I've got a lot of thoughts floating around like the ubiquitous dandelion fluff that's all over this town, and I'm hoping that they'll coalesce a bit as I write. We're coming to the end of our Chicago visit, I think (although it's tempting to stay here), and I would like to see everyone in one room again. It's been great - we went to quarter beers at a bar with Joe, Claire, Lyrica, and Tiger on Tuesday night, after an hour and a half trek on the public transportation. The night ended with homemade brownies and vanilla ice cream at Joe's house. We went to Melissa's house for dinner Wednesday night, and invited Joe, and ended up staying over after a tasty lentil salad/green salad/nachos meal. Last night I went to a frisbee cookout for the current U of Chicago team, then we went to an MFA student's final art show, on the way back from which we caught a few minutes of the Rocky Horror Picture show, and after which Lyrica and I went back out and did a late night workout. Days were full of poking around the city, mostly Millennium Park and eventually the Art Institute, which is where we should have gone first and probably could have stayed the whole time. But a moment to pause and ponder the art show. The girl, Sara Black, had two(ish) pieces. The central piece was a platform upon which she walked, bent at the waist, pushing a long pole attached to a reciprocating pair of keystone shaped blocks set into a square holder. The motion was transferred somehow, although we couldn't figure out how even crouched on the ground looking at the inner workings under the platform, into energy, enough to light a single incandescent bulb in the next partitioned space over.
The second piece was a small portable hut that turned out to be something like a sauna, with a hotbox, a swinging bench, cedar walls, and a copper floor. At the bottom of the funnel-like copper floor there was a hole, and through that hole Sara inserted copper wire wicks, which gathered her sweat as she sat in the hut. The companion piece to the hut itself was an array of the sweat wicks, which were bluish crystal formations of salt.
Both pieces had a beautiful simplicity to them, and a nice consistency of aesthetic. They also spoke to a deep thought process, not only of how to create the physical objects, which clearly took a lot of planning and hard work, but also of what the objects meant and why those two objects were appropriate to create. I thought they were great reminders of the vast amount of energy that goes into the simplest things we take for granted, and intended to make one reconsider the necessity of artificial light and added salt. There's more, but I'm not done thinking about this show - I just wanted to capture it and hold it here for a moment, so that it can gather a few more thoughts.
BTW, it's dangerous to buy cookie dough. Since grabbing some Tuesday night when we came into town late and needed something to be dinner, I've been having constant cravings. Yesterday when we returned to the apartment, the package was missing, and though I had intended to share it, I had been looking forward to my next fix since lunchtime on Wednesday. It was rough not to find it waiting for me.
Anywhoo, Chicago has been lovely, a very slow blur. It's been hard to motivate in the morning, nicer instead just to sleep in, read my novel, wonder why I haven't been reading novels, and then poke around other folks apartments. Public transportation here could be significantly better, but other than that, the city gets my approval for its very concerted, well advertised efforts to become the greenest city around, and plus for its general niceness.
A few more thoughts: my novel is A Million Pieces, which I think I mentioned, and it's great. I know why I wasn't reading novels, it was all that freakin non-fiction for Sunday nights, both assigned and in hopes of creating a presentation, plus being fairly well occupied with the rest of life. But I think I'm remembering now how much better I feel when I've got a story in my life.
And, Irony. I haven't been a coke drinker since maybe ninth or tenth grade, when I quit because I realized that I was addicted, that it wasn't good for me as an athlete, and that the whole thing was a giant sugar scam that represented a lot of evil that I could easily excise from my life. So Wednesday as we're wondering around in the Loop, the Dr. Pepper folks are handing out this new berries and cream flavor, and Jake takes one, and one for me even though I say I won't drink it. We keep exploring, and at lunch he cracks his open and has it, which kind of saves our bitter veggie juices that were part of the lunch deal we found at this wacky downtown health food store cafe. I insist that he put the other in my bag, rather than carrying it around in the pocket of his coat that he's got tied around his waist.
Thursday morning, when we finally get out of the house around noon, I put on my bag and think there's something wrong. Down to the car we go, when we notice that I'm dripping. So it wasn't just the voices in my head telling me that my butt was getting wet. Open the bag and all seems fine, except that at the bottom of the bag is a punctured can of Dr. Pepper Berries and Cream and my Cannon Rebel G camera. Making love. Their sweet juices mingling. Or rather, the Dr. Pepper has assaulted my Cannon Rebel G, because there's no way that under normal circumstances my camera would have anything to do with the Dr.
So, bottom line, after much wiping, we've deposited the camera at Chicago's Central Camera, and will get an estimate, for which I paid $15, on Tuesday. That's what I get for not drinking coke, for offering to be kind and carry someone else's drink, and in the end, probably for being clumsy/careless enough to let a can of coke puncture in the bag where I was carting around my camera. Low point.
Now I'll leave you on that low point. Coming up, the great-unplanned adventure continues without reservations for campgrounds in the coming week! Oh, and I've added the second day of travels to my map. I will soon find a way to make said map more interesting, although I guess it won't be with all the fantastic pictures I'm taking.