It would be cool to be a cartoonist, the trouble is that I've only come up with two good ideas for cartoons, an average of one per decade. The first is from my radical environmentalist phase in high school. At that time, the first George Bush wanted some protected wetlands to be undefined as such because they were only wet part of the time, or something. So one of my cartoon characters (the characters were the NG people, who were anthropomorphic drops of natural gas) was running for president, and proposed that many "trees" should not be defined as such because a "tree" is a tall, leafy plant; while many so-called trees are only leafy during part of the year, while others aren't "tall" at all. It should have ended with a witty comment by one of the other characters, but I could never come up with one.
The second would be titled "Harry Nilsson with a banana in his ear." The first panel would show Harry Nilsson with a banana in his ear, and a friend would come up and say, "Harry, did you know that there's a banana in your ear?" Harry would say, "What?" This would happen a couple more times, and in the final panel, Harry would say, "I'm sorry, I can't hear a word you're saying, only the echoes of my mind, because I have this banana in my ear." Ha, ha.
More recently I had an idea for a bumper sticker that would read "I'd Rather Be Preserving Ma'at," however I can't remember if this was my idea or Andy's, or maybe somebody else's. I frequently plagiarize other people's catchphrases and witticisms without really being aware I'm doing it.
I'm not totally sure what I've been doing the last 8 days, but probably not much interesting enough to write about. School stuff, of course--I'll be spending a good deal of this evening finishing up a map assignment for tomorrow. I'm a PhD student, and I'm working on a map assignment. I feel very fulfilled.
Last weekend, Andy and I met up for a short visit. We talked about some wedding stuff, and I've gotten a couple of other wedding odds and ends done. I'm kind of ashamed to say that I watched most of a show called "Bridezillas" the other night. It was worse than I expected, made me feel guilty for watching it, and bored at the same time.
It snowed yesterday, and it looks pretty outside. The sun came out today, which was kind of startling. It's so much brighter than I remembered!
Nothing very exciting is going on around here. We had to cancel a Michigan visit due to snow, so I spent the time mulling over wedding stuff. I think I may have over-mulled, though; I've driven myself nearly mad pondering china patterns and bridesmaid dress possibilities. I've attempted to foist off the dress decision on my matron of honor, and think I've finally come up with a china solution. Nobody seems to like cobalt blue anything these days; it's all freaky mint greens and lavendars. I think it might be the Trading Spaces effect.
It's cooolllld outside. The ancient steam radiators in my apartment are keeping the place a temperate 79 degrees inside though. The temp isn't by my choice, I don't have control over the radiator level, but I am enjoying it.
I was counting up recently and realized that I’ve had 22 different jobs over the past 13 years, ranging in duration from one week to four years (the latter not counting summers). I’m not sure if this is is more or fewer than normal, but at least it gives me something to look back on and ponder in my old age. I started thinking about them and realized that though a lot of them were boring and some of them I really disliked, it was a lot of fun to think back about them and the people I worked with.
--My first job was as a busser at a chicken restaurant. I worked Sunday evenings for about three months when I was 16. I hated it, mostly because the other bussers made fun of me. The actual job was okay, and the customers were a blast. Part of my job was to keep peoples’ iced tea and water filled up. I was pretty bad at it and spilled it all over the tables, but nobody ever minded.
--Summer after freshman year at college, I worked in the gatehouse at a lake near Lincoln. I sold park stickers and spread disinformation. People came out to go fishing and would ask me what was biting. I always said “crappies” because it’s a funny word, but I didn’t really know. The first few weeks at this job were tedious, because I had to paint guideposts all day—guideposts are those two-foot tall log sort of things that go along the sides of roads sometimes for whatever reason, to guide people who can’t discern the difference between the dirt road and the grassy shoulder I guess. I also painted picnic tables and railings. I got very sore doing that, and had paint in my hair for months afterwards. The gatehouse part was more fun, it was not a very hot summer so we didn’t get much business, and I mostly sat in the gatehouse and read all day. I read Atlas Shrugged (all of it except for most of the 50-page speech at the end) and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I didn’t like either of them much, but they’re good books to have read.
When people who already had park stickers on their cars drove up to the gatehouse, we would yell “go ahead” at them as they went by, to indicate that they could go on into the park. A girl who had worked the year before told us that it was fun to yell “goat head” instead of “go ahead,” and she was right. Often I would sit just outside the gatehouse and my co-worker would sit inside. She would yell “goat head” at people as they approached; and I got to enjoy the looks of people as they observed my stern unmoving countenance and heard a disembodied voice yell “goat head” at them. All in all, this was one of my favorite jobs.
--During junior year at college I spent one semester at home in Nebraska taking classes and working, because I wanted to study Plains Indian archaeology. I had three jobs during that semester and summer, one of which was in the archaeology lab at the University of Nebraska. I spent quite a lot of the time at that job weighing bags of dirt, dried mud actually, and recording my findings. Every once in a while, this one guy would come bounding into the room to tell me how important this dirt was going to be in the future when archaeologists had developed new tests they could do on the dirt. Whatever. I got very buff at this job, lifting the computer paper boxes of dirt from the floor to the table and back again all day.
--Immediately post-college was a weird job time. I didn’t know what I wanted to do and didn’t want to make any major commitments, so I signed up with a temp agency. My first assignment was at this place that manufactured business directories. Each “signature” or section of the book was placed on a round table that rotated, and you grabbed each signature as it went by you in the appropriate order so that it stacked up into the correct book order , then set it aside for later binding, with a little square piece of paper with your name on it tucked in so they could take you to task if you messed it up. This is what I did all day long, though I did spend at least a few days doing other equally dull tasks. You had to sign out for breaks and lunches by scanning a bar code thing they gave you, the scanning tended to take up appreciable amounts of our break time which was annoying. I learned a skill there which has been surprisingly useful to me in later life; which is the ability to collate by hand very quickly.
--After my stint as a temp, I got a job at a local bookstore, which was a great job. I would have stayed there forever if they’d paid me enough to live on .
--While I was doing the temping and bookstore, I also cleaned apartment buildings with a friend. We vacuumed hallways and stairs, scrubbed entryways, cleaned out ashtrays, and swabbed out the laundry rooms. It was a fairly thankless job, nobody ever thought things were clean enough. I found this discouraging, and ultimately quit.
--The spring after I got the bookstore job, I decided I wanted to go to England, so to make extra money I got another temp job and relegated the bookstore to evenings & weekends. The temp job was at an insurance company, where I gathered insurance applications and forms to send out to agents. Both that job and the bookstore required me to be standing up the whole time (I mean not as a function of the job; it was a rule that we weren’t supposed to sit down), so my legs got tired but I cheated and sat a lot.
--A few months after I got back from England, I got another temp job, this time at the State of Nebraska in Child Support Enforcement. I spent quite a bit of time getting bawled out by a lot of angry people despite the fact that neither I nor the department had anything to do with either causing or perpetuating their problems. It was one of the few jobs I’ve had where I’ve felt like I was directly helping people, however, and weirdly enough after I left there I really missed the adrenaline rush from people calling and yelling at me. My co-workers there were very fun, in particular a girl named Misty who one of the funniest people I’ve ever met. She used to recite Kids in the Hall sketches from memory for us, and I’m pretty sure she was funnier than the original.
--When I got done with my master’s, I worked downtown here in Chicago for a year at a technical consulting company. I worked with the salespeople. Me in any kind of sales related position is a total joke—I loathe anything to do with sales, and if an abstract concept were capable of emotions it would detest me too. However, I got to know a lot of techies, learned some stuff about UNIX, and got flown all over the country by the company for extremely superficial reasons. For example, for some reason they sent me to Boston to get trained, where we stayed a few blocks away from the Italian restaurants in the North End, and from Quincy Market and Faneuil Hall.
--I currently work for my advisor, mostly inputting data from his archaeological excavations at Ashkelon into a database that his wife built. I also work in the map collection at the library, and have worked on and off at a couple of other fairly tedious jobs. One spring break I worked for the U of C humanities division, inventorying computer equipment. This involved going into a lot of offices of confused faculty members, asking if we could read the serial numbers off of their computer equipment. One department had all of their computer equipment alarmed, so if you moved it the alarm went off and the police came. That was certainly a humiliating experience.
Somehow, the bridal industry has gotten hold of my name and location. I've been receiving wedding-related junk mail, telemarketing calls, and spam. I've "won" so many valuable prizes in the last few days that I must have single-handedly smashed the laws of probability all to bits. I just hung up on some woman who wanted to tell me I'd won...something, I couldn't figure out exactly what, but apparently it was the result of "the survey" that I filled out at "the mall." I've spent approximately two hours in a mall since last summer, and I don't recall filling out any forms while I was there. "Maybe a friend filled it out for you?" the lady suggested. Now there's a creepy thought.
Yes, I hang up on telemarketers. Usually before they say anything, because on those computer-dialed ones there's that irritating pause between your first "hello" and when they get around to picking up the phone on their end. I don't think this is disrespectful, first because I consider somebody calling me on the phone trying to sell me something to be nearly as intrusive as someone forcing their way into my home and making me listen to their sales pitch; and secondly because there is absolutely no chance I'm going to give any money to some anonymous voice on the phone, so the sooner I hang up the sooner they can move along to somebody that will. On the other hand, I don't want to browbeat the telemarketer. I'm no good at browbeating people, for one thing, and more importantly they are probably just regular people who need the money. I myself have interviewed for two "telephone survey" type jobs. One was with Gallup, it was a telephone interview with lots of deep psychological questions like "Do you like the sound of your own voice?" and "Do you ever "get tough" with people?" I didn't get the job.
I did make some calls of my own today for various wedding-related goods and services. I was reasonably polite on all of them, and so were the anonymous telephone voices. See how much better it is this way?
The other day I looked at my calendar and noted that I had put a heart sticker on the 14th. At first I thought, "What's so gruesome about Tuesday?" Then I thought, "No, that's something else. Tuesday is our third dating anniversary." If anyone had told me while I was snoozing through Hebrew class all that time ago that someday Andy and I would be planning our wedding, I would have been surprised (into wakefulness, perhaps), but pleased. It has been a wonderful three years, and just keeps getting better.
I didn't get to see Andy this weekend, but I did get to spend a lot of time in my advisor's lab, a small windowless room in the basement of the OI. I've been doing various data entry type things on the Ashkelon excavation database. The room also contains a DNA lab. This is enclosed by a lumber framework covered with semi-opaque plastic, through which can be seen the dim outlines of a lot of incomprehensible equipment. Everyone who works down there had to have DNA samples taken in case (I don't know how this would happen) our DNA somehow drifted in with the ancient stuff. So I guess if I ever want to have myself cloned I can find the sample down there somewhere. I really don't, though.
Someday, I would like to start treating Sunday as the Sabbath day and not working on that day, but so far it hasn't happened. In fact, I kind of wish we as a society still had a day of rest, doesn't matter which day of the week it would be, but just a day when people are supposed to rest, without the option of catching up on work or housework or roaming around the mall. One thing that is really special to me about Christmas is that it is pretty much the only day of the year when everything shuts down, the streets are quiet, everyone is at home relaxing and not busying themselves with the millions of things we busy ourselves with. It might be nice if we had a day like that every week, which respected our need (which we usually don't respect for ourselves) to have time just to think and reflect and rest. Going back to the old practice of everything shutting down on Sundays probably wouldn't be that great an idea, but I would like to start honoring the Sabbath myself--I do take time off during the week, but the structure of one day per week (either the day or sunset to sunrise, whichever) is cool in that it provides a structure for the week, and begins the week with worship and rest, which seems like a good way to start a week.
They are building an extension to the school which is visible to the southwest from my apartment window, over what used to be part of Nichols Park. It seems to be going well, they have the steel framework built. Over on the other side of the school they are building something else, presumably another extension; the steel framework over there is covered with huge sheets of plastic, which whips around in the wind making it look kind of like a big ghost building.
A couple of years ago there was a bit of a flap about tax credits being offered to businesses in Hyde Park. HP is not what they call a "blighted" neighborhood but did qualify as "at risk" and the tax credits were supposed to keep businesses in business so that HP wouldn't turn into part of the wasteland-like area it is surrounded by. The flap was due to the fact that HP is considered to be a rich neighborhood in comparison to a lot of the rest of the south side, and people were annoyed about "the rich" getting tax credits. They have a point, a lot depends on how HP is defined; the area right around the University and Kenwood is pretty rich, but if you treat the area north of 47th St. or west of Cottage Grove as part of HP it makes it look much closer to "blighted," though I don't know the technical definition of that term.
There's a newspaper called Streetwise in Chicago, which is sold by homeless and other disadvantaged people, the purpose being to help people learn job skills and so forth. It's an interesting paper, and definitely represents a different point of view than the mainstream media, but sometimes it's hard to know what to do with that. For example, a lot of the people living in the projects really didn't want to move when the city started planning to tear them down and create new, smaller-scale subsidized housing interspersed in middle-class neighborhoods. I can understand not wanting to move and leave the community of people you've become familiar with; but on the other hand the projects were terrible, terrible places to live and the new plan at least had a hope of being better, so, as I say, it's difficult to know how to resolve that, but fortunately I'm not in charge.
Anyway, Streetwise had a big article about this tax credits thing, filled with cleverly photographed pictures of the upscale businesses on my own beloved street. For example, they managed to get a photo of the health foods store, without getting the "Harper Beverage Mart" or "Valois: See Your Food" in the frame. If I remember correctly there were also some photos of the stores in the Harper Court complex, which look nice, but seems to always have several empty stores in it; and the photos managed to exclude the dismal looking storefronts right next to it, which include a now-defunct movie theater (I think it was operating then, but just barely).
Apparently, I don't have much of a point to make with all this, just going over my mental landscape. HP is such a strange place; when I moved here the custodian in my first building assured me that it was a relatively low-crime neighborhood, and the police statistics seem to agree; but there are muggings in broad daylight here practically every single week. Some people think it's a rich neighborhood, some people tell me they would be too scared to live here. I often wonder how Chicago got like this: why does so much of it seem to be full of abandoned, boarded up buildings and sketchy-looking businesses? Why is it still so segregated? Why do so many people seem to think Lincoln Park is so great, anyway?
Anyway, I'd better get back to ancient Anatolia where I belong, at least for a few more weeks.
Today was fairly dull, work and class--though I had some fun finding the class, since it was at Cochrane-Woods Art Center which is completely off the beaten path for NELC students. The prof is new this quarter and asked if we called it CWAC; I certainly hope so, that would add some levity to my MWF middays. I consulted with my landlady about getting out of my lease early, and sent some info to an apartment locater thing, so it's starting to look like this moving thing might actually happen. This has been a good place to live, despite the above-mentioned Subway bread machine issues and so forth. Tomorrow, two more classes and more work at the Social Sciences office.
I've returned from what will probably be my last multi-day visit with Andy for a while, which is kind of depressing. Classes start tomorrow, and Chicago is lapsing into its damp, grubby, winter mode, when the sky, buildings, and streets take on a uniform steel gray shade and Christmas decorations either disappear or take on a dismal neglected look. However, I like my atmospheres bleak, and I'm still feeling pretty upbeat. After all, this is the year I'm going to get married, leave Chicago, and move to fabulous western Michigan, which gives me a lot of reasons to stay positive.
Andy and I watched Donnie Darko this weekend, and it was very good. Andy and I discussed it for quite a while but didn't come up with a totally coherent theory, but I'm leaning toward thinking that the movie wasn't supposed to make total sense. There are a lot of elements of different things going on, but the movie as a whole is supposed to represent the "whole gamut of human emotions," so that while nothing is totally clear-cut or reasonable, it is still possible for Donnie to be able to make a decision about what to do at the end, and somehow it's the right decision. But, I'll have to do some more reading about it, and probably find out I'm totally wrong.
The title refers to my new Gilmore Girls soundtrack, which I'm listening to now. It has a lot of different music that I don't know anything about on it, but it's very enjoyable.
Happy New Year! It's been a good year around here so far. I've been assembling my thoughts on the New Year and the somber responsibilites of reappraising my life, but haven't yet converted them into blog entry form. I am enjoying my last few days of freedom before classes start again, however. I hope to see Andy this weekend, and spend no time at all thinking about the ancient Near East. This is my last quarter of classes, and after that I start studying for comprehensive exams. It's disturbing that I'm actually looking forward to that.
I'm trying out my new breadmaker tonight. It smells good. I live above a Subway restaurant, and when their bread machines kick in it causes my floor to vibrate. I hardly ever notice it any more, just like I rarely notice this hissing and clanking of the radiators, the car alarms and sirens from outside, the 5:00 a.m. garbage trucks in the alley outside my window, the sounds of the construction going on 10 feet away from my window (7:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m.)...okay, I do notice and I'm just complaining. I think I made a resolution not half an hour ago to stop complaining so much. Ah, well...anyway, the bread smells good.