this summer (a compilation of journal entries to trite prompts)
Chicago is a great place to live during the summer. I tried to post my journal entries weekly, but that didn't happen for more than the first few, so I'm compiling them all here for those with nothing better to do with their time than read things I did. Or, you know, when the me of the future needs to remember what went on.
I find it hard to say exactly what my goals are when someone asks, because there are several of them sort of linked together and I can never remember all of them, but also because they all boil down to something too simple: I just want to learn what people do and how, by watching, listening, and doing. I want to know what working at a museum is like, or how to run a nonprofit organization, how to plant and harvest, how to treat artifacts, how to use public transportation, or what people do on the weekends. I just want to experience things. I’m not a complicated or demanding person in this respect.
Everyone at the museum is worried about making sure my experiences meet my goals and expectations, but really they’ve exceeded them already. I’ve been brought to meetings and gotten to hear what kind of issues conservators and collection managers deal with other than the big move and preservation. Apparently the museum has a behind-the-scenes tour that gets the groups who don’t work in the public sphere extra money for conservation projects like desalination (getting salt out of artifacts that are from the Middle East so that when they interact with any kind of humidity they don’t start expanding and leaking salt water), but some school groups have already seen this and don’t tell them until ten minutes before hand, and the people giving the tour have to scramble to come up with changes in the tour so the children don’t get bored. There is contention about whether it’s feasible or necessary to make a second version of the behind-the-scenes tour. Another issue that might affect me is that there is tension between the specialized conservators and the collections people who haven’t taken chemistry classes and whatnot but are practicing preventative conservation (putting things in trays so they don’t get jostled around and don’t have to be touched in order to move them) regarding lab space. I like hearing this part of museum work, partly because it’ll help me assess whether I think I can deal with this kind of thing and thus whether I want to work in a museum as a career later. I also like variety, so even though my work for Antonio doesn’t deal with artifacts directly, it’s another aspect of how archaeological work is done (now I know what happens to field notes!). And Chris, who is always frazzled anyway, seemed especially so this week because of things like fire drills and construction in one of the storage rooms but again this gave variety to who I was working with and what I was doing, which I think is great.
On the other hand I’m alright with doing the same thing for a while too. I like weeding a lot. I did not mind doing it all day (except for the last 20 min when I prepped tomato plant holes by digging and with eggshells) even though I was told I wouldn’t be. Something that has visible progress feels really good, as does dirt on hands and pulling things (I am the kid who always destroyed the grass around me while sitting in it by yanking at it. I still do this, really). And it’s really good for thinking. I thought of all kinds of things that day that I have mostly forgotten other than the ambulance thing. I know I thought about archaeology a lot, how weeding is one of the things that affirmed the revelation that archaeology would be a pretty great thing for me, how people have been weeding gardens for tens of thousands of years, and how it is a pretty good communal or solitary activity, especially when it is fairly regular. Last few times I’ve weeded have been horror stories of thistles three feet tall and ant nests and other things because gardens have been neglected for years. Also thought it was funny when people asked if I’ve got a lot of experience weeding. You don’t need a lot of experience, I think, but apparently some people (this I witnessed) are afraid to touch dandelions at first because they (or their fuzzy stuff on the stems?) look sharp, even though thistles are the only really prickly plants the city farm gets and they’re not so bad when they are small. As I was pulling weeds I thought about all the sirens I was hearing - how for every good (or even mediocre) moment I was having, it was someone else’s worst day ever. Someone somewhere near my in Chicago has an emergency going on at least once an hour. As Skot pointed out, there’s nothing like that for when people have great days. There is no car going around and around saying “WOO-HOOOOOOOOO!” super loud. In fact, someone might get arrested if they did that.
Living in the city has been pretty great. It is not hard to experience the city, and no one asks me whether I’m getting all I want out of exploring it. Took a lot of walks during the first few days, most of them downtown but one just kind of around to the west. It usually takes me about a half hour to feel like I’ve come far enough to turn around, which means about an hour at least. When I can’t find the subway after I’ve walked more than that and am sick of it, takes me longer. Found out that Erie street is pretty good for eating if you’ve got money, ended up by the horribly huge McDonald’s way too many times, and walked along the river for a bit before sitting on a playground. There is a Farmer’s Market by Washington and some other street every Thursday, but I didn’t hang around that day and won’t have a Thursday free for a good long time. Luckily, I will be working at such an event soon so it doesn’t matter. I saw a lady working out in a building on a machine during one of my walks and wondered why anyone living in this city needs to pretend to walk when there’s plenty of opportunity right outside, but I guess people have families and such and can’t waste their time doing that. Or something.
I was able to put my wandering AND the extra space in our apartment to use almost immediately. The day before we moved in, one of next year’s roommates Marie and her friend Theresa called because they needed somewhere to stay in Chicago Thursday. By Tuesday, we had an air mattress and a hairdryer and a way to put guests on a list so they don’t get thrown out of the building, so it sounded good. That day wasn’t really the best mostly because we weren’t sure when they were coming, what dinner was going to end up being for whom, and if we were going to make it to Eddie Izzard, although having tried out the route there the day before we knew it wouldn’t take too long. Our guests came around rush hour, which was pretty much a bad idea because traffic is already bad in Chicago, so they got shunted off 90 early then got back on then got off again because nothing was moving. Pretty much they were lost for a long time and we hadn’t been that far south yet and couldn’t help much until!!!!!! I remembered from my walks that navigating through the city works a lot better if you think about it using coordinates. We are at about 30 west and 1220 north, and they were somewhere extremely southwest of that. But with the advice about looking at block numbers via street signs, they were able to get here easily! It was magical. Timing worked out really well actually, because then they went to get dinner and Skot and I went to the theater. Later we bought cookies and cream ice cream for everyone, which we cleverly put into a Tupperware tin for later since the original container doesn’t fit in the tiny freezer, but it melted, and then we put in many brownies that were taking up too much ‘counterspace’ and refroze it; then it got too frozen, but it is still good because of the brownies. But that’s all after they left for…A-Con? A-Sen? Some anime convention that we rodes the blue line to that weekend and got to experience first-hand for a few hours. (Not very exciting as someone who’s not an invested fan for the genre.) On Saturday, Skot’s dad flew in to take the SUV (skot’s mom’s) back so we don’t have to pay outrageously for it to sit somewhere all summer, and none of us knew that the red line is closed in all underground stops on the weekend, so he was stranded also. We don’t have internet in our room because it’s too expensive - after this month of starbucks-tmoblie (still 40 dollars a month) we are totally switching to the free option that the library holds. I don’t need the internet much when I’m not at school anyway. Skot’s phone has some internet capabilities and can see maps, but not when he’s using it as a phone, so we couldn’t really help his dad out. But eventually, his dad made it and took us out to breakfast/lunch even though we were trying to do that to him. At least he ate some pie. And in the end, Skot now has some nice clothes for interviewing in and we don’t have to pay to park a car here all summer.
I mentioned pie! It is because we have done some nice cooking. There is a mysterious food van affiliated with the resource center that, I’m pretty sure, takes donations from various Whole Foods to a soup kitchen (or something) that stops at the City Farm about twice a day driven by a very cheerful person. The food isn’t even always expired! We get to take things that we will need for lunch or to take home. I made off with all kinds of stuff the first week, more that I will probably ever take again, because we had yet to build up our pantry and so fruit (mostly strawberries. more on that later), vegetables (mostly broccoli - so. much. broccoli.), eggs, butter (skot was complaining that even though margarine was cheap it was not good enough to justify not getting butter), and a few other things. It’s a fifteen-minute walk to the apartment though, at my normal (quick) pace, so I had to get my roommate to help me carry it, which is one of the reasons I’m not taking nearly as much ever again. Anyway, I was able to make two strawberry pies and two loaves of banana bread, and unrelated to the free food we recently made spaghetti sauce from scratch and many other fine meals. Marie made me laugh when she was on her way here because she asked how people in the city did their grocery shopping if they could only buy what they could carry. This is a question that has never occurred to me and whose answer is obvious once you’re in the city. Our fridge doesn’t hold much and it only takes about ten minutes to get to the store, so we’ve been doing tiny grocery errands every other day or so as we need things. Really I think gigantic grocery stores and fridges were invented because of the suburbs, since people in rural areas (at least at some point) were largely self-sufficient and people in cities have easy access to farmer’s markets and small food stores.
Nicole from the city farm told me about a place called the Garfield Park Conservatory that has a lot of great plants. It’s also where they get all their tomato plants (since young tomato and pepper plants need a lot of protection during the spring until they are strong enough for the open air, which is something I remember my grandpa telling me.) We went there on Sunday via the green line, and it was very nice. Many biomes were represented, and they even had small stone paths for those who wanted to walk among rather than around the plants. I like the fern room a lot. I will certainly go back there to look at Garfield park and the flower show at a later point. There was a volunteer there doing a badly-designed ‘sugar test’ trying to educate people about the ways sugar is made and transported or used (or something) but she didn’t know what she was talking about very well. She said that proteins are made of sugar, which is not true except in a very indirect sense (if that), and also seemed to believe that any plant material that we use in objects is sugar (also not true). She really thought she was educating people and spreading knowledge, which is good, but I wish she would have done some research first. I am not sure whether it’s better to have someone trying to educate at all, even if they don’t know their subject matter very well, or if it’s better to have less people spreading information but have it be accurate.
There is a mall by…Washington and Lake, I think, that was swarming with people the first two times I encountered it, but I never went in. Then the last few times I’ve tried to go there, it’s been closed. There were even people looking at some set of boards - maybe art - but it was still locked. What is going on? Can those businesses really afford to be closed for a week? Is the mall only open during business hours? It’s very strange. I don’t even want to shop there, just to go inside and look around. But one day I will find out what is up with that building! [update, many weeks later - you can't go higher than two floors unless you work there (boring!) but there is a cool museum thing full of pieces of metal balancing on each other]
There is no typical day at the Field Museum. Sometimes I go to meetings, but this week that didn’t happen either due to Memorial day (department meetings are usually Mondays) and John Terrell (curator for the Pacific collections) being gone on Thursday (when Pacific collection meetings are). Last week we also had a fire drill before I could even clock in and people were putting fire safety equipment in one of the storage rooms, so someone had to be in there at all times, limiting what could be done. But basically, the idea is that I split the day between Chris Philipp helping with rehousing and Antonio Curet entering ceramic analysis data and scanning field forms. Rehousing could involve moving objects (like Wuvalu spears) from one place to the CRC (collections resource center?), making boxes and mounts for artifacts so they are more protected, and inventorying what’s been moved to new locations (this was making me nauseous for a while, but that may have just been oncoming illness). Building in mounts happens in Regenstein lab, which everyone calls the ‘fishbowl’ because people in the Pacific exhibit can watch us working, which makes me think that if we were in the zoo, we would be the most boring exhibit, except for maybe some lizards. I’m just making boxes. I have to wear a lab coat and gloves in case something has been sprayed with heavy metal pesticides and keep anything from us from getting on the artifacts (and also I think to look professional for the audience), but anyone who watches for more than a second will see I am not doing a whole lot technologically. I’ve got a glue gun and a measuring tape and a pencil. Other people do more advanced conservation that involves peering at things, but how exciting can that be either? The DNA lab has that ability to talk to the public about what they are doing, but I don’t think we do that. It’s just another exhibit piece.
I don’t really know what the best part of the internship work is. It feels pretty good to be depended on sometimes. Sudden insight into secretaries’ lives once. Otherwise, I had a lot of fun scanning forms Thursday because I was building in my head an analogy between scanning and microwaves, because the beep when the machines transfers information to the network is exactly like when food is done, and even though I know I could take the form out, I don’t until it’s done, much like waiting for the last few seconds of a microwave’s heating to go by even though they don’t matter. This was all wrapped up in writing this in my head as a parody of a character’s voice from a book I’m reading, since he is not my favorite character and has a propensity toward hyperbole and lengthy, vivid analogies about or descriptions of normally-mundane things.
My least favorite thing is that I can’t get into room 38, where we put out stuff and eat lunch, PRL (a collection room), the CRC, Regenstein lab, or up elevators. Access is slow in getting through the system apparently, and that leads to the most difficult part of the internship, which is getting started with the day. I have to wait for someone to open whichever of the three doors to room 38 that I’ve chosen to stand near so I can put my stuff there, then I have to find Chris or Andrew, but I can’t get to some of the places they could be, and even if they told me where to meet they might not be there (Thursday chris was not there til noon and Andrew didn’t check his email and find this out until an hour and a half after we were supposed to get started). I’ve been told, and it has been proven to me often, that adaptability is the most important thing to have here, and that’s alright, I just wish Access Control would hurry up and process by access request so I could get to where I need to be. Also, I guess one other thing stands out as not the best, but it only took two afternoons to do, so it’s already obsolete, but anyway I found out that checking data entry (not putting it into the computer, that’s fine, even if it’s an old mac) produces within me an inexplicable feeling of panic and anxiety. So I guess that’s something I didn’t know before.
Andrew has been working under Chris for two years and is very nice, but sometimes I get the feeling he loves hearing himself talk. He makes fun of me pretty often, which is alright, (I do the same to him a bit) but it’s usually the same joke for all of a day, told whenever a new group of people to hear it is nearby. I’m so used to having thoe kind of jokes that only a couple people understand that public jokes kind of weird me out. Which is kind of strange. Anyway, things I’ve learned about this guy: he has more hair products than I ever thought anyone could have, he works out every morning because he used to be fat and doesn’t want that to happen again, he has not gone to grad school but is thinking about getting a PhD sometime, he is interested in antique furniture, lives in a suburb, is pretty OCD about making mounts and other things, and keeps trying to get people together to do things like go to theater-on-the-lake or festivals. I guess I know him better than anyone else so far, just because Chris is always frazzled and dashing from on place to another, Antonio is always gone or doing likewise, and I only met Helen the volunteer for one morning (she loves textiles a LOT). I am not really sure if Andrew is the like of person I’d be friends with if I met him in another context (this is how I evaluate most people I work or am related to), because sometimes we jive pretty well and other times I just get kind of annoyed. He’s pretty alright as a coworker though.
My birthday was Thursday. I bought some ginger ale, and that was about it. This weekend, though, I plan to go to Dave and Buster’s and play some arcade games or something (I’ve never been to such a place). I was pretty excited to find that the clark street farmer’s market goes toward rather than away from our apartment and thus is right outside our window (and down many stories). I guess I’m curious about what else I’ll find when doing errands today and exploring tomorrow. Last weekend I went to the holography museum, which was guarded by the creepiest most archetypal old crone I’ve ever met (all with prominent teeth chattering together and spouting of knowledge about the mysteries of the world and apparently smelling horrendous and demanding that we look at rooms in a certain order and repeating herself quite lengthily halfway through her first speech) and was hard to find, got badly-needed jeans at the goodwill, and went to greektown, which was dumpier than I expected (maybe because it was Sunday afternoon and I didn’t have much money?). Memorial day was great! Went to the zoo, didn’t see everything because I didn’t have to because it was FREE, went to the beach briefly, found a nice grocery store that had beef on sale, and ate some cheeseburgers and macaroni salad, which we tried to share with some others people, but they had just eaten. I am wondering if Skot will find a job this week. His last test for the bartending school is Monday and he’s already applied to some places. He’ll get a job of some kind pretty soon, we just hope it’s one that involves what he just trained for and wants to do. Anyway, time for something other than sitting here writing.
There are a lot of times I don’t know what I should be doing or saying. I do not consider these crucial moments in my life, however, because there are so many of them and I already consider most social expectations to be over my head. I can remember two or three times in my life where being held accountable for something I didn’t know about has greatly upset me, but they have not happened in the past month. So I’m going to interpret this as a request for awkward moments that have happened lately, because that’s all that not knowing what to do or say is - awkward but fleeting.
There are moments when I am caught off-guard during my daily routine, like when someone who had just moved in asked as I was going down the elevator to check on my laundry if it was hot up here, and all I said was ‘it would be nice if we had a ceiling fan’ instead of ‘yes, extremely’ or ‘depends on where you lived before’ (the kid installed a window AC unit later that day). Or while heading for room 38 during week 2 of my internship and scrambledly asking someone who was leaving to keep the door open, I was surprised to see her close it, apologize, and walk past me, turn around, ask if I needed to get in, then demand to know who I was looking for. I wasn’t looking for anyone, obviously; I just wanted to eat lunch or get my stuff or something, so I was confused. Then she asked who I was with, which I still didn’t get. Eventually I said I was an intern but still didn’t say who I was working for, for some reason (probably because I thought she should recognize me or something, and why the hell was it so important to guard the lunch room from people with IDs anyway?) but eventually with some reluctance she let me in. The reason she didn’t recognize me was that I had just gotten my hair cut, I assume, but it didn’t occur to me to say that, either. Pretty much a basic case of freezing up, stammering, etc.
Circumstances that lead me to lie in order to save face happen every now and then, like that time when I accidentally (via a misunderstanding) told the person in charge of Bell Tower that I’d never been there before, and instead of saying that I’d misunderstood I just went along with it, which overall was a ridiculous conversation. I wanted to check out a Brazilian steakhouse, and we ended up at one that had lots of signs in the window saying it was opening soon, but there were people going inside and laughing and talking and such in the lobby, all dressed very nicely and looking too much like they all knew each other. We went in, got pointed at by the people at the hostess area, and made a reservation. The hostess said that the restaurant opened Monday, did not explain what was going on (I assume an opening party of something? But it was the middle of the week, so I don’t know). She wanted my phone number - I remembered that nice places like to call and make sure someone is coming, so I thought ‘okay.’ At the end of the proceedings, she explained that dinner costs a flat fee of something like $49.50 a person, and there is no way in hell I am spending that much on dinner, but I wasn’t going to back out. So now I am waiting for that call so that I can say I changed my mind. Can’t call them because I don’t have their number. Basically, it was clear to everyone in that situation that the class of the people who can afford to go to these places (and the people in that lobby) and the status/resources of Skot and me are vastly difference. I wasn’t going to admit it right there and say I couldn’t afford it, but I don’t think they will be surprised when I don’t show. Probably shouldn’t have gone in, but oh well. Now I know. Especially since I went to another one, followed a bunch of foreign tourists from a bus inside and just asked blatantly how expensive the place was, in pretty much those words, which was as direct as possible about who I was (a reaction to the other encounter? Probably) and felt pretty silly but good.
And now you have a window into the stupid, awkward moments that I tend to encounter. I could talk about the search my first day here for subway passes, and possibly some other encounters, but I really think that’s enough.
Went to the art institute on Thursday afternoon after work because it was free. Bummed that part of it won’t be built for a year. Walked briefly though the Blues Festival on the way. This afternoon, I help take things from the City Farm stand at the Logan Square farmer’s market back toe the farm. It was extremely windy, which made putting up canvas (or something heavier) signs extremely difficult, reminding me quite a bit of sailing. The Printers Row Book Fair took up most of the afternoon yesterday. We took the bus there and walked back, eating lunch at Ronny’s on the way back (stupid, because neither of us were hungry and then we didn’t eat dinner til eleven). The book fair was great, but it was too much to really consider looking for books in. Lots of amusing books could be found and laughed at though, such as an issue of Sexology, the periodical, dated 1958 (women don’t always do well in relationships when they must be passive? Gasp!), or the Dune (the movie) pop-up book.
It has been brought to my attention once again that I may come across to some people as more negative than I actually am. I see negativity as a feeling that hits for a day every once and a while, and makes things I don’t like feel like problems that are horrible and can’t be solved, but the rest of the time circumstances are just challenges that I should work to deal with or get around or are simply part of how things are, and they lose any heavy sense of the negative. But I guess people who don’t know me well (relatives I don’t see often, acquaintances, whatever) have a difficult time sifting the things I feel almost good about having to confront and those that actually bother me. I don’t think I mention things that actually bother me as often, come to think of it. Another part is, perhaps, the lack of need to hold onto things that have been good. Happiness is ephemeral, just like awkwardness, and though I may rave about a simple and delicious meal I had recently, I may forget or be unable to talk about things on a grander scale. I wonder, sometimes, why people seem so disinclined to believe that someone can just be content; happy in a calm and quiet manner. But that might not even be it. I was excited about Chicago, and still am happy to be here, but now that I’m here it’s the new reality and I am not continually excited in the high-energy sense about it, my job, the farm, or anything else. So when people ask me if I’m thrilled to be working at the museum or in Chicago, I never know how to respond. It’s a bit like when people ask if I’ll be disappointed by doing x menial tasks. I’m not disappointed (don’t really know how I could be); I’m not super-excited. I would like for people to stop asking if I’m one or the other, because that can shake me from feeling good.
Anyway, this was all a preamble for a description of the room, which we have had enough time to discover is just as good-but-slightly-dumpy as a first apartment during an internship summer should be. The appliances work well, except for the freezer (tiny fridges just melt and refreeze things because of how they work). Having a gas stove is awesome, and the oven takes no time to preheat because it’s not huge. The windows don’t have screens because of something that’s going on with the outside of the building, I think, but we’re so high up that not many bugs end up flying in. We’re also high enough that the noise from the bars isn’t all that distracting. The closet is huge, and now that me moved one of its doors so it will actually close and open (we just had it pressed open before) we don’t have to worry as much about the bathroom door not closing all the way. The tub takes a while to stop dripping, and the bathroom window is stuck partially open, so we stuck a towel in there to limit the number of water-seeking bugs that go there (because we’ve found some) and it’s always cooler than the rest of the apartment because of that permanent opening. The view is awesome, especially at night, because we can see state street all the way past that weird triangle ‘park’ where another road splits off it, and where a bunch of fire trucks were gathering one night.
And there is the heat. Our room is on the top floor and all the heat in the building rises up to us. This was nice when it was chilly outside. Now it’s close to intolerable at night because unlike everyone else I know, we don’t have a ceiling fan, and I’d venture to guess they didn’t install any on this floor. I talk about it to some people, and sometimes it’s a complaint and sometimes it’s funny, and sometimes it’s a rather neutral observation. Today I feel that the heat is something I’m going to try to get past. Before, I was thinking I was weak and could toughen up by just dealing with it - increase my tolerance for heat (more humidity than anything else) over the summer, which would be pretty cool. Today, though, I though about headrests from New Guinea, which I’ve been rehousing. According to the display case, they were used to lift people’s heads above the ground to increase air flow (thus cooling a bit more), but they also had mats placed on them, and some of them were ceremonial, so I’m not sure how that all fits together. Skot came up with the idea of a head-hammock, a less uncomfortable version of this. But in seriousness, the plan of action is either to start keeping a bowl with water and a washcloth in it nearby so I can wipe off my face whenever, to keep the windows upen all the time, or to try to find somewhere that sells fans or dehumidifiers. It’s pretty much an adventure of the smallest (and for me) best kind. We’ll see how it comes out eventually.
Skot can’t find a job because no one in Chicago wants someone who will only be here for two months. I guess they’ve got more of a labor pool to draw from than the suburbs, so it makes sense, but is still pretty disheartening for him. Maybe he could enter a sleep-deprivation study that will pay him at the end or something. That would be pretty interesting. I’ve always wondered what goes on in sleep labs (there’s one in the basement of my dentist’s office, and the hygienists are always a little creeped out).
There weather this weekend has been great. Not to cloudy or sunny, enough breezes to cool things down. I ate a lot of fruit this week because summer is the season for it, and I’m pretty sure we are wired to want more fresh crisp foods when they are best for us (which is now). Getting fresh vegetables from the city farm is the best thing, and I just had some delicious pepper-and-green-onion eggs because of it.
Saw a man slumped, unmoving, outside of one of the bars, two police with bicycles on either side of him. Skot said he’d said hello to him earlier and had an odd, short conversation. We hoped he wasn’t dead.
Location: In the park between Dearborn and Clark
People use the park for many things. About half of the people in the park had dogs with them, and they often made sure to greet other people who had dogs, sometimes only so that the dogs would meet (that is be physically right next to each other and interact, but often to meet each other as well, perhaps throwing a frisbee, sitting and talking, or walking together. I remember having a dog and doing similar things. People with dogs don’t walk up to people without them in such a friendly manner, probably because they lack that common excuse to interact (letting dogs meet each other). When I had dogs, though, this almost never went well because they were crazy and didn’t respond well to other dogs. I was surprised to see that there were few dog-meeting-mishaps because of this. One man just kind of stood at intersections (of the park’s internal sidewalks) with a dog that may have been a poodle, as if waiting for someone else with a dog to come by. When they did, they would exchange greetings, and they would pass each other, and then he’d stand at another intersection. It seemed odd, since most other dog-owners eventually go in the grass or walk their dogs, and this guy picked up his dog when he finally left the park. Did the dog lack the ability to walk much? I do not know. The smaller dogs were occasionally treated to the water fountain for a drink. Overall, a good place to take dogs in a city with little grassy public space.
Other activities in the park included having conversations, either on a park bench with someone or on a cell phone, walking diagonally through the park (as I have done many times for a shortcut), or napping. The benches here are not horrible to recline on, and three people were doing so, just tucking their legs in enough to avoid the discomfort of the armrests halfway through the benches. I thought it was nice that these benches weren’t horrible for sleeping on, since some people don’t have places to do that, and they also let people converse facing each other with nothing between them while sitting on the bench. It’s important to me that cities don’t try to shut out the homeless everywhere by making benches for sitting only (and not too long either). Chicago still does this in places, just to varying degrees. Anyway, one man in a yellow shirt did not choose to sleep on a bench. Instead, he headed to a tree in a corner of the park, threw his backpack there, and use it as a pillow. First, he had to chuck a few pieces of something off of that patch of ground. Rocks or dog shit, I imagine. He was the only one without a dog to walk on the grass. I wondered if people have picnics here in the park, but I guess that depends on how much dog poop is left on the ground, the weather, and other things.
The only people I saw eating were a girl somewhere near my age and an older man in striped clothes and with silver in his hair, both on a bench. I was unsure as to their relationship, but guessed daughter-father based on age. I could not imagine spending much time with my father willingly, but people have varying degrees of luck with that kind of thing. Then someone talking on a phone next to me mentioned Father’s Day and it seemed to strengthen that interpretation. I wondered who had bought whom Starbucks and food, because in my experience holidays and visits mean that someone takes the brunt of hospitality.
I did not experience many strong emotions during this exercise. I was also not keyed up like I was last time, so I didn’t start with much either, other than resentment at having to do this again. Mostly I became sleepy because of the noise of the large fountain, and a little lazy about taking notes due to both the resentment and the lethargy. I did feel bad for a moment for the flowers all around the fountain, because they do not look terribly healthy. I guessed that there was nowhere for water to drain if it rained, because the flowers are walled in and surrounded by concrete. The trees around the central square of the park, however, look fantastic (tall, green, healthy), and I longed for the times in my childhood when I always climbed trees and explored wildlife. I am fairly sure you are not allowed to climb trees at Miami or in Chicago, and these rules always annoy me. I judged the fountain pretty harshly for a moment at the beginning for sloshing heavily and irregularly instead of prettily and evenly. I have no idea whether the pigeons have anything to do with that. There is a sign to please not feed them, but as long as they have drinking water / a birdbath (the fountain) I think they’re going to keep coming around. People (or at least extablishments) don’t like pigeons much. They can muck up one’s roof/rafters and sidewalks, but other than that I like them.
That’s about all on that front.
In other news 250 African pots and a strange bicycle came on Wednesday in the middle of lunch, and all hands were on deck unloading them and trying to remove bugs/dirt until 5:15. It was exciting to see everyone working together on the same thing and to get variety. The day before, I had tried to get to the contemporary art museum, but I left late due to laundry (lab coats) and the northbound subway was broken. Two days in a row home late. Oh well. Called a lot of my friends this week. Rachel bought a chinchilla off of craig’s list. This makes me laugh to think of. Today I went to the farmer’s market that the City Farm is representing itself in (they left early last week and no one was there when I arrived) to help pack up. It took well over an hour to get there, but Taylor ended up taking the same journey most of the way so that was something. We had just been on a long journey on Saturday to Andersonville’s ‘Sommarfest,’ a conglomeration of artists, food venders (chicken kabobs were so tempting), live bands, and children’s entertainment (very involved puppet show of Where the Wild Things Are and the inflatable caterpillar that they could crawl through were both memorably strange) and here we were again on another long journey.
Skot did not get into the sleep deprivation study. We’re not allowed to know why. Maybe he’ll start donating blood plasma? In the meantime he is my housewife, cooking and cleaning and asking about getting a ceiling fan (we did!) and such. It’s not the worst arrangement; I just probably won’t be able to afford a new laptop now. And that’s not catastrophic.
Bridget and Laura might want to go to dinner with Skot and I next week. Hopefully this happens; until this weekend I haven’t had much contact with anyone else in the building.
The City Farm is part of the Resource Center, an organization that started as a local recycling effort in the ‘70s. The City Farm’s mission is “to create a higher standard of living in Chicago neighborhoods through profitable agricultural enterprises.” From what I understand the people who work there don’t all have the exact same reasons, but a lot of them are really chill and enjoy eating vegetables and making them affordable to the people in the area, both higher and lower class (the farm borders two very different neighborhoods income-wise). Most of the weeds we pull (there are a lot) go into a big compost heap, which becomes usable dirt more quickly than I would have thought. I guess it helps to have dirt and whatever bugs like to hang out on roots go with the weeds into the pile. Some of the weeds, though, can be eaten, and these early weeks of selling produce (before tomatoes and the like are ripe) are good times to try to sell those too. This weekend purslane (a Midwestern succulent?) and sheep’s quarters (tastes like spinach!) were the main wild plants we sold.
The farm has an agreement with the city of Chicago that lets them use undeveloped land and the city’s water until the city sells that land. The farm can ‘float’ from one plot to another in this manner, as there are about 10,000 undeveloped plots of land in the city. In return, the farm employs people nearby, uses a lot of volunteers, and does community outreach. Something I just learned about that will be happening as part of this is that the farm participates in something called “After School Matters” where kids around the age of 15 get paid by this program to work somewhere for four hours a day five days a week for six weeks. This starts in a couple of weeks, and I’m not looking forward to it, because apparently most of these kids don’t actually want to be doing the work, and while that’s often true of low-income jobs it’ll be a big contrast to the employees and volunteers I’ve met so far. Also, kids, especially boys, at that age tend to act out when they’re bored, and I don’t know how I’d handle a situation that came up. There will be fifteen of them this summer, and there are only about five employees, none of whom are usually all on site at the same time. A couple other people are leery about participating in the program again, but it’s good for the farm’s reputation and if they acquire another piece of land they have been writing proposals for, one that would have a permanent community center, they want to keep the ties they have so they can make it worthwhile to everyone. Still, I am not excited.
The farm gets enough money to keep itself going and pay its employees by selling produce to nearby residents who come by the farm in the summer and to nearby restaurants interested in using local/organic ingredients, through CSAs (bags of produce every week of the summer, paid for ahead of time in a lump sum), and by converting old wooden pallets into firewood for a restaurant that uses it in their pizza ovens (this requires a lot of pulling nails out of the wood so it’s not dangerous). We also started having a stand at a farmer’s market in Logan Square on Sundays, which I am helping out with. My first day doing that for the whole ten-hour stretch was this Sunday. It was frustrating at first because Nicole was too busy to really explain things to me, so I’d be told to do things I lacked the knowledge or resources to do, or I’d guess my way through a question incorrectly. It seemed like I was being molasses-slow at everything. It’s pretty much the opposite in general at the farm than at the Field Museum, where I’m running into the funny problem of being too efficient sometimes. But helping with the market got better about halfway through, when I finally knew the names of everything we were selling and what to say to potential customers. Also, I found out that for some reason I was a fountain of patience, or at least, Nicole and Bridget kept remarking that the day was going by slowly, but I was not bored. This does not happen often, but it was a good day for it.
Promoting things seems the best way to sell vegetables that people are not very familiar with. We ended up cutting samples of a white turnip (very crunchy and sweet for turnips) for people because it’s a rather unappreciated food and we wanted to show them that we had a variety they could eat raw (and we also needed to sell them). The market was as much a place to advertise the farm (and a reusing-resources project also affiliated with the resource center) as it was to sell produce or check out what other people had. A lot of people also asked if we had a CSA thing going on as well.
I like the City Farm because unlike Greenpeace or other activist organizations like that, it uses environmental means to achieve both social and material ends. The project is really down-to-earth. People can see things happening, can help if they want, and can benefit directly from the farm’s activities. Applicability is important to me in the kinds of service work I do and support.
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I find it hard to say exactly what my goals are when someone asks, because there are several of them sort of linked together and I can never remember all of them, but also because they all boil down to something too simple: I just want to learn what people do and how, by watching, listening, and doing. I want to know what working at a museum is like, or how to run a nonprofit organization, how to plant and harvest, how to treat artifacts, how to use public transportation, or what people do on the weekends. I just want to experience things. I’m not a complicated or demanding person in this respect.
Everyone at the museum is worried about making sure my experiences meet my goals and expectations, but really they’ve exceeded them already. I’ve been brought to meetings and gotten to hear what kind of issues conservators and collection managers deal with other than the big move and preservation. Apparently the museum has a behind-the-scenes tour that gets the groups who don’t work in the public sphere extra money for conservation projects like desalination (getting salt out of artifacts that are from the Middle East so that when they interact with any kind of humidity they don’t start expanding and leaking salt water), but some school groups have already seen this and don’t tell them until ten minutes before hand, and the people giving the tour have to scramble to come up with changes in the tour so the children don’t get bored. There is contention about whether it’s feasible or necessary to make a second version of the behind-the-scenes tour. Another issue that might affect me is that there is tension between the specialized conservators and the collections people who haven’t taken chemistry classes and whatnot but are practicing preventative conservation (putting things in trays so they don’t get jostled around and don’t have to be touched in order to move them) regarding lab space. I like hearing this part of museum work, partly because it’ll help me assess whether I think I can deal with this kind of thing and thus whether I want to work in a museum as a career later. I also like variety, so even though my work for Antonio doesn’t deal with artifacts directly, it’s another aspect of how archaeological work is done (now I know what happens to field notes!). And Chris, who is always frazzled anyway, seemed especially so this week because of things like fire drills and construction in one of the storage rooms but again this gave variety to who I was working with and what I was doing, which I think is great.
On the other hand I’m alright with doing the same thing for a while too. I like weeding a lot. I did not mind doing it all day (except for the last 20 min when I prepped tomato plant holes by digging and with eggshells) even though I was told I wouldn’t be. Something that has visible progress feels really good, as does dirt on hands and pulling things (I am the kid who always destroyed the grass around me while sitting in it by yanking at it. I still do this, really). And it’s really good for thinking. I thought of all kinds of things that day that I have mostly forgotten other than the ambulance thing. I know I thought about archaeology a lot, how weeding is one of the things that affirmed the revelation that archaeology would be a pretty great thing for me, how people have been weeding gardens for tens of thousands of years, and how it is a pretty good communal or solitary activity, especially when it is fairly regular. Last few times I’ve weeded have been horror stories of thistles three feet tall and ant nests and other things because gardens have been neglected for years. Also thought it was funny when people asked if I’ve got a lot of experience weeding. You don’t need a lot of experience, I think, but apparently some people (this I witnessed) are afraid to touch dandelions at first because they (or their fuzzy stuff on the stems?) look sharp, even though thistles are the only really prickly plants the city farm gets and they’re not so bad when they are small. As I was pulling weeds I thought about all the sirens I was hearing - how for every good (or even mediocre) moment I was having, it was someone else’s worst day ever. Someone somewhere near my in Chicago has an emergency going on at least once an hour. As Skot pointed out, there’s nothing like that for when people have great days. There is no car going around and around saying “WOO-HOOOOOOOOO!” super loud. In fact, someone might get arrested if they did that.
Living in the city has been pretty great. It is not hard to experience the city, and no one asks me whether I’m getting all I want out of exploring it. Took a lot of walks during the first few days, most of them downtown but one just kind of around to the west. It usually takes me about a half hour to feel like I’ve come far enough to turn around, which means about an hour at least. When I can’t find the subway after I’ve walked more than that and am sick of it, takes me longer. Found out that Erie street is pretty good for eating if you’ve got money, ended up by the horribly huge McDonald’s way too many times, and walked along the river for a bit before sitting on a playground. There is a Farmer’s Market by Washington and some other street every Thursday, but I didn’t hang around that day and won’t have a Thursday free for a good long time. Luckily, I will be working at such an event soon so it doesn’t matter. I saw a lady working out in a building on a machine during one of my walks and wondered why anyone living in this city needs to pretend to walk when there’s plenty of opportunity right outside, but I guess people have families and such and can’t waste their time doing that. Or something.
I was able to put my wandering AND the extra space in our apartment to use almost immediately. The day before we moved in, one of next year’s roommates Marie and her friend Theresa called because they needed somewhere to stay in Chicago Thursday. By Tuesday, we had an air mattress and a hairdryer and a way to put guests on a list so they don’t get thrown out of the building, so it sounded good. That day wasn’t really the best mostly because we weren’t sure when they were coming, what dinner was going to end up being for whom, and if we were going to make it to Eddie Izzard, although having tried out the route there the day before we knew it wouldn’t take too long. Our guests came around rush hour, which was pretty much a bad idea because traffic is already bad in Chicago, so they got shunted off 90 early then got back on then got off again because nothing was moving. Pretty much they were lost for a long time and we hadn’t been that far south yet and couldn’t help much until!!!!!! I remembered from my walks that navigating through the city works a lot better if you think about it using coordinates. We are at about 30 west and 1220 north, and they were somewhere extremely southwest of that. But with the advice about looking at block numbers via street signs, they were able to get here easily! It was magical. Timing worked out really well actually, because then they went to get dinner and Skot and I went to the theater. Later we bought cookies and cream ice cream for everyone, which we cleverly put into a Tupperware tin for later since the original container doesn’t fit in the tiny freezer, but it melted, and then we put in many brownies that were taking up too much ‘counterspace’ and refroze it; then it got too frozen, but it is still good because of the brownies. But that’s all after they left for…A-Con? A-Sen? Some anime convention that we rodes the blue line to that weekend and got to experience first-hand for a few hours. (Not very exciting as someone who’s not an invested fan for the genre.) On Saturday, Skot’s dad flew in to take the SUV (skot’s mom’s) back so we don’t have to pay outrageously for it to sit somewhere all summer, and none of us knew that the red line is closed in all underground stops on the weekend, so he was stranded also. We don’t have internet in our room because it’s too expensive - after this month of starbucks-tmoblie (still 40 dollars a month) we are totally switching to the free option that the library holds. I don’t need the internet much when I’m not at school anyway. Skot’s phone has some internet capabilities and can see maps, but not when he’s using it as a phone, so we couldn’t really help his dad out. But eventually, his dad made it and took us out to breakfast/lunch even though we were trying to do that to him. At least he ate some pie. And in the end, Skot now has some nice clothes for interviewing in and we don’t have to pay to park a car here all summer.
I mentioned pie! It is because we have done some nice cooking. There is a mysterious food van affiliated with the resource center that, I’m pretty sure, takes donations from various Whole Foods to a soup kitchen (or something) that stops at the City Farm about twice a day driven by a very cheerful person. The food isn’t even always expired! We get to take things that we will need for lunch or to take home. I made off with all kinds of stuff the first week, more that I will probably ever take again, because we had yet to build up our pantry and so fruit (mostly strawberries. more on that later), vegetables (mostly broccoli - so. much. broccoli.), eggs, butter (skot was complaining that even though margarine was cheap it was not good enough to justify not getting butter), and a few other things. It’s a fifteen-minute walk to the apartment though, at my normal (quick) pace, so I had to get my roommate to help me carry it, which is one of the reasons I’m not taking nearly as much ever again. Anyway, I was able to make two strawberry pies and two loaves of banana bread, and unrelated to the free food we recently made spaghetti sauce from scratch and many other fine meals. Marie made me laugh when she was on her way here because she asked how people in the city did their grocery shopping if they could only buy what they could carry. This is a question that has never occurred to me and whose answer is obvious once you’re in the city. Our fridge doesn’t hold much and it only takes about ten minutes to get to the store, so we’ve been doing tiny grocery errands every other day or so as we need things. Really I think gigantic grocery stores and fridges were invented because of the suburbs, since people in rural areas (at least at some point) were largely self-sufficient and people in cities have easy access to farmer’s markets and small food stores.
Nicole from the city farm told me about a place called the Garfield Park Conservatory that has a lot of great plants. It’s also where they get all their tomato plants (since young tomato and pepper plants need a lot of protection during the spring until they are strong enough for the open air, which is something I remember my grandpa telling me.) We went there on Sunday via the green line, and it was very nice. Many biomes were represented, and they even had small stone paths for those who wanted to walk among rather than around the plants. I like the fern room a lot. I will certainly go back there to look at Garfield park and the flower show at a later point. There was a volunteer there doing a badly-designed ‘sugar test’ trying to educate people about the ways sugar is made and transported or used (or something) but she didn’t know what she was talking about very well. She said that proteins are made of sugar, which is not true except in a very indirect sense (if that), and also seemed to believe that any plant material that we use in objects is sugar (also not true). She really thought she was educating people and spreading knowledge, which is good, but I wish she would have done some research first. I am not sure whether it’s better to have someone trying to educate at all, even if they don’t know their subject matter very well, or if it’s better to have less people spreading information but have it be accurate.
There is a mall by…Washington and Lake, I think, that was swarming with people the first two times I encountered it, but I never went in. Then the last few times I’ve tried to go there, it’s been closed. There were even people looking at some set of boards - maybe art - but it was still locked. What is going on? Can those businesses really afford to be closed for a week? Is the mall only open during business hours? It’s very strange. I don’t even want to shop there, just to go inside and look around. But one day I will find out what is up with that building! [update, many weeks later - you can't go higher than two floors unless you work there (boring!) but there is a cool museum thing full of pieces of metal balancing on each other]
There is no typical day at the Field Museum. Sometimes I go to meetings, but this week that didn’t happen either due to Memorial day (department meetings are usually Mondays) and John Terrell (curator for the Pacific collections) being gone on Thursday (when Pacific collection meetings are). Last week we also had a fire drill before I could even clock in and people were putting fire safety equipment in one of the storage rooms, so someone had to be in there at all times, limiting what could be done. But basically, the idea is that I split the day between Chris Philipp helping with rehousing and Antonio Curet entering ceramic analysis data and scanning field forms. Rehousing could involve moving objects (like Wuvalu spears) from one place to the CRC (collections resource center?), making boxes and mounts for artifacts so they are more protected, and inventorying what’s been moved to new locations (this was making me nauseous for a while, but that may have just been oncoming illness). Building in mounts happens in Regenstein lab, which everyone calls the ‘fishbowl’ because people in the Pacific exhibit can watch us working, which makes me think that if we were in the zoo, we would be the most boring exhibit, except for maybe some lizards. I’m just making boxes. I have to wear a lab coat and gloves in case something has been sprayed with heavy metal pesticides and keep anything from us from getting on the artifacts (and also I think to look professional for the audience), but anyone who watches for more than a second will see I am not doing a whole lot technologically. I’ve got a glue gun and a measuring tape and a pencil. Other people do more advanced conservation that involves peering at things, but how exciting can that be either? The DNA lab has that ability to talk to the public about what they are doing, but I don’t think we do that. It’s just another exhibit piece.
I don’t really know what the best part of the internship work is. It feels pretty good to be depended on sometimes. Sudden insight into secretaries’ lives once. Otherwise, I had a lot of fun scanning forms Thursday because I was building in my head an analogy between scanning and microwaves, because the beep when the machines transfers information to the network is exactly like when food is done, and even though I know I could take the form out, I don’t until it’s done, much like waiting for the last few seconds of a microwave’s heating to go by even though they don’t matter. This was all wrapped up in writing this in my head as a parody of a character’s voice from a book I’m reading, since he is not my favorite character and has a propensity toward hyperbole and lengthy, vivid analogies about or descriptions of normally-mundane things.
My least favorite thing is that I can’t get into room 38, where we put out stuff and eat lunch, PRL (a collection room), the CRC, Regenstein lab, or up elevators. Access is slow in getting through the system apparently, and that leads to the most difficult part of the internship, which is getting started with the day. I have to wait for someone to open whichever of the three doors to room 38 that I’ve chosen to stand near so I can put my stuff there, then I have to find Chris or Andrew, but I can’t get to some of the places they could be, and even if they told me where to meet they might not be there (Thursday chris was not there til noon and Andrew didn’t check his email and find this out until an hour and a half after we were supposed to get started). I’ve been told, and it has been proven to me often, that adaptability is the most important thing to have here, and that’s alright, I just wish Access Control would hurry up and process by access request so I could get to where I need to be. Also, I guess one other thing stands out as not the best, but it only took two afternoons to do, so it’s already obsolete, but anyway I found out that checking data entry (not putting it into the computer, that’s fine, even if it’s an old mac) produces within me an inexplicable feeling of panic and anxiety. So I guess that’s something I didn’t know before.
Andrew has been working under Chris for two years and is very nice, but sometimes I get the feeling he loves hearing himself talk. He makes fun of me pretty often, which is alright, (I do the same to him a bit) but it’s usually the same joke for all of a day, told whenever a new group of people to hear it is nearby. I’m so used to having thoe kind of jokes that only a couple people understand that public jokes kind of weird me out. Which is kind of strange. Anyway, things I’ve learned about this guy: he has more hair products than I ever thought anyone could have, he works out every morning because he used to be fat and doesn’t want that to happen again, he has not gone to grad school but is thinking about getting a PhD sometime, he is interested in antique furniture, lives in a suburb, is pretty OCD about making mounts and other things, and keeps trying to get people together to do things like go to theater-on-the-lake or festivals. I guess I know him better than anyone else so far, just because Chris is always frazzled and dashing from on place to another, Antonio is always gone or doing likewise, and I only met Helen the volunteer for one morning (she loves textiles a LOT). I am not really sure if Andrew is the like of person I’d be friends with if I met him in another context (this is how I evaluate most people I work or am related to), because sometimes we jive pretty well and other times I just get kind of annoyed. He’s pretty alright as a coworker though.
My birthday was Thursday. I bought some ginger ale, and that was about it. This weekend, though, I plan to go to Dave and Buster’s and play some arcade games or something (I’ve never been to such a place). I was pretty excited to find that the clark street farmer’s market goes toward rather than away from our apartment and thus is right outside our window (and down many stories). I guess I’m curious about what else I’ll find when doing errands today and exploring tomorrow. Last weekend I went to the holography museum, which was guarded by the creepiest most archetypal old crone I’ve ever met (all with prominent teeth chattering together and spouting of knowledge about the mysteries of the world and apparently smelling horrendous and demanding that we look at rooms in a certain order and repeating herself quite lengthily halfway through her first speech) and was hard to find, got badly-needed jeans at the goodwill, and went to greektown, which was dumpier than I expected (maybe because it was Sunday afternoon and I didn’t have much money?). Memorial day was great! Went to the zoo, didn’t see everything because I didn’t have to because it was FREE, went to the beach briefly, found a nice grocery store that had beef on sale, and ate some cheeseburgers and macaroni salad, which we tried to share with some others people, but they had just eaten. I am wondering if Skot will find a job this week. His last test for the bartending school is Monday and he’s already applied to some places. He’ll get a job of some kind pretty soon, we just hope it’s one that involves what he just trained for and wants to do. Anyway, time for something other than sitting here writing.
There are a lot of times I don’t know what I should be doing or saying. I do not consider these crucial moments in my life, however, because there are so many of them and I already consider most social expectations to be over my head. I can remember two or three times in my life where being held accountable for something I didn’t know about has greatly upset me, but they have not happened in the past month. So I’m going to interpret this as a request for awkward moments that have happened lately, because that’s all that not knowing what to do or say is - awkward but fleeting.
There are moments when I am caught off-guard during my daily routine, like when someone who had just moved in asked as I was going down the elevator to check on my laundry if it was hot up here, and all I said was ‘it would be nice if we had a ceiling fan’ instead of ‘yes, extremely’ or ‘depends on where you lived before’ (the kid installed a window AC unit later that day). Or while heading for room 38 during week 2 of my internship and scrambledly asking someone who was leaving to keep the door open, I was surprised to see her close it, apologize, and walk past me, turn around, ask if I needed to get in, then demand to know who I was looking for. I wasn’t looking for anyone, obviously; I just wanted to eat lunch or get my stuff or something, so I was confused. Then she asked who I was with, which I still didn’t get. Eventually I said I was an intern but still didn’t say who I was working for, for some reason (probably because I thought she should recognize me or something, and why the hell was it so important to guard the lunch room from people with IDs anyway?) but eventually with some reluctance she let me in. The reason she didn’t recognize me was that I had just gotten my hair cut, I assume, but it didn’t occur to me to say that, either. Pretty much a basic case of freezing up, stammering, etc.
Circumstances that lead me to lie in order to save face happen every now and then, like that time when I accidentally (via a misunderstanding) told the person in charge of Bell Tower that I’d never been there before, and instead of saying that I’d misunderstood I just went along with it, which overall was a ridiculous conversation. I wanted to check out a Brazilian steakhouse, and we ended up at one that had lots of signs in the window saying it was opening soon, but there were people going inside and laughing and talking and such in the lobby, all dressed very nicely and looking too much like they all knew each other. We went in, got pointed at by the people at the hostess area, and made a reservation. The hostess said that the restaurant opened Monday, did not explain what was going on (I assume an opening party of something? But it was the middle of the week, so I don’t know). She wanted my phone number - I remembered that nice places like to call and make sure someone is coming, so I thought ‘okay.’ At the end of the proceedings, she explained that dinner costs a flat fee of something like $49.50 a person, and there is no way in hell I am spending that much on dinner, but I wasn’t going to back out. So now I am waiting for that call so that I can say I changed my mind. Can’t call them because I don’t have their number. Basically, it was clear to everyone in that situation that the class of the people who can afford to go to these places (and the people in that lobby) and the status/resources of Skot and me are vastly difference. I wasn’t going to admit it right there and say I couldn’t afford it, but I don’t think they will be surprised when I don’t show. Probably shouldn’t have gone in, but oh well. Now I know. Especially since I went to another one, followed a bunch of foreign tourists from a bus inside and just asked blatantly how expensive the place was, in pretty much those words, which was as direct as possible about who I was (a reaction to the other encounter? Probably) and felt pretty silly but good.
And now you have a window into the stupid, awkward moments that I tend to encounter. I could talk about the search my first day here for subway passes, and possibly some other encounters, but I really think that’s enough.
Went to the art institute on Thursday afternoon after work because it was free. Bummed that part of it won’t be built for a year. Walked briefly though the Blues Festival on the way. This afternoon, I help take things from the City Farm stand at the Logan Square farmer’s market back toe the farm. It was extremely windy, which made putting up canvas (or something heavier) signs extremely difficult, reminding me quite a bit of sailing. The Printers Row Book Fair took up most of the afternoon yesterday. We took the bus there and walked back, eating lunch at Ronny’s on the way back (stupid, because neither of us were hungry and then we didn’t eat dinner til eleven). The book fair was great, but it was too much to really consider looking for books in. Lots of amusing books could be found and laughed at though, such as an issue of Sexology, the periodical, dated 1958 (women don’t always do well in relationships when they must be passive? Gasp!), or the Dune (the movie) pop-up book.
It has been brought to my attention once again that I may come across to some people as more negative than I actually am. I see negativity as a feeling that hits for a day every once and a while, and makes things I don’t like feel like problems that are horrible and can’t be solved, but the rest of the time circumstances are just challenges that I should work to deal with or get around or are simply part of how things are, and they lose any heavy sense of the negative. But I guess people who don’t know me well (relatives I don’t see often, acquaintances, whatever) have a difficult time sifting the things I feel almost good about having to confront and those that actually bother me. I don’t think I mention things that actually bother me as often, come to think of it. Another part is, perhaps, the lack of need to hold onto things that have been good. Happiness is ephemeral, just like awkwardness, and though I may rave about a simple and delicious meal I had recently, I may forget or be unable to talk about things on a grander scale. I wonder, sometimes, why people seem so disinclined to believe that someone can just be content; happy in a calm and quiet manner. But that might not even be it. I was excited about Chicago, and still am happy to be here, but now that I’m here it’s the new reality and I am not continually excited in the high-energy sense about it, my job, the farm, or anything else. So when people ask me if I’m thrilled to be working at the museum or in Chicago, I never know how to respond. It’s a bit like when people ask if I’ll be disappointed by doing x menial tasks. I’m not disappointed (don’t really know how I could be); I’m not super-excited. I would like for people to stop asking if I’m one or the other, because that can shake me from feeling good.
Anyway, this was all a preamble for a description of the room, which we have had enough time to discover is just as good-but-slightly-dumpy as a first apartment during an internship summer should be. The appliances work well, except for the freezer (tiny fridges just melt and refreeze things because of how they work). Having a gas stove is awesome, and the oven takes no time to preheat because it’s not huge. The windows don’t have screens because of something that’s going on with the outside of the building, I think, but we’re so high up that not many bugs end up flying in. We’re also high enough that the noise from the bars isn’t all that distracting. The closet is huge, and now that me moved one of its doors so it will actually close and open (we just had it pressed open before) we don’t have to worry as much about the bathroom door not closing all the way. The tub takes a while to stop dripping, and the bathroom window is stuck partially open, so we stuck a towel in there to limit the number of water-seeking bugs that go there (because we’ve found some) and it’s always cooler than the rest of the apartment because of that permanent opening. The view is awesome, especially at night, because we can see state street all the way past that weird triangle ‘park’ where another road splits off it, and where a bunch of fire trucks were gathering one night.
And there is the heat. Our room is on the top floor and all the heat in the building rises up to us. This was nice when it was chilly outside. Now it’s close to intolerable at night because unlike everyone else I know, we don’t have a ceiling fan, and I’d venture to guess they didn’t install any on this floor. I talk about it to some people, and sometimes it’s a complaint and sometimes it’s funny, and sometimes it’s a rather neutral observation. Today I feel that the heat is something I’m going to try to get past. Before, I was thinking I was weak and could toughen up by just dealing with it - increase my tolerance for heat (more humidity than anything else) over the summer, which would be pretty cool. Today, though, I though about headrests from New Guinea, which I’ve been rehousing. According to the display case, they were used to lift people’s heads above the ground to increase air flow (thus cooling a bit more), but they also had mats placed on them, and some of them were ceremonial, so I’m not sure how that all fits together. Skot came up with the idea of a head-hammock, a less uncomfortable version of this. But in seriousness, the plan of action is either to start keeping a bowl with water and a washcloth in it nearby so I can wipe off my face whenever, to keep the windows upen all the time, or to try to find somewhere that sells fans or dehumidifiers. It’s pretty much an adventure of the smallest (and for me) best kind. We’ll see how it comes out eventually.
Skot can’t find a job because no one in Chicago wants someone who will only be here for two months. I guess they’ve got more of a labor pool to draw from than the suburbs, so it makes sense, but is still pretty disheartening for him. Maybe he could enter a sleep-deprivation study that will pay him at the end or something. That would be pretty interesting. I’ve always wondered what goes on in sleep labs (there’s one in the basement of my dentist’s office, and the hygienists are always a little creeped out).
There weather this weekend has been great. Not to cloudy or sunny, enough breezes to cool things down. I ate a lot of fruit this week because summer is the season for it, and I’m pretty sure we are wired to want more fresh crisp foods when they are best for us (which is now). Getting fresh vegetables from the city farm is the best thing, and I just had some delicious pepper-and-green-onion eggs because of it.
Saw a man slumped, unmoving, outside of one of the bars, two police with bicycles on either side of him. Skot said he’d said hello to him earlier and had an odd, short conversation. We hoped he wasn’t dead.
Location: In the park between Dearborn and Clark
People use the park for many things. About half of the people in the park had dogs with them, and they often made sure to greet other people who had dogs, sometimes only so that the dogs would meet (that is be physically right next to each other and interact, but often to meet each other as well, perhaps throwing a frisbee, sitting and talking, or walking together. I remember having a dog and doing similar things. People with dogs don’t walk up to people without them in such a friendly manner, probably because they lack that common excuse to interact (letting dogs meet each other). When I had dogs, though, this almost never went well because they were crazy and didn’t respond well to other dogs. I was surprised to see that there were few dog-meeting-mishaps because of this. One man just kind of stood at intersections (of the park’s internal sidewalks) with a dog that may have been a poodle, as if waiting for someone else with a dog to come by. When they did, they would exchange greetings, and they would pass each other, and then he’d stand at another intersection. It seemed odd, since most other dog-owners eventually go in the grass or walk their dogs, and this guy picked up his dog when he finally left the park. Did the dog lack the ability to walk much? I do not know. The smaller dogs were occasionally treated to the water fountain for a drink. Overall, a good place to take dogs in a city with little grassy public space.
Other activities in the park included having conversations, either on a park bench with someone or on a cell phone, walking diagonally through the park (as I have done many times for a shortcut), or napping. The benches here are not horrible to recline on, and three people were doing so, just tucking their legs in enough to avoid the discomfort of the armrests halfway through the benches. I thought it was nice that these benches weren’t horrible for sleeping on, since some people don’t have places to do that, and they also let people converse facing each other with nothing between them while sitting on the bench. It’s important to me that cities don’t try to shut out the homeless everywhere by making benches for sitting only (and not too long either). Chicago still does this in places, just to varying degrees. Anyway, one man in a yellow shirt did not choose to sleep on a bench. Instead, he headed to a tree in a corner of the park, threw his backpack there, and use it as a pillow. First, he had to chuck a few pieces of something off of that patch of ground. Rocks or dog shit, I imagine. He was the only one without a dog to walk on the grass. I wondered if people have picnics here in the park, but I guess that depends on how much dog poop is left on the ground, the weather, and other things.
The only people I saw eating were a girl somewhere near my age and an older man in striped clothes and with silver in his hair, both on a bench. I was unsure as to their relationship, but guessed daughter-father based on age. I could not imagine spending much time with my father willingly, but people have varying degrees of luck with that kind of thing. Then someone talking on a phone next to me mentioned Father’s Day and it seemed to strengthen that interpretation. I wondered who had bought whom Starbucks and food, because in my experience holidays and visits mean that someone takes the brunt of hospitality.
I did not experience many strong emotions during this exercise. I was also not keyed up like I was last time, so I didn’t start with much either, other than resentment at having to do this again. Mostly I became sleepy because of the noise of the large fountain, and a little lazy about taking notes due to both the resentment and the lethargy. I did feel bad for a moment for the flowers all around the fountain, because they do not look terribly healthy. I guessed that there was nowhere for water to drain if it rained, because the flowers are walled in and surrounded by concrete. The trees around the central square of the park, however, look fantastic (tall, green, healthy), and I longed for the times in my childhood when I always climbed trees and explored wildlife. I am fairly sure you are not allowed to climb trees at Miami or in Chicago, and these rules always annoy me. I judged the fountain pretty harshly for a moment at the beginning for sloshing heavily and irregularly instead of prettily and evenly. I have no idea whether the pigeons have anything to do with that. There is a sign to please not feed them, but as long as they have drinking water / a birdbath (the fountain) I think they’re going to keep coming around. People (or at least extablishments) don’t like pigeons much. They can muck up one’s roof/rafters and sidewalks, but other than that I like them.
That’s about all on that front.
In other news 250 African pots and a strange bicycle came on Wednesday in the middle of lunch, and all hands were on deck unloading them and trying to remove bugs/dirt until 5:15. It was exciting to see everyone working together on the same thing and to get variety. The day before, I had tried to get to the contemporary art museum, but I left late due to laundry (lab coats) and the northbound subway was broken. Two days in a row home late. Oh well. Called a lot of my friends this week. Rachel bought a chinchilla off of craig’s list. This makes me laugh to think of. Today I went to the farmer’s market that the City Farm is representing itself in (they left early last week and no one was there when I arrived) to help pack up. It took well over an hour to get there, but Taylor ended up taking the same journey most of the way so that was something. We had just been on a long journey on Saturday to Andersonville’s ‘Sommarfest,’ a conglomeration of artists, food venders (chicken kabobs were so tempting), live bands, and children’s entertainment (very involved puppet show of Where the Wild Things Are and the inflatable caterpillar that they could crawl through were both memorably strange) and here we were again on another long journey.
Skot did not get into the sleep deprivation study. We’re not allowed to know why. Maybe he’ll start donating blood plasma? In the meantime he is my housewife, cooking and cleaning and asking about getting a ceiling fan (we did!) and such. It’s not the worst arrangement; I just probably won’t be able to afford a new laptop now. And that’s not catastrophic.
Bridget and Laura might want to go to dinner with Skot and I next week. Hopefully this happens; until this weekend I haven’t had much contact with anyone else in the building.
The City Farm is part of the Resource Center, an organization that started as a local recycling effort in the ‘70s. The City Farm’s mission is “to create a higher standard of living in Chicago neighborhoods through profitable agricultural enterprises.” From what I understand the people who work there don’t all have the exact same reasons, but a lot of them are really chill and enjoy eating vegetables and making them affordable to the people in the area, both higher and lower class (the farm borders two very different neighborhoods income-wise). Most of the weeds we pull (there are a lot) go into a big compost heap, which becomes usable dirt more quickly than I would have thought. I guess it helps to have dirt and whatever bugs like to hang out on roots go with the weeds into the pile. Some of the weeds, though, can be eaten, and these early weeks of selling produce (before tomatoes and the like are ripe) are good times to try to sell those too. This weekend purslane (a Midwestern succulent?) and sheep’s quarters (tastes like spinach!) were the main wild plants we sold.
The farm has an agreement with the city of Chicago that lets them use undeveloped land and the city’s water until the city sells that land. The farm can ‘float’ from one plot to another in this manner, as there are about 10,000 undeveloped plots of land in the city. In return, the farm employs people nearby, uses a lot of volunteers, and does community outreach. Something I just learned about that will be happening as part of this is that the farm participates in something called “After School Matters” where kids around the age of 15 get paid by this program to work somewhere for four hours a day five days a week for six weeks. This starts in a couple of weeks, and I’m not looking forward to it, because apparently most of these kids don’t actually want to be doing the work, and while that’s often true of low-income jobs it’ll be a big contrast to the employees and volunteers I’ve met so far. Also, kids, especially boys, at that age tend to act out when they’re bored, and I don’t know how I’d handle a situation that came up. There will be fifteen of them this summer, and there are only about five employees, none of whom are usually all on site at the same time. A couple other people are leery about participating in the program again, but it’s good for the farm’s reputation and if they acquire another piece of land they have been writing proposals for, one that would have a permanent community center, they want to keep the ties they have so they can make it worthwhile to everyone. Still, I am not excited.
The farm gets enough money to keep itself going and pay its employees by selling produce to nearby residents who come by the farm in the summer and to nearby restaurants interested in using local/organic ingredients, through CSAs (bags of produce every week of the summer, paid for ahead of time in a lump sum), and by converting old wooden pallets into firewood for a restaurant that uses it in their pizza ovens (this requires a lot of pulling nails out of the wood so it’s not dangerous). We also started having a stand at a farmer’s market in Logan Square on Sundays, which I am helping out with. My first day doing that for the whole ten-hour stretch was this Sunday. It was frustrating at first because Nicole was too busy to really explain things to me, so I’d be told to do things I lacked the knowledge or resources to do, or I’d guess my way through a question incorrectly. It seemed like I was being molasses-slow at everything. It’s pretty much the opposite in general at the farm than at the Field Museum, where I’m running into the funny problem of being too efficient sometimes. But helping with the market got better about halfway through, when I finally knew the names of everything we were selling and what to say to potential customers. Also, I found out that for some reason I was a fountain of patience, or at least, Nicole and Bridget kept remarking that the day was going by slowly, but I was not bored. This does not happen often, but it was a good day for it.
Promoting things seems the best way to sell vegetables that people are not very familiar with. We ended up cutting samples of a white turnip (very crunchy and sweet for turnips) for people because it’s a rather unappreciated food and we wanted to show them that we had a variety they could eat raw (and we also needed to sell them). The market was as much a place to advertise the farm (and a reusing-resources project also affiliated with the resource center) as it was to sell produce or check out what other people had. A lot of people also asked if we had a CSA thing going on as well.
I like the City Farm because unlike Greenpeace or other activist organizations like that, it uses environmental means to achieve both social and material ends. The project is really down-to-earth. People can see things happening, can help if they want, and can benefit directly from the farm’s activities. Applicability is important to me in the kinds of service work I do and support.
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