess of privilege as a woman, and feeling guilty about my own transgressions along these lines, when a car pulls out of a parking lot and a sketchy older guy in an eyepatch, in the passenger seat, leans out his window and shouts to a couple of cute young college girls walking a few steps ahead of me, “Hey girl! Come here and sit on my lap!”

They snickered (“ha ha, look at the drunk moron!”) and walked on, and he kept hollering, “Come here, girl!”

Meanwhile, a cute young college guy also walking down the street laughed his head off and chortled encouragement to Eyepatch as the car pulled out onto State Street.

Thus endeth my feeling guilty about the unfair privileges I enjoy as a woman.

Score: Gay men: 0, “girls”: 0, drunk shitheads: 1.

So, the other day, in my Organizational Communications class — for which the homework was, as usual, some seriously dry chapters to read (seriously, guys, you could not have made this textbook drier if you’d buried the manuscript in an arid desert, or perhaps on the Moon, for forty years before publishing), but also as usual turned into an interesting discussion — we talked about diversity in the workplace, and integrating cultures therein. One of the questions our group was assigned to discuss and do a short presentation to the class about was this:

On the basis of the descriptions of the four different age groups provided in the chapter (Traditionals [Greatest/Silent Generation], Boomers, Generation X, and Millennials) what sort of problems do you anticipate occurring as these different groups interact in the workplace? What sort of advantages of opportunities exist in combining people from these different groups in one department?

The descriptions they referred to encapsulated each generation with a short blurb on birthdates and some tendencies they embody plus the feelings they hold toward others. One other woman in my group and I sort of took over the group discussion and talked about our perspectives; she, the Boomer, and I, the Gen Xer. As it happens, I have pretty pronounced opinions on the topic of Boomers and GenXers, which I know will come as a massive surprise to all of you reading this blog.

What the textbook says is this:

Baby Boomers … created [or] grew up under the influence of the 1960s counterculture. They regard Generation X as selfish and manipulative, and Millennials as lacking focus.

Generation X … are also more likely to view work as a means to support their current lifestyle interests … versus viewing work as a means to support retirement activities. They … regard Boomers as disgustingly “New Age” workaholics, and see Millennials as too optimistic and insufficiently rule-governed.

Although they are children of the counterculture, Boomers nonetheless tacitly accepted many conventions that Traditionals hold as bedrock principles of work life. … Generation X is turned off by inflexible time schedules, workaholism, and close supervision. They like to learn new things, … [and] want to be encouraged to display creativity and initiative to find new ways to get tasks done.

We’re also cynical little beasts. Coupland:

“As luck would have it, that was the morning the public health inspector came around in response to a phone call I’d made earlier that week, questioning the quality of the working environment.

“Martin was horrified that an employee had called the inspectors, and I mean really freaked out. In Toronto they can force you to make architectural changes, and alterations are ferociously expensive — fresh air ducts and the like — and health of the office workers be damned, cash signs were dinging up in Martin’s eyes, tens of thousands of dollars’ worth. He called me into his office and started screaming at me, his teeny-weeny salt and pepper ponytail bobbing up and down, ‘I just don’t understand you young people. No workplace is ever okay enough. And you mope and complain about how uncreative your jobs are and how you’re getting nowhere, and so when we finally give you a promotion you leave and go pick grapes in Queensland or some other such nonsense.’

“Now, Martin, like most embittered ex-hippies, is a yuppie, and I have no idea how you’re supposed to relate to those people. And before you start getting shrill and saying yuppies don’t exist, let’s just face facts: they do. Dickoids like Martin who snap like wolverines on speed when they can’t have a restaurant’s window seat in the nonsmoking section with white napkins. Androids who never get jokes and who have something scared and mean at the core of their existence, like an underfed Chihuahua baring its teeny fangs and waiting to have its face kicked in or like a glass of milk sloshed on top of the violet filaments of a bug barbecue: a weird abuse of nature. Yuppies never gamble, they calculate. They have no aura: ever been to a yuppie party? It’s like being in an empty room: empty hologram people walking around peeking at themselves in mirrors and surreptitiously misting their tonsils with Binaca spray, just in case they have to kiss another ghost like themselves. There’s just nothing there.

“So, ‘Hey Martin,’ I asked when I go to his office, a plush James Bond number overlooking the downtown core — he’s sitting there wearing a computer-generated purple sweater from Korea — a sweater with lots of texture. Martin likes texture. ‘Put yourself in my shoes. Do you really think we enjoy having to work in that toxic waste dump in there?’

“Uncontrollable urges were overtaking me.

“‘…and then have to watch you chat with your yuppie buddies about your gut liposuction all day while you secrete artificially sweetened royal jelly here in Xanadu?’

“Suddenly I was into this très deeply. Well, if I’m going to quit anyway, might as well get a thing or two off my chest.

“‘I beg your pardon,’ says Martin, the wind taken out of his sails.

“‘Or for that matter, do you really think we enjoy hearing about your brand new million-dollar home when we can barely afford to eat Kraft Dinner sandwiches in our own grimy little shoe boxes and we’re pushing thirty? A home you won in a genetic lottery, I might add, sheerly by dint of your having been born at the right time in history? You’d last about ten minutes if you were my age these days, Martin. And I have to endure pinheads like you rusting above me for the rest of my life, always grabbing the best piece of cake first and then putting a barbed-wire fence around the rest. You really make me sick.’

“Unfortunately, the phone rang then, so I missed what would have undoubtedly been a feeble retort…some higher-up Martin was in the iddle of a bum-kissing campaign with and who couldn’t be shaken off the line. I dawdled off into the staff cafeteria. There, a salesman from the copy machine company was pouring a Styrofoam cup full of scalding hot coffee into the soil around a ficus tree which really hadn’t even recovered yet from having been fed cocktails and cigarette butts from the Christmas party. It was pissing rain outside, and the water was drizzling down the windows, but inside the air was as dry as the Sahara from being recirculated. The staff were all bitching about commuting time and making AIDS jokes, labeling the office’s fashion victims, sneezing, discussing their horoscopes, planning their time-shares and Santo Domingo, and slagging the rich and famous. I felt cynical, and the room matched my mood.

Yeah.

So anyways, during the group discussion, my one classmate and I mostly ran with the conversation in our little group of six. She complained that Gen Xers are always off re-inventing the wheel, as though what already is in place isn’t good enough or we can’t be bothered to look for it. I complained that the last thing I want to do at work is to get dragged into a meeting to talk for thirty minutes about other people’s children. We agreed, at least, that we don’t have to deal with many older Traditionals or Millennials, so we focused mostly on the differences between us. Though, I’ll note, I have no beef against Millennials at all: they seem like fairly sensible sorts… well, those without serious helicopter parent issues, anyway.

So my classmate and I were the last to get up to make our presentation, and so we had just under ten minutes before class ended. She fielded one question, about the issues surrounding “feminizing” workplaces, which we all agreed was a silly question best forgotten. I had the age question, so I opened my mouth and started talking.

(I don’t recall my exact screed, and when I did and neatly wrote it down here a day after class, an errant mouse button click sent me away from my unsaved draft and I lost it, and I can’t be bothered to try again to reproduce either the speech or the text about it. Typical Gen X slacker, I suppose. Instead, I’ll paraphrase — and save much more often.)

The problem in integrating these two styles of working, the Boomer collaborative style and the Gen X independence, is that Boomers do not understand why we don’t want to be like them and they keep trying to convince us, and we are tired of tilting at windmills, trying to break through. Boomers grew up with extended families and neighborhood communities, and they learned that collective efforts can make an impact, like, say, protesting the Vietnam War. We, on the other hand, have been on our own since always; we don’t have the same support systems that Boomers did and do; we grew up in suburban wastelands with nowhere to ride our bikes to but other featureless cul-de-sacs, frightened of our neighbors because they probably poisoned our Halloween candy. We’re latchkey kids and many of us had divorced parents and fewer siblings. Through our experiences, we learned that we can’t rely on others to do things for us, and we’d rather discover a failure early and work around it than spend time beating up on it. (E.g., walking away from what might be seen as a one-sided discussion rather than trying to convince the other: if you can safely suppose that a person is just trying to convince you to do what they want, and is unwilling to be convinced of your reasoning, why bother wasting your time just to get frustrated? Give up on the no-wins early, and extricate yourself as soon as possible. Sure, you’ll lose some things you maybe could have won, but you’ll also be spending your time much more effectively and enjoyably.) What a Boomer sees as independence to the point of intransigence, an unwillingness to play well with others, we see as a virtuous, and necessary, responsibility to do things for ourselves: “If you want something done right, … ,” and all that. And what we see as mind-numbing, mumbo-jumbo pattings-on-our-own-back, time-wasting affirmations of our own effectiveness, Boomers see as … meetings.

(I think that was about the time where, in class, I got a shouted “Preach it!” from my fellow Xers in class, although it might have been about the crack about meetings to talk about other people’s kids.)

That is not to say that all meetings are evil, or that willful independence is a particularly effective way to get things done. I’m just talking about the prejudices that we have, that we bring with us to the workplace. The trouble is not even necessarily with having the prejudices (which is great, because good frigging luck shaking them off), but when people use them as weapons in a workplace culture. If you’re an independent sort alone surrounded by a bunch of meetings-to-plan-the-meeting-about-having-the-meeting types, get used to being the elitist cowboy snob; if you’re a collaborator lost in a sea of do-it-yourselfers, welcome to your new life as The Interfere-Tron 3000.

Gen Xers are few in number, bracketed on both sides by more populous generations — 76 million Boomers, 44 million Gen Xers, 78 million Millennials. One natural outcome of being a minority population is that we have to sit around and listen to how great and significant everybody else is, which is unbelievably tiresome and completely inescapable.

Here’s a typical example, from a site calling itself Baby Boomer HeadQuarters:

I’m not denying the X’ers the right to a name. Personally, I don’t care. But do they really need or warrant one? Do they have enough in common with each other and yet unique about their circumstances (as the baby boomers do) to warrant a defining name? Why not just leave them alone? Why do we have to categorize them? Oh well, I’m probably spitting into the wind here, aren’t I? I am just suggesting that it may not be fair to categorize and compare any other generation to the boomers, that’s all.

He probably intended that to read as: “Why do we try to force everyone into a category? Is that fair, to label everything endlessly and foist these expectations upon others?”

But what initially I read that as, before putting on my Boomer-awesomeness-field correction filter, is: “Why are we asked to label anyone else? Boomers are a huge group that should be celebrated for our self-evident awesomeness, so clearly paeons should be written to us, but these other guys, what have they ever done to deserve having even a name for themselves?” This interpretation lends itself first to hilarity oh, those wacky Boomers, and then to writing it off, because what else can we do? In combination, that is expressed as dismissive snark. Let’s call that the cynicism/pragmatism divide: What a Boomer sees is us being catty, and we see it as justified realism.

(Actually, the entire “Boomers, Gen X, and Beyond” essay there is well-worth a read. Boomers, you’ll be happy and smiling along as you go, maybe shaking your head here and there, probably pensive but upbeat by the end. Xers, you’ll be falling out of your chair laughing, if you bother to finish it once you see how the wind is blowing. I’d summarize it as writing ‘they just don’t get it’ as an act of just not getting it.)

Here’s an op-ed I was reading this morning: The Fat Lady Has Sung, by Thomas Friedman. I’d arrived at the page from someone’s tweet about a community charging for 911 calls, but found that the piece was actually about politics, and surprisingly, had a generational disconnect twist:

Our parents truly were the Greatest Generation. We, alas, in too many ways, have been what the writer Kurt Andersen called “The Grasshopper Generation,” eating through the prosperity that was bequeathed us like hungry locusts. Now we and our kids together need to be “The Regeneration” — the generation that renews, refreshes, re-energizes and rebuilds America for the 21st century.

This illustrates one personal prejudice I do have about Boomers as a class, and I’ll own it: I feel like they ate everything on the table and left scraps for the rest of us to scrabble over. As an example, I grew up being told by laughing adults to not count on Social Security, the system would be bust before I got there. I remember this distinctly, standing in my grandmother’s kitchen as a young child, an adult jokingly lecturing me that above all, I had to save for retirement because Social Security was going to be gone before I got there. (Never mind the problem inherent with that suggestion; that Social Security is meant for security, i.e. a basal level of support to avoid destitution, not to finance a comfortable retirement. It’s a common mistake.) Surprise, surprise: the prophecy is coming true. I pay substantially into the system, and I absolutely support my taxes being used to help others avoid starvation and homelessness. But it burns my toast on a massive scale to see people being gleeful about their own irresponsibility. Listen up, my precious darlings: Y’all are the ones who left Social Security a messed up pyramid scheme doomed to failure, and screaming now about maintaining your entitlement benefits after you had 40 freaking years to fix it — seriously? Seriously? You don’t get to moan about the fruits of your own recklessness and cast us as the villains. I’m only 32, I didn’t break this. This one’s on all y’all. And considering your benefits checks are coming out of my salary, I think you’d better shut up about cold-hearted younger people not caring about your golden years. I conserve gasoline, I shut the lights off when I’m not using them, I reuse and recycle, and I save. I am responsible, and I am doing my duty to support myself because you guys made sure that I knew I had no safety net. I’m doing my duty to future generations by doing my best to make sure that I not just do not diminish but actually improve their positions. And I gotta support a bunch of selfish blowhards who were given so much, and blew through it all like life was just a bad run at the craps table. Don’t talk to me about your retirement plans, don’t talk to me about the fabulous, fabled 1960s; I don’t even want to hear it. (You’ll tell me anyway.) When you need me, and you will: you always do, I’ll be there to save you because it’s my responsibility to support the society I live in, but don’t expect me to be giddy with delight as you’re reminisce about how great things used to be. Things could have been great now — it’s 2010, for God’s sake; we could have a colony on the moon and a cure for cancer! — but you guys got bored in the 70s and so we’re shutting down our space program and still driving cars that get 17 miles to the rapidly-disappearing gallon. Don’t talk to me about social security, man. Just don’t.

…but I digress. And I’d been so good up until now!

A frequent complaint that I see about Gen Xers is that we are, allegedly, just waiting for the Boomers to die. (You’ll see that come up over at that Baby Boomer HQ site I mentioned earlier, if you visit.) It’s a suspicious, furtive accusation, and it makes me sad. We’re not, you know. You’re still our parents, even if you are idiots with your money. I’m not sure what it is that we’re just waiting for the Boomers to die, for — presumably the supposition is that we’ll swoop in and snatch up all those sweet CxO corner offices. But the corner office isn’t a big deal for us. I’m not saying that there are no avaricious, social-climbing Xers, but that’s not what it’s all about. One remark I made in class that definitely earned me a shoutout was when I said that my work is not my life. I told an example of a discussion I’d been having with some coworkers at lunch. Someone was shocked to learn that although I have a smartphone, I do not use it to keep up with my work email at all times. (I maintain a pretty sharp work/life distinction, having learned the hard way that if I never stop working, my life sucks. I made a decision to not read work email on the weekends unless I’m on call or it’s an emergency several years ago, and never looked back.) Someone asked, “why don’t you read email before you come to work like we do?” And I stared at him and answered, like I was talking to a three year-old, “Because I’m in the shower, dude.” Working before work is the equivalent of the meeting-planning meeting. At some point, the abstraction gets a little silly.

Boomers have admirable dedication to their jobs, and are tenacious when it comes to accomplishing what they want. The unflattering name for this is “workaholism.” The generational disconnect here comes because Gen X watched these workaholics have their loyalty and dedication rewarded by layoffs and disappearing pension plans, and shifting the kids between the parents two weekends a month. So, again, we learned to work around the failure in the system: if our employers treat us as fungible or disposable, we will figure out a way to flourish regardless of the environment. That translates to us not depending on the company, and being protective of our individual development, so that we always have a backup plan.

When I want to go off and learn something new, to me, that feels like a positive act — I’m happier and more capable, which benefits my employer (thus the time is justified), and I have a new bullet-point for my CV, which benefits me. It’s worth pointing out that this is an prescribed behavior in some business practices: Agile programming practice, for example, insists on “refactoring,” which is the art of going over a working program in order to make it better. The wheel’s there, sure, but let’s throw some sweet rims on that baby and take her for a spin.

But that sort of thing can be interpreted as standoffishness or a selfish insistence on reinventing the Boomer’s perfectly good wheel for no reason other than self-aggrandizement, as my classmate (remember my classmate? This is a song about me and my classmate.) said was one of her hangups about younger workers. So it’s important for a Gen Xer to be able to explain this in a way that it makes it clear that it’s not because we don’t value the work that was already done, so we don’t make people resentful. And it’s important for a Boomer to recognize that just because something benefits us doesn’t mean that it’s devaluing them.

You’ll have noted by now that continual improvement, and acting to preemptively avoid disappointment, is a major factor in Gen Xer behavior patterns. That’s the thing that seems to be perceived as our cynicism; if you assume things are going to end badly all the time, well, how pessimistic of you, Debbie Downer! I don’t think it’s a negative though. It’s actually more optimistic: we see things that can be improved everywhere we go! If the rules don’t get us to success, we invent new ones. The accusation of cynicism assumes we see everything labeled “this sucks,” but in reality, it’s like seeing everything labeled “hope” everywhere we can go, because we can really do so much with what we’ve got at hand.

I like to joke, when people ask me what operating system or computer is “best,” that everything sucks, and you just have to find the one that sucks least for what you want it to do. But that’s just a joke, guys. I don’t really think everything sucks, because seriously, if I did, I would have given up years ago. (See earlier re: “Gen Xers and windmills, tilting at.”) If I were truly the cynical pessimist that people paint us as, don’t you think I would just phone it in, rather than showing up at work just trying to get to the point where I get to gleefully tell someone “I learned something new today”?

In practical terms, the work-is-not-life split means that I view myself as selling a product, my time, to my employer, and I don’t subscribe to the company-as-family metaphor. If the company and I do mesh well, that’s fantastic!, but I don’t count on it. I don’t set my sights on twenty years advancing through the ranks at one place, because in my experience, that’s unrealistic and setting myself up for disappointment. I set my sights on making sure that what I do is interesting and rewarding to me in terms of continual learning. If someone else is happy spending 70 hours a week slaving over a hot terminal, well, whatever floats your boat… but dude, it doesn’t float mine.

I think that one thing that gets frequently overlooked in trying to navigate tricky generational work-style conflicts is that, y’all, we’re all focused on the same end. I want to achieve things at work because it is interesting to me to make things better. Boomers want to achieve things at work because they like to win. So what if you want to have a meeting and I don’t? It’s hardly a crisis. Go schedule your meeting. Send me the agenda; if it sounds useful, I’ll tag along. If I don’t, send me the summary later. Don’t assume that just because I’m sitting at my desk, it’s because I’m plotting against you, and don’t use it as a weapon against me. In return, I’ll try and avoid assuming that you’re meddling with me just for the sake of being a meddling meddler. You might have to remind me that you are curious because you want to be involved, and I might have to explain that I’m not throwing out the wheel you already invented just because I didn’t invent it. But if we can put aside some of those differences, we can come up with some really great ideas, with each of us compensating for the other’s failings. You bring the beer and I’ll let you play the jukebox. It’ll be great — just so long as you know that if you play that “does your bubblegum lose its flavor on the bedpost overnight” song, I am totally making you listen to Green Day.

I will close with a couple of jokes, stolen from someplace else, because I just wrote an essay that’s about twice as long as one of my homework projects I was supposed to be working on, and I’m about out of steam. First, I shall disrespect my elders:

Q: How many Baby Boomers does it take to screw in a light bulb?
A: Not really sure, but they’re going to have a day-long retreat to brainstorm on the issue and will report back their recommendations.

Q: How many Baby Boomers does it take to screw in a light bulb?
A: The light bulb committee has determined it will take two – one to screw it in and one to supervise. Once the bulb is screwed in, there will be a group hug and a team building exercise.

Next, I shall be a realist about myself:

Q: How many Gen Xers does it take to screw in a light bulb?
A: Just one – the slacker who blew off the brainstorming session.

Q: How many Gen Xers does it take to screw in a light bulb?
A: Ehhh…. it’s not that dark.

And because there has been far, far too little taunting of the younger generation in this blog post:

Q: How many Millennials does it take to screw in a light bulb?
A: All of them. And they worked as a team! And it was the best light bulb screwing in that any generation ever did – so I gave them all a trophy!

That’s all, folks. Thanks for reading to the end, you slackers. Now make like a tree and get out of here, McFly.

Anyways, as it turns out, I’m pretty gullible myself sometimes (ask my coworkers) so I thought, what the hell, I’m going to buy a lottery ticket. I marched right up to the lottery machine in the local ex-White Hen (sorry, 7-11, it’s always going to be the White Hen to me)… well, more properly I went in the door and got in line behind the other guy who was waiting for the one guy working to check out all the people who were buying actual things so he could buy a lottery ticket, and waited for my turn, but I did that, anyways. And then I asked for two Mega Millions quick picks (because I figured their pseudo-random number generator was at least as likely as my brain to pick the 1 set of numbers out of 175,711,536 possible sets that would match), and then gave them two dollars and they gave me one slip of paper with a little bar code on it. (I feel robbed. Two “tickets,” I should have two slips of paper to show for it; to hell with the trees!) And now I shall wait until tomorrow at midnight, or more properly Saturday morning, because to be honest, I cannot be bothered to watch television at midnight to see if I won the thing there’s no way in hell I’m going to win.

But, I have to say, the novelty of buying a lottery ticket has been interesting. It’s been sort of fun thinking up how I would spend money if I didn’t have to worry about it, since I first thought of buying a lottery ticket two days ago. If the cost of a really lovely daydream is only $2, how can you argue with that? That’s value. Most of my dreams (cough, cough, ENGLAND, cough) cost much more than $2. I suppose if I played regularly, the dreams wouldn’t be nearly so lovely; it would be routine and boring and maybe I’d just skip it entirely in the drudgery of buying my habitual ticket and shoving it in a pocket while fetching a coffee on Monday mornings, like clockwork. But for a first-timer, it’s been fun to sort of lose myself in a little bit of pointless dreaming.

And of course the tradition of winning the lottery is that then you go out and spend your ridiculous amounts of money. I don’t want a big house, and I like my car just fine (okay, maybe I’d have it detailed). So those are not really in the cards for my theoretical jackpot. And there are philanthropic things I’d do for friends and family, but then I’d lose the surprise if I just went and blogged about it in advance, so where’s the fun in that? So here it is, my list of Ten Selfish Things I’d Do if I Won the Lottery (or, I should say, if I win the $140m jackpot that is the only lottery I’ve ever played or am likely to play for the foreseeable future, because seriously, it really is a gullibility tax, y’all, and I am gullible but it takes real guile to trick me repeatedly):

• I’d pay off my mortgage. (This is arguable as a selfish thing, since it’s my mom’s house, but it’s my name on the paper, so I think it counts.)
• I would pay off my student loans and not take out any more, ha ha ha, sorry Department of Ed making big bank (ha) off my interest.
• Speaking of which, screw this whole sticking around and trying to qualify for a work permit thing, if I had like $50m cash on hand I wouldn’t need to work constantly — I’d totally try and get a visa immediately and move to the UK. Maybe finish my degree there. Or maybe I’d try and buy the Swinford toll bridge from its new owners before they can get really attached, and spend the rest of my life collecting 5p pieces one car at a time, and catching up on Eastenders in my little toll booth. I’m just saying, I’d have a little more leeway.
• But until I did that: FULL SEASON SOX TICKETS, BABY, and going to allllllll the day games. Box seats, too; third base line, right by my guys’ dugout. And all the churros and Beers of the World I could handle!
• I think I’d buy a new iMac. Just walk right in to the Apple Store on Michigan Avenue and buy one, not worrying about MacWorld or WWDC or random Steve Jobs announcements obsoleting it immediately, and take a taxi straight home, because I would totally be rich enough to do that.
• I would renew my city sticker, ‘cos I’ve kind of been putting that off since, um, June, when they screwed up my paperwork and I have to go stand in line to tell them that my 2001.5 Volkswagen Passat four-door passenger sedan did not, in fact, overnight turn into a truck. Chicago, I love you, but sometimes you are honestly just plain chock-full of idiots.
• I can’t believe I am running out of ideas after only 6 things. Oh, all right, fine: I’d buy actual diamond replicas of some earrings I inherited from my grandmother when she passed. (We had lots in common; a shared love for shiny, sparkly things was only one of them.) They’re costume jewelry but I love them because they were Grandma’s. I actually bought CZ replicas of them a while back, because I was afraid of losing the real ones; every time I put the fake fakes on (which is most days; they’re my default earrings) I think of Grandma. And I’d buy real ones, but cruelty-free diamonds are not cheap, and I am a college student. So if I won the lottery, I’d buy real ones just like them, but in expensive fancy-pants Canadian nobody-died-for-this-rock ones that sparkled all over the room. I think she’d be behind me a thousand percent on this one. — I was kind of planning to make that my college graduation present to myself (I survived! Now I get sparklies!), but what the hell, if I win the lottery, I can cheat a little bit on the timeline.
• I would totally go to France. I’ve never been, and that is like the second thing that people ask me after they learn that I can speak French. It’s starting to feel a little stupid that I’ve never gone. Maybe I’d go to Alliance-Française de Paris and take one of their immersion courses; I’ve wanted to do one of those for ages. Nothing against my beloved Alliance-Française de Chicago, but you know, there is something to be said for learning to wear Hermès scarves with the native folk. (And, okay, maybe I’d go to Québec too, because, truth be told, the Quebecois accent is a little mystifying to me and I’m starting to think that I really will have to spend some time with it before I can figure out how the heck they get from ‘hiver’ to what sounds more like ‘hivaille’ to me.
• That reminds me. (Merci, Tricot Machine.) I will buy every record I have ever wanted to buy but couldn’t because I couldn’t afford to buy music at the time. That includes one-hit wonders like Jesus Jones, because my freshman year in high school they released “Right Here, Right Now,” and I loved that song, and every other album that I don’t already have that was on that list — which I still have, because I carried around a little notebook in high school to take random notes on, and I still have it, because I was a freak who loved high school. and also, like, massive shit-tons of classical. If I didn’t already own the Police box set it would be everything they ever did because I loved them so, so much in the 80s and never got to buy any music because I didn’t have an allowance, so no money until I got a job in 1994. I’m sure there will be mistakes along the way — I know Pablo Honey was on that list, and I think that album is pretty pointless (no offense, guys) now that I own it — but there is no doubting that I loved Pet Shop Boys hard when “West End Girls” came out and I love them even harder now, so, I’m pretty sure the music purchase will work out, net, in my favor.
• Is that ten yet? Shit. I mean, I’m sure I’d spend more money if I won the lottery, but going to the Body Shop and picking up a tube of hand cream even though I don’t strictly need it doesn’t quite count, does it? Okay. Ten: I would throw a ridiculous party at my house. You’d all have to put up with my playing deejay (I love teh musicks), it’s a teeny apartment so it’d be scrunched, and I’d invite my family so you might have to listen to my dad ramble about Nascar (for god’s sake, it’s not even a real sport), but I promise top-shelf liquor. And cupcakes. Always the cupcakes.