Thanksgiving II

Last night was Thanksgiving II, hosted at my friend Charlie's pad. It was a good time, chaotic in a good way, all of us doing a little dance around the stove when one person was carving the turkey, I was trying to take some rolls out of the oven, another person was trying to keep the gravy from boiling over, and about five other people were standing around the kitchen drinking wine and laughing at us. There were piles of food -- literally -- platters on every horizontal surface including the floor, trays stacked on top of bowls, bottles of wine perched rather precariously on the edges of tables. Lots of food, lots of wine, lots of people, lots of fun. I think a new tradition has been born.

Thanksgiving on Argyle

It seems like an awful lot of people are celebrating with turkey pho at Tank Noodle. Everything is open, not just restaurants, but the laundromat and everything. And here I thought Thanksgiving was an immigrants' holiday...

Wake Up Call

At 5am, some guy's car alarm started blaring. Then it did that little beeping thing and turned off. Then it started blaring again. Then off. Blare. Off. Blare. Off. For about 15 minutes. Around minute five, a lady (I imagine with her head out the window, although I didn't get out of bed, so I can't be sure) screeched, "Take care of your shit!" Indeed. I never could get back to sleep.

I Wish I Was a Scientist...

...so I could figure out things like this.

Black? White? Invisible?

Sitting at the Lake subway station this afternoon, I heard a man ranting. It wasn't clear if he was crazy or just angry. As is my habit, I was listening carefully but only sneaking sideways peeks. You can't risk making eye contact, with either the insane or the enraged. Either one might bite. This guy, an older black man, stringy build and graying hair, was pacing halfway up and back the platform, and he was barking: "What are you, Michael Jackson? Are you black or white? You're a damn oreo cookie, you're black on the outside and white on the inside. Oreo cookie! What are you? Do you know? Black or white?" And so on.

But no one was reacting to the guy, and he kept moving around and not looking at anyone in particular. So I don't know if a real person had offended him with his alleged oreo-cookie-ness, or if he was calling out some imaginary enemy. It seems like a strange thing to hallucinate.

Hey Jude

This post is for Jude, who is intrigued by my boy.

Check out his hipster pose outside the world's greatest bar.




















And here he ponders the question that has nagged philosophers for millenia: Should I have another drink?

Winter is Here

The first snowfall usually turns people into grinning 6-year-olds, except the people who aren't from places where it snows normally. It turns them whiny and annoying. Why is it so cold? When is it going to warm up? When will the wind stop ripping the doors off of buildings? Etc. Whiny people. Suck it up. This is Chicago. It's November. Winter is here.

Drugs = Good

After suffering for a week with an awful kidney infection, I finally broke down and went to see a doctor. This guy (after making me sit around for about an hour on a little paper sheet) gave me a prescription for some gigantic orange pills. These gigantic orange pills are magic. I am no longer in massive, back-breaking, unable-to-stand-or-sit-or-lay-down pain. Drugs rock!

I Wish I Was Innovative

Why didn't I think of this? Oh right, cause I'm nowhere as cool as Dave Eggers.

Neighborhood Security

This (taken from the Chicago Sun-Times site) happened three blocks from my apartment:

Two people were found dead Monday afternoon in an Uptown apartment and, according to initial reports, they may have been homicide victims. About 12:30 p.m., the two were found inside an apartment in the 900 block of West Argyle. Police investigated the possibility that the two had taken an overdose of drugs, but after noticing the two had apparently suffered some kind of trauma, thought they had fallen victim to foul play. Police, saying that family still had to be notified of their deaths, would only say that the woman was in her 30s and the man was in his 50s. An autopsy was scheduled for today.

I am feeling totally safe and secure right now. How about you?

Signs of the Season

Every year, they appear earlier and earlier. The decorations at the State Street stores were up before Halloween this year, and now that November has actually arrived, so has Christmas. The trumpets and wreaths are up at Fields. (This is the last year for the famed ritzy megamall, it will be replaced in 2006 by a differently-named megamall, which has my mom all weepy for the good old days.) Next week they'll unveil the Last Fields Christmas Windows. Holiday-themed commercials, featuring elves and trees and families gathered in their pajamas, are all over TV. My Christmas list is halfway complete, the usual suspects (that's you, Mom) still have blanks after their names, and this year I have the challenge of buying a present for a whole new difficult boy. Not to mention between now and then I have the world's greatest Thanksgiving Part II party to host and about a thousand impossible-to-meet deadlines at work.

That's maybe the clearest sign of the holiday season. The crushing stress whenever you have time to think of all you have to do (say, on the morning train or while cooking dinner). I shall rely, again, on spiked hot chocolate and the fact that I get two extra holidays from work this time around.

My Sad Little Victory

It's pathetic that what gives me the greatest sense of accomplishment during the day is correcting a tiny mistake on Slate.

How We Let Off Steam

All day I pace back and forth a maze of cubicles done in soothing professional colors in a parade of young women in grey pants and ponytails. There are a few men, but they are almost unnoticeable for all the femininity here. Like most low-paying, non-high-powered offices, I'm sure. We all speak a language subtly different from the one we speak outside these walls. We use the words "core skills" and "differentiated" far too often. We bend over desks so that we get aches in strange areas of our backs, and we leave with peculiar injuries to our hands that tell everyone what we do: ink stains and papercuts.

And then, when we just can't take it any more, we go to the famed Happy Hour. Like last night, held at a decent pub, with reasonable prices and food I didn't at all mind eating. I did fall off the stage that my table was on, but not because I was drunk: oh no, because I had forgotten I was on a foot-tall stage. Despite being tipsy and wearing heels, I spilled not a drop of my full pint. I am just that graceful. My youngest co-worker, the one who is still very new to the big city, had one mixed girly drink and began laughing like a frat boy. The office flirt flirted. The office hippy expounded on her... thoughts, I guess you could call them? The rest of us did a combination of whining and jokey small talk. It was what I imagine most normal people's social lives are like. Not bad, really. I wouldn't do it every day, but it was good to get out of the purple-and-tan-hued cubes and into the real world with people who understand how annoying it is when your superiors don't know what a comma is or when authors don't understand that you can't possibly make the pages any larger, so they will just have to cut some of their precious verbosity. We're good folks, really, once you let us out of the cage.