we'll be here,
swinging in the air,
laughing at the skies.
This post's quote is from a poem that a student wrote at a workshop for 826CHI, that was put on an 826 postcard. They were giving out postcards at an event I went to awhile ago, and I picked up this one because I liked the quote. It doesn't have much to do with this post, but whatever. I loved swinging when I was younger (and I still do, and I get so mad when I babysit and we go to the park and I have to push the kids and they yell at me when I try to swing myself) and I feel like the words just remind you what it's like to be a kid again, how you used to look at the world, when stuff like swinging was the best thing in the world and everything was just… free and new.
Now that 826CHI has officially moved into their new space, stuff is happening! Like in-school and after-school tutoring. I've had some great and weird and not-so-great experiences with the students. Every kid I ineract with is in elementary school, and I feel like adults really underestimate young kids' concept of the world. They say things that are so funny, or so deep.
I do in-school tutoring once a week, and it's great because we work with the same group of kids, and they're starting to recognize us and become familiar and comfortable with us. Last week I had a student see me, skip over, say "see you next week!" at the end and skip away. I'd get into conversations with the students about Halloween and fall and school. One girl was telling me about a field trip that's in the spring that she's already excited about because there's a spring dance that goes with it, but it's at night and she was saying her mom probably won't let her go, and when I asked why, she said, "My mom doesn't trust me."
Another fourth-grade student's personal narrative involved a bad decision where he decided to cut his own hair at his friend's house (we've all been there) and his mom yelled at him. We were talking about it, and he had a really good line about wishing he could go back and fix it. I said, "Yeah, a lot of people wish that they could go back and change things." And he said, "A lot of people in jail- I mean, I'm not saying that I'll end up in jail- but a lot of people who are in jail wish they could go back and change things."
That was so deep. And so perceptive. I couldn't even say anything for a couple of seconds. I think kids understand a lot more of this world than we give them credit for.
I also had a pretty sassy girl and her younger brother last week for after-school tutoring. She kept trying to make me do her homework for her, constantly complained, refused to follow the rules, and was one of those annoying kids who, when you play games with them, keep making subtle rule changes so they win, and when you try to apply those changes to other players, they say, "That's against the rules." Her brother was the exact opposite: sweet, a good listener. They kept fighting like siblings do, I totally should've sat in between them, and at one point the girl was bugging her brother and teasing him, and he said, "What doesn't kill you makes you stronger." It was great. I bet his mom told him to say that.
Also last week at 826, I had to drive my boss's car to in-school tutoring. The staff member who usually takes another intern and I to the elementary school we go to each week was gone, and we asked our boss about it. She said she'd either give us a ride or let us take her car. And of course since she's the boss, she neded up being busy and handed me the keys.
If you have never had to drive your boss's car through the streets of a big city, you've never known true fear.
The other intern kept telling me what a great job I did when we got back, but I'm pretty sure we almost died, especially when I tried to turn into the alleyway behind 826 and there was another car coming right towards us, and to keep from crashing into them I pulled back out into the street and ended up on the wrong side of the road facing the wrong way. But we survived. And I managed not to crash in the alley.
Anyways. Food. Cooking. I'm still cooking a lot of pasta, and I'm starting to get sick of it, something I didn't realize until about a week ago. My goal for November is to actually do some of the recipes I look at that I always think I should totally do that and then never do. But I'm starting to incorporate veggies more, and last weekend I felt fancy when I cooked asparagus (and then I left the rest of it in the fridge, and when I pulled it out today there was brown juice at the bottom of the bag. Of course my fanciness couldn't last). I still haven't found my ground meat, but I have chicken nuggets that are the best thing in the world because I just put like eight of them in the microwave when I'm really hungry, and I don't have to put much effort into making something that's filling.
Also, two Fridays ago (obviously I've been putting this off) for core course, we spent the day in Pilsen. We all went to Simone's, a bar/restaurant, and met the owner. It was really great, he gave us free coffee and talked about what it was like to be the owner, and what impact the bar has had on the neighborhood. The cool thing about the restaurant is that everything's recylced material; the stools are partially made from old door frames, the backs of the booths are made from seat belts, there are old pinball machines that decorate the walls, and there are chandeliers that look like art pieces. If you want to go to an awesome place in Pilsen for lunch or for a weekend night, go there.
In the afternoon, we went to Blue 1647, which is a local technology innovation center. I was kind of confused when I was there, and still kind of confused when I left, but I think basically, it's a space for several entrepreneurships and businesses, as well as a space that's open 24/7 to members to come and hang out, learn, and work on their projects. It has a 3D printer and offers workshops and classes on technology, such as programming and creating apps. It was a really cool place overall, but what really struck me was the artwork that was there. Here are some coolio pictures:
An art piece that was there
Another art piece
The walls in the main room were painted! It was beautiful.
These are tiny robots (that don't actually move on their own but were still cool) that were created from the 3D printer that Blue 1647 had. They came out looking exactly like that; no assembly required.
After that, we went to the Chicago Art Department, which was also in Pilsen, and which is an art gallery and residency for artists. We were given a tour of this too, and shown some of the work spaces upstairs. Some photos of that:
Real bananas were part of one piece, just sitting on the floor. It was kind of weird.
This piece was really interesting; the words are spelled out of teeth. Not real teeth, which is what we thought at first, but molds of teeth. Creepy, and ironic, given the sentence. I'm not sure if sanity includes making sentences out of teeth.
A close up of the teeth molds
A painting of the white house on fire
Also, some good advice:
Basically, to sum up the day, Pilsen has a ton of coolio things for everyone, whether you love art, technology, or food. It's just an awesome place to live and has so many hidden resources, and a big part of our Core Course education is learning asset mapping, and how to evaluate a neighborhood based on its assets rather than its issues; rather than looking at Pilsen as a place that still has a lot of cleaning up to do, we're exploring the huge range of things it has to offer.
The next Friday, we came back to Pilsen in the afternoon and learned how to do makeup/paint faces for the upcoming Day of the Dead celebration and parade, which we were volunteering for on November 1st. The woman who taught us explained how the Day of the Dead and a lot of the traditions surrounding it are not only meant to remember the dead and celebrate their lives, but to celebrate death itself too. They treat death as just another step, and believe that dying gives new life to something else. The sugar skulls that people create and decorate are meant to symbolize, when they're eaten, the dead providing nourishment for the living.
Here's an example (taken off the internet because I didn't take any of my own pictures) of what the end result of our painted face-skulls looked like:
Except that ours were a little less coolio and a lot simpler.
Then we went to the National Museum of Mexican Art, which is literally a couple blocks away from where we live, and we were given a tour of their exhibit of Day of the Dead altars, which were incredibly varied and detailed. I thought, in my ignorance of Mexican culture, that they would all basically be the same, but the tour guide explained how, just as each person is unique, each altar is unique. Each one is meant to incoporate who the person was, and showcase their favorite things. Some of the altars had food, some had wine, some had art and flowers. Here are pictures of some of them, as well as some art at the museum:
Sorry, these would look a lot better if they weren't sideways but I don't know how to fix it.
This altar had pictures of people with their faces replaced with skulls.
On November first, we all dragged ourselves out of bed and went to Dvorak Park, where we took the awesome face-smearing skills we learned and painted people's faces for a couple of hours. It was a really interesting experience for me. I was expecting most of the people who came through to be kids, but I painted mostly adult's faces. A lot of them had never done it before but thought it was cool, and were nervous about it. I was like, I'm nervous about painting your face and getting stuff in your hair and smearing your pretty lipstick and having to deal with your beard, but since you're nervous I won't show it. I learned that I could never be a makeup artist; sitting so close to a stranger and touching their face and feeling their breath was really uncomfortable. It was kind of nice though, to sit and talk with people for the two minutes they were in front of me. It was probably evenly split between people from the neighborhood and people from other neighborhoods or tourists. There were so many different people who came through, which I was not expecting. One girl told me she'd heard about it a while ago, and it'd been on her bucket list to do in Chicago. There were a couple of adults who didn't speak English at all, and their teenage children hung around while I painted so they could tell their mom what I was saying. A kid came whose face was still stained green from the zombie makeup he wore for Trick-or-Treating the night before. I thought I'd be pretty okay with the kids, since I've been working with 826CHI, but helping a seven year old with their personal narrative and trying to paint their face while they lean away from you and keep looking at their parents and move their mouths right when you really need them to keep still, are completely different things. But overall, it was fun. The celebration united, not the neighborhood, but the neighborhood with a lot of people who were from other places, which I was not expecting at all, and that was great.
Last week I made pretty good progress on my ISP. I talked to an art therapist, and I'm going to interview her later in November. Patrick showed me how to use his sound equipment, which includes a fancy mini microphone that you can clip to people's shirts, and a fancy recorder, and now I'm terrified of losing any of it. And last Thursday, I interviewed my first veteran! It was Patrick K., the veteran who I met at the art reception where I had to network and talk to people, and whose email I walked away with. He lives out in the suburbs, and instead of having to take three trains and a taxi for three and a half hours to get to him, by some miracle Patrick was willing and able to drive me, which took an hour.
Even though it was only an hour away, the drive was so nice. It was nice to get out of the city, to just take a short break. Patrick K. lives in this awesome house that he received from a program (I completely forgot the name of it) that provides housing for veterans. We talked for two hours, then we all hung out for a little bit and talked some more, off-camera, afterwards.
I'm totally willing to admit that I didn't do a very good job with the beginning of the interview. I was super nervous, for multiple reasons. It's one thing to talk about something, and another thing to actually do it, and I've never done professional interviews like this. Plus I'm pretty bad at talking to people at first. Like, after a while I start to relax, but it often starts off kind of awkwardly. Patrick K. talked about what he did and why he joined the Marines; he was in the infantry in both Iraq and Afghanistan, and he wanted to be in combat partially because of his grandfather, who was in World War II, and it was 9/11 that really made him want to join up. At the beginning, he'd talk and then pause, and I'd just move on to the next question, when I could've asked something about what he said, which would've been better. I just kind of read off my list of questions when I should've been engaged in the conversation more. When he talked about what he did, instead of being like, "Okay. So what did you do that you're most proud of?" I should've asked him to go into more details, that kind of thing. Patrick helped out a little with the very beginning of the interview, and he was so much better at it, so much more casual and relaxed. But I had to remind myself that Patrick did his thesis in grad school on an hour-long documentary, and this was the very first time I'd done this, ever.
I'm so glad Patrick was there. He won't be with me for every interview; most of them I have to do alone, but now that I've seen how it all goes, I'm okay with that. He showed me how to situate the person you're interviewing, how to take the background and lighting into account, and to sit really close to the camera, so when the person's talking to you and they look at you, it seems like they're looking into the camera too, and then on film it seems like they're talking to the audience. He taught me to pause the audio recording and the camera after a couple of questions, then start them up again, so when I go to edit the film, I'll already have it in chunks, rather than face a two-hour long recording. He told me it's best to send the person examples of what I'll be asking so they'll have an idea of how the interview will go, and they'll be more relaxed about it. But I'm also glad he was there because he was kind of a bridge between me and Patrick K. Patrick and Patrick K. were instant bros. I think partly because they share the same name, but also partly because they're both veterans. They were involved in different wars and Patrick was in the air force while Patrick K. was a Marine, but they had a ton of things in common, and they'd talk about the pranks they pulled and all the military acronyms. I think having Patrick there made Patrick K. more relaxed, like hey, here's someone who can totally relate to what I'm saying, and knows where I'm coming from. And then there was me. I had no idea what I was doing, which basically sums up my project.
Patrick K. was so nice. I asked if he had any photographs to show me, and he brought out this year-book type thing as well as a whole album from his deployment. I asked if he wanted to pick some photos out, and he was like, "You can take the whole thing." I'm scanning the photos and then bringing it back, of course. With each veteran I'm asking for a follow-up interview, so at some point I'm going back to his house. But now I have some random guy's personal military photos sitting on my desk, which I'm also really afraid of losing.
The great thing is he liked my questions! He said after the whole thing was over, that he was worried that I'd want to know about "the gritty stuff," and he was all prepared to tell me, "I can't answer that question." He was really glad I'd stayed away from those things. And I was glad he appreciated it. The last thing I wanted was to talk about things that would be hard for him. Since I'm talking to combat veterans, it's basically a given that they have PTSD, and I wanted to be respectful of their experiences. I talked to Patrick about it on the ride over, that it was what I was most nervous about. I didn't want to say or do anything wrong, and he said, "The fact that you're nervous about it says a lot. You're aware of their situation compared to what you want to know. You'll be fine. It's the ignorant people, the people who aren't even aware that there is something they could say that would upset someone in this situation, who ask the wrong thing." It was all good, in the end.
But yeah… I think we're all excited to continue the conversation. I don't know when that'll happen, and I have no idea who my other two veterans are going to be. Which is really stressful. But at least things are happening, and off to a good start. Yay.
This ISP is really opening my eyes to the military and what that's like. It seems like its own world, and I'm totally an outsider, trying to understand, but I never completely will, I can only ever try.
Sometimes I wish I was like the kids I work with at 826, little again, with no sense (hopefully) of the hardships of the world (unless you're the amazing kid who recognizes that jail is full of regrets), in a place where you can believe swinging is flying, where you have an hour of homework at most and go home to your family every day after 3pm. Sometimes I'm glad I've grown up, that now I have the capacity to understand things that are completely beyond me, that I can have a mature conversation with a stranger and try to take their experience and their art and make sense of it. I'm not sure which place is better. But things like learning about Mexican culture, and exploring Pilsen, and talking to Patrick K., has made me feel like a kid again in that way where everything is new and amazing and you just take in wide-eyed the fact that observing it maybe makes you a part of it. That at least, you've become aware of it, and your world has now expanded. Maybe we grow up when we realize our world will always continue to expand, and we come to be not only okay with it, but to love it.
- Laura
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