Oblations at the Shrine of the Pig-God, or, How I Ended my Vegetarianism: a kind of review

Two Saturdays ago at The Publican, I sacrificed my vegetarianism upon the altar of a hog-headed god. Consider this a eulogy.

Ways I Amuse Myself on the Train: because everybody loves a list.

1. I play a Stupid Game that occasionally results in me laughing to myself maniacally like a cartoon villain, much to the consternation of those in the immediate vicinity.

So, this past weekend, I'm on my way to work at Coobah. Just like every other weekend, I head out the door of my apartment to the Western Brown line stop at a pace just above a walk and just under a run, because, just like every weekend, I've left the house with little time to spare. Fortunately, the Brown line is not long in coming.
Here commences the drama: the train starts to pull into the station and I ready myself. I only have a few seconds. I keep my face casual, but my body taut and ready for action. I'm already at the eastern end of the platform; this is the best position from which to achieve my objective. As the train pulls in to the station I have to decide quickly whether to get into the back of the second car or the front of the third car. I hesitate for a moment as the train settles to a stop and the doors slide open. No time to wait! Doors closing! I have to decide now! Without further deliberation, I quickly enter the front of the third car and take a seat facing that door.
The ride is short. A mere 7-9 minutes from Western to Southport. As the train pulls into the Southport stop, I stand and prepare for the moment of truth. I position myself directly in front of the door through which I had entered such a short time ago. I could, if necessary, quickly move towards the door at the rear of the car, but I stick to my original decision. It's the front door of the third car or bust. Back at the Western stop I'd made a call, now all I can do is wait and see if I made the right one. I'm ready for the moment in which my mettle will be proved. Do I have the stuff it takes to....the train stops. The doors slide open. I step down onto the platform directly in front of the exit stairs. I have won! Goddamit I've won!
Not only have I arrived at Southport in the closest possible train car to the exit stairs, I have actually exceeded all expectations and arrived right in front of the stairs. Right. In front. Of the stairs. Between the stairs and myself there is nothing but a foot or two of platform. I am Queen!
Oh, poor woman who must backtrack from the front car to get to the stairs. How worthless it must feel to take those extra steps back over ground the train had already passed. Better luck next time sucker! Oh, guy who's walking aaaaalllll the way from the very last car to get to the exit stairs...boy, you really blew it huh? Wow. That was a poor choice on your part, did you really think that the last car was the way to go? Amateur. Learn from a true master, you neophyte cta riders. Observe my excellence and marvel! Mwhahaha Mwahaha!!!
And this, friends, is why I will never in my whole life be cool.

2. I look at people's shoes...and I judge those people.
I deeply enjoy looking at people's shoes while on the train. It's a bit of a fixation. When a person has the taste to choose an excellent pair of shoes and the grace to proudly wear those shoes in public I feel that person should be respected. I might not know anything else about that man or woman, but I can respect the manner in which they choose to present their feet to the world. If we chance to make eye contact, I will probably give that person a subtle nod that says "you, friend, you know what shoes to wear."
When, on the other hand, a person's choice of footwear leaves something to be desired, I tend to become rather agitated and distressed on that person's behalf. For instance, I am frequently frustrated when women wear bright, white athletic shoes with their work attire. Especially if a woman is, say, wearing a skirt suit with black tights and then has decided that her shiny, white, extra cushioned New Balance aerobics shoes are just the thing to wear on the way to work. I get a little upset. I mean, I get it--I get that if you have to take cta and walk to the train and your work shoes are probably uncomfortable and it's better for your feet to wear the sneakers blah, blah.
But, my dears, when you are on the train you are still in public (this also holds for those who choose to wait until they are on the train to apply eyeliner, brush their hair, or clip their fingernails--the train does not magically become your bathroom just because you got up late). People can still see you. I can still see you and I judge you dear fellow train-riders. I judge.
There are comfortable shoes you could change into post-work that would go better with your outfit than those jazzercize shoes. I swear to you, there are a number of options that would do more justice to, well, to all of us really.
Also, and this goes out to both men and women, Crocs are not shoes. Please make note. Thank you.
Now, before I expose the empty, cold, judgmental shallows of my soul any further I will end discussion of this topic by saying that it's not all about judging people based on their shoes. Some of my fixation involves, pure, simple pleasure: I like to look at men's dress shoes. I just really like to look at them a lot, all judgment aside. I will stare at a sharp pair of well-polished leather dress shoes for the whole damned train ride. If the neatly hemmed cuff of a well-tailored pant hangs at just the right point above those shoes...ladies and gentlemen...I might just miss my stop.

3. I listen to the conversations of tweens, because as much as I find tweens on the train to be one of the great scourges of our society, they can also be pretty damned hilarious when they aren't stepping on my shoes.

Example of tween conversation #1:
Tween A (sitting behind me, can't see her very well): ....SO anyWAY, he TOTALLY thought I was 21!
Tween B (sitting next to me, turned around so she can talk to her friend. She periodically thwacks me with her backpack as she adjusts in her seat. She looks not a day over 15): So, how old are you?
Tween A: I'm sixteen!
Tween B: I'm sixteen too, but people TOTALLY think I'm, like, 24 ALL the time.
Tween A: Oh my god!
(conversation then dissolves into a series of high-pitched squeaks halfway between a giggle and a squeal. This is a sound that I feel is unique to tweenaged girls. It is clear at the least that no other living creatures make that sound--not even bats. As for the unholy dead, who can say what sounds they emit as they languish in purgatory? Perhaps they squeak and giggle in order to better torment the living. )

Example of Tween conversation #2 (this one actually took place in the H&M dressing room, but it could have just as easily been on the train)

Tween A: So, Billy** was all like, saying he was going to fail 8th grade ON PURPOSE just so that he could still go to school with me next year!

Tweens B, C, and possibly D: (chorus of) OH my GOD! I can't believe it! (din of aforementioned squeal-giggle)

Tween A(with obvious pride in her voice): I KNOW, isn't that CRAZY!!! But, I told him not to do it, because, it would like, totally RUIN his life. I mean, he'd have to take the tests to get into high schools all OVER again and then he probably wouldn't even get into a good college!!!
Tweens B, C and possibly D: (assorted sounds that eventually rise to a pitchedness so high as to only be discernable by dogs and other animals)

Oh, Tween A, you are truly wise beyond your years.

**names have been changed to protect the innocent--and also because I can't really remember.

4. I try to guess which guys on the train are going to be posting missed connections later and for which women, or men.
Yes, I confess I read the Craigslist Missed Connections on a fairly regular basis. Just how regular is that basis? Dear reader, my ladylike discretion and natural sense of shame prohibit that I answer that question; "fairly regular" will have to do. I enjoy the Missed Connections from an academic perspective, but let's be honest, I look both to see if I've been Missed Connected and because sometimes they're kind of funny.
Anyhow, regardless of why I read them or how often, the fact stands that a large percentage of these Missed Connections take place on public transit. One frequently sees posts along the lines of the following:

You: Red hair, beautiful green eyes, wearing a blue coat and reading Cat's Cradle on the Brown Line last night. Me: The guy sitting across the aisle from you pretending to read The New Yorker; really I couldn't take my eyes off of you. I should have said something. I know this is a long shot, but if you read this, coffee sometime?

I am deeply curious about who would make such a post. Therefore when I am not looking at a man's shoes on the train, I am often creepily looking at his eyes to see if he is wistfully/furtively looking at someone else. I wonder about the women as well, but tend to wonder about the men more since I usually read the m4w missed connections. There really isn't anything more to say about this particular amusement, other than to mention that one of the best "Missed Connections" I ever read went something like this (this is an abbreviation and paraphrasing that does no justice to the original post, but the last line is pretty much verbatim):

Me: I'm new to the city and just looking to meet some nice girls to hang out and have fun.
I'm tall and athletic.
I would survive a zombie invasion.

Since reading that post, it has become an additional, minor, cta amusement to wonder who would and who would not survive a zombie invasion. Think about it sometime. It's fun.

5. I panic a little bit.
Examples:
--I see that wretched new ad they have in some of the train cars now that says, all cheery-like, "Bedbugs are back!!! Find out what you can do to protect your mattress!"
I panic.

--I realize that the rather large dude sitting right over there has snot all up in his mustache and doesn't seem to realize it.
I panic.

--The train stops right in the middle of the freaking bridge over the river and the lights go out.
I panic.

----A dude lights up a crack pipe right there in the aisle without the slightest attempt to conceal what he's doing.
I panic.

--An older woman pops a squat and starts to pee right there on the train, while it's moving. I sit mesmerized and awkwardly focus on the ads posted along the ceiling. Guy sitting across from me says, "Hey, you might want to lift up your feet." I look down to see a rivulet of urine rapidly approaching.
I panic (and I lift up my feet).


6. I listen to snatches of businessmen's conversations.
For some reason I am ridiculously amused by the conversations of businessmen--but only in brief bits. So, not if I'm waiting on a table of businessmen and have to hear it over the course of a whole lunch, or heaven-forbid, if I actually find myself in conversation with one and have to listen to a bunch of stuff about...whatever... for more than 1 minute. But, I am very, very much amused when I overhear bits like "I TOLD him to move the funds to X account!" as I walk past someone on the train platform. Or "McCloughlin's a real piece of work, huh? I couldn't believe he said that to Goldworth's face," "The client really fucked us over on that one, I'm going to have to call Miami about it" "Always. Be. Closing." etc, etc.

Because I myself am so removed from the world of business-- living in a hippy-dippy world of rainbows, tofu, and poetry as I do--pretty much any little bit of conversation I overhear from suited types tickles my fancy. It's a little bit as though one were to see a reality tv star in real life. It's not like you're seeing someone really big like Angelina Jolie or Johny Depp, but it's still a little bit exciting. "Oh, hey, it's that one chick from Rock of Love/The Bachelor/Survivor! Neat! She doesn't/does look as scary and orange in real life!" With the suits it's kind of like, "hey! Business guys say stuff like that in the movies and those real life guys sound kind of like that! Neat! They aren't quite as good looking in real life!"
I am particularly delighted if the suits in question do any of the following: refer to people by last names; mention the words and phrases "moving assets," or "capitalizing on investments"; light cigars; give instructions to their secretary over the phone; curse emphatically.
I always want to clap my hands like a little kid and say "ooo! ooo!Do it again!"

7. Hmm. There isn't really a seven I guess. Ending a list with six things just seems kind of weird. Number seven could be sleeping I guess? I do that on the train a lot. Not really as a form of amusement I guess--just as something that happens. Sometimes I pretend I'm texting people just to look occupied? I don't know, any ideas?

Hyde Park is Where the Heart is: a one-sided perspective; part I

Hyde Park feels, in some ways, more like home to me than anywhere else in the world. So many years have passed since I last visited Santa Cruz, CA, the city in which I spent my formative years, that it has become more of a mythic fairyland than a hometown. I tiptoe around my memories of that place so as not to destroy them. Corvallis, OR, where my parents live now and where I spent my Junior and Senior years of high school, never has really felt like home. My parents and brother are there so it is home in a certain sense, and I have enjoyed good times there, but I never spent enough time in Corvallis to feel any sense of ownership or belonging; I was always the newcomer. Hyde Park, on the other hand, is real and it is mine. For going on nine years now, Hyde Park has been a constant in my life. A place I know and that I have felt a part of as I have grown and changed and transitioned from adolescence to, an admittedly tenuous, adulthood. I have fallen in and out of love in Hyde Park, seen friends married there, and dealt with death there. I no longer live in Hyde Park, and there are reasons for that, but when I go back it feels like home. Walking or driving down 55th street now that I live elsewhere in the city produces all of the sense of nostalgia, vague awkwardness, slight regret and, as a proper UofC alum, gnawing bitterness that ought to go with a hometown visit. It seems fitting, therefore, to inaugurate my loosely Chicago-related blog with a post about my home within home. There's no way that I could sum up Hyde Park nor my experience of it in one post, so this will be the first of several posts in which I hope to delve into some of the places and memories I associate most strongly with the neighborhood.

Let us begin at the beginning. I learned Chicago-ness in and around Hyde Park and, more specifically, in and around the University of Chicago. UofC taught me that sense of defiant defeatism that clings to the homecity of the Cubs and the 2007 Superbowl Bears. UofC's slightly wounded sense of, "we're just as good as the Ivy Leagues no matter what anyone thinks dammit!" is, I think, rather analogous to the city's general, "we don't care what everyone else thinks, we're crazy about the Bears and we'll pack Cubs games" attitude. Hyde Park and UofC are also the places around which I learned about seasons. As someone born and bred in the mild West, where a day below 50 degrees Fahrenheit is a day on which to wear one's winter coat, my delicate hide was brutally shocked by its first winter in Chicago. "People aren't meant to live like this" I often grumbled as I stumbled to class on the blocks of ice that I had formerly called my feet. But I soon learned that the brutality of Winter and the cruelty of the icy joke that masquerades as Spring around these parts provokes a certain glee once the first signs of real Spring and Summer appear. This giddy, nearly insane, euphoria simply cannot be understood by anyone who hasn't fought though the winter here. Those first, brave, daffodils dotting the campus walks and pushing up in yards seem like heaven-sent drops of mercy bestowed by a suddenly forgiving god after the punishment of below-freezing days in March. I still believe that Hyde Park boasts more and prettier daffodils than any other part of the city, which may just be my skewed perspective from the fact that they were the first daffodils to which I really paid attention. Spring is not the only season I discovered in Hyde Park; there are few places in the city that rival the splendor of UofC's campus in the fall when all of the somber gray of the buildings briefly diminishes behind explosions of crimson and orange leaves. Stoicism, overly-enthusiastic appreciation of summer, the conviction that ketchup has no place on a hot dog, and an eastward-dependent sense of direction are all aspects of living in this city that I cultivated, or that were cultivated in me, along the shaded (and sometimes shady) streets of Hyde Park and under the grim shadows of UofC's gargoyles.

The University of Chicago. Of course a University so immersed in theory would have a vague and open-to-interpretation mascot: we were known as the Maroons. Maroon is a dark, reddish-brown color--maybe a little darker than the color of blood. Maroons also were renegade African slaves living in the hills of Haiti and other parts of the West Indies. In addition, a maroon is someone who has been deserted on an island as punishment. Usually left with a musket, a little water and some ammunition, the unfortunate maroon has to fend for him or herself far away from civilization and from the comforts of home and family. This latter definition of "maroon" is the one I think of most when I think of UofC's unusual mascot. When I become a sour-faced, unpleasant old lady, who will collect beer bottles as pets due to my allergy to cats, I think that I will be able to trace the seeds of my misanthropy and misery back to the years I spent at the University of Chicago. That cold, gothic, monument to self-importance and sadism perches over the Midway like some gloomy bird of prey, or perhaps like an intellectual version of an ogre from a fairy tale: it lures young, bright minds into its lair, then breaks their bones and crushes their spirits and grinds it all up to make its bread. As a Lost fan, and for the purposes of self-indulgently belaboring the maroon metaphor, I might compare Hyde Park to the mysterious Island in which we young students found ourselves abandoned and the University would be like the smoke monster that makes short work of many of us, and sucks the souls out of the rest. I say all of this, of course, with no disrespect intended to my Alma Mater. After all, the University is the reason that I ended up in Chicago. It has shaped my entire adult life and adult mind, and not just by turning me into a bitter and socially awkward misanthrope, but also in very genuinely positive ways. I wouldn't trade my UofC education for any other and really, all rumors aside, fun was in no short supply. No single story can sum up the University and its relationship to Hyde Park, nor is there any one moment I can think of that really defines how the University shaped my life, but I think that a very abridged version of my First Year experience might help illustrate the way I, and at least a few others, feel about the place.

During my first year at UofC, I lived in a cinder block edifice that surely had previously housed dangerous criminals if one were to judge by its labyrinthine interior and its grimly functional exterior "design." "Squat" is really the only word that can sum up the overall look of the building, well, that and maybe also "ugly." The prison theme continued in Woodward's cafeteria, which may not have been the worst food one could eat, but which most certainly was not good. Indeed, Poor Mr. or Ms. Woodward (I can't be bothered to look up which it was) must have been a rather unloved donor to have his or her name attached to such an unlovely building.

Questionable food, terrifying basement, and depression-inducing "architecture" aside, we band of 18 and 19 year-old misfits marched into our first year with as much boldness as we could muster, and probably more than was warranted. During those first weeks we made our awkward alliances, and began to form our little community. Not yet sure who our real friends would turn out to be, we would march down 57th street in groups of no less than 15 to try out some restaurant or other or to go down to Point and walk around. In those days, dear reader, a "facebook" to us was a compact, bound pamphlet, printed on actual paper, and containing black and white photos of everyone in the entering class with the student's name, hometown, and dorm printed underneath each photo. Ah, how we would huddle together in the cold, angular bosom of Mother Woodward and discuss whose picture was the hottest. Based upon the results of our highly empirical study of the relative hotness of our classmates, we would then determine with whom we hoped we would share a class or perhaps a table in the cafeteria. Everyone was new and everyone reached out with the same tentative yet eager sense of anticipation as we adjusted to our new lives and tried to find our niches.

The quarter moved forward and we faced our classes and all other aspects of First Year life with varying degrees of aplomb. Ah, the sweet sounds of panic when those first papers and exams came back bearing Bs and even Cs, much to the shock of the cocksure. Oh, the gentle squeak of chalk as students worked together on their calc problem sets late into the night and the cries of despair that accompanied o-chem problem sets. Oh, how the dulcet tones of First Year gossip rustled through the halls after every instance in which the somewhat less dulcet tones of undergraduate horniness finding happy relief had rocked those same halls. "Who had gotten sexiled by his or her roommate the night before?" we might whisper, "Who had tiptoed out of whose room? Who was hot, but turned out to be kind of a dick?" These were the questions that occasionally (okay, often) were as important to us as "What exactly is Rousseau's State of Nature? Ayn Rand...thoughts?" and "What does the jungle really stand for in Heart of Darkness?" And, let us not forget the gentle sounds of inexperienced drinkers unburdening their troubled stomachs upon the unfortunate carpets. Nor let us be so remiss as to neglect to mention the nuanced panoply of odors that hovered around said carpets at any given time. It may speak to the uniqueness of UofC, or it may speak only to the nerdiness of myself and the people with whom I associated, that as often as we gossiped about sex and drugs and all of the normal things a First Year college student might gossip about, I remember equally often sitting up in the lounge with other students debating topics such as the true nature of altruism until 5am or so.

And then, there was the ping pong. How many long afternoons and late nights did I spend playing ping pong in the Woodward lounge? The answer to that question is something like, "how many afternoons and nights are there in a school year?": other students might be late to class because they had gone to a party the night before, I would be late because I had played ping pong all night. Heated rivalries were forged around that ping pong table, new games, some cruel and unusual, were invented and new enemies were made every time someone trying to read on the couch got hit with a ping pong ball by accident. Other games were part of life at Woodward as well, such as the incredibly awesome Marvel vs. Streetfighter arcade game on the ground floor and the poker games that may or may not have funded the educations of some of my fellow students.

Despite any complaints we might have had about good old Woodward, and we had many, we actually loved that dorm. Its halls were wide and perfect for sitting and having loud, silly arguments until someone trying to sleep or to study told us to shut up. It's lounges were worn and odiferous, but large, and there was a tunnel from the main building to the cafeteria so that one didn't have to walk outside across the courtyard in the winter. We could go out the back door to play ultimate frisbee and touch football in the spring and fall, and out the front door to play broomball in the winter. In our own way, we blossomed in those halls. We forged community there and developed deep bonds that helped us to weather all of the pain and anxiety the UofC threw at us in those early days and months of our college education.

The next year they tore Woodward down.