Judy's Crash Course on Being a Tourist in Chicago

I'm super tired but wanted to post the following email I sent to a friend in DC visiting Chicago for the first time this weekend. I'd love to hear additional recommendations, thoughts on these, or just general Chicago love.

---------- Forwarded message ----------

From: Judy
Date: Nov 28, 2007 10:13 AM
Subject: Re: chicago

Hi,

I'm so excited that you're going to Chicago! It's such a wonderful city that I'm coming to appreciate more and more with the different experiences I'm having in other cities (though Boston and DC are pretty great too... :) ). As far as must sees, I'll give you a list longer than things you really should do so you can pick and choose. Also, what kinds of things do you like to do when touring? I can think more about those. I have some good friends with specialties and can ask them for advice if your interests match up. (I don't know good restaurants downtown, but I have some friends who really do!)

So, here goes:

The main part of the downtown area with stuff to see falls into two areas, the loop and the magnificent mile (mag mile). The loop has the financial district, Sears Tower (really cool!), and some of the older more historic stuff. The mag mile is a mile of good shopping. Most of what I'm thinking of is within a mile or two of these places. Chicago public transportation is for the most part pretty excellent so things are closer than they seem for such a big city.

Art Institute, Shedd Aquarium, and Adler Planetarium -- all wonderful. Shedd and Adler are right next to each other and both really cool.

Navy Pier is relatively near the John Hancock building. John Hancock tours are great but I'm not sure I'd recommend doing both Hancock and Sears because they don't offer such different things. Navy Pier, if the weather's nice, is fun because it has a kind of mini-amusement park. I'm not sure what goes on in the winter there, though when I was there for new years last year it was really fun. They might have something going on.

If the weather is nice then the Chicago Architecture Foundation (CAF) river architecture tour is not to be missed. It's a wonderful intro to Chicago and something that "true Chicagoans" love.

I love Millennium Park. There's not a whole lot to do there unless there's something specifically going on, but there's lots to look at. I'm not sure when they turn the fountains off but they're nice. The bandshell might have a concert or something too. It's also a short walk from Millennium Park to Buckingham Fountain.

For sports, it might be hard to elbow your way into a Bears game but I'm sure Bulls tickets are cheap now (haha) and every game is fun at the United Center.

If you're out in the Hyde Park area then the Museum of Science and Industry is absolutely fantastic. I think it's my favorite museum.

Second City is a really funny improv group that should have shows. Blue Man Group isn't as distinctly Chicago (at all) but is also great.

There are also some off the beaten path type things, like the Broadcasting Museum, Greektown, etc. I feel like for first time visitors, something like Second City is way cooler, but thought I'd throw them in just in case.

For food, as I mentioned before, I don't have good experience with excellent restaurants (though my co-worker went to U of C and recommends Bin36 with all her heart). I do have to recommend FoodLife cafe in the Water Tower (near the Hancock at the north end of the mag mile) which is just fun. It has lots of different stands with tons of types of food and it's all pretty good. They hand out magnetic cards at the beginning and you just get food and pay at the end. For excellent deep dish pizza, I recommend Lou Malnati's. It's wonderful! Going to the first Uno's (or Due's) is cool but Lou Malnati's is better. Greektown also has amazing Greek food. I can check with my mom for the name of my favorite restaurant there if you're interested but I can't remember it off the top of my head. Another fun youngish area is Lincoln Park or Belmont (though I don't really have any experience in Belmont, I've just heard of it). Slightly farther out, my co-worker recommends Pilsen for Mexican food (though the area has been going through major change and I don't know it well enough to recommend or not recommend, though I suspect it's totally fine). U of C has some good restaurants and is fun to walk around.

For books, U of C also has amazing book stores (Powell's is the one I know). And I love the Harold Washington Public Library in the Loop.

I'm sure I'm going to come up with more things later and I'll try not to send too many annoying "what about X!" emails but definitely let me know how your trip goes and if you want more of any one type of site/event. I'd also recommend checking some of the Chicago websites because there are constantly street fairs and neighborhood festivals. Chicago has really fun quirky theaters so it'll depend on what they're playing but ticketmaster or google can help. If you need help tracking down any of the things I recommended I'd be happy to help! Just figured it was better to give you names instead of bombarding you with websites. It's fun just to walk up and down the mag mile, or around the loop, or up and down the lake shore.

And finally, I'm a disaster with directions, so a few hints that have kept me sane:
1. The streets near the loop and Millennium Park downtown follow the American presidents in order of their presidency. (I've been known to call home with a "Mom, who was president first, Jackson or Van Buren?!?!" to sort myself out.)
2. The lake is always east, so if you're not sure which way you're facing, look to see where the tall buildings end, and that's east.
3. There are eight blocks to the mile, so the distance from 55th street to 35th street is exactly 2.5 miles.
4. State and Madison is the (0,0) mark of the city.
5. Chicago's not as obsessed with east and west as DC is (east is the lake), but north and south matters a lot. The neighborhoods change very rapidly as you go from north to south. In general, the north side is nicer though there are pockets of good areas, like Hyde Park, in the south parts of town.

I hope that you have a lovely trip and I can't wait to hear about it :)

Judy

TINSTAAFL

Illinois has a high school graduation requirement that all students take economics. In my senior year, I took AP econ (we called it econ then, but ec in college) and was enthralled by it to the point that it was one of my three potential majors when I filled out my "I'm coming to college!" form in my senior spring. (The other two were linguistics and physics, none of which ended up as my major.)

One of the concepts we discussed was that "there is no such thing as a free lunch," or "TINSTAAFL," as I thought of it, given my propensity for pronouncing acronyms. Basically, anything that seems free must have some cost, even if it's not in the same currency as the original item. Not out of pure contrariness, but instead out of genuine concern, I used to (and to some extent still do) consider how I could gain the free lunch. I was mostly concerned in case I ever become homeless, and would take note of particularly protective awnings or weekly library cake tastings (or whatever) as potential resources were I in need of shelter or food. It always seemed to me that it would be hard to go hungry if I had a few resources -- then you have friends or access to free opportunities. But if you look grungy, smell kind of funky, and are carrying too much stuff, then you're not allowed in, even to some public events.

I've been thinking a lot about finances for the recently graduated and in particular, savings. Specifically, if you (or really, if I) put money in a savings account, presumably I make interest on the account. Sure, it's not a free lunch because I had to lend that money to the bank (I think that's how it works..), but really, I need to keep my money somewhere and I treat my checking account like a savings account in the sense that I withdraw from it very infrequently (yay credit cards!). So it's not really a cost to me, except in the sense that potentially my money is restricted. Obviously TINSTAAFL, so I'm wondering, where's the catch?

I don't feel like many people my age talk and maybe even think about this new financial independence, or pseudo financial independence. How do they figure out how to manage their money? What should I do? Also, I wonder how independent one can truly be while knowing that it's impossible to mess up entirely. Sure, paying for everything oneself has an inherent value, but I'm not sure that it's true independence if you know that there's a safety net that will lovingly and selflessly give of itself if your independence was unjustified, a situation in which many of my peers find themselves in relation to our parents. At the same time, this safety net need not specifically be our parents, but instead perhaps that nice awning, the U.S. government, friends, or even a free lunch. On that level, I hope that I'm never truly independent.

$26 billion endowment, one library fine at a time

I'm back in DC after a lovely and quite relaxing Thanksgiving break. I'm starting to get over my Thanksgiving hangover (you know, the feelings of dread, nausea, and resentment about getting back to work just as people with sufficient alcohol feel about sobriety) and am going to sleep shortly so that I don't feel like I got hit by a truck when my alarm goes off in the morning. In lieu of a real post (though I have some doozies cooking, just you wait), I offer the following story:

I graduated in June and through some glitch in the electronic bills system, was left with a $1.50 credit on my account. After receiving enough e-bills, my mother wrote the following email to my school (reprinted without permission):

To: Student_Billing@edu
Date: Thu, 18 Oct 2007 10:38:09 EDT

Judy graduated in June. Her account shows a balance of $1.50 so we keep getting e-mails from Student Billing. Please consider the $1.50 a contribution and stop sending us the e-mails. :)

Thank you very much.

Today I received the following letter on official stationary:

On behalf of the President and Fellows, I thank you for your generosity and acknowledge the following contribution. A check/cash contribution of $1.50 was received on October 24, 2007. Per your request, this has been distributed as follows: $1.50 to Faculty of Arts & Sciences for the Senior Gift for Scholarships. Your support is greatly appreciated. Please retain this document for your tax records.

Since I still find it too funny to write anything "deep," a few take-aways:

1. They truly mean it when they say that no donation is too small.
2. I wonder if people really do turn in these sorts of letters to the IRS.
3. Supposing the paper, printing, envelope, and stamp all cost $0.50, do I really want to donate to an institution with at least 33% overhead?

Nighty night!

home is where the heart is

I am very much from Chicago (well, the Chicago metropolitan area). When I arrived at college, people actually couldn't understand my accent (particularly my short Os, like "box" or "top") and I purposely (re-)started calling pop pop in order to maintain my roots. I think of myself as Midwestern and there's a certain pride in the fact that I simply can't remember to refer to New York City as "the city" instead of my default of "downtown."

Even so, I'm at a time in my life when "home" has to be far more fluid than this connectedness to Chicago suggests. Home is an important concept to me -- I value community, roots, and the senses of belonging and comfort that accompany being home. It wouldn't be OK with me if I felt that Chicago was still so much my home that I hadn't really lived at home for the past 4+ years. I remember the first time I referred to college as home, or rather the first time I was forced to confront the fact that it was in an important sense my home. I was discussing some sort of travel logistics with my mom and she called college home; it was about something totally inane, but at the time, important and shocking.

Graduating threw my concept of my home into a tizzy. The first time after graduation that I visited my campus, I felt sad that I no longer lived in the place that I not only loved so much, but also had considered my home for the better part of four years. Where is home now?

I graduated on a Thursday, moved to DC on Friday, and on the Sunday morning two days later, flew to Denver for a work meeting. The first leg of my trip connected through Chicago, so I was on a flight from DC to Chicago when the woman sitting next to me naively asked me if I was from Chicago or DC. After brief mental turmoil, I decided to take advantage of my captive audience and explain that I grew up in Chicago, moved to DC 36 hours earlier, and had just lived for 4ish years in Boston. I didn't really have a home and so parading the details allowed me to avoid that important and overwhelming issue.

Almost six months later, DC is just now starting to feel like home, way quicker than Boston did. Recently, when I returned from a trip, I was grateful for the familiarity the city afforded me. Playing Trivial Pursuit with my family tonight, one of the questions asked about a post office at 14th and Irving and asked the responder to name the city, and I felt true warmth toward the city that I now know well enough to recognize street names. (Given my abominable sense of direction, that knowledge might place DC ahead of both Chicago and Boston in terms of my slight ability to navigate. God bless the grid.)

It's odd for me to grow attached to a place in which I only have definite plans to remain through June (although I hope to stay in DC for another year or two after that). At the same time, I recognize that this sort of transient lifestyle requires that concepts of home come more quickly and potentially, more strongly, than they have at other times in my life. I depend on the city for the sense of community and comfort that was previously accomplished by family, time invested, or the explicit inclusion of a college community. At this point, I indiscriminately refer to my Chicago suburb, my house in DC, and even sometimes my former college house, as home. For the time being, home is a more expansive concept, reflecting places in which I feel comfortable, grounded, and "in my element." I will continue to work to cultivate my sense of home in DC, but will try to develop it without turning it into my only possible home. I see no need to staple myself to a city at a time when I might need to move.

I wonder if that's possible.

Corrections

I'm getting into this idea of keeping a blog. Whenever I hear something interesting, instead of thinking, "Hmm, that's interesting," I think, "Hmm, that would make a good blog topic." I think that's healthy.

Anyway, for the sake of honesty, I feel the need to update my first two posts:

1. I have shared the address of this blog with two people. Granted, I haven't plastered it all over the place, but it's no longer fully anonymous.

2. My headset didn't really break - HOORAY! It turns out (as I discovered after one visit to Radioshack, three to Sprint, and three to Verizon) that it was my phone that was broken, and the good name of my trusty headset should hereby be cleared.

These corrections beg the question: What is the role of truth in a blog, or really in any sort of semi-anonymous communication? When I set out for my freshman year of college, my dad and I drove a third the way across the country with all of my belongings. (I always picture my 4 foot tall stuffed-animal penguin tied to the van like a masthead, but we didn't actually do that, we just thought about how amusing that would have been.) As we were nearing Boston, my destination, my dad turned to me (I was driving -- we thought it was poetic for me to drive the beginning and end bits) and said, "You know Jude, you could go by Hillary and no one would ever know that's not your name." It was such a crazy thought. I was going to a place where I had no history and no context, and was essentially starting anonymously. There were a few details on google that I could never escape. But other than those, I could completely remake myself.

The idea never appealed to me. It would have felt so hollow, and so deeply dishonest. I feel the same way about my writing. Sure, it might be more entertaining to create an alter blog-ego (blogego?), but I'm not trying to write fiction. In Steven King's book On Writing, the only Steven King I can read, King describes writing as a form of mental telepathy. When someone reads something another person wrote, s/he is reading the other person's mind and communicating directly. As I read that sentence, it really resonated. In my head appeared his thought. And I feel uncomfortable with the idea that I'm telepathing myself falsely. What's the point of writing as myself if I'm deceiving people by introducing them to a non-body, like those horrible 34 year old men romancing 12 year olds on the internet? What deception to think that I allow other people to read my mind, and purposely manipulate what they read to misrepresent my mind!

That being said, obviously I can't convey myself perfectly, nor would I want to be the sort of person who could be fully conveyed in blog posts. So, I will try to keep these posts both technically honest and true to myself. Even if I don't think of myself as a blogger.

Eulogy to my headset

My unfounded-in-anything description of schizophrenia is a severe disorganization of thoughts and actions. There are well-researched positive and negative symptoms, brain patterns, and behaviors, but what it comes down to is that the reality experienced by an individual dealing with schizophrenia is radically different from that agreed-upon reality of society.

I often think of these various "realities" even more specifically. When I just don't "get" a friend of mine -- Why would she buy a new pair of shoes for a date? Why did he just arrive late for a midterm in order to pick his Fantasy Football team? -- I consider it in terms of the realities we share, or don't. I have found that most, but definitely not all, of my closest friends share my reality with me.

At any rate, I opened this whole discussion to lead into the main topic for this post: my headset. In the summer after my freshman year of college I worked in a physics research lab approximately an hour and a half (2.5 hours in traffic) from home. Among other life modifications, I bought my headset -- a single cord with an ear clip, a microphone in the cord, and a convenient plug to my phone. Thus I could drive and talk on the phone without using my hands. I should emphasize that this purchase occurred in the summer of 2004, years before these sorts of headsets were common (I talk like I'm 80).

I grew dependent on this headset, using it even when I wasn't driving but because my bag was heavy and I didn't want to lift my arm to talk on the phone or because it was cold out, and this way I could keep my phone in my pocket (how many of you are thinking, "Man, this wacko is in her own reality"?). People often wouldn't notice that I was on the phone and would either (1) talk to me, requiring me to be rude to either the person on the phone or embarrass the approacher in public (the situation usually resolved itself with me having to talk over my phone buddy saying, "Wait, Mom, hold on, wait, Mom, one second, Mom? hold on please" or (2) assume I'm talking to myself and give me a wide berth as I walk along. After one such #1, my mom remarked to me, "Judy dolly, you and people with headsets are giving people with schizophrenia a new social acceptability." This observation intrigued me.

Last Thursday, I was in the airport and bumped into an acquaintance. As he was running off to deal with our delayed flight, my phone started vibrating. I plugged in my headset to answer the call to the astonishment of my acquaintance/new friend. He thought it was outrageous that I used the headset for something so simple as a basic phone conversation.

Later, on the plane, he was sitting in the seat behind me and we were discussing how to spend the plane ride. The flight attendant came up to me and said curtly, "Ma'am, are you powered down?" I had been talking to my friend while facing forward -- he could hear me perfectly but it looked like I was talking to myself. In just three short years, the assumption switched from schizophrenia to BlueTooth.

Tonight, my headset died. Or more accurately, it got really quiet so that each person can kind of make out what the other person says, but not actually have a conversation. But my first thought, instead of wondering how this change will impact my empathy with people with schizophrenia, was: how can I play computer games while talking on the phone?

A blog?!?

Maybe a week ago, it occurred to me that I might enjoy writing a blog. I'm still wary enough that I wouldn't call it "blogging," because that connotes both a seriousness and a dorkiness that I am not quite ready to broach. I suppose my dedication to this blogging thing will only be tested by time, or really the next week or so. I love the idea of writing and was inspired to start/continue keeping a journal after a conversation with Megan last week. Here's why I opted for blog:

I wouldn't say that I'm paranoid, but I certainly always worry that someone I might be talking about can hear me. In an aisle at CVS, I'll whisper unnecessarily about what a friend ate for lunch (even though I'll talk about my own nonsense on my cell phone anywhere that it's ok to talk on a cell phone). I'll write emails with extensive code names that take four times as many emails to explain. And even writing in my diary, there's always this concern that someone might come across it and might read it, either a nosy roommate/boyfriend or some day in the distant future when my life is inexplicably interesting to my great granddaughter or my biographer (just kidding about the biographer). But it's arrogant to write a diary with the knowledge that someone might read it, and wise to write a blog with that same foresight. So even though I have no plans to share this address with anyone (ever), I'm writing to my unseen and nonexistent audience, rather than "Dear Judy" or "Dear Diary." (Hello!)

I'm hoping to post about once a week on my thoughts on some topic, anything that's been on my mind. I'm thinking about starting in on long distance relationships but may instead opt for cooking lentils or something less touchy (especially because I might have accidentally linked this to my email account).

And since you, my dear faux readers, have clearly happened upon this blog, I hope you enjoy. It is, after all, in large part because of you that this blog exists at all.