In the bottoms of our shoes,
they are sleeping. They are the shadows
drifting across our ceilings the moment before we wake up.
What we have to do
is live in a way
that lets us find them.
Before I got here, I wasn't sure how I'd feel about not being at Knox. It's incredibly weird. I get all the emails about events and classes and what's going on, and it's so familiar. I thought I would either really really miss Knox, or not at all, and I'd just be like, I'm so glad I'm not there. But it's actually this weird mix. I miss getting food from the cafeteria and the great workers there, and Old Main, and my friends, and it makes me feel lonely in weird way to know it's moving on and I'm not a part of it. But I'm also really, really glad I'm here, and in a way I'd rather be doing this.
Weirdly, I miss Knox the most when I drink tea that I stole from the caf. I really love the English Breakfast, Rasberry Rose, and Sweet Orange tea that they have, so last spring I'd grab a couple packets and shove them in my pocket every time I got food to go, so now I have a stock of each kind. And when I drink them, that's what makes me miss Knox the most. I guess it's because it's a sensory detail, like a smell, and that makes me feel like I'm there, and reminds me the most that I'm not.
Anyways. One of the things I really like about Chicago is the people. I've had some kind-of-weird, kind-of-awesome interactions with total strangers. I went to a little, local camera store by the ACM office to buy a new memory card, and I thought it'd be like Target where you can just look and pick out something yourself, but everything was locked up in cases behind the counters, and an old man helped me out after I went to the end of the store and back. He was so nice, and after asking me some questions he gave me the cheapest memory card for what I needed, he didn't try to give me something more expensive or convince me to buy something else, he just got the cheapest one, which I really appreciated. After I bought it, he said, "Want a cookie?" And I said sure, because I was really hungry, and sure I'd trust him, and he pulled out this tupperware container from underneath the counter and opened it, and there were soo many cookies in there. He told me he made them himself, and then he looked down at the container and was like, "I need to make more cookies." And it was adorable.
Last week I was waiting in the Bucktown-Wicker Park library, at a table near the entrance, before my internship orientation began, and I guess I looked really sad because this random guy came by, and as he was about to leave he turned back towards me and said, "Don't look so depressed." He asked what made me happy, and before I could reply he was like, "Where's your boyfriend at?" I said Colorado, and he shook his head and said, "Tell him to get his ass over here!" And then he left.
And then Monday, I went to McDonald's, which is just a couple blocks away yay, and I wasn't paying attention when my number was called. The worker had to say it again, and she was like, "Number 203. 203, you sleepin?" When I went up go get my food, she said, "Enjoy your food. Enjoy it to the moon and back." She was so happy and so enthusiastic about my burger and fries, even though she wasn't the one who got to eat them. You got a free small coffee when you bought something, so maybe everyone was just happy, I don't know. But some of the people here are so friendly and cute and say the weirdest things. They spread their happiness, try to cheer you up, give you cookies. The people in big cities are incredibly interesting- I guess, people are incredibly interesting in general. I've just experienced more interaction here. There are millions of people in Chicago. It's interesting how you get probably every personality that's out there, and we focus so much on the people who are cold to us or barely give us a second glance or scare us on the subway, that we miss people like this, who don't treat you like you're just one nameless person among them all, and interact with you on a deeper level.
As for the food here in the apartment, our 10-person fridge is getting fuller. I still haven't found my ground beef, but I'm proud to say that I've officially been here for 3 weeks and I've only made ramen three times. Also, I found out that the dollar store across the street has THE BEST JUICE EVER, which is Minute Maid Fruit Punch, and which I grew up on. I still remember the one night my siblings and I couldn't agree on a movie and my mom sent us up to our rooms and we didn't get to watch anything since we were fighting over it. I was like five and I stared up at the ceiling and drank that juice and felt really sad. Anyways, of course I bought some, I would've bought like two or three cartons but there's barely room for one in our 10-person fridge. But that's okay. I really don't need three cartons of Minute Maid Fruit Punch.
I went to a concert last Tuesday with my friend Sarah, who did the Chicago program a year ago. The artist was Ed Sheeran, who I totally didn't know before she told me about the concert at the beginning of the summer, and who now I really like. I haven't been to a concert since I was a junior in high school, because I am a sad human being, and I was amazed at how happy everyone was. People were freaking out, they were so excited. They were willing to wait an hour in line for merchandise, they stood and danced throughout the whole concert, and they didn't care at all who saw them and what they thought. We were all there for one thing, we shared this excitement and happiness. We'd all been waiting for this for months. We were… so united, in a sense. And people were so happy. There was a girl a couple rows down from me, who probably wasn't by herself (I think she was with her mom) but stood by herself and danced the whole time. She never looked around or talked to anyone. It was like her whole world was the stage. I wonder what it's like to be the artist, to be the instigator of all this craziness and happiness, the connecting thing among all of us. It's powerful, in a way.
Some ok pictures from the concert, because my camera is not as good as a smart phone:
It was just him up on stage, and they used a bunch of hanging screens, it was really cool.
And also a random picture of the mural on the outside of The Plant (explanation coming soon).
Also, last Friday, the whole group met with Alderman Joe Moore, who's in charge of the 49th ward (and who's also a fellow Knoxie!!). He talked to us and we were shown the room where City Council meets (I have no idea what it's officially called), and we walked up along the platform where the mayor sits. All the chairs are so cushiony, and the mayor's chair is above the rest and all official-looking with the Chicago seal on it. Also, they were starting a meeting (not a City Council meeting, but still) so it was kind of awkward. But it was so cool to be able to talk to an alderman, to someone who's important, and be in City Hall, and the City Council room.
After seeing the room we could ask Alderman Moore questions, and he called on me because he had to pick on another Prairie Fire-er. I asked him what he's done as an alderman that he's really proud of, like what's one of his favorite things that he's done. He talked about being the first elected official to do participatory budgeting, where he turns over $1 million of his capital budget each year and they have a vote on how to spend it. He was really proud of that, and then he talked about how nice it was to help people, and have people come up to him and thank him for things he's helped get going, or for ways he's helped them personally. He said how cool it was to drive down the street and look at something and think, that happened partly because of me. It was great to know he was a part of things, and to not only feel but know that he's making a difference. He also said when he first became an alderman, he thought he'd do it for a couple years and move on, and he wanted to make it to Washington D.C. (not as President but as a Senator), but now, he feels like he's making much more of a difference here than he ever would have in Congress, and that was kind of cool to hear, that a politician could care about the small things, and what he wanted to do, when you really got down to it, was help people. I'm really glad I asked him that question. He kind of changed when he talked about it, he smiled more and his passion came through. Politicians do have hearts after all.
Also last week, on Thursday, my ISP class went to this thing called The Plant. It's what used to be a pork packing facility in The Back Of The Yards, the neighborhood where all the stock yards used to be. We were given a tour by Joe Miller, an artist who helped paint the mural on the side of the building, where they kept the old "Peer" advertisement. What they're doing at the Plant is keeping the old building and much of what's in it, and reusing it. There are big plans for it; they want it to be a space for artists, and have a museum and a cafe. When we toured, they were still in the middle (or the beginning) of renovating things; it'll take years and years to make the plan a reality, but it was still really cool. They still had a bunch of old machines and stuff, and all the floors were tilted toward drains in the middle; when it was a pork facility, the drains were used to get out all the blood. It was cool to imagine what used to go on in the building and what it is now, and I thought it was great how they're keeping all the old things. They recognize the value in those old things, even if it's just an asethetic value. They're also hoping it'll become self-sustainable, and all the waste that's produced will help fuel something else. It's one thing to learn about the stockyards and how Chicago used to be, but it's totally another thing to be in an old meat packing facility, and see the old machines and the huge doors. The building's essentially the skeleton of what used to be there.
I also learned, on my own when I was looking up Chicago mayors because I know nothing, that Millenium Park used to be an airport. It was called Meigs Field, and was a really small, lakefront airport. In 1996, City Council approved Mayor Richard M. Daley's plan to convert the airport into a park, but in March 2003, he basically went ahead and started without telling them. Construction people moved in at midnight and by morning there were large X's on the runway. He went ahead without telling Homeland Security, the governor, the City Council, or the Federal Aviation Administration. I was like, hold up. The mayor went ahead with his plan to demolish the airport? Without telling anyone? Especially the people who had private planes on the runway at the time? It's kind of impressive, actually.
Mostly it was mind-blowing to realize that Millennium Park used to be something different. I don't know what I thought, I guess I just assumed the park had always been there and things like the pavilion and the Bean were recent additions. I had no idea it used to be something else. Not only did the whole Daley-doing-whatever-he-wanted thing happen when I was in elementary school and didn't care about anything, but I was nowhere near Chicago so it didn't affect me at all. When you realize that you've come in and what you thought has always been here was once something else, it's kind of a jolt. It makes you realize the limits of your own perception. How you assume what is here always was, because you've never experienced anything different.
Also, I promised to put this in: yesterday the majority of us went to the only Cheesecake Factory in Chicago to celebrate Marian's 22nd birthday. We all were super excited about the $7 cheesecake and there were so many choices people didn't know what to do. Basically, we were freaking out by the time we finally ate them. Yay cheesecake.
Anways. To wrap everything up so there's something coherent to this post, a couple weeks ago for my art seminar, we watched a TED talk by Billy Collins, who discussed how you can find poems anywhere, and sometimes you can take a weird sentence you've heard or a moment and turn it into a great poem. He talked about staying at a friend's house, and his friend said not to leave matches around, because the mice might get into the matchbox and accidentally burn the house down. We did this, a little bit, this past week with our "found poems", which we had to write for Core Course. We took artifacts- images or objects or phrases- that we'd discovered in our first couple weeks and incoporated them all into a poem about our first impressions about Chicago. It was a really interesting exercise, making a whole out of the parts. It taught us too that there are cool little things in Chicago, and often the city's story can be captured in one thing or one sentence, and those things can become poetry. There are little, beautiful, amazing things everywhere, things that have infinite potential to become poems, or become art. You just have to notice them. You just have to find them, like the old man and his cookies, like Joe Moore changing as he talked about his favorite things about being an alderman, or the girl dancing at the Ed Sheeran concert, or the things we all talked about in our found poems. You have to recognize the use and beauty in things, like what they're doing at the Plant. Beautiful, amazing, incredible things are constantly around us, and they're not things like Niagra Falls or people with perfect features or paintings at the Art Institute. All we have to do is live in a way that lets us find them.
- Laura
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