i saw the future, and...

with my friends off playing in europe, and mb off to west virginia for a week of mountain biking with the guys, i am having an uneventful memorial day weekend. it's been very relaxing - shopping with my former roommate for shoes/jewelry/etc for her wedding, biking on the lakeshore path, making plans to grill out with a couple of friends and neighbors. three cheers to my upstairs neighbors for seeing me waddling back from the store, arms loaded with groceries (why were my arms so loaded with groceries when i am by myself this week? this is what happens going to the store hungry), and promptly call out "hey jo-na, can we get you a beer? kids, move the sprinkler for a minute so she can get inside." and four cheers (is that a term?) for said same neighbor, for not waiting for me to finish unloading groceries, but instead knocking on the door to see if i needed my beer *before* coming outside to socialize.

so yes, there are nice neighbors in the city. and yes, these are the same neighbors whose major hobby on first moving to the neighborhood was sitting on their deck watching drug deals. but these blocks have changed a lot in the last few years - many of the nearby projects have been torn down, and plans are underway for a mixed single-family/rental apartment/section 8/townhouse kind of development. in the meantime, we mostly live in the center of empty lots surrounded by security fences. although technically we live in little italy, mb and i have dubbed the neighborhood "Swath Of Destruction." our directions to friends driving in from out of town go like this:

"west on roosevelt thru x lights... when you get to a totally empty stretch with a boarded up check-cashing place and liquor store, with some teenagers loitering on the corner, look for the lonely little condos in the center of a Swath Of Destruction and that's us."

as we await the inevitable progress of housing developments (meanwhile taking advantage of the cheaper rent), in the center of Swath Of Destruction sits 1950. i spent yesterday afternoon drinking beer with the neighbors, watching the kids run through the sprinkler in the front yard. one of the girls is clearly the alpha; she decides when we are playing little mermaid, and when we are playing beauty parlor, and when we are too cold for the sprinkler, and when we are tired and curling up like burritos in our towels on the sidewalk. the other kids mostly accept these instructions. the parents, clearly more used to this than i am, seem completely at peace ignoring the repeated insistence that they please stop the yard work and give back the sprinkler.

it occurs to me that once Swath Of Destruction is re-built, there will be more strangers, more traffic, more coming and going in our admittedly-rented section of urban renewal. it won't be as easy to know all of the neighbors with more dynamic moving in and out. so i'm a little sad to know that Progress is coming. but i'm even more sad to realize that kids' personalities take after their parents -- i commented to alpha's mom that i was that kid growing up. she told me that when grandma picks up the kids from preschool, she looks in the room and gets deja vu because she sees so much of her mother's personality in little alpha.

mb and i are not planning on having children any time immediately, but i am having visions of an imaginative but talkative bossy little girl whose hobbies are the words "why?" and "let's do it my way!" i don't think penance will help, but to my brother, i'm sorry for all the times i made you play house instead of war with your robots. i'll get mine in due time. progress is inevitable.

i should have been watching american idol

while my friends are off eating cheese and intestines and mocking gendarmes in france, i am minding the store back here in sunny chicago. things are not super exciting here. thankfully, nobody is stopping me alongside the road to ask about my knowledge of local criminals, although my neighbors do have some funny stories about sitting on their rooftop porch at night watching drug deals go down in the blocks south of us. i thought i would mix things up a bit the other night by driving up to the north side to do a good deed by watering my blogmate's plants, which would conveniently have happened right around 7pm in time for american idol watching, thus fixing my problem of loving that tv show but having no tv with which to watch it. unfortunately, my conscience got the better of me, and i decided that if my choices were get exercise and see mb or drive across town for one tv show, the right thing to do was exercise. but by the time i got ready to embark on any actual exercise, it was getting late and instead of run outside or go to the gym, i put in a new dvd lent to me by mb's sister: "yoga booty ballet." i thought, this seems perfect! yoga sounds relaxing, i've been working a lot lately, i won't have to come up with my own poses or anything and just get to follow along.

let me just say this: when the video starts with two women asking you to start with your hands folded together, they do NOT get to say "namaste" (which i was taught meant something like "the divine in me greets the divine in you") while the cameraman is zooming right in for gratuitous boob shots. the rest of the video was impossible to follow, because the camera work focused exclusively on the leaders' chests and pelvises (pelves?), occasionally panning over to the south-asian hippie on the bongos, and the only instructions were "now you can get a little funky." namaste? is there a yoga word for "the perv in me greets the d-cup in you"?

from this i conclude the following things:


1. it is sometimes the morally acceptable thing to skip exercise in favor of reality tv.
2. maybe this was for the best. had i gone for a run or watched jordyn sparks win this year's title, i would not have nearly this much good work story.
3. blogmate, ck and ss, when are you getting back? i'm bored.

lust and despair: contextually correct but outside of my vocabulary (le blog volume 2)

it's not every day you watch a dear friend get served a plate of grilled intestines. and it's not every friend who would manage to keep it together the way ss did when she was served said intestines. after wandering all over town looking for a restaurant that the guide book described as cheap ("pas cher") and friendly ("gentille") which turned out to be more like expensive and smokey we found ourselves at some kind of no-nonsense brasserie along the side of the road which was actually kind of nice except but for the fact that everyone was starring at us... and except of course for the intestines.

aside: is there an obviously american way of parking? how did they figure out that we were foreign before we even got out of the car?

anyway, our choices for lunch (handwritten onto slips of paper in the menu) were chicken, pork, and andouillete, and the exchange between us went something like:

ck: what kind of pork?
jo-na: i don't know. some kind of pork.
ck: but what does this other word mean?
jo-na: i don't know. something about how the pork is prepared.
ck: and the chicken?
jo-na: chicken... prepared in some fashion.
ck: (sigh) i guess i'll have the chicken.

ss: what's an-douil-lete?
jo-na: i don't know, but i think it might be gross.
ss: what does this word mean?
jo-na: grilled. you know, i'm not sure it's gross. isn't that what's in andouille sausage? maybe it isn't so bad. it's some kind of grilled meat that may or may not be gross.
ss: what do you think?
jo-na: go for it.

i can only imagine the laugh the kitchen guys had, but they brought us our plates of chicken, french fries, and what looked like a giant brat with straight faces. ss kept her game face on as she cut into her andouillete, releasing a smell so awful that ck discreetely inched herself down the table and i asked myself without internal sarcasm if there were toxic fumes coming from some nearby industrial facility.

it wasn't only that ss didn't cry, or sulk, or vomit. she dissected it a bit further, looked up, and announced: "i think this is intestines." she picked at it a little more and then tried a little bite. she made a funny face and was quiet for a little while. then she looked up at us again: "it tastes piggy in a way you wouldn't expect."

so ck and i ate our chicken and eventually the waiter came and took everything away and the cheese tray came and everything was back to normal. we had exacted our revenge on the most obvious table of starring people by sitting right down next to them so that they were forced to stop starring (apparently it's possible to silently call out small town europeans when their behavior is so eggregiously poor).

we spent the rest of they day examining various towns and churches, entertaining everyone with our adventures in french cuisine. apparently ss was right on the money, as the quality of andouillete is assessed by its degree of pigginess (as it gets better and more expensive it's less piggy). we continued to learn the lexicon of roman religious architecture, inspecting tympana, crypts, cloisters, and of course the famous capitals depicting important religious themes ("lust and despair", for example).

so i'm very proud of my friends for being such good frenchies, even if they do shriek with delight every time we pass a flock of sheep or someone says "merde."

le blog

even though i've become quite the blog-slacker over the last few months, i find myself overcome, once again, by the urge to blog from afar, this time from le very small town in france.

the advent of cheap, reliable technology continues to make the world smaller - looking out the window from where i'm sitting you might think you're mere inches (or maybe centimeters) from
falling off the planet, but you're just never that isolated in the presence of high speed internet... especially when your american cell phone is completely functional.

that said, there was no way we were going to wander into town without calling attention to ourselves. i am here with s "i love goat cheese" s and c "six seconds to sunburn" k who were gracious enough to join me on my sojourn in bfe, so i'm doing my best to show them the local sights. i thought we should start in the nearby town of la machine, most famous for it's fall from greatness after the coal mines closed. it's only about 4 kilometers from where we're staying, but the uncharacteristic blazing heat resulted in three loud, sweaty americans appearing out of nowhere, banging down the doors of the mining museum. sore thumb doesn't begin to cover it.

it turns out that the mining museum is open only between 2 and 6 pm, only on sundays and bank holidays. not surprising, really, in a town where the grocery store closes for lunch and the church is open for mass every 4th sunday. but a drag nonetheless, since it meant that i couldn,t come through on my promise of hard hats, head lamps, and a guided tour of a mock coal mine.

not that the day was without excitement. there was a brief moment of panic when we thought we'd come across a naked man on the side of the road, fishing in the nearby creek (it turned out he actually did have pants on), and there was our chance to help out with local law inforcement. as we were walking home on the small road (there isn't so much sidewalk as there is ditch) we got, pulled over by a very little car carrying two very attractive policemen (gendarmes, if you will). while i was still trying to figure out how it was possibly illegal to be walking along the side of the road, they pulled out a flyer with a picture of a man and a separate picture of his motorcycle, with a "excuse me but have you seen him?"

even more surprising than being asked to help out with a french rural man hunt was that we were actually helpful, as we had actually seen him going in the opposite direction about a half hour before. we supplied all the details we could (we're not sure they believed us) and watched as a small legion of law enforcement paraded into town. if there was a newspaper it would be on the front page.

maybe it's the jet-lag talking, but i don't think it gets any better than this.