"lady and gentlemen, start your engines..."

in mother night, kurt vonnegut writes, "be careful what you pretend to be, because in the end you are what you pretend to be." i'm rarely one to wax philosophical, and even less likely to retain anything i read long enough to quote it back to anyone, but i've always loved that line and after many years of trying to apply it to my own life, i think i've finally got it.
in the hours of deliberation that have followed my flopped date with msfg (i have very patient and supportive girlfriends) i've come to the conclusion that i'm totally justified in 1) remaining steadfast in my opposition to the trend of shishi restaurants and bars with monosyllabic names that has taken chicago by storm and 2) blaming the failure of my planned romance with msfg on his apparent love of such restaurants and bars. while i suspect that i could play the part (of fashionably beat-up jeans with pointy heels and lacy tops), i really don't wanna, for fear that it will stick.
unfortunately, by the same logic, i think i have to be a little careful with some of my more low-brow indulgences, lest i actually turn into a nascar dad. i come to this realization after watching the indy 500 in its entirety today. to be fair, my interest was only sparked after hearing a piece on NPR about danica patrick and all the surrounding semantic controversy, but i have to admit i got totally sucked in and might have picked up a little more knowledge about car racing than i really intended.
the point, i guess, is that if i'm going to claim that i can't do the $10 martini scene because i'm afraid i might actually start to like it, i should probably be drinking a little less PBR.

porn, breakfast, particle accelerators, and hindus

in reference to my blogmate's addendum to the last blog:

friday mb and i were originally planning on some sort of cultural-sounding evening where i took the bus downtown to meet him for dinner after work, and then we were thinking of grabbing hot tix for some sort of theater or music or something. but on perusing the available tickets online, i couldn't really find anything that grabbed my interest. the best thing i found turned out to be right here in good old hp: doc films with "inside deep throat," a (thank you, dear blogmate, for allowing me to pilot my new favorite word first) porn-u-mentary about the political backlash and financial ruin that befell the good people who filmed a first-of-its-kind adult flick. does it say something about our friends that we actually ran into some of the few people we know in hp at the movie?

so the weekend has been significantly less exciting since then. i'm back to my usual position of waiting for people with more exciting lives to report back to me. blogmate, thank you for the details of le date, although i want more info on the fancy-pants bar you met at, since i'll never find myself there. bro (who wishes to be known on the blog as "anonymous minnesotan sibling" but seems not to actually post anything here), you are killing me by not returning my calls demanding details on the new house. you can't get all growns up in a few short months - graduating from law school, getting married, buying house - without letting me hear good stories! also if you don't start posting soon, i'm going to let your friends pick your blog name, and i'm not sure you want that. finally, henry, we naturally demand details on smut 'n' eggs.

one more wholesome post-script: went trail running yesterday at waterfall glen in darien, which sounds very pastoral but is in fact a 9-mile loop around argonne national lab. fun, great weather, much more tiring than the lakefront path. but i think this marks the third time now that i have tried to run a SINGLE LOOP on a trail and somehow gotten lost. my blogmate and i got lost in busse woods in schaumburg, and out at the sledding hill trail in palos. i thought this one was a no-brainer, since there are NO branching paths. somehow we missed the path entirely and ran a mile out of the way on some other dirt path. as we were wandering down a hill we started to hear some sort of not-quite-identifiable ethnic music in the background, and i started to joke that we'd left illinois and entered a foreign film. i wasn't far off- around the corner was the hindu temple of greater chicago, which is apparently just south of argonne in lemont, il. it made a nice running break to wander around the outside of the temple, which is, for the record, stunning. we felt a little out of place as the two pink-cheeked white people in running shorts milling around with the sari-clad women at the statue of swami vivekananda.

back to le drawing board

after a prolonged blog hiatus it's hard to get back on the horse. i haven't really had much to contribute in the last few weeks. i was sure i could find a clever way to talk about my week of academic conference in washington, but the only question i could really ask myself was "why is everyone else smarter than me?" then i thought i could find something funny to say about the fixing of my giant cavity, but it seemed like repeatedly suggesting that i have sub-optimal oral hygiene might not do much to enhance my image as a sexy, sophisticated professional, and the only other observation i'd made was that the whole experience would be alot easier to take if you didn't have to hear the horrible sound of the drill (i'd even tried to work out a pun about hitting a nerve, but i had to give up). finally, my blogmate has become a tough act to follow, what with the discourse on venereal disease.

sadly, i'm finding my way back to blogging with a topic near and dear to my heart: bad blind dates. tonight was the the long awaited "coffee" with msfg. after a few weeks of increasingly flirty emails we finally managed to make plans. it was such a long wait that i was ridiculously nervous about the whole thing- to the extent that my good blogmate had to invest a few hours in calming me down before i even left. while it wasn't nearly the disaster i had anticipated (a la frank lloyd wrong), it would definitely be a stretch to say that it went well... quite a shame really, since msfg was pretty easy on the eyes. the chemistry was so markedly absent that it abruptly yanked me away from the starry-eyed lala land i had entered upon first seeing him- a land in which i got to marry a sophisticated parisian with dashing good looks, have some adorable french babies, and summer in a villa on the riviera. how can it be that such engaging email banter led way to such a striking lack of things in common? it didn't help that he was uncomfortable when spoke in english and i was really uncomfortable when we spoke in french and it was just a whole lot of uncomfortable. not the either one of us was especially funny or articulate in our native tongue... i'm going to leave that word dangling there at the end, since i don't think it'll come up again in the saga of me and metrosexual french guy.

nature lover

mb must have been a gardener in another life.

this past weekend we took a coworker's suggestion and drove out to sunny beecher, illinois to a huge nursery with reasonable prices on plants, and had fun stocking our porch herb garden. i thought mb was just along for the ride and the ice cream stand outside the nursery, but to my surprise he got into the whole plant ownership idea, picking out a hanging plant for the bedroom and a pretty purple-leaved tropical plant for the porch. (i know, i should call it "handsome" or "manly" or something, not "pretty," since this is a story about men buying plants.)

i shouldn't have been so taken aback by the sequence of events that followed, considering the whole terri schiavo-like drama when he accused me of not taking my parsley's life seriously enough when i wanted to stop watering my already-dead indoor plants this winter and put them on the porch to freeze. but every day after work he goes to the porch and gazes at our little plants, sighing "they grow up so fast..." when i got home from a night shift this week, i walked in to find the purple plant in the living room, because mb didn't think it was strong enough to handle the 40-50 degree cold. last night he announced that he thought mr. purple should sleep in the bedroom. i know he meant at the window next to our hanging plant, but i couldn't help the mental image of mb, plant, and me all curled up in bed.

so this morning i walked out to the porch to find that the rosemary, which was planted in a window box along with the sage and thyme (i know, very scarborough fair, although the parsley is separate), is missing. there's a hole where the rosemary used to live. i can only conclude that the rosemary got tired of mb picking favorites and left for a porch where it can be more appreciated. (i'm sure it has nothing to do with the birds trying to eat the scrawniest plants, like they did last year.) maybe i should try to give all of our plants porn names like mr. purple, although it can't be easy to find a sexually suggestive name for garlic chives.

the grass is always greener

this is a little off-color, i'm sorry.

you know how in the past people with tuberculosis were sent to live in sanitoriums where their treatment was basically to hang out in the fresh air and sunshine and eat healthy food? not a bad treatment, really, even if it didn't work... and lepers were sent to live in colonies, which if you believe simpsons episodes (which is where i get much of my historical and medical knowledge) are tropical islands where people relax on the beach? so this weekend mb and i couldn't help but notice all these valtrex commercials where this guy announces that he has herpes but that with the magic of valtrex, he won't let it ruin his life. and there he is with an attractive woman at his side, hiking in the mountains with a gorgeous skyline as the backdrop. therefore, mb and i conclude that only people with socially stigmatizing diseases get to live fun lives. mb further concludes that he might like having herpes. i am trying to explain that he might not actually enjoy herpes, and furthermore, that i might not enjoy his having herpes. but every time i start to make my point about pain and ulcers, the commercial comes on again with the mountains and my case is lost.

grosse pointe blank meets napoleon dynamite

the other day i received a letter inviting me to my next high school class reunion. since the last one was held at a bar 7 miles outside of town in a wood-paneled room usually reserved for remote-control car racing, and featured all-you-can-drink bud light and ham sandwiches, i was guessing anything had to be one step classier. i was not disappointed. this one is being held at the next fanciest meeting space in town: the bowling alley. i have been to many events in the bowling alley including graduations, weddings, funerals (fine, i'm kidding about the funeral in a bowling alley, but you get the idea). at the last reception, i drank free all night because the kid behind the bar apparently recognized me from being a freshman when i was a senior, and we were both in band or some similar extra-curricular for only very popular people like me... and the kid behind the bar, who i cannot remember for the life of me, but with whom i pretended to be very chummy because it got me free g&t. (sad and unethical, i know, especially since the drink cost $1.50 full price.)

so i'm very excited to bowl and drink with my former classmates. but more importantly, my blogmate and i are thinking that somewhere in this lies a great story for a dark indie film about small-town america. enter the somewhat surly but creative n., our shortest-acronymed friend with a film degree. n, how would you spin this? shy, vaguely-awkward-in-high-school guy finishes college and lands solid career in large midwestern city, making him leagues more successful than his llama-farming classmates, who comes home to his reunion with his lovely city girl on his arm, and has some sort of angst about his roots? loud but still awkward girl made briefly popular in high school for winning some obscure competition (for this purpose, maybe the regional pig-roping championships?) who comes home after some similarly moderate amount of success, wondering why nobody will acknowledge said success in favor of reminiscing about her days as the pig princess? naturally there has to be the once-popular girl who slept with everyone who is now fat and drunk somewhere in a corner, and a gaggle of flannel-wearing mullets getting riled up about nascar. for artsy effect, can we add a tall blond lawyer taking in the scene, beer in hand, with some repeated one-liner like "yup..." while staring into the distance like he's thinking something meaningful?

but i'm not the film genius. n, you're on your own. i would employ my more creative blogmate, who dreams of being a film critic in another life, but she went to a high school especially for smart people. her high school memories do not include an in-school garage where you can tinker with your truck and call it education.

venti-sized vent

as much as i love going to intelligentsia to "read" (by which i mean gaze at all the pretty people), my inner coffee snob is resisting. their coffee tastes like swill. i think it's mostly due to the readily apparent fact that the baristas are chosen more for their eye-candy qualities than for their ability to do things like follow directions or think. my other growing gripe with initelligentsia is their ridiculous coffee sizing scheme. i mean really, what's so bad about small, medium, and large? in any case, if you want an iced-coffee there, you can only have a large or an extra large, and i think that's just dumb.

tickled pink

had you been a fly on my wall earlier today, you might have seen me let out a shriek of delight before high-fiving mgfwb. you probably would have asked yourself "what could possibly be making her so happy?"

so i'll tell you.

it wasn't that i won the lottery, or that the woman at work with the sticky-sweet veil over her overt bitchiness (i'm told the term for this is "grin-f%#$-ing") suffered some kind of public humiliation, or that i heard from msfg (i did, actually, but that's another story).

nope.

what caused my unfettered euphoria was that i finally managed to make an appointment with the dentist. not only that, but my appointment is tomorrow.

i'm so excited to be getting my teeth cleaned (in spite of the numerous obstacles put up by my dental insurance provider) that i don't even care that i'm such a dork.

the world is his supermarket

mb seems to be adapting well to life in chicago. just 3 months into his job downtown, and he's managed to find a new sandwich place that happened to be offering free lunches on the day before opening as training for their staff, a new pretzel place handing out free demo pretzels, a new chocolate place offering samples, a haircut place that offers free "maintenance" (now that he's a customer, when he doesn't need a full haircut but just a sideburn trim or neck clean-up, they'll do it for free without an appointment), a couple of free chicago tribunes from various things... so basically the loop is just one big pick 'n' save (or insert the name of your favorite grocery chain). incidentally, how great is it that liquor stores in chicago on fridays seem to all offer free samples?

more exciting for me was the big shiny box of chocolates that arrived on the day mb visited the chocolate-sampling place. slightly less exciting was the discovery that the chocolate place's new staff managed to give him a sugar-free chocolate box by mistake. it made for an amusing exchange of each of us biting into a piece of chocolate, giving each other that polite "thanks, grandma, for the socks" smile before we realized we weren't eating substandard chocolate but in fact were the luckiest diabetics ever.

stymied... again

even more shocking than the the apparent union of tom cruise and katie holmes is the fact that i may actually get to meet metrosexual french guy (msfg?).
i guess mgfwba talked me up pretty well, seeing as how msfg sent (with appropriate delay) a delightfully witty email offering a solo coffee date, describing himself as the frenetic banana republic shopper (fbrs? i can't decide).
my glee at this turn of events was almost immediately replaced by a vague sense of dread. i have a mild dislike of coffee dates and an intense hatred of blind dates. as some of you may recall, my last attempt at combined coffee-getting and boy-meeting was the unequivocal disaster that was frank lloyd wrong.
adding to my angst about this is the fact that msfg/fbrs undoubtedly speaks better french than me, and may actually speak better english than me. i also have the distinct impression that he dresses way better than me.
talk about preformance anxiety.

drunken memoirs (or lack thereof)

ok. is all i'm saying is that it's never good when you honestly don't know how many beers you had last night.

excuses, excuses

in apology to my good blogmate, i really have been trying to post a list of possible mates, and a theoretical personal ad for her to have new dating adventures through which i can continue living vicariously. in my private mental blog, i had envisioned a brief but clever list of suitors. the problem is that they are all described by occupation, and then i got into a moral debate with myself about what kind of person i was making my good blogmate out to be if i thought that a man's job was the most important thing. but i'm more thinking that a list of occupations for potential suitors might just reflect how i envision their personality, you know?

case in point: man number two on the list is a musician. but i don't want him to be a drummer in a rock band, because those guys are a little too full of themselves. and drummer in a jazz band is even worse, because those guys think they're artistes (apologies to my late friend who was a drummer in a jazz band, but i told him this to his face long ago). bass player isn't bad, except that the ones i know are a little greasy. lead singer in boy band is clearly out of the question. mr. honesty offered up one of his alcoholic punk rocker friends, which would be promising if not for the one little snag. i was thinking keyboard player in some regional funk band, because i think of those people as happy-go-lucky and laid-back, although i'm not sure if that's because my true career ambition is to play keyboard on tour with james brown, or because i've always secretly had a thing for the keyboard guy in barenaked ladies which has only increased since i first saw him on vh1 behind the music.

so it's harder than i thought. the mental blog grows heavy with justifications. so far:

1. well-dressed indian neurologists (see prior blogs)
2. musician (see prior angst)
3. architect, but given the whole issue with frank lloyd wrong from some months ago, have switched this position on the list for urban planner, if mb would stop withholding on us
4. neurotic graphic artist of some sort, maybe like the guy i used to work with who left his relatively cush ad job because he described his work as "morally neutral at best" and wanted to put his technical talents to work for good... except that guy ended up taking a job doing environmental canvassing on some college campus and shacking up with the 19-year-old that he met on the internet two months prior... see? it's hard! how do you balance your desire for sense of duty with plain sense?
5. kind nephew of the doting wealthy french couple i can only assume she would meet on finally starting to attend those french language table meetings, who would naturally take her in and feed her wine and cheese in their flat in the gold coast while discreetly inquiring as to her interests so they could introduce her to their lotion-loving relative in chicago on business
6. fallen monk (personal favorite; answer to the question "why would [she] date a 30-year-old virgin?")

feel free to add to my list, my qualifier-unencumbered friends.

relative intrusion

in spite of her repeated assertions that she wants to be inappropriately entangled in my love life, i'm a little disappointed in my blogmate's lackluster preformance when it comes to meddling. sure she talks a good game about posting things like my personals ad and a list of potential boyfriends for me on the blog, but apparently these entries haven't made it past her private, mental blog.

aside: i do have to give her credit for directly taking on rcfog, even if it didn't seem to register with him.

in sharp contrast lies my good friend with bad allergies (mgfwba, formerly known as gwcbwdbsbhhwtt, on her way to being known as something better as soon as i think of it), who has taken being a wingman to whole new level (and believe me, she was a pretty good wingman to begin with). the story, i'm told, goes like this: mgfwba was in line at banana republic the other day with a friend of hers with whom we'd both gone out the night before (i find this friend kind of cute, but that's another story, especially since i hear he's bad news when it comes to matters of the heart). she and kocf (kind of cute friend) were talking about my self-perceived boy-repellent factor when, lo and behold, a rather metrosexual french guy (is there any other kind?) inserted himself into their conversation, to the effect that a girl like me sounded pretty good to him. mgfwba stopped short of actually giving him my number, but she did give him her number, should he decide that he was curious enough to meet me.

now that's meddlesomeness... (it's a word- i looked it up)

you're stepping on my storage solution

a few weeks ago i came to the proud realization that i care more about shoes than real estate. this realization stemmed from my irritation with the 6,000 or so people i know (or don't know) compelled to offer the unsolicited advice that only idiots rent, and that if i were at all financially savy i'd buy a condo already. this advice is almost as intolerable to me as the prolific, "you should go on j-date."

so i've been walking around feeling pretty liberated about admitting that i'd rather have stuff than financial security... but i seem to already have enough stuff, and apparently need new ways to divert the disposable income that i'm decidedly not diverting to a buy-a-house savings account.

that diversion, it turns out, is storage solutions.

i have to give my blogmate credit for this one, as she's the one who showed me that people like us are allowed to crazy at target, filling our (rented) homes with stylish, faux-pottery-barn accent pieces which conveniently house the crap that we already have (and are a little bit ashamed of).

what i hadn't anticipated as i embarked on my quest to find the perfect container for my millions of picture frames, is that stylish leather storage solutions took over the market and then crashed out of style so quickly that you can't even find them anymore, except in weird shapes and colors at the discount store. after extensive searching, interrupted by lots of drooling over shoes, i finally found the perfect basket-thing, only to catch my blogmate using it as a footstool to get a closer look at the orange plastic martini glasses with matching dishtowels.

vintage reflections

funny how things can snowball.

i spent all day saturday at home cleaning my wreck of an apartment only to find out around 5PM that i had to come in to work on sunday to deal with a crisis. prior to this wrecking of my plans i had specifically front-loaded the weekend with the non-fun stuff so that i could sleep in on sunday and then go out and play (read: shop).

lesson #1: from now on, have fun first, clean later.

so with the new sunday plan (get up early and work all day) i made myself comfortable on the couch with pizza, wine, and the long-awaited sideways DVD. while such a wall-flower evening did nothing to advance my anemic social life, i did manage to learn more lessons...

lesson #2: to hell with vegas... exact revenge on my future throng of bridesmaids by demanding a week-long party in napa (minus the golf, unless i magically know how to play by then)

lesson#3: kick self for not liking the guy who tried to make the 3rd date a weekend in napa

midwest state of mind

every now and then i feel compelled to make cultural observations about people and places so un-sophisticated that i'm a little embarassed having opinions about them. but after spending an entire afternoon at ESPN zone (i'm telling you: there really is a time and place for miller lite), i'm in no mood to hold back...

when did rob thomas (of matchbox 20 fame) become ricky martin?

existential bandaids

most people probably have the good sense to take a much-awaited day off, especially when that day off comes at the expense of working an overnight shift, as an excuse to catch up on needed errands, clean their apartments, or something relaxing and slower-paced than usual.

we are not those people.

after both working overnight shifts, my blogmate called me to see if i wanted brunch. of course i wanted brunch. but i had planned on picking up a few things at the store this morning. of course she wanted to come along shopping. but she would need coffee first. of course i wanted coffee also. but i had to stop at home first. of course she would stop with me. etcetera. two hours later, brunched and pre-erranded, we headed out - not for something easy, but for the mecca of illinois consumerism, the schaumburg ikea. i had the single goal of buying a closet organizer. somehow, my simple closet organizer turned into an orgy of "oh, actually, i've always been looking for..." and other similar justifications that ended in a mountain of plastic items with umlaut-ed names that i can neither remember nor pronounce. as i looked around, i realized that the only people at ikea on a thursday morning were perfect blonde housewives with their perfect blonde towheaded children in their perfect spring outfits lined up in perfect rows, hands folded across their bodies as they waited patiently for their perfect mothers to buy a perfect pink pillow for their rehabbed bedrooms in their split level ranches in bartlett. contrast that scene with us - two frazzled brunettes in fleet farm hoodies, carts overflowing with orange watering pots and rickety particle board storage solutions, nearly running over the perfect little people as we swerved the stubborn carts toward the checkout, breathless with relief that said storage solutions, larger than expected, actually fit in my 4-door plymouth... with such monumentous effort, one would also think we would count our blessings and head for home, or lunch, or shoes, or at least something small. but no. with the storage solutions properly stowed in my car, my ambitious and sleep-deprived blogmate decided that the best idea was to now buy a new dining table. a few minutes later, the perfect blonde housewives in the loading zone (who naturally drive perfect eddie bauer suvs), their pigtailed little ones buckled safely in their carseats and were about to drive off, except that they were probably frightened by frazzled brunettes cursing and throwing things, realizing that the dining table would never fit into the smaller less perfect plymouth. in the course of trying to make the table fit in my car, we took it out of the box, tried unsuccessfully to maneuver it that way, put it back in the box, and in the process managed to drop the table on the ground, making a satisfying loud crash, smearing it with car grease and scratching the finish a little. we finished boxing it up, and i waited in the car while my blogmate took it back to the store to ask them what to do. i take it they accepted the table, because the next thing i knew she was in the car saying "drive away from here before someone realizes what i've done."

now, we have never been those girls who want the house in the suburbs and to stay home with the kids. but we never meant to actively harm their children and their furniture. i can safely assume that my lack of desire for a perfect blonde life has something to do with my clumsiness (i managed to back my blogmate into a wooden bench resulting in big leg welts for her and skinned knuckles for me) and my overambitiousness (what was i doing at ikea after working a night shift, anyway?), but it sounds better to say that i just dislike it on principle.

gay, straight, or german?

i've spent the last 2 days laid up in bed, dying a slow painful death of what i can only imagine is tuberculosis.

needless to say i've had time to do alot of thinking... and watch alot of movies.
let's get the film-critic portion over with, shall we? movie themes that make me crazy (take 1):

1) long, epic dramas in which cute, good-natured men spend long, tortured lives trying to win the hearts of women who, though beautiful, are horrible and mean.
2) the ominous death cough (much like my own) that starts about half-way through said dramas, heralding the long, tragic death of said bitchy heroines... of some nebulous disease (usually consumption, which, from what i gather, can refer to cancer or tuberculosis).

getting back to the point, i really am sick as a dog... and i think it's because of a boy.

preface: shortly after we met my manic hippie ex-boyfriend (mmheb) in new orleans my blogmate and i were talking about that kind of guy that just loves women (prgm and mmheb being good examples). as the words rolled off my tongue it occurred to me that someone as boy-crazy as myself really has no room to talk. "i'll admit," said my typically insightful blogmate (mtib), "you do have a certain appreciation for men."

last friday afternoon i found myself of the u of c quad with mtib and dwtacc, as we'd stolen away from our dark confines to enjoy cheap thai food from the divinity school. a third of the way through my tofu and ginger noodles i found myself suffering from stabbing chest pain and a rather "disagreeable sense of impending death," much to the amusement of my two friends. they assured me that it was not, in fact, a massive heart attack in progress and that it probably had more to do with the spiciness of my ginger noodles. dwtacc tried to comfort me by complimenting me on my j-lo glasses and pointing out that i seemed to have caught the eye of "that bob dylan looking guy over there." forgetting about my chest pain, i surveyed the landscape, only to discover that "bob dylan looking guy" could describe any number of people in my immediate line of sight, and that she was going to have to be more specific.

so i certainly can confirm that hippies have apparently taken up residence in hyde park.

the next evening i tried to put the chest pain, the bob-dylans, and the allergy attack that had resulted from my afternoon among the tulips behind me as i headed to the green mill for a night of jazz and hippie-stalking. i had pitched the outing to my girlfriends as a chance to see an excellent new orleans jazz ensemble, knowing full well that my real motivation was that the invite had come from none other than mmheb who would be in town for the show. truth be told, the band's phenomenal-ness was more memorable than my encounter with mmheb (although he did look awfully cute), and the smoke in the bar played no small role in my impending 48 hours on the couch with my death-rattle cough and overall miserableness...

i might not have been fawned-upon by mmheb as much as i would have liked, but i did get a surprising amount of attention from his equally cute sidekick... which i enjoyed until we hit a snag (he lives in texas) and then a deal-breaker (he comes to chicago to visit his daughter).

so while i will no doubt continue to to be the boy-crazy one in the group, and seem to enjoy men with a wide variety of attributes (in the age of men so metrosexual that i'm not sure what to make of them), even i have to draw the line somewhere... and i draw that line at potential step-mother-ness.

hippie 54, where are you?

my weekend made me feel vaguely athletic. it was nice. up to madison with mb to pick up the latest version of his southern wisconsin bike ride book from the printers and deliver it to the local bike shops. i got a little ego boost out of the whole thing, because every shop we stopped in had some clerk who was really excited to get more of the books, saying how they sell out so quickly, and i got to feel a little more like an avid biker than is actually true, just by being the tagalong. on sunday we did our long run for the week, in preparation for the san diego marathon - 15 miles around lake monona and its bay. it would have been wonderful if only the water fountains would have been on. i have never been so excited to see a bottle of warm grape gatorade as i was at the end of that run.

but that's not really the point i wanted to address... on running around lake monona, i couldn't help but notice that madison's hippies seem to be moving. the last time i ran that route, which was a while ago, there were still a few stragglers left on spaight street, which is now all upper-middle-class youngish families with kerry-edwards stickers on the back of their subarus. the shiny new luxury apartment complexes moving in next to the hemp stores and organic bakeries on williamson street are not helping matters any. later on, moving past brittingham park to the south side of monona bay, i found the displaced hippies. they seem to be taking over the southern part of the bay near the formerly infamous bernie's beach of drug dealing and open container infringement fame. the shady lakeside liquor is still there, but now it's flanked by a bahai center, a natural fibers store (not hemp? tell me how), a salon, and purple and orange homes with flowers in the yard.

when i met up with mb at the end of the run (you didn't think we were running this together, one of those romantic "oh, let's stroll along the lake" couples, did you?) i asked him about the moving-hippie phenomenon over breakfast at come back inn. (quick digression - yup, it's still delicious. the swearing waitress who tried my bloody mary when i asked her why it tasted like taco is gone, though.) after the expected urban-development conversation (which my blogmate and i would like to have more of, if mb would introduce us to his urban planning friends), i returned to wondering - really, where are the hippies in chicago? do we have any, or are we doomed to floofy martinis at uber-clean "sports lounges"? bucktown = yuppie. wicker park = still a little gritty and artsy, but as mb points out, in that haight-ashbury kind of way where the punk institutions are still there but flanked by real estate and fancy-pants mono-syllabic restaurants that nobody can afford. ukrainian village = ? punk, but hippies? grand/chicago area = possible, but hard to tell. as dwtacc suggests, hanging out on the quad in hyde park? hp has enough academic weirdness, green space and liberal indignance to support hippies, but it's hard to find them between harold's chicken shack and the complete lack of bars. and don't get me started on the magic-johnson-teaming-up-with-starbucks-to-bring-the-magic-of-megacorporations-to-the-inner-city coffee shops right on campus, where clearly the underprivileged college students are in dire need of another latte option.

i'm still lost on this. dwtacc? mr. honesty with your cool artsy girlfriend? anyone? where are the hippies? i guess i have to wonder at my motivation here... i'm not a hemp jewelry girl, i don't wear patchwork pants, i don't follow around jam bands. i'm not even a vegetarian. but i want to know that there's a place to live where those people can get their free-range whatever for lunch without it being a concept. maybe i selfishly just want to find chicago's version of come back inn and the weary traveler. or find shaggy grad students for my blogmate. or cheap real estate. or redeem myself for the key lime martinis i drank on vacation.

spicy strawberry meat pies

while i'm rarely one to be at a loss for words, i just don't know where to start.

maybe with the ex-boyfriend brigade. for one thing, i got busted by three different people on friday afternoon while i was wandering around hyde park, clearly not at work where i was supposed to be. one of the run-ins was with an ex-something or other (boyfriend is way too strong of a word) with whom i'd had an extremely unsuccessful summer fling. i was pleased to find that the guilt i've intermittently felt about having not returning his phone calls was substantially alleviated by the discovery that he's moving to california. moving right along... between what i thought were pretty slick dodgings of my real exboyfriend's family and friends i found myself on bourbon street, transiently unable to recall the name of another ex something-or-other, wondering how it was that i'd ever dated such a hippie. i also wondered how someone who was a little bit stinky (in the way that only hippies can be) and alot bit crazy could also seem rather attractive.

fortunately, there was a lot more to the weekend than slightly uncomfortable run-ins with former flings.

there was also gator-on-a-stick (you all know it's coming- tasted like chicken), deep fried strawberries, chocolate covered strawberries, strawberry beer, strawberry wine, strawberry face-paint, and picture of my blogmate standing in front of the ponchatoula seed and feed carrying a flat of strawberries (that's 12 pints). there was mrs. wheat's natchitoches meat pies, the depreciating budweiser in a go-cup (the price started @ $1.25 but dropped to $1 when the barista [selling the beer across his espresso machine] got tired of dealing with quarters), 3.5 pounds of crawfish per person, sadly un-spicy potatoes and corn, splitting a crawfish flavored head of garlic 3 ways... and of course the 25-cent key-lime martinis. i guess i might have warned my blogmate that the whole point of new orleans is eating, occasionally interrupted by drinking and live music.

sadly, there were no spicy strawberry meat pies. to the lay person, such a suggestion may sound rather absurd, but when you've already got a mouth full of deep-fried strawberrry and have spent the last ten minutes at a craft stand dedicated exclusively to the sale of soap bottle aprons (yes, little, tiny, frilly aprons for dish soap), anything is possible. in fact, my good friend tb got ahead of herself when she saw the sign that actually read:

spicy________ strawberry
meat pies _____cheescake
$3 __________$2

so while i learned many valuable lessons last weekend:

-- 3 beers in a hour makes blogmate dance,
-- the more j-lo the sunglasses the better (talk about rose-colored, faux d&g lenses),
-- tired, dirty, pony-tailed, hoodie-wearing chicagoans are very attractive to hippies...

i think my most interesting discovery has been this:

the world just looks better when viewed from a convertible.