Where I Was From

February 11, 2009

California

I threw away my anchor necklace today. Who needs an anchor when you're already home?

December 31, 2008

2008 Recap

No probing survey this year: just books. And a couple of very serious magazines. Top five are bolded.

1. Ascending Peculiarity: Edward Gorey on Edward Gorey – Karen Wilkin
2. Scott Pilgrim’s Precious Little Life – Bryan Lee O’Malley
3. Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder – Lawrence Weshchler
4. Tropic of Cancer – Henry Miller (re-read)
5. Bird by Bird – Anne Lamott
6. Bone – Jeff Smith (complete series)
7. The Yiddish Policemen’s Union – Michael Chabon
8. Scott Pilgrim VS the World – Bryan Lee O’Malley
9. Scott Pilgrim and the Infinite Sadness – Bryan Lee O’Malley
10. Scott Pilgrim Gets it Together – Bryan Lee O’Malley
11. Red Eye, Black Eye – K. Thor Jensen
12. Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age – Modris Eksteins
13. Brief Interviews with Hideous Men – David Foster Wallace
14. Water for Elephants – Sara Gruen
15. The Sound and the Fury – William Faulkner (re-read)
16. As I Lay Dying – William Faulkner
17. A Light in August – William Faulkner
18. Absalom, Absalom – William Faulkner (second aborted effort)
19. Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
20. Journal of Ride Theory Omnibus – Dan Howland
21. The Beauty Myth – Naomi Wolf
22. Girl with the Curious Hair – David Foster Wallace
23. Buckminster Fuller: At Home in the Universe – Alden Hatch
24. The Magic Mountain – Thomas Mann (aborted effort)
25. Everything is Illuminated – Jonathan Safran Foer
26. Berlin: City of Stones – Jason Lutes (re-read)
27. Berlin: City of Smoke – Jason Lutes
28. Mrs. Dalloway – Virginia Woolf (re-read)
29. The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil – George Saunders
30. The Second Tree from the Corner – E. B. White
31. The Girl in the Flammable Skirt – Aimee Bender
32. Guns, Germs, and Steel – Jared Diamond
(33. The New Yorker)
(34. Harper’s)

Labels: memoir

December 07, 2008

Please stop calling me crazy for moving someplace as grand as Chicago

Last night I was invited to a dinner party at the home of someone I’ve been on a couple of dates with. I wasn’t quite ready to meet all his friends at once, but accepted out of curiosity, since he was cooking vegan food and was itching to prove to me that said food can be completely edible when done right. He was completely right on that account – I was pleased to see that lasagna and tiramisu can be completely amazing with zero dairy in them. I don’t really have a useful place to store this knowledge, but there it is, just the same. I also managed to sucker myself into daring that I could be a vegetarian for the rest of the month (with the exception of Soup Night next week, but not the holidays…ohhh, boy), but that was the fault of my big mouth, and I don’t blame him for being smug about that.

What really caught my attention at the dinner party was the fact that here were fifteen or so Midwestern folks who couldn’t stop talking about San Francisco for the several hours the party lasted. San Francisco as the greatest place on earth. “Why the HELL did you leave San Francisco?” ad infinitum. “The restaurants are so much better there,” they said over an amazing dinner a local person had just spent all afternoon cooking them with ingredients bought at Trader Joe’s, a store that can obviously be found right here in Illinois, as well as in their illustrious Promised Land. Trader Joe’s is the same there. Let me get back to you about West Coast sushi, but after living all over the country, I have to say that in general, life is pretty much the same in all metropolises.

Words I could have applied to the cities themselves. When it comes down to it, despite the beautiful landscape and the mild climate, when you live in San Francisco, you are still living in a city. You still have to work a job like any other and wait for the train (just TRY finding parking anywhere in that city besides grocery store lots. Want a space near your apartment? $150 a month. Sorry, no street parking, even at home). There are still dull people in San Francisco. Sometimes even the ultra-sophisticates the city is famous for are complete dullards – just dullards who are extremely well-dressed, and whose monologues are about music and performance art and their dietary habits. They are easier on the eyes than Midwestern dullards, who are forced to dress down because of our unforgiving winters, and for a while it’s difficult to tell that boring talk of creative ventures isn’t actually more exciting than boring talk about practical things like work and what’s in the news.

I can stare at the websites for Bay Area concert venues and miss them until I look at the bands’ own websites, where they inevitably list a tour stop here in Chicago. I can bitch about the cold, but honestly, when it’s foggy and the wind makes even 50 degrees feel pretty damn unpleasant, I wouldn’t be taking those constant jaunts through Golden Gate Park, anyway. You adjust to different climates with surprising speed. My parents have both spent a lot of time living in Minnesota and cross-country skiing, but living in Los Angeles has acclimatized them so they are now miserable at any temperature below about 55. I would be lying pretty hard if I said it’s not a huge imposition to stay mainly indoors for four months out of the year, but I do like having the four seasons. I hate wearing layers, but the snow can be breathtaking as a visual, even when it’s literally breathtaking in that a sharp inhale makes your head and lungs ache. The ocean is majestic, but so is the architecture in Chicago. Strangers greet each other on the street here, but in San Francisco, the only strangers that approach you are derelicts demanding your change – and they appear quite literally every few yards that you walk. The rent is as steep there as it is in New York, and forget the comforts you expect here, like wood floors, windows, dishwashers, and porches. There is a lot less of that, out there. The “yard” behind my last place was just a spot where the landlord kept the building’s garbage.

Earthquakes always seem to come up in these conversations, but I feel like I should mention them just to say that I usually don’t think about them unless I’m quake-proofing a new apartment, something most people I knew out there never even bothered to do. They’re terrifying, but what city doesn’t burn down once or twice? What of hurricanes, tornadoes, riots, terrorist attacks, and recessions? Every city is susceptible to something. Even Paris goes through some shit once in a while.

None of this should be taken to mean that I don’t love San Francisco. I do plan to return to California fairly soon. I live 2,000 miles away from my family right now, and I am not the kind of person who can stay so far away for life. But that’s what it is to me: home. Not heaven. Not a dream of escaping reality. It’s where my family is, and where I’m from, and for that reason – and that reason alone – it is, to me, unique in all the cities of the world. That’s really the only reason a big city can be different from all the others.

Labels: California, Chicago, memoir, travel

November 05, 2008

Yes, we did.

The news looked like the last five minutes of Return of the Jedi last night as they switched from place to place where the whole country was gathered in crowds to celebrate. We all called our mothers. Some of us were gently admonished by said mothers, "calm down," to which the only natural response was, "I don't want to calm down!"

I am finally ready to visit my country's capital for the first time.

October 25, 2008

Dominick's receipt, Friday night.

HER:
1 bottle raspberry ginger ale
Ghostbusters II
a Hungry Man frozen dinner

ME:
1 bottle Jameson Irish whiskey
a High School Musical flashlight shaped like a microphone

September 27, 2008

Debate Night

Here's a new one: watching political TV with people who actually disagree with you! I've been surrounded by left-leaning but mostly pragmatic Democrats most of my life, if you exclude the far-left extremists in SF whose rhetoric I generally tuned out. So it's unusual for me to run into people who aren't voting for Obama.

I watched last night's debate with a couple of radical pinko Trotskyites and we proceeded to argue for two hours about Obama and whether there is any point to them voting for perennial write-in candidate "Skinner Sucks" when we are operating in a TWO-PARTY SYSTEM, oh, sorry, kids. I feel no need to explain here why I support Obama, but even if I was not a fan, we only have two choices here. The candidates are not going to be your perfect ideal human beings and you shouldn't expect them to. These are two men charged with the challenge of appealing to an impossibly diverse population. That requires just a touch of compromise and centrism.

The third roommate eventually came home and said he was undecided but leaning toward McCain, and we had at it for a while. It was all an exciting evening since we all actively listened to each other and I thought I was holding my own pretty well for someone confronted by Obama detractors for the first time (three at once), and they were respecting my ideas after I pushed back against the inevitable "you just blindly vote Democrat every time, don't you?" (Repeat: Two. Party. System.)

But it was a Friday night, and we were drinking some beer, and two of them suddenly started flirting with me and asking about things like my ballet habits and my little red hat. I'm so glad we could hold off on that nonsense until after hearing each other out about more interesting things. That's the way it should be.

Let's hear it for Obama, everybody.

Labels: politics

September 18, 2008

Piracy Update

Missed the golden age by three or four-odd centuries? Don't worry: you can still get into the business.

BBC NEWS
Life in Somalia's pirate town

By Mary Harper
BBC Africa analyst

Whenever word comes out that pirates have taken yet another ship in the Somali region of Puntland, extraordinary things start to happen.

There is a great rush to the port of Eyl, where most of the hijacked vessels are kept by the well-armed pirate gangs.

People put on ties and smart clothes. They arrive in land cruisers with their laptops, one saying he is the pirates' accountant, another that he is their chief negotiator.

With yet more foreign vessels seized off the coast of Somalia this week, it could be said that hijackings in the region have become epidemic.

Insurance premiums for ships sailing through the busy Gulf of Aden have increased tenfold over the past year because of the pirates, most of whom come from the semi-autonomous region of Puntland.

In Eyl, there is a lot of money to be made, and everybody is anxious for a cut.

Entire industry

The going rate for ransom payments is between $300,000 and $1.5m (£168,000-£838,000).

A recent visitor to the town explained how, even though the number of pirates who actually take part in a hijacking is relatively small, the whole modern industry of piracy involves many more people.

"The number of people who make the first attack is small, normally from seven to 10," he said.

"They go out in powerful speedboats armed with heavy weapons. But once they seize the ship, about 50 pirates stay on board the vessel. And about 50 more wait on shore in case anything goes wrong."

Given all the other people involved in the piracy industry, including those who feed the hostages, it has become a mainstay of the Puntland economy.

Eyl has become a town tailor-made for pirates - and their hostages.

Special restaurants have even been set up to prepare food for the crews of the hijacked ships.

As the pirates want ransom payments, they try to look after their hostages.

When commandos from France freed two French sailors seized by pirates off the Somali coast this week, President Nicolas Sarkozy said he had given the go-ahead for the operation when it was clear the pirates were headed for Eyl - it would have been too dangerous to try to free them from there.

The town is a safe-haven where very little is done to stop the pirates - leading to the suggestion that some, at least, in the Puntland administration and beyond have links with them.

Many of them come from the same clan - the Majarteen clan of the president of Somalia's transitional federal government, Abdullahi Yusuf.

Money to spend

The coastal region of Puntland is booming.

Fancy houses are being built, expensive cars are being bought - all of this in a country that has not had a functioning central government for nearly 20 years.

Observers say pirates made about $30m from ransom payments last year - far more than the annual budget of Puntland, which is about $20m.

When the president of Puntland, Adde Musa, was asked about the reported wealth of pirates and their associates, he said: "It's more than true".

Now that they are making so much money, these 21st Century pirates can afford increasingly sophisticated weapons and speedboats.

This means that unless more is done to stop them, they will continue to plunder the busy shipping lanes through the Gulf of Aden.

They even target ships carrying aid to feed their compatriots - up to a third of the population.

Warships from France, Canada and Malaysia, among others, now patrol the Somali coast to try and fend off pirate attacks.

An official at the International Maritime Organisation explained how the well-armed pirates are becoming increasingly bold.

More than 30% of the world's oil is transported through the Gulf of Aden, and even though the pirates lack the means to hijack huge tankers, there are reports that they have fired at them.

"It is only a matter of time before something horrible happens," said the official.

"If the pirates strike a hole in the tanker, and there's an oil spill, there could be a huge environmental disaster".

It is likely that piracy will continue to be a problem off the coast of Somalia as long as the violence and chaos continues on land.

Conflict can be very good for certain types of business, and piracy is certainly one of them.

Weapons are easy to obtain and there is no functioning authority to stop them, either on land or at sea.

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/africa/7623329.stm

Published: 2008/09/18 15:10:52 GMT

© BBC MMVIII

Labels: the life aquatic