ps

I'm not really that good at saying good bye; I'm better at saying see you later. So stay tuned. There is the potential for a few more postscripts.

rise above the wave ahead

Procrastination makes everything better. I'm sure that's how wine was discovered. (speaking of which, sip)

I'm sitting in a room in a French country house in the suburbs of Paris. Everything that I was building is either built or on hold. Including this blog. This blog was meant to be the commentary on my alone time in the woods of Michigan, embodying the struggle. And I was that struggle, and I am precisely that which I struggled against. But now I'm not struggling. Now I feel more like I'm living.

And so while I've been thinking about it, hinting at it, muttering it under my breath at coffee shops, now it's time to do it: end it. I have come to appreciate moments of cadence, juncture, as necessary to a healthy perception of time. And time is all we really have, no matter how many times it slips through out fingers.

So while this will be my last real post on this blog (I will finish culling for another best of post) I have already started another one: cork in the sea. Not only is it a line from one of my songs, it's the way I like to live my life, the way I'll have to be as I crisscross Europe for the next few months, sleeping on couches, guest rooms, and fancy hotels, hitchhiking and ridesharing to travel; it's going to be fun.

But not a struggle. It's more a matter of flow. As in, go with it.

Which is both exciting and difficult, so get ready for some good stories.

where i lay my head

In wrapping up this stage of my life, I thought it would be nice to pay homage to some of the perks and disadvantages of crashing with friends.

Right now, I'm staying in Nicole's while she is out of town. Having keys is a perk. Living on the 14th floor provides good views but adds a couple minutes in the elevator to the commute.

She definitely has one of the best showers.

She has internet, but it's flaky. But since it's a huge apartment building, there are 20 other wifis around; only two don't require passwords.

Unlike the other high-rises around, this one has a pool in which I went swimming today. It's not big enough to get a good workout in, but I went back and forth a couple dozen times, tread some water, and did some vertical kicking.

And then there's the unexpected. Nicole had told me how she went to IML last weekend; I had actually tried to go too but couldn't find it. (I had 2 hours to kill between bike tours.) IML is international man of leather and is primarily a gay leatherfest. Knowing all this, I was a little less surprised to see this calendar appear on the wall.

Do you like that egg shape I added? The gayest I felt was digitally altering the photo to hide the pen15. When I first noticed it, I was startled but in the hours and days that followed, I hardly even notice it. I think that's a decorative whip of some sort hanging next to it.

Speaking of gay, I read today that most homophobia grows out of homosexual desires that are perceived as repulsive and repressed: "there is a growing body of research that supports the notion that homophobia in some men could be a reaction to their own homosexual impulses." Looks like homophobia is uncool. Especially if you believe what Glee says. They (apparently) make homophobia look like something expressed by stupid bully jocks, casting it in a negative light. Some douchey conservative guy (who, at this point is still repressing the shit out of his homosexual urges, unlike some people...) thinks it's unbalanced, promoting a pro-gay anti-homophobe message. Um, duh? It's a show about musicals or something.

Although it is interesting that it's on Fox.

time for a sabbatical

I am always on the lookout for when things I see or read reference things going on in my life or the lives around me.

The other day, for instance, I went off to O'Hare to see Quentin before he heads to Europe for 2 months. Sound familiar? We're going to meet up along the way, so we have some things to talk about.

Related to something else, a conversation I had today, I found this article. It is ostensibly about "nervous breakdowns" but in the meat of the article brings up other terms, such as "burnout syndrome." It seems to me that you can be burnt out without having a breakdown. So maybe they're not perfect synonyms but part of our on-going quest to be more precise with language.

The scientists in Europe who came up with "burnout syndrome" talked about 3 varieties: frenetic, underchallenged, and worn out. I like those categories and think they may prove helpful to people to pinpoint the source of their angst.

I think I was dabbling in all three without really focusing on any one, avoiding completely burning out.

I spent the first few months defining the problems and then the next few months healing. Now I'm ready for an adventure. And then the cycle begins again.

take your machine to the airport

In a few days I'll be in Europe. My friend (and former student at Iowa) Quentin will be there during almost the same period as me. He left Wednesday from O'Hare and had a few hours before his flight, so I went out to hang.

I was in Andersonville, which is not on the Blue line, the most efficient way of getting to the airport. I had my bike, so I thought I would bike to Wicker Park, pick up the Blue line and then hang out in the WP with Laura afterwards. But then, the time changed and I decided to ride straight west, picking up the Blue line wherever I crossed it.

But then I crossed it and kept riding, making it all the way there.

To be honest, I did some research on biking to O'Hare finding this page. I took Foster straight west and then followed most of the suggestions, taking Higgins to Mannheim. Here's the route I took.

Higgins was fine at first--low traffic, 35 mph limit--but started to cause me worry when I saw some narrow bridges and other highway features. But, just like in the picture, there was little traffic. When the speed limit got to be 45, I was even more cautious but almost never felt unsafe. There was one SUV driven by some apathetic, life-hating SOB that left less room than I would like--when cars are passing faster, they should leave more room--but most were quite considerate.

Higgins to Mannheim isn't maybe the most direct route--a crow could do better--but is probably route that uses the most straight lines. I turned left on Mannheim, to the confusion of drivers and truckers, but since I turned with the left arrow, the bulk of the traffic stood still waiting at the light. I only stayed on Mannheim for a block, turning right at the first light and getting on Bessie Coleman drive going south.

The Higgins part was the worst; Bessie Coleman and the subsequent access road had much slower traffic, more lanes, and a really nice shoulder. I think it's funny that O'Hare is one of those few places in Chicago that you can't really get to without using some machine--car or train. Human power transportation--walking, biking--is somehow incongruous to airports--near the top of the industrial food chain. [A similar incongruity to when I rode my bike into and through the steel mill--marauding.] When I got to the terminals, there were a couple guys who had, apparently, passed me and who said "hey it's the bike guy." Whatever, sure. Das bin ich!

Then I met Quentin and had a coffee at one of the few places to buy anything to eat or drink not past security and talked about music, relationships, divorce, bikes, and meeting in Prague.

To leave, I was thinking of just taking the train to Wicker Park to meet Laura. But it was 5:40. There's a ban on bikes from 4-6pm on CTA trains (and 7-9am), which, ostensibly has something to do with rush hour. I was hoping to cheat the system (by 20 minutes), especially considering I was headed into the city--a reverse commute.

But no. The letter-of-the-law CTA peon checked his watch and barred me from entering. Well shit. I tried asking him how else I could leave O'Hare on bike but his only response was to wait 20 minutes. Not my M.O.

So I biked. Took the access road and then took Mannheim south (see photo at top) but jut for a few blocks (wide shoulders are key) and got on Irving Park going east. Irving is not the best bike road either but the best I could see on myPhone. I played with the lights a little to avoid riding in heavy traffic (~45mph) but mostly rode in the gutter like the disaffected minority I am. It's much more stressful, taking much more energy, riding along such roads. But I made it, only cursing under my breath at a few impatient drivers. Then, beautifully, like the sun piercing through the clouds after an afternoon thunderstorm, a guy in a metallic red pickup truck gave me a thumbs up. It totally worked, changing my whole perception of drivers from nameless, faceless tailpipes and license plates to people operating machinery. He turned somewhere behind me and then passed me. Then I passed him. And so on. It was super cute. Then, on Milwaukee, I passed him definitively and passed a long line of cars never to look back. Milwaukee progressively became better for biking, and I could feel the tension float away as the neighborhoods got more familiar.

So yes. It's possible to ride your bike to and from O'Hare, but it's not for the faint of heart (literally and figuratively; it's over 10 miles and you should go ~20mph so as to mimic the speed of traffic).

[It only took me 50 minutes, which is about the same as driving (with traffic). Bikes FTW!]

music and the brain

For some time, I've followed the New York Times "Most Emailed Articles" feed on Reader. I find it a good way to ensure that my reading material is both well-written, topical, and popular (to NYT readers).

Here's a quotation from an interesting one recently:

Both species are vocal learners, with the ability to imitate sounds. We share that rare skill with parrots. In that one respect, our brains are more like those of parrots than chimpanzees. Since vocal learning creates links between the hearing and movement centers of the brain, I hypothesized that this is what you need to be able to move to beat of music.

aside: Darick

I was at Darick's last night working on a post when he came home in a state of tense distraction. Somewhere between leaving the house in the morning, driving to work, working, and coming home, he had misplaced his wallet. We looked all over the apartment finding nothing, and he checked the car a couple of times.

He came up with two possible places it might have been left or dropped--both of which were dumpsters. In the morning, there were some new dress shirts still in the packages sitting on top of the dumpster in the alley. Maybe he had his wallet still in his hand and dropped it to pick up the dress shirts.

[Let's pause and appreciate the strangeness of new dress shirts being thrown out.]

Then, at work, he threw out a bag of garbage. Did it get mixed up?

We had dinner in, some really good homemade chili from Amish country in Ohio, and just as we finished watching what may be the best-worst movie I've ever seen, he got an email from the Old Town School. Apparently one of their teachers had found it and turned it in.

But the Old Town School is 40 blocks south. So how? Darick must have kept his Old Town membership card in his wallet, and whoever found it turned it in there. It's like what people used to do before the internet. They also could have just googled him and found darickmaassen.com.