and most importantly, i have been alive. and writing. here's a strange, distant memory:
before my hair turned dark. before black tee shirts and baggy jeans. before catcher in the rye. before middle school.
before i hit the depressing hilarity of puberty, i thought a lot about myself dying. dying in some self-induced accident. sure, technically, i was thinking of suicide, but i never said the word. i never said it aloud in my head.
like any kid growing out of childhood, death was becoming a very very real possibility and i obsessed over it constantly. i waited patiently for the phone to ring and tell me that my mom was killed in a car accident. getting called to the front office to be informed my dad passed away. and it became steadily more prevalent. i thought about it when laughing at mystery science theater 3000 episodes. i thought about it while peeing. i thought about it while feeding the dogs and chickens. while reading my mom's cosmo. while pulling textbooks out of my desk.
my tiny eleven year old body, which still voluntarily chose to wear floral leotards to school, had come up with a new game. how long could i go without thinking about dying? it felt a lot like that absurd dare to not think about breathing. as soon as you thought about breathing, it seemed impossible to make it involuntary again.
i considered myself "curious" when i decided i would die voluntarily. i had an almost full container of perfume my parents gave me the christmas before. not particularly my favorite scent, i would still occasionally spray it on my barbies anyhow. and i decided to drink it, poison myself and see. thinking back on it, i'm not sure if i meant to "look down at my lifeless body being shaken and cried over" as a ghost (i was a child!) or just rid myself of the constantly overwhelming thoughts of dying. certainly, it was much much different than the thoughts of suicide i collected during my teen years and probably much different thoughts of suicide than that which plagues actual adults. maybe every suicide thought is distinct from each other.
obviously, i didn't go through with it. i don't know why. i think i had a coin toss in my head to choose my fate. i was a very silly child with very trivial ways of thinking about heavyweight subjects. and as an adult, i have tendencies to act the same way. only, i leave dying thoughts alone. i never turn over that stone. i never know if i can trust myself to think about it again. occasionally, when around my friends, when i feel safe and immortal, i allow myself to think about dying.
and it is therapeutic to think about it in a healthy way. i'm working up to the point where i can conjure up emotions and words about dying and not push it around, quickly changing my mind's thoughts. the older i get, the smaller of a threat death becomes, however counterintuitive it seems.
anyway, my perfume poison memory is something i think about on new year's eve. strange and distant.
i just caught the end of this episode of the dog whisperer. here's a short clip. watch with your volume turned ON:
sure, ok, whatever lady. i'm definitely not going to judge somebody's non-harmful lifestyle, but jesus, this lady embodies everything i remember about LA. ba-da-da-DA! did you hear the background song? tchaikovsky's dance of the sugar plum fairy with accidental flats and sharps. and nothing (NOTHING) signifies cu-KOO! cu-KOO! more than playing a classical song with accidental flats and sharps. good song.
of course, it lead me to find this video. and it's kinda long so at least watch the first few seconds:
how does one acquire the hobby of playing glass harps? does it come about through homelessness? you'd need that perfect combination of restlessness to put yourself through glass harp training but still be excruciatingly bored enough to sit down and fill up 50 wine glasses. no matter, amazing talent.
afterward, youtube suggested to me this video. also kinda long, just watch the first few seconds:
again, amazing talent in that why-am-i-laughing sort of way. nice. normal. metal guitar.
unfortunately it holds no weight when compared to the rock stardom of this next video i found:
um. so. many. questions.
is this world of warcraft? why is the camera having a seizure? what the fuck is he flying in? how is it flying? why does he have blow-up doll face? is this a snowstorm or meteor shower? why was that elf not moving? wait. how did the elf and guitarist get from the ground to the flying refrigerator? AND WHATEVER YOU DO, WATCH UNTIL 1:43 when a blonde bimbo starts dancing like she just dropped acid during a coma. even after all this nonesense, the part most likely to give me nightmares was at 1:46 when the elf grabs his crotch, thug-like, and motherfuckin' STARES at the camera. alas, the more you learn, seems like the less you ever knew!
the truly significant act of finding all these new videos is that it forced me to look up the spelling of Tchaikovsky. Here, i learned i've been pronouncing it 'Tchai-cow-sky' all these years. i blame my poor pronunciation on the Beethoven movies, of which i was fond of in the early 90s. I'm pretty sure the family named one of Beethoven's pups, tchaikovsky, and fuck me if that little girl didn't call him "chai-chow-sky" or "chai-cow-sky" every single time. that's what i get for learning russian language pronunciation through a slack-jawed eight year old.
tuesday blues. i searched the interweb for good deals/free schtuff to do in chicago. these museums claimed to be free on tuesdaze:
adler planetarium chicago academy of sciences museum of contemporary art int'l museum of surgical science art institute of chicago
my instructions were super psychotic. i had to make absolutely sure there was no chance of getting lost. i only had 6 hours to enjoy all this free bounty and something like 7 miles to travel in between.
lucky me, i thought, it'll be a warm day. the snow's melting.
my walk down lincoln was uneventful. i had smoke blown in my face by stoned 30-somethings.
the academy of science was invisible. i wandered a small park drenched in puddles, asking the cyclists where the fuck lincoln park west was and running up to street signs and crying on park benches when i couldn't find it. my dad called to say hi, which kind of set me straight again. i already wasted an hour looking for this museum so fuck it. i'll just move on to my next destination. the international museum of surgical sciences.
by the time the 151 picked me up, it was pouring. everything about this rain was opposite of new mexico rain. this, chicago rain, hurt me. it weighed me down. i could physically feel each raindrop on my coat and hat. heavy, heavy gray raindrops. my first museum trip was bust but i was moving on. down lakeshore and into the grim, gothic museum of surgery.
i'm sitting at brickyard waiting to be picked up or at the very least wink-winked at. let me explain.
so, there i was, sitting at home half-ironically watching lifetime christmas specials (only the best, baby!) and taking pictures of myself looking bored and in ill-repair. too lazy to delve back into my kafka short story book. too unmotivated to study for any kind of silly chemistry grad school exam. too full to eat. i'm just sloth-like tonight.
but still active enough to drink beers, think and write on blog. let's see ... i hate 'stay-at-home' nights, which is exactly what i'm doing right now. i hate that i have a body like a 21 year old college student and i might be wasting it. i hate paying for beers and drugs when i might be able to acquire them through superficial means. i.e. what can the average looking girl can get for free?
this is where i decided to conduct a social experiment. let's see if i can get a free drink by changing variables about my person. whereby, free drink = pick-up line = substantial wink wink = offer to fuck = offered phone number = increased self-esteem. and also, whereby, variables may include:
amount of time since i washed my hair, dark stripper eye make-up bra vs. braless tight clothes bright clothes heels vs. flats (remember i'm 5'7'' on a shitty day, 5'8'' on proud ones. some guys have issues with tall girls. maybe?) brooding moody overtly sexual mysterious straight hair curly hair perfume vs. no perfume unable to hold my liquor demeanor (i.e. underage babe) minding my own business eyeing the guys first pheromones (this, unfortunately, depends solely on where i am on my cycle) pants vs. dress red lipstick vs. chapstick glasses or not tomboyish seemingly busy seemingly bored dressed up as dorm rat (i.e. appearing to be 18 or thereabout) dressed as my age (i.e. saggy diaper pants??? i.e. what the fuck do 24 year old albuquerque residents dress as?) dressed as an art student dressed as a rich girl dressed as a dyke hair up vs. hair down
etc. etc. etc. as you can see!
my control will be composed of normal me, which i will describe now:
body is curvy and slightly average. body is composed of slightly rounded ass, but nothing to be proud of. body is composed of b-cups until recently when i bought a c-cup bra (this means i still have perky tits but they're large, like no less than one and a half handfuls of mammary glands and fatty tissue per ... unit?) body is composed of wide hips and longs legs. height is 5'7'' [note to reader: i'm not being a dbag here, about my qualities. every girl under the age of 25 or before pregnancy, whichever come last, have these exact same qualities.] tan skin, basically (to be slightly more descriptive: my arms, shoulders, and legs have always been very dark, i would say, dark as if both my parents were native. my face, because of sunblock, has always been light brown, like milky-tan gas station cappuccino. my tits and ass, of course, could be mistaken for mary catherine o'donnell's ass and tits, i've never gotten sun to those parts.) hair is longer than shoulder length. hair is black (hair is actually a plethora of colors, which of course matters no more, since bars will always have shitty beer goggles lighting.) hair is greasy when not washed every 15 hours, therefore, hair is usually greasy.
and i find it inexplicably difficult to describe my face. i've been told i'm a 7 so let's stick with that, however depressed it makes me feel.
everything else can be altered for the experiment. clothes, personality, hair style, demeanor, etc.
ON TO THE EXPERIMENT!!!
wait a sec. you know what? as i write, i realize that this is a kinda, maybe, cool social experiment (when will i ever again have this c-cup, tiny waist, long leg thing going on for me?) so i should try to plan my night better than i did tonight.
in the future i'll label these posts as social experiment. see ya then.
my eyes opened. the sun was bright. the night ended. i stretched my legs and stared at the walls for another 45 minutes. sore and confused from the passing of sunshine p., my mouth tasted different. my fingers were longer. uncomfortable in my body. i needed to get out of the house.
the chicago history museum (link!) is free on mondays so i rubbed my eyes clean and brushed my yellowing teeth to go out. didn't have time to pluck the brows but who the fuck cares? under thirty pounds of winter wear, i may as well have had a mustache.
on my walk down lincoln, i found "old town". wikipedia has this to say about it:
still today, the forced removal of Native peoples living in and around Chicago is jarringly clear in the great city. i didn't come across one Native American while in town. what has the city of chicago done to rectify their racist actions from the 19th century? this is something i will investigate and report back.
wikipedia also tells me that this was the center of the midwest hippie kingdom. ok. sure. lol. all two blocks of it.
please stop buying real christmas trees to decorate and admire for two weeks and then throw out. it's so beyond wasteful. buy the plastic kind. or better yet draw a picture of one and glue photos of dick knipfing on it. it'll preserve the christmas traditions and make the funny funny happen simultaneously. basically, i feel like a piece of shit fake-out green peace advocate right now. let's agree that it wouldn't kill you to tell your mom about fake christmas trees.
now, observe the bed that abraham lincoln died in:
minus the post mortem stains.
just based on their wall color choice and wall font, you'd think the checagou exhibit would be prosaic. it's not bad. it's a little too 9th grade american history textbook-y but they make up for it by being COMPLETELY FREE ON MONDAYS. fair.
it feels so good to say 'beaver' and really mean it.
basically each diorama had a button you could press to hear commonplace chicago sounds from their respective times. my favorite would have been the fiddle song, representative of 1880s party music, except it wasn't long enough or unabashedly loud either. of course, the fiddle song led me to seek out my favorite old west movie song as recreated by zz top in back to the future 3.
this is mark beaubien. he and his wife created the hotel and tavern, sauganash, around 1830, basically inventing chicago's first studio 54 environment complete with overtly erotic facial hair and hoop skirts that would blow your mind. faux-hawk!
photos of immigrant families:
originally i figured it was a poorly attended exhibit but no, it was just the decorations on the hallway to the bathrooms.
history of catholocism in chicago exhibit. i never went in.
there was also a pretty cool exhibit about couture gowns worn by prominent Chicagoan women from the 1860s to about now. the cool part was that it focused on the haute couture of each individual dress, rather than the details of Mrs. Richie Rich, Esq.'s life and social charity balls.
so it was a no photo zone but i wrote down some interesting notes about the exhibit. i'll post em separately.
k, so i moved on to the world's fair exhibit.
i fell in love with the 1930s poster artwork. it was so revealing. audacious. i was the only one walking the exhibit and imagined it to be my opulent french country estate.
i eavesdropped on the hurried conversations of museum curators while in this room. i like their job. i could dissect aesthetic as they do.
i took this pic bc it reminded me of the glass blowing show connell and i watched when we were stoned. we weren't really stoned but why the fuck did we watch a guy make a glass business card holder for 35 minutes?
1907 telephone operators waiting for the l.
the 'father of chicago', jean baptiste pointe du sable. he was the first settler on the banks of lake michigan where chicago now stands. and something about a fur-trader. born in haiti. idk, wikipedia kind of did an assy job of describing the importance of jean. he was in at least 6 out of the 10 exhibits in the history museum.
french?! french? yesssssss! lane and ashley's apartment has that adorable unique french architecture that makes me wet. in my mouth. salivating? this sentence has regret written all over it. moving on.
this read like it was written by a waste of space english/philosophy/american history graduate. not quite independent from the parents' money. not quite using their own brain. don't try to wrap up loose ends, chicago history museum! let them dangle out of the wrists like blood drenched veins.
personally, i think mark beaubien got robbed for "handsomest man in chicago."
the romance of the rails!!! it seems like ages and ages ago when i was in my sunshine high on the coast of california, doesn't it?
yeah, some parts of the exhibits had kids' museum mentality.
very cool. even a vegetarian such as myself can appreciate the importance of oscar mayer all meat wieners.
agnes nestor. tres cool dame. she helped to organize a ten day strike against the non-unionised glove factory she worked in. it was a success. wiki-p says it better than i:
She also helped to organise unions in other industries, such as the needle trades, campaigned for women's suffrage, a minimum wage, and maternity health legislation, and against child labour, and took part in the 1909 and 1910–1911 garment workers' strikes. She was largely responsible for the passing of the Illinois ten-hour-day law of 1909 (her goal of an eight-hour day wasn't reached until 1937).
she ran for congress and lost, but during her lifetime and with her help, many advancements in women's suffrage and labor laws were acheived. i like seeing well-planned powerhouse actions coming from small, contained women. it reminds me of a coiled snake positioned to strike. additionally, agnes nestor makes an excellent snake name.
m: here's some fine woodworking detail in the furniture industry exhibit. what is this? walnut painted as cherry? plastic? metal? cherry painted as cherry? i don't have the same eye for wood as you have, mon oignon.
this exhibit had no free samples. bummer.
homage to the world's first hipster glasses.
lane, look familiar?
so on a more serious note, my favorite exhibit was called CHICAGO: CITY IN CRISIS. it was a novel way to define chicago as the city that gets bruised and broken but still shuffles into the future. a city that breaths and feels pain. it bleeds. and you can see how it falls. a city that doesn't wither. a strong city. chicago. it's heavy with scars.
the exhibit featured six incidents: the great fire, the haymarket affair, the 1919 race riot, gangland, the sinking of eastland, and basically the tensions of 1968.
"i will" is chicago's motto, bet you didn't know. now forget it.
a journal filled with entries written by 'justin' was found after the fire subsided. his imprisonment in the fire, experiences escaping the smoke filled streets and eventual last days.
"everybody calls me a racketeer. i call myself a businessman. when i sell liquor, it's bootlegging. when my patrons serve it on a silver tray on Lake Shore Drive, it's hospitality." al capone.
in the interest of inappropriate history museum turn-ons, i compiled images of the sexiest gangsters from gangland.
the guy on the top is pretty in that upper class yalie turned bad boy way. middle guy is grouchy hot and the guy on the bottom satisfies my egon fetish. you know, egon from ghost busters?
here, the guy on top is hot in that sugar daddy suck-a-dick for a scholarship sort of way. the guy on bottom has great hair. also, glass eye = hot.
yeah, so the two guys on left aren't getting me off but that's why they're gangsters. machine guns make up for asymmetrical ears and marshmallow face. and obviously guy on the right is bone worthy.
the eastland disaster:
here ends the city in crisis exhibit. i cried during the history channel video about chicago's grieving families crying out on the streets when dr. martin luther king, jr. was assassinated. and the confusion and brutality that arose after the events.
so there was an awesome 80s pbs style documentary in the museum. they asked several residents of chicago to talk about their neighborhoods. one lady relayed the way to find a polish village in chicago is to look for the polish delicatessen and polish video rental store. there's a distinct kind of proud that comes from living in chicago. and the jazz! ravenwood is an earthy neighborhood. a kind of place where people from many different backgrounds say 'you know what, let's make this work.' and chicago is a city that constantly refurbishes its centers. rather than gentrification, you see the residents scrub and refine their neighborhoods. etc etc. i'm making it sound super corny and useless but really, it made my trip worthwhile. and besides, the whole time i was like, 'man, these people are progressive for being from 1983.' and then i found out the video was made last year. it's just that everyone had terrible midwest fluffy hairstyles and ill-fitting geometrical shaped sweaters. lol.
innovations from chicago:
i barely got to the architecture room and they kicked me out. get out! the museum closed ten minutes ago! on a positive note, the museum attendant asked me to marry him. no joke.
suddenly, north face costumes make sense.
walked around michigan avenue until my toes fell off. additionally, my eyelashes formed pointy icicles.
i call michian avenue OBNOXIOUS, in a loving way.
then i took the wrong bus back to ash and lane's apartment building and had to walk 45 minutes out of my way with serious knee joint problems. m and i got in a phone call fight and we all kind of went to sleep early.
and most importantly, i have been alive. and writing. here's a strange, distant memory:
