lindsayliveshere.org

I don’t have Twitter. Furthermore, I don’t have a handheld advice device with which to Twitter when away from the computer. So here’s a backlog of status updates the old-fashioned way:

-Am standing in REI and completely confused by the bajillions of products that could probably take me to the Himalayas and back. I remember how my ninth grade global studies teacher used to say “Himalayas”.

-Am the proud owner of like $200 worth of lightweight airtight weatherproof elephant-repellant items. Plus a big floppy sun hat.

-Am in the Whole Foods remembering how rich people can afford to buy nicely stacked organic carrots.

-Am feeling a crazy panic rise in my chest over the thought of seven days in the wilderness.

-Am wondering why all the bathing suits at Target are string bikinis. Maybe a girl wants her top to stay on if she hits a wave.

-Am so hot. It’s so hot. Oh lord. This star we came from is melting any thought I have before it hits the pavement of my consciousness and if you could just turn it down a little, even a teensy bit, we could all get along.

-Am feeling the cold caffeine buzz of this Frappucino cycle through the heated coils of my existence. Am thinking too hard about all the floor cleaner that it’s perhaps made of.

-Am staring straight ahead wondering how the Buddhists do it and thinking of Janelle leaving for Taiwan, my sister wanting to study in Dublin, remembering how lost I got in Dublin, how I would love to get lost in Taiwan. Or Dublin. Or the woods.

-Am really hoping I don’t get lost in the woods. Though, you know, I’ll have a big floppy sun hat. Which is pretty cool.

Somehow I ended up becoming friends with the kind of people who sing in old-timey jazz-folk bands, who hand out kitten stickers to strangers, who think turtle races are a good Friday night, who plot to steal at least one turtle and liberate it to somewhere more humane, who bring a ziploc bag of harmonicas (one in each key) to the picnic, who custom-fit their road bikes with stereo speakers, who jeopardize their antibiotic regimens to have a beer with me, who feel like dancing pretty much all the time. Friends. Thanks.

Follow me on this one. Birds evolved from dinosaurs. They’ve been around a while. So the Field Museum tells me. They’ve been around much longer than people. So… they’re probably less dumb and more incredible than humans (except ornithologists) normally give them credit for. For example, they can fly. Also, they don’t have to use some wordy, clunky language to communicate. Also, they follow the magnetic signals of the earth or whatever and can navigate all over the place, whereas humans need their fancy GPS locators. I mean, sure they never developed computers, but they keep it simple — making a nest out of sticks, for example, whereas people try to make their houses out of incredibly time-intensive materials. And we, stupid humans, are making them tweet really loudly over our lame-o attempts to transport our earthbound-selves.

Kevin and I are going camping at the end of July to North Manitou island. It’s off the coast of Michigan, and apparently you can just camp wherever you want as long as you don’t disturb the wild things. My basic requirement for a summer trip was that it needed to be as off the grid as possible.  (The grid, for me, meaning e-mail, electricity, whining, gas prices, Starbucks, deadlines, gushing over Sex and the City: The Movie.) It’s an hour and a half by ferry from the mainland, so I’m pretty sure it’s gridless. I’ve never been camping before either, so this is big news for me. Most concerning: I don’t know how to make any camping foods. And I like to eat. So leave me some recipes if you’re backpacking-savvy.

Other people have camped there and survived, I’m told by the interweb, which is reassuring.

Fireworks at Winnemac Park are my new fave tradition. Smoke and loudness, as much as you can take, as many neighbors as can cram on the sidewalk, as many zoomy whistle-boom sounds as the air can hold. Like the finale at most park displays. Except it goes on for hours. And there was no warm-up.

On the El today we passed a tennis court where some kind of lesson was going horribly wrong. Little kids, three or four year-olds, were arranged in three lines like they were about to march off somewhere, except they were holding tennis rackets half the size of their bodies. They wiggled around or looked up at the sky or down at their shoes while waiting for their turn. Three adults, each in army green shorts, tossed bright yellow tennis balls to the first kid in each line. And these kids’ swings exploded with energy but were just… Just. Such. Misses. Rackets went straight up into the air; fell right out of their hands; smashed the air with vigor. Kids whirled around and sprung off the ground, but nothing connected. The tiny Asian kid in flourescent orange shorts held his racket with two hands badminton-style and had to bend his knees just to lift it off the ground. The bright yellow tennis balls whiffed right past all three kids. They went to the back of the line. Next!

The El moved on, but I couldn’t help think about those kids and how they seemed like a perfect visual representation of something that I’ve been mulling over the past few days. I used to think that, by your late-20s, we’d all be pretty slick at this being-a-grownup thing. And for a minute there, it seemed to be happening: people got jobs that meant something, found real love or acquired condos and graduate degrees. But as together as we seem, we’re still battling something — ourselves, our personality traits, our weaknesses, things we hash out in long three a.m. phone calls about our hangups and bangups. The basic building blocks of a Sensible Life fell into place, so now the second, deeper layer of problems can plague us even more. It’s like we’re all standing there distractedly with these rackets as heavy as cast-iron skillets, taking madly clumsy swings at these problems.

Your temper alienates those around you: SWISH.

Your dependence on others makes you unstable: SWISH.

Your unwillingness to accept blame makes others resent you: SWISH.

Your inability to commit prevents you from emotionally investing in anything: SWISH.

Your fear of failure keeps you safely in mediocrity: SWISH.

We’re trying so hard and waiting so desperately for the time that ball connects and sails over the net, hoping for one good THWACK.

Lately I’ve lost the deep peace that comes with having time and energy to burn. And with it, some creativity. People say that creativity needs time and space to breathe. I always thought that was pretty much B.S. — an excuse for lazy people. But it’s totally undeniable: I just started a second, 10-hour-per-week job, and those hours have indeed soaked up those excess brainwaves and made me the kind of person who’s determined to get from one stepping-stone deadline to the next but who’s missing all that empty time in which to daydream. We’re plum out of original thoughts ’round here.

-mold

-pollen

-goose down

-myopic negativity disguised as being realistic

-insecure bragging disguised as telling-you-a-story-about-me

-antibiotics that are made of sulfates

-dust

Yesterday Kevin and I saw Wanted, the new movie with Angelina Jolie and what’s-his-face… James McAvoy. It’s filmed in Chicago, and the whole time I’m seeing places I know; I know exactly how it feels to step around that corner with the Irish pub, or hear the el grind along next to your window. So maybe the movie’s location compounded the Superpower Effect, as I call it: Any time I see a movie where people have mad fighting skillz (like The Matrix, or Kill Bill, or Spiderman even), I leave the movie and think my body should be able to act like that. Like, maybe there’s some switch I forgot to turn on that lives just below the skin on my abdomen and can be activated by pressing my belly button just right, ready to turn me into one of those people who can kick a lot of ass and floss their teeth at the same time. So I have to sorta talk to myself as we’re leaving the theater and popcorn is crunching underfoot and teenagers are jostling each other out the door, and tell myself in a firm but soothing internal conversation: No. You do not have superpowers. It sucks, I know, you want to be able to curve a bullet with your mind and knock out the bad guy with a kick in the jaw and walk away all casual — like man, you could really use a cheeseburger. But you’re here. In Chicago. Without superpowers. And getting on the escalator in the lobby suddenly seems like the lamest form of transportation ever. Worse when Kevin rides down by lifting himself, like a gymnast on those parallel bars, no feet on the moving stairs, and I’m totally spooked out, because for another nanosecond I think we can fly and kick and walk up walls… and then I remember, again, that we’re not in the movie.

the good: got a second job, take that you crazy government trying to make me all poor and shit, guess what I’ll work harder. vegetables are growing from the ground, maybe we’ll all live if we need war gardens again, especially if tomatoes can fight. people are getting married, see this love garbage works, you’re endeared by the cadence of their voice right before a joke, the way they look in snug t-shirts, their morning eye crust. david sedaris wrote a new book i don’t like, so let’s joyfully chalk up more imperfections to good writers. i washed a bunch of laundry, ate a bunch of bright fake orange sun chips, took the laundry out of the dryer and only streaked a few things with my bright fake orange fingertips. that is called good karma.

This weekend was Midsommarfest, the annual street fair in my (ancestrally Swedish) neighborhood. The theater where I work was supposed to have a table there in a booth with a few other nonprofits, a “Fliers! T-shirts! Raffle tickets!” kind of thing. Saturday morning we arrived at the nonprofit booth to find that several other neighborhood nonprofits had already arranged their displays and wares on all available table space. Holding armfuls of merchandise and papers, plus a hollow plastic hen (receptacle for all completed raffle tickets), I was troubled. A large, glossy-tan booming-voiced man from a local community counsel declared, “Didn’t y’all hear? We only get half a table each this year.” The three other nonprofits looked around sheepishly. I adopted a deer-in-headlights look. An elderly man and woman from the Edgewater Historical Society started slowly condensing their large science-fair-sized display into one half of a table. The elderly fellow pointed at my companion, a young red-haired man with a rolling suitcase full of t-shirts. “The girl can stay. No room for you though.” We chuckled like he was kidding and set up, moving piles of fliers and raffle tickets slightly left and slightly right as though square centimeters were the last food on the island.

I found two reps from the event company running the street fair. They were approximately 16 years old and wearing shiny lip gloss and tight t-shirts with the name of the event company on them. They had another space for us, a large space. But no canopy. As it was approximately 100 degrees in bright sunlight, this too was troubling. Especially since we’d paid for a space with a canopy, being fair-skinned theater wimps. But we packed our things, moved them to Space 2, a luxuriously large space. A patch of pavement with a beat-up folding table in it. Home. Without a roof. A half-hour later, the sixteen year-olds returned with a canopy that they’d borrowed from the people running some of the concerts, a bright blue overheard tent called “family-style gazebo” on the vinyl zip case. Sweet. For the next four hours, we were lounging amidst the glory of Midsommarfest.

But this was a 2-day street fair. And there were thunderstorms overnight. And we arrived Sunday morning to find that our borrowed, blue family-style gazebo had completely bent and blown up against the side of the Alamo Shoe Store. It was still raining and storming, we were again carrying armfuls of supplies, and now our loaner roof was in a tangle of angular metal and canvas.

Kevin had volunteered to help me carry stuff over that morning, and I bet he immediately regretted it, because we were then stuck trying to track down those sixteen year-olds to tell them, Yo. This tent. It’s busted. And we don’t know whose it is.

Two hours later, the rains had mostly stopped and we were back in the nonprofit booth. The Edgewater Historical Society hadn’t shown up for day 2. So we could have the whole table. At 1pm, I made an executive decision to simply go home. I only went back to the street fair that night, for a margarita and to listen to Hairbanger’s Ball sing that song about pouring some sugar on me.

Some poems have stuck with me for years, remembered and forgotten, phrases popping into my consciousness at random times: I am sitting in the diner and the poem comes on the jukebox; I am walking down the street and the poem floats down from an open window. “The Patience Sutra” has stayed with me that way; I read it in high school and have never quite forgotten the feeling of possibility it gave me.

An excerpt:

Come on
Let’s steal a car
and drive to the mountains
Let’s do it right now

We’ll buy a bottle of wine
and sit on a railroad bridge
and sing songs to the moon
We’ll find a fuse
and we’ll set it on fire
Come on right now
Let’s go
Let’s go
Coffee cigarettes whiskey sex
Let’s eat everything that makes us crazy
Come on we’ve got to go
We can’t wait even a minute more
Tonight is the end of the world
So let’s dodge this catatonia
that sings us into dangerous sleep
We can sleep when we’re dead
We can diet
when famine rolls into town
Enough of this comfort and anesthesia
Enough of insurance
car payments
love money
deadlines
Can’t you see the beautiful body
you’ve been assigned
Don’t you want to test it?
Run it like a race car?
Let’s go
Let’s go
Right now

Despite planting tomatoes, my thumb, it is not green. My houseplants must consider themselves miracles. They know they’re living in a household that claims to love them but, when times get busy, forgets about them entirely.

Eliina and I used to live in one-bedroom apartments stacked on top of each other like a cheap apartment club sandwich. Often she would venture from her piece of bread up to mine, and when I opened the door she’d instantly lock eyes on the plants. They never looked good. At best, they were pale and limp. At worst, dead. She would pick them up (in my memories, she’s murmuring to them, but maybe she doesn’t do that) and put them in the sink, where she’d fill the whole pot with water, let it filter through the soil, fill it again and then let it sit in the sink to drain.  Emergency resuscitation.

I always imagined that this soaking/draining process felt so good to the plant. A few hours later, they’d be deep green and perky again, like the drought never was.

On Sunday night, I spent hours wandering around Lakeview by myself with a book, an apple pastry from the Chinese bakery near my house, and nowhere to be, the first non-scheduled time I’ve had in a while. Then Oriana and I met up and took a walk to the lake, where we laid next to it and looked up at the stars, the satellites, and the lightning in the approaching clouds. Laying near the lake does something to my brain, like the moment after the ambulance passes and there’s space where the sound was. Or like a wilty plant flooded by the faucet one time, and then again, and then left to wake up in the sink.

A meditation on Lloyd Dobler. By Chicago author Elizabeth Crane.

The animated story of a girl and a traveler, for your viewing pleasure. Made by an artist in Seattle.

Eliina and I recently spent an afternoon planting tomato seedlings and sipping cold beer in my backyard – sending me awash in memories of my grandparents’ garden, which is basically one giant salad. I remember pushing open the back screen door and running barefoot across the spongy cool grass to pick cherry tomatoes and eat them from my palm.

Maybe someday my whole front lawn will be a garden too. The “edible estates” idea, explained in the link, sounds much more appealing than the perfectly manicured lawns that I grew up with. My childhood lawns were sprayed regularly with chemicals, pruned by our development’s lawn care service, and have generally maintained the same I’m-not-a-tree-I’m-a-Lego effect for the past 20 years.