The Middle Distance

1 AM is the best time for posting for me, it's the closest to real free time I get; I know a lot of people miss the posts because of that, but what can I do? It's been a very, very busy week. #understatement.


Occupy Chicago is where I was for 12 hours yesterday. No, I wasn't arrested -- I had the choice to stand in the arresting space, and I chose to stand in the witnessing space instead. I felt vaguely guilty about that for about 10 minutes, and then I remembered my early 20s and remembered I'd earned my merit badges already. Still, the amazing mass solidarity of a singularly-focused crowd is a major peak experience for me, and I will keep going until....well, until our nation is different. Very different.

Today I went to the Chicago Cultural Center for the release party for a longtime dear friend's book about Aretha Franklin.

In between, y'know, work. And the novels. I'll be putting up a new post at my original fic journal face_fomus shortly. (all posts there are locked)

At the lagoon in my (very large) neighborhood park, spring is definitely in the air. Canada geese and mallard ducks are EVERYWHERE and pretty visibly paired off now, swimming and grazing in couple-formation.


One of the mallard pairs consists of two males. :D (Some of the geese pairs might as well, but they don't have gender-dimorphic plumage, so who knows?)


Also saw one of our friendly neighborhood peregrine falcons again today, on the wing this time.

There's a peregrine falcon in my hood. I've seen him or her twice now, sitting in the same tree at about the same time of day.

The lady down the block feeds the pigeons--and, indirectly, the falcon.

If I never see another cardboard box in my life, it'll be too soon. Alas, they're a pretty basic building block of my universe right now.

Tonight's massive job: sorting books. Which ones are coming with me and which are going into storage (with friends, whom I hope will enjoy them while they're playing host). So I've got two sets of boxes right now - the ones I can afford to part with for now, and the ones that are important to research I've got going on for three (3) longterm fiction projects.

My head's starting to spin.

Please, if you've got links handy, link me to fun stuff to look at on my breaks? (preferably funny, porny or both.)


Here's something interesting as an offering:

Someone at the aforementioned Dresden Files Kink Meme requested a medieval AU and got Life in Medieval Chicago. With bonus racebending. Much cooler than a medieval European AU, IMO. (Why yes, Chicago--or at least shikaakwa--does mean something like "Stinky Onion" or "Place of Stinky Onions" in the Algonquian language of the area. That's why the satirical newspaper The Onion is called that.)

I have to move in 3 weeks. Blergh. Have appointments to look at two places tomorrow--wish me luck!

So I was walking to my bus route and back, and mentally wanting to put a Molotov cocktail through the window of everyone who couldn't be arsed to shovel or put down salt. Because you might think the ice on your stretch of sidewalk is no big deal. For yourself.

BUT...if you're clumsy and have no health insurance (cause you're underemployed and broke, as many of us are these days)--and are in the US;I'm ranting about Chicago people here--you know damn well that every chance you have of falling and hurting yourself might mean that your parents could lose their house if you wind up suddenly hospitalized. For us pedestrians, it's often safer to walk in the street than on the sidewalks, and even so we have to go slow and grope the iron fences.


Mostly, the worst offenders are yuppie condos. People who have garages right under their lofts, and so have no vested interest in the general communal life of the city, which involves WALKING.

I got to meet the lovely ithilwen and her parents. We had lunch at the Signature Room, on the 95th floor of the John Hancock building. Can you believe I've lived in Chicago 18 years and never been there? It's really the kind of place you go with out-of-town friends.

We saw peregrine falcons flying by!

Then we spent the afternoon at the Field Museum, which always makes time fly by like nothing else. Ancient Egypt. Mammoths and mastodons! Sue the T-Rex on 3D! Creepy old taxidermy! (That and the T-Rex film made me feel really carnivorous, I think. Must tear meat with teeth! Does passenger pigeon and California condor taste like chicken? Mmmm, bison.)

So when we went to Heartland Cafe for dinner, I had a bison burger. And there I got to meet the lovely deborah_judge, who is a brand-new Chicagoan.

Thank you, all of you, for the fantastic day!

Current reading obsession: Jim Butcher's The Dresden Files.

At the bus stop a couple days ago, a woman stared at me and squee'd with a look of recognition, and I'm thinking, like, "do I know you?" and it wasn't me she was squeaking at, but the book (Summer Knight, book 4). "I'm on Book 9" she said, and I said, "NO SPOILERS!" and she said, "Oh no. But you'll love it."


I want to recommend this EXCELLENT post by mofic: Talking to the Long-Term Unemployed: a Few Suggestions. Nowadays, I bet just about everyone knows someone in the this category. This post is excellent because it addresses a lot of the emotional aspects of unemployment and how it affects people socially--there is such awkwardness around matters of income and class status in our society, so much internalized shame and unconscious judgment, so much uneasiness concerning depression and despair especially as related to the cult of positive-thinking in the conventional wisdom about job-hunting, so much dread of imposing-on-friends and wanting-to-help-but-being-unable-to-fix-it, etcetera, that it's a real minefield. Please read this post.

(I am sort of reluctant to say I feel a lot of this applies to me, because I am not "unemployed" per se; in fact, I have two jobs, but neither is full-time, neither has benefits, and neither pays particularly well, so I still feel like I'm struggling and my position is very tenuous and I am looking for a full-time position, so still getting the rejections. But emotionally this post really hit home for me in a lot of ways.)

Happy Yay We Got Rid of Them Day, Brits!


My neighborhood is quiet. Too quiet.

So today was an exciting day. I took my little girlfriend to the vet for the first time.

(Nothing wrong, but she's been a little wheezy so I thought a kitty-cold was a possibility, plus it's been a year so I figured OK, have her looked at and tuned up and get her shots updated--and besides, the vet throws in claw-trimming, which...yay!)

Madimi is a pretty quiet cat. She chirps and trills and purrs and snores and squeaks, but she very rarely meows. Until you get her outside in a carrier, and then it's pretty non-stop. Three blocks walk to the bus stop - yowl!yowl!yowl!yowl!. On the bus - yowl!yowl!yowl!yowl!. Everyone on the bus could at least see that I'm not abusing her whiny ass. Once we get to the vet, though, all is peace. She purrs and tries to fall asleep on the scale (12 lbs). She endures the rectal thermometer like the most stoic of ukes. She roams around the little room, noses open the cabinets, curls up in the sink, and licks the vet's hand. Vet says that if all her patients were this mellow, her days would be a lot easier. (!!!!!!)

On the way back, since she still hates being outside, very vocally, I hailed a cab to make it easier on both of us. Cab wound up being a minivan -- which I hate, because I always struggle in a very undignified way with the side door, but OK. Now, there's a speed bump on Erie St near my place, which is normally a good thing - but it's not a good thing when the cab driver is searching for street numbers and distracted by yowling cat, and doesn't see the damn thing until it's too late with a BANG and both human passenger (blaspheming loudly) and feline passenger in carrier (also presumably blaspheming, but I'm sure Bast can take it) go airborne and land sort of upside down on the floor. After ascertaining everyone was fine, the cab driver just sits there, apologizing abjectly, and I'm just too startled to be upset at all. If I were the kind of person who throws tantrums over stuff like this, it would have been a prime opportunity, but I'm just not. (I only regret that we were coming back from the vet and so I had already dropped off the stool sample. That would be something amusing to "forget" among all the contents of my purse I was fishing out from under the front seat.)

Madimi's already forgotten all about it, bless her evil little tiny cat brain.