"You know what it is to be Black now. Here it is."

FROWSY!

I got two interesting books Wednesday, one on loan and one for keepsies, that I'm really excited about.

One of my favorite classmates, Jeff, handed me The Word Finder, something he calls "his nerdiest English major possession." It was given to him by an old retired English teacher from his high school who keeps tabs on the school's students, even though he doesn't teach in the classroom anymore. He decided that Jeff was one of those students who would do something with English and bestowed upon him this book and another called, I believe, Great Ideas.

The Word Finder is weird. The Preface says, "What is The Word Finder? Is it a new kind of thesaurus? The answer is emphatically 'no!'" It's an adjective-finder. Say I'm trying to think of a modifier for the word corpse, which I swear is the first page I opened to just now, I would look it up using the convenient alphabet side tabs and find

adjectives
poor; little; galvanized; sundried; good-looking; bleeding; dripping; handsome; desiccated; mangled; unrecovered; mutilated; disfigured; peaceful; lovely; charred; shriven; bloated.

verbs
animate--; attend--; bear--; bury--; collect--s; desert--; destroy--; discover--; disinter--; dismember--; dispose of--; drag for--; exhume--; grapple for--; hide--; hunt--; identify--; inter--; lament--; lay out--; mourn--; preserve--; recognize--; regard--; restore--; strew with--s; stumble on--; trip over--; view--; --decays; --decomposes; --disintegrates; --putrefies.
(See remains, carcass.)

It's just as fascinating to look at what modifiers get printed as it is to think about those that don't. Corpse is perhaps a distracting example because I find myself tripping over "trip over--" and "--putrefies," but looking up woman I find, just selecting a random row, "frightened; fruitful; frigid; frowsy; full-blossomed." What the hell! My eyes are also jumping down to "home-making." Jerks!

... Whatever. The guy who wrote the intro's named Dr. Edward J. Fluck. So whatever you say Dr. Fuck...

The other book is called Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design. And I haven't read any of it yet, but I like the pictures. Most likely, more to come on that later.

keeping myself amused

Late last night I was walking home from work I snapped a few photos of this little thingy that I've been admiring the past few weeks.

It doesn't look like much when you pass it coming from east,


nor from the front,


but it's a face!

When raccoons get up on the back porch, Mama just sweep 'em off with the broom

As I write, there is a family of raccoons pawing at our living room window. Here's one:


In the past year, we have found a snake in my closet, a small guinea pig or large hamster in the living room, several cockroaches, and now raccoons.

Megan thinks that one of us is going to grow up to be a horse whisperer or something. I can't think of a better explanation for this madness.

Captain Hook

I noticed this picture in the Main Library today, and was drawn immediately to the eyepatch. Although my first impression was that the man in the portrait must have been half-former trustee, half-pirate, I checked out eyepatch on Wikipedia. I guess they were more common for non-pirates back before advanced eye surgeries. I always thought that pirates wore them because their other eyes got stabbed out or something gross like that, but it's a practical thing having to do with their eyes adjusting to the light difference above and below deck. Hm.


New learned thing for today: James Joyce occasionally wore an eyepatch even though he didn't need one.

"Ghetto Bus Tour"

I came across an old copy of the Daily Illini from July in a shop on campus today, and picked it up because the full-page image of a woman with a microphone on a school bus and the headline "Touring the Projects" caught my eye.

The story highlights the work of Beauty Turner, a former resident of the Robert Taylor Homes in Chicago. Ms. Turner shows the $20-paying customers on her "Ghetto Bus Tour" that "all those news reports [about the violence and drug-activity in the projects] distorted what day-to-day life was like." She says, "All the horror stories that you heard about in the newspapers, it was not like that at all." These tours, she hopes, will help to raise awareness of her cause, alleviating the plight of former residents of the various projects that are being destroyed as part of the Chicago Housing Authority's $1.6 billion "Plan for Transportation." Where are they supposed to go? is what she wants to know. Quite wisely, she observes, "People that come in [to these neighborhoods] don't want to look across the street and see seven little black churches in a three-block radius. What they want to see is a Dominick's, and sushi joints and a Starbucks."

Don Babwin, the AP journalist who wrote the article, doesn't seem to be entirely convinced. Or he might just be presenting both sides of the argument. Anyway, he lists a few of what Turner refers to as the "horror stories" and mentions that the Housing Authority are accusing her of only showing the "bad things" and of "taking a circuitous route so she doesn't have to drive by the new stuff."

Frankly, I'm behind Turner. What exactly will the planned progress look like? Where are these former residents going to live, and where are the seven little black churches going to fit? Without knowing, admittedly, too much about this Plan for Transformation, I'm still a little skeptical.

That said, a tour? How useful is a tour? Babwin reports that Turner's clientele consists of "students, academics, activists, journalists and residents of Chicago and surrounding suburbs -- most of them white and visiting a part of Chicago they've only seen on television or from the expressway as they sped by." I'm torn, because I'm part of that group. I've never spent any time in any of those neighborhoods; I've seen them from the Dan Ryan. At the same time though, making a tourist attraction of people instinctively feels wrong to me. But what would be better?




In other news, classes started today. One of my profs, after placing a fan on the desk on one of my classmates, literally inches from his face, asked us to write down all of our contact information on these recycled business cards that she passed out. But they were already printed on both sides? And then she wrote on the board "Name," "Where you're from," and "Doing with your life" and asked us to introduce ourselves with that information.

Doing with my life? Oh I don't know, today I've been thinking about Ghetto Bus Tours. I'll probably get some coffee later.

Antiques Road Show: Urbana, IL

One of the things that's been consuming my life a little bit over the past few days has been helping out with the preparation for a massive garage sale run by the University YMCA as a fundraiser for the Y and it's programs (which by the way are really cool: Amnesty International, Students for Environmental Concerns, Engineers Without Borders, and the like). Every May, we offer to collect everyone's shit as they're moving out of their dorms and apartments, and then we collect again in August. The idea is that we're keeping lots and lots of stuff out of the landfill, and we're also having a garage sale which is obviously the coolest.

The best part about volunteering is getting to look at all the great stuff that gets donated before all of the greasy college kids and quirky townies come in and ransack the place. Look at some of the stuff we found today!

a head in a box

(That's what she said.)

a guitar-shaped tin

a heavy-duty metal camel/llama of some sort

and this, my favorite so far, a creature

Kasey thinks it looks like Voldemort.

Sale starts Thursday if you're in town!

It's the little things in life, you know?

Today as I was leaving the grocery store, there was a man coming in, in his fifties I'd say, and wearing a vintage teal B.U.M. Equipment sweatshirt. He had longish gray hair and just as he was stepping into the sensored zone of the automatic door, he kicked his leg forward, did this karate chop thing, and yelled, "Hiyah!" He was by himself, no kids with him or anything. But after he did it he looked so happy. He looked at me with no shame and said, "I've always wanted to do that." Yeah, man.

Grand Junction, what are you thinking?

Oh my gosh.

A few days ago Josh emailed me to tell me about some goofy signs that have been posted around his hometown, Grand Junction, Colorado since his last return. This morning, I got a photo:

In case you can't get a good look at the list of sponsors at the bottom, they are the City of Grand Junction, United Way, Grand Valley Coalition for the Homeless, Grand Valley Catholic Outreach, Downtown Grand Junction, Mesa County, the City of Fruita, and the Town of Palisade.

I mean, I understand that giving someone a dollar is not likely to make a significant change in her or his life, but is that image a little harsh? I think yes. What exactly are the intentions of this campaign? Seems pretty jerk-ish to me.

sappy

As I was walking down the street at dusk this evening, I could see into someone's kitchen where two people were hugging like they've never hugged before. Nothing sexual. No funny business. Just a good solid hug. It was lovely.

"We're not worthy!"

So I'm down in Urbana for good now, enjoying our sweet new apartment. There was an old plaid armchair in my room when I moved in, and I didn't really want it there. My plan to move it to the living room down the hall, though, was foiled when it didn't fit down the hall. So now, in homage to the Wayne's World skit in which Wayne proclaims, "Aerosmith is in my breakfast nook!" we created a little breakfast nook with a great view of the garbage can.



In the nook, I've been reading Strip City: A Stripper's Farewell Journey Across America by Lily Burana, and it's fascinating. Frankly, even thinking about strip clubs used to make me really nervous, but now I'm embarrassed that I was Judgey McJudgerson about them without knowing anything about them.

really really ridiculously good-looking

Dad, Conor, Finola, Eoin, Johnny, Neil, Mom, Michael, and me

My whole family was home this weekend for the first time that I can remember in a loooong time, not including the odd Christmas here and there. Pretty big deal. All day Saturday we mutted around in the yard and in the pool blasting Wilco albums. Is this heaven? No, it's Evergreen Park.

PACKING IS RUINING MY LIFE

In addition to getting all of my shit ready to go back down to school tomorrow morning, I've been charged with the task of cleaning out all of my forgotten treasures that in around 2000 I stored away in our family's collective dumping ground. I could not think of a less enjoyable thing to do right now. I think I'd even rather go to the zoo than do this shit.

Anyway, since just about anything in the world is more exciting than my life right now, especially this piece of old news that Cassie sent me that I forgot about and just rediscovered, I bring you the "Gay Bomb".

This article pretty much speaks for itself, and since I should be sorting and packing and not commenting on this ridiculousness, I will now find my way back to my eighth grade scrapbooks.

Burn!

According to a report in the online Slate Magazine, Rudy Giuliani's daughter is a liberal who supports Obama. How do they know? She's in the "Barack Obama (One Million Strong for Barack)" Facebook group. Well, at least she was. Take that shit off the mini-feed, Car!



She's also looking for "Random Play" and "Whatever [she] can get."

"Why any woman give a shit what people think is a mystery to me."

I'm just back from a lovely evening at the theatre with my mom, our second lovely evening at the theatre this week, actually. Wednesday night, in Vegas, we saw Cirque Du Soleil's LOVE, which is the one that they do to Beatles music. Tonight we saw The Color Purple at the Cadillac in Chicago, the Oprah-produced, Broadway version of Alice Walker's novel.

Live entertainment is so cool. Probably creepy, but I really like watching the other people in the audience. For some reason, I'm really affected by the way the other people in the audience are responding to the performers.

For instance, at LOVE, I was seated next to a family who was speaking French before the show. The lights went down, the extravaganza began, and all of a sudden they were singing along loudly. By the end of the show, as the rest of the audience began to sit back down for the post-standing-ovation number to "All You Need is Love," they were on their feet dancing around, still singing every word.

And tonight, when the actress who played Celie came out for her curtain call, a young woman across the aisle from us was literally jumping up and down and screaming she was so excited.

I mean, I thought both the shows were great, too, but I was really glad to be sitting both times near people who seemed so completely overwhelmed with joy and admiration. It's such a beautiful thing to watch.

There was also this crotchety, older white couple sitting near us tonight. When Celie and Shug, played by Michelle Williams (Destiny's!), kissed for the first time, the man got all noticeably wiggly in his seat. Almost wiggly enough to make me feel a little wiggly. And during the intermission the woman said, in an obnoxious Chicago accent, "Well, the singing's good but I can't understand a word they're saying." Hhhhhh