Prangster in Chicago

Two nights in a row

Weekend, come back

There were no posts during the week because I was busy and nothing much happened. No that's a lie. I was just boring and bored. All I did after work was go to the Gap. Twice. (Woops. That's not entirely true. I went out on Tuesday night. Moby happened to be playing. I got home early at 12:30am and still woke up hungover the next day. Weird that I forgot about that.) This weekend, however, much happened. For example, fresh air entered my studio for the first time since I moved in last November. KB the superhero opened the weather protection layer on the main window near my desk. Hello spring.

On Friday night we went to an Ethiopian restaurant in Evanston and ate with our hands. And on Saturday night we went to Great Lake again. It's the cute pizza place in Andersonville I wrote about earlier this month. This time we had a full pizza that was made to order and sat at the communal table with four people who may or may not have been on a double date. Man, that pizza was delicious. I hope we're one visit closer to becoming regulars. Also we rented Dan in Real Life and American Gangster. I thought both were awesome. Steve Carell was as good in Dan as he was in Little Miss Sunshine, and the movie was about 50 times better than the complete waste of time that was The Family Stone. Question for my American readers: does your family play charades as often as they do in movies like these? And has anyone in your family ever fallen for their sibling's partner? You can tell me.

Plus I got this thing that hangs over my bathroom door from the Container Store. I'm not exaggerating when I say it's forever changed the feng shui of my studio.

And we drove out to see the Baha'i Temple in Wilmette, which is only one of seven Baha'i Temples in the world. Doesn't it look nice all lit up like this at night?

I finished off the weekend by buying a secondhand copy of Wonder Boys by Michael Chabon from the tiny bookstore that's next door to Intelligensia. It's the second book I've bought this month after having written books off completely. I think if I'm going to get back into books, I should only buy secondhand ones, and after I'm done, try to lend them to others or just give them away. I'm so green.

2008 so far

It's a third of the way through the year and I wanted to take a look back at how I've been doing with my resolutions. So here are the goals I set for myself back in January:

1. To give up my 2007 habit of drinking a Sprite Zero with every meal during the work week.
This one still sticks. I really considered throwing in the towel yesterday and having a Sprite Zero with my lunch, but I decided not to and just had water instead. Bor-ring.

2. To not buy one single magazine (except for Lucky, which I subscribe to because I have a shopping problem and it's 'The Magazine About Shopping'.)
I've stuck to this one too. Haven't paid for a single magazine yet this year.

3. To cook more adventurously at home.
Mmm, I dunno. Maybe this counts: I made three month's worth of pasta sauce earlier this week and have four Ziplock bags of the stuff in my freezer. Also I currently have all the ingredients in my fridge to make spring rolls. Maybe I'll do that tonight.

4. To see more of North America. And South America, if I can manage it.
I've been to Boston and DC, which were the two U.S. cities at the top of my list. So really I've fulfilled this goal. Simone will be down in Buenos Aires and Rio de Janiero next month, but I don't think it would be sane to go down for three days and spend around $1000. Airfares to South America are craaazy expensive.

5. To better manage my finances and avoid sticky cash-flow situations.
Yes, yes. I've totally been doing this one. I opened an HSBC online savings account and today I'm going to Washington Mutual to re-open an account there. They have free U.S. bank transfers and even free international bank transfers, so I can move money to my Australian account if I feel like it. But really, having reasonable travel goals and a "no shopping showdown" with Jessi helped the most.

6. To remember my plane tickets when I fly.
How sad it would be if I couldn't pull this one off...and had a repeat of this incident.

7. To never cross paths or make eye contact with my bitchy landlady.
This one is safe. She sold the building and moved down to Florida this month. There's a story that needs to be told relating to the sale of the building I live in, but I'm still too annoyed to talk about it right now. It's a timeless tale involving eBay, the laundry room and a tenant revolt.

8. To call my family more.
I think so. Maybe. My parents would probably disagree.

9. To take more photos, write more on this blog, spend more time thinking creatively.
This counts, right?

Okay, I'm out to get a coffee now then I'm going to do some work. I'd been meaning to do some work last night but instead fell asleep at 9:30 and woke up this morning at 9.

I feel the sky tum-ble-ling down, tum-ble-ling down

Yesterday morning at 4:37 we had an earthquake in Illinois. It was 5.2 on the Richter scale, which isn't bad. Everyone was asleep anyway, so it's like it never even happened. No injuries and no severe damage, though my coworker Heather said a brick fell out of her wall. Maybe it was suicide. I think I felt the earthquake, despite my body working overtime to digest the prime rib sandwich, massive onion rings and key lime pie I had the night before. No, I must've felt it because I remembered there was an earthquake in my dream that night. My dreams never lie.

This is America

I took my friend Randy out for his birthday tonight. We ate at J Alexander's, a restaurant with the slogan, "Straightforward American Food." Needless to say, I am so full right now all I can do is sit here and wait for my load of laundry to be done. Aren't those onion rings ridiculous? It looks like a freaking tree!

Best of DC: possibly the longest post ever

The weekend I was in Washington DC, April 11-13, was the tail-end of the National Japanese Cherry Blossom Festival. A lot of the pink petals were on the ground, but it was still really pretty around the Tidal Basin area and also along the streets in general. I stayed with a friend's friend who lives in Virginia, which is on the other side of the Potomac river, and is connected to DC by the same metro system. It's only 10 minutes away from downtown DC. Virginia is so freaking cute.

Oh, and newsflash, I had my first funnel cake after waiting in line for 20 minutes.

We went on a guided tour of the Capitol building lead by an intern at the office of the Illinois Senator. It's an awesome building. In fact, all of the monuments and museums were awesome. And the best part were they're all free! I loved the layout of the city, the height restrictions of the buildings, the clean and modern metro system, and the wide streets. DC doesn't have a big city feel, but it was a nice change of pace. It feels orderly. Like it always has on its serious face. Or maybe that's got to do with the fact I didn't see a single Gap (or enter a store, or buy anything apart from sunscreen) while I was there. For reals. I didn't buy a single thing apart from Starbucks coffee and sunscreen.

Above is the view of the National Art Gallery from a spot on the grass where I took a nap. And below, a Segway group at the back of the White House. Man, I don't care if I look like a fool. This summer I'm gonna be a total tourist and do a Segway tour here in Chicago. And I'm going to take photos.

This is the back of the White House. (Because my photo of the front of the White House isn't particularly good. There was a long, long line to get up close and I probably needed to pee.)

This dark place is the inside of the National Archives building, the room where the Bill of Rights, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution are stored. There's no natural light in there and the wait to get in, even if the line outside isn't bad at all, is around 40 minutes. I should point out that the documents are barely legible now. They're over 230 years old! But oddly, the Magna Carta, which is from the 1200s, is in great shape and the link still clear. It's in Latin though, so maybe that's why no one cares. Latin is so dead.

On Sunday afternoon before heading to the airport, we went to Arlington Cemetery, the military cemetery on the Virginia side of town. It was a really nice way to end the trip. I read in the travel guidebook that each tombstone can have one of around 20 symbols on it to represent the soldier's faith, like the cross, the Star of David, etc. If the soldier was atheist, they could choose to have an "atom" on there instead. I kept looking for one, but couldn't find it. Disappointing.


Above is the Arlington Memorial Amphitheater, made mostly of marble.

So that about wraps it up. Oh wait, how could I forget this. At Dulles Airport before the flight, I had a burger at Five Guys. It was the Best. Burger. Ever.

Senator Obama Goes to Africa

I went to a screening of the documentary, Senator Obama Goes to Africa, at the Skokie Theater last night. It was filmed back in August 2006 when Obama went on his first foreign diplomatic trip to the African continent and before he announced his presidential candidacy. The film's been available on DVD since late 2007, but with the momentum of Obama's presidential campaign, has been shown in a handful of theaters here in the U.S.

The documentary follows Obama as he meets with political figures, humanitarian workers, refugees and educators. In Kenya, he spoke at the University of Nairobi to students and professors, and also to crowds at a slum where 800,000 people live in a 1.5 mile radius. He visited his paternal grandmother with his wife and daughters. While there, he and his wife took a highly publicized AIDS test at a mobile clinic to encourage local couples to do the same.

He went to South Africa, where he spoke against the government's misinformation about AIDS/HIV and visited the prison where Nelson Mandela was jailed. He also went to Chad to hear stories from refugees of Darfur, where his English questions needed to be first translated to French, before being translated again to Arabic for the refugee women to answer. Everywhere he went, his presence pulled thousands -- if not tens of thousands -- of locals. It's a shameless cliche to say the film was inspiring, but guess what: it was inspiring. And it was a perspective of Africa we don't often see. One where the people are hopeful and happy and in the streets cheering.

After the brief screening, the film's Chicago-based producers, Bob Hercules and Keith Walker, stepped up to answer questions.

Here are some highlights from the Q&A:

- One of the first things the producers said was the Obama presidential campaign didn't have anything to do with the film, funding or otherwise. In fact, the two men only had about $50,000 in private funding, which was just enough to cover the travel expenses for the two of them, a camera guy and a sound guy. The producers had to pay for everything else out of their own pockets -- including the music, the stock footage, the production, and a $1,000 bribe when they touched down in Kenya so they could have their camera equipment unloaded. (Bob Hercules said they later got their money back after the Kenyan president intervened.)

- Even with all the press Obama gets on the campaign trail, the producers said the film doesn't get much coverage in the mainstream media. "No one wants to touch it," they said, due to equal time for press coverage of candidates. They've been turned down by all the TV channels, though they believe they shouldn't have a problem finding a channel to screen it after the election. (This would explain why it's only 52 minutes.)

- Ironically, the film hasn't had any trouble finding an international audience, having already sold to nine foreign countries, including Australia and two distributors in France. The Obama people have also bought some footage to include in campaign ads.

- There was a CBS journalist in the audience too, who piped in with his own stories of traveling with the Obama posse in Africa. I missed his name, but just did some Googling and it was probably Mike Flannery, the political editor from CBS 2. I would definitely recognize his voice though. He has a deep, booming voice and enjoyed dropping extended beats into his stories. He wrote some blog entries here about his own experience, including this one from August 26, 2006:

"There is, of course, some talk of Obama running for President back in the U.S.A. (something he still says he has no intention of doing.) Were he to run, it would be a battle royale. But Kenya has a presidential election coming up, too. Based on what I've seen in the past week, if Obama ran HERE, he might just win by acclamation."

Ha.

Good weather, that

Hello, was Saturday's weather perfect or what? It probably hit 16 or 17 celcius* here in Chicago. Everyone was out and about! The lakeside paths were experiencing heavy traffic from runners, bikers and dogwalkers. And there were shadows. Real shadows! Cast by the sun!

I wore my thongs (aka. flip flops) out and for a few blocks, I just had a t-shirt on. Yeah, that's right. I was walking around outside with just a t-shirt on. I'm sorry about the dramatic italics, but this is huge. This hasn't happened since October 2007! My feet were chuffed to be experiencing my (not so) new neighborhood for the first time and my pasty white arms were squinting from the sun. Of course, I quickly got cold again and had to put my jacket back on. Some ambitious people were walking around in thongs, shorts and t-shirts. I would have done the same, alas I am not crazy.

We tried a new pizza place in Andersonville called Great Lake for late-lunch. My coworker Hugh is friends with the couple who own it and a few weeks ago the place received a great review from Drive Thru, the restaurant blog of Gapers Block, "a site about Chicago." We'd tried to visit a few weekends ago, but couldn't find it even though we stood less than 15m away from the storefront at the intersection of Clark and Balmoral. The reason is that Great Lake is a bit off the main drag, and they don't have a sign out front. It's almost as if they're hiding. Or wearing the costume of a boring store.

But yesterday, we walked up Balmoral to Clark from the other direction and found it. It was a happy moment. And oh man, the store is so incredibly cute. Plus the pizza was great. And the wife was sitting at the counter knitting with a ball of twine. Maybe to make a net? I'm not sure. I thought it was cool she was knitting with twine. I've decided we're going to be regulars.

* The word "celcius" is getting red-lined by Typepad's spell-check. I just looked it up and apparently "celcius" is a common misspelling. It's meant to be "celsius" after a Swedish guy from the 1700s called Anders Celcius. I mean, Celsius.

Here are a few photos from Great Lake and also one from the place where fancy boats rest during the summer. The word I'm looking for might be "dock".

I guess I had a smudge on my lens. You can see the smudges in the top left corner of the first and last photos. Grr.

I heart Joshua Ferris

I went to Borders on Michigan Ave after work tonight to hear a guy I didn't know named Joshua Ferris read from his novel, Then We Came to the End. I'd never been to a real book reading before (the launch of the UTS student anthology doesn't count) and I imagined a room crowded with people sitting and people standing with tape recorders and microphones. Lots of those people wore reading glasses and scarves. But in reality, there were only about 20 people. And amongst those 20 people were the author's father, two of his old colleagues and three Borders employees. It was pitifully intimate.

The good news though, was Joshua Ferris read for about ten minutes and I swooned the entire time. The entire time, I tell you. First, his story is a satire set in a Chicago ad agency. Sold. Second, there's an annoying office co-ordinator character called Kathy. Hey, I'm a Kathy. Sold again. Third, he said in the Q&A session that he was a copywriter for three years. Well, whaddyaknow, I'm a copywriter. So. Seriously. Sold.

I lined up for 15 minutes after the Q&A to get a signed copy and happily paid $13.99 plus tax. I started reading it on the way home and I love it. So clever and hilarious and same-as-my-life. This totally makes up for the time I made the stupid decision to skip a lunchtime George Saunders reading because I was worried about the time crunch. George Saunders deserves better than that.