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today’s favorite things

{13 February 2007}

since i started labeling my posts it’s made me aware of the fact that i post more rants than i post odes to my favorite things. so this post is in the spirit of achieving balance.

today, my 3 favorite things are:

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i. my forest green wellies with bright yellow laces. i only get to wear these when the snow fall is deeper than about 6″. they’re too big and slop around my ankles and make me feel like a little kid with hand-me-down moon boots on. remember moon boots?

ii. the fact that the Atlantic Theatre in Florida is advertising “The Hoo-Haa Monologues” on their marquee, because some patron walked by and was offended by seeing “Vagina” in giant letters. finally, we have a national consensus on how to spell hoo-haa.

iii. my grandfather’s sense of humor. on sunday night at dinner my sister-in-law was talking about how the german version of TSA had tried to take away her knitting needles at a security check point. without missing a beat, my grandfather said, “they’re afraid you’re going to knit an afghan.” the joke’s been done before, but he clearly made it up on the spot. i can only hope to be that sharp when i’m 90.

survivor: north pole

{07 February 2007}

as punishment for us winter-tough chicagoans belittling the woes of our new york-based pals when manhattan hit 18 degrees last week, chicago has been in the throes of a deep freeze for four days now. and by deep freeze we mean highs in the single digits, wind chills of -20, dead car batteries, pipes at my favorite coffee place frozen, emergency warming centers for the homeless, take a cab you’ll die waiting for the bus, boogers in your nose freeze on the first breath, what-the-fuck i don’t live in fargo for a reason-cold.

to add insult to injury, it started snowing this morning, apparently to the surprise of whomever schedules the snowplow drivers. about four inches hit the ground before the sanding trucks made it out, consequently it took me, oh, 90 minutes to travel 16 miles to work today. on the upside, chicago is really really pretty with a fresh coating of snow.

the first day or two of really extreme weather are kinda fun, it’s something to talk about with everyone you meet, like we’re all in a game of Survivor: North Pole together or something. after that it stops being so much fun.

whenever i complain about the cold JUST a little too much, someone points out, “wait, aren’t you from idaho? don’t they have winter there?” true, they do. but, two items in my defense: 1) i lived in the bay area for five years, and that made me weak, once i learned that people don’t have to live like this, and 2)winter in idaho is fun. they have mountains, and outdoor sports. and garages to park one’s car in. anyway, i’m taking a long weekend and going out to idaho for 4 days of skiing, snow-shoeing, and generally loafing around the cabin eating/cooking/knitting/reading/napping. the weather man promises chicago will back to livable temperatures by the time i return, and i hopefully will have reconnected with the sporty fun side of winter.

five impressions from super bowl sunday

{05 February 2007}

1. the bears scoring a touch down in the first 14 seconds of the game.
okay, i know nothing about football and even i understood that that was pretty much a miraculous start to the game.

2. fuckmeitscoldoutside.
the windchill bottomed out somewhere around 24 degrees BELOW zero today. tell me again why i don’t live in california? on the upside, it pretty much quelled the post-super bowl riots. well, that and the spanking defeat.

3. blue paint smeared on my favorite winter boots had nothing to do with the bears.
i started training this weekend with my first for-profit theater gig. we shall not name names, as we all know talking about one’s employer on a blog is a bad idea. but let’s just say it involves a lot of blue paint. learning to call the show is nerve-wracking; the corporate environment seems to somehow add a new layer of pressure to get it right on the first try. but, the people are cool and the show is fun. i am now a part of the chicago tourist industry. does that officially make me a local? or does it officially make me a nuisance to the locals?

4. omigod that’s my ex boyfriend in a super bowl commercial.
one of the lesser-known perils of dating an actor would be that after the breakup he still has the power to turn up in your living room unannounced. well, good for him. i hope he’s lonely all the way to the bank.

5. puppy bowl III!
an excellent alternative to the super bowl for those who are not so football-inclined, puppy bowl basically consists of an play arena painted up like a football field with about a dozen adorable puppies turned loose inside. the half time show featured a bunch of kittens climbing around on a big sparkly cat tree hissing at one another. fortunately puppy bowl was held in a domed arena; i don’t think the cats would have coped with the rain nearly as smoothly as prince did.

{03 February 2007}

happy groundhog day. now shut the door before we all freeze to death!

i can’t quite seem to get this piece right, but in honor of groundhog day and it being friggin’ cold* this weekend, i’ll post it anyway. maybe some exposure will help me decide what it’s trying to be.

——–
the lake is partially frozen along the shoreline. it’s all shades of white and grey, and when the wind comes up the ice fractures into pieces and the waves move beneath, creating a rocky, undulating surface. the lake and sky blur white at the horizon so that there’s no clear delineation of where one stops and the other begins. snow has been on the ground for several weeks now. it doesn’t melt, just blows around and seems to evaporate, and then another short storm brings a fresh layer. the air is cold and dry and acrid under low-hanging snow skies. and yet, in the midst of all this winter, there is a subtle but perceptible lengthening of days.

each day this week we are gaining two additional minutes of daylight. already our days are nearly an hour longer than they were at our darkest point in december. i wake with the light, and in spite of the cold there are birds singing a morning song in the trees outside my window. when i cross the city on my way home at the end of the day, the light is draining from the sky and lights are flickering to life in the skyscrapers, silhouetted black against the pale western sky. by the time we reach the equinox in march, the days will be lengthening even faster, cresting at nearly 3 minutes per day. then the pace will slow even as the weather mellows and the earth tilts our faces toward the sun, toward a future of long summer evenings and the scent of sun-warmed earth, rising even above the noise and crush of the city.

in june the long days will peak and then daylight will begin to run back out of the hourglass, each season flowing like waves, cresting again in september before plunging back into winter.

the sine waves of temperature are staggered, so that the coldest days peak even as the days are lengthening toward spring; in june the longest days will mark the beginning of the warm season, but it won’t be until august that the sun really beats down, relentless, for that period of a week or two when it’s hard to draw a breath and we all think we might fry like eggs right on the sidewalk. by then, the cooling darkness of evening will arrive two minutes earlier each day, and the approaching fall days will be welcome.

in the past three days, three close friends of mine have lost friends of theirs, all to premature deaths, coincidentally perhaps, all to cancer. tragedy moves in sine waves, too. it crests and then ebbs back. our successes and our misfortunes are stagged, so that we can bear the weight of our sorrows on the backs of the joys. if we could graph our lives, would it help us bear the tragedy? would it temper the joy?

———-
*and by friggin’ cold, we’re talking windchills in the -10 to -20 category. we’ve moved to defcon 3 in the winter-clothing department.

on my answering machine today

{27 January 2007}

bill collectors have reached a new low, it seems. i got home today to a message on my machine that went, “hello my full name. this is generic woman’s name from generic corporate-sounding firm. could you please pass a message to your neighbor, first and last name. tell him to please call me back at 877-555-5555 about an important matter…”

jeez. can they do that? can they actually harass someone’s neighbor to try and shame them into paying their bills? now, i’m all for paying one’s bills and not spending more than one earns and good fiscal responsibility like that, but i also know first hand that one can get screwed through no fault of one’s own (poorly-managed health insurance plans, for example, cough cough) and have bill collectors calling at all hours while you’re waiting for some pea-brained administrator to straighten out their mistake. so i’m not passing judgement on my neighbor (and besides, i have no idea who this person is anyway). and yeah, technically the message said nothing about it being a bill collector, but really, there’s only one reason why pleasant-sounding women call from anonymous-sounded firms and leave 877 callback numbers. talk about invasion of privacy. if she calls again i might take up this fight just out of spite.

{24 January 2007}

an interesting side effect of last week’s post about fears is that all of you who commented reminded me that i’m afraid of most of those things, too. yeesh.

to report back for hannah’s mom’s art project, it seems that the top 5 for our unofficial poll would be:

loved ones dying
illness
creepy crawlies
swimming in big open places
our own limitations

i look forward (sort of) to an art project about that.

learning to love the mustard

{23 January 2007}

in the past year, i’ve been surprised several times to discover that i suddenly like something that i have always, always disliked. things that come to mind are:

mustard
the color orange
hard-boiled eggs
turtleneck sweaters

i have always been a mustard hater. i think turtleneck sweaters make people look like their heads are about to be swallowed by a wooly snake which has already consumed the their arms, chest and neck. the color orange was downright gross, and don’t even get me started on hard-boiled eggs and the way that they smell, not to mention that nasty green-ish black rim that forms along the border between the yolk and the white if you overcook them.

it’s interesting to realize that while we are defined by our tastes, we are also, then, confined by those tastes. if i’m not a mustard hater, then who am i? my sandwich identity has gone all topsy-turvey.

who’s afraid of a little peanut butter? (the expanded edition)

{17 January 2007}

the comment box asks,

How about this question- Mom is starting an art project and wonders what people’s top 10 fears are. What are yours?

well, since you ask, the my top 10 (some rational, some not-so) would include:

vomit
growing old alone
mediocrity
old-lady baldness
having parties where no one shows up
food poisoning
cancer
authority figures
my luggage getting lost when i travel to foreign countries
swimming pool drains

to frame those in nice sterile, clinical (treatable?) terms, we turn to the phobia list:

emetophobia
gerascophobia & isolophobia
atychiphobia
phalacrophobia
sociophobia
toxicophobia
carcinophobia
sociophobia (another form)
and i managed to stump the experts with my fear of lost luggage and pool drains. yay, i’m unique!

and the winner of weirdest-fear-that-has-a-clinical-name is…

arachibutyrophobia – fear of peanut butter sticking to the roof of the mouth

i dare you, comment box: what’s your fear list?

the post in which i finally stop writing about myself for a wee moment

{15 January 2007}

q. so what’s really bugging you today?

a. oh, so glad you asked. at the moment, it’s that dunkin’ dougnuts commercial* where all the zombie-looking people sing about how confusing it is to order espresso (digging, in particular, at starbuck’s admittedly inconsistent tall-grande-venti sizing system). the chorus goes, “is it french or is it italian? perhaps fratalian.” followed by a voiceover: “lattes from dunkin doughnuts. you order them in english, not fratalian.” is it possible that they actually missed the irony in that latte is not, in fact, an english word? i hate this kind of rah-rah-average-joe-ness that smacks of cultural xenophobia. we appropriate yummy foreign foods, but god forbid that we have to wrap our mouths around a unfamiliar word in order to do it. everywhere else in the world, educated people learn to speak two, three or more languages. what gives americans the perogative to bask in our own cultural ignorance? it’d be one thing if we were some little isolationist nation. but the US goes lumbering around the world imposing our own notions of right and wrong on other cultures right and left.

you know who else has been up to this same sort of cultural newspeak? Iran. we snickered last summer at the news blurb that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had required that more than 2000 foreign-appropriation words be replaced with modified farsi words. pizzas, for example, are now known as “elastic loaves” (washington post article

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the ‘five things you didn’t know about me’ meme (childhood edition)

{12 January 2007}

per kidchamp and with-an-i:

1. i used to have a peculiar speech impediment that prevented me from being able to pronounce the word “thirsty” correctly. i heard the word thirsty in my head, but it came out of my mouth “soasty.” my brother, as brothers are wont to do, thought this was hilarious. it led to many, many repetitions of the following exchange:

me: “mom, i’m soasty.”
chris (mocking): “mom, jennie’s soasty.”
me (now furious): “i didn’t say soasty, i said soasty!”
chris (gleeful, triumphant): “that’s what i said! soasty!”
sibling squabble ensues.

2. until i was about 15, i thought that men actually literally had one less rib on the right side of their bodies than women did and that this was the physiological proof of the bible story in which god created adam and eve. i was shocked to discover that men’s and women’s rib cages are the same. it was like hard, tangible evidence that the bible didn’t contain fact. it was like finding out that the easter bunny wasn’t real.

3. another story involving my older brother: as kids, when he would get angry with me, he would yell my name in a staccato fashion: “jen-if-er-cath-a-leen-gad-da!” this was about the only time i ever heard my middle name pronounced. consequently, i learned to spell it the way i heard it: cathaleen, with an extra a tucked into the middle of cathleen. i was embarrassingly old the first time my mom pointed out to me that i was spelling my own middle name wrong.

4. i have an inch-long white scar on my chin. this is because the first time i jumped off a diving board into the deep end of the swimming pool, i took a tremendous leap and landed smack on top of my swimming teacher’s head, splitting open my chin and her eyebrow. we surfaced a tangled bloody mess and were both hauled off for stitches. i recall a blur of horrified faces, bloody paper towels being held to my chin, then staring up from the operating table, the doctor and nurse’s faces in shadow behind the bright operating light. the injury was not at all serious, but the memory of it is vivid. i wound up with a scar under my chin; my teacher got a luke perry-style slash across one eyebrow.

5. the first movie i recall seeing in a movie theater was Tron.