Home* Sweet Home*
Mood:  energetic
Now Playing: Magic Numbers
As I am planning to move next month, I have been digging through the apartment, purging the pointless and organzing the important. And I'm getting a bit nostalgic for the Chicagoland area. Here are some of the things I'll miss:

1. Hot dogs with a whole bunch of shit* on 'em. Especially from Portillo's and Spankys.
*mustard, hot peppers, onions, relish, celery salt and a big dill pickle on a poppy seed bun. While we're on food, Chipotle, Jimmy John's and Lou Malnati's pizza as well)

2. Four distinct seasons, none of which are all too hot, even if one is really cold with lots and lots of snow. But it was fun to have sports writers with snow shovels digging out my car once a week after work.

3. The cute little girl with bells on her ankles who hides behind her mother's skirt when I see them in the laundry room. And also the effiminate Courtney, this tall fellow who works in the office and is also in the laundry room a lot. He has 100 bright yellow towels and folds them meticulously straight from the dryer.

4. Baseball, baseball, baseball. Most days you can watch two games a day, even if one of those is the Cubs. Plus whatever's on national tv. Living in a World Series champion town really was exciting.

5. Paper wad fights at work.

6. Packing the cat in the car and taking a road trip to St. Louis.

7. Riding trains. The parks downtown. Skyscrapers and museums, not that I saw them all that often.

8. Everyone here thinks I have a Southern accent and have taught me new ways to say "sausage" and "garage key."

9. Definitely the Steelers bar. And The Official Bar in Elgin, where my picture is on the wall, and I have the jukebox memorized.

10. I can choose to embrace or to ignore the giant mall in my backyard.

11. Everyone here had just learned to spell my name.

12. With O'Hare and Midway, you can always fly somewhere for pretty cheap.

13. The libraries are freaking awesome. Seriously.

14. Free guitar lessons from Jamie and hanging out at the shop of the most bad-ass airbrush artist in the country.

15. A best friend who likes Family Guy, good movies, thrift stores and yard sales, roller coasters, beer, road trips, crossword puzzles, books, John Prine and Grateful Dead, Mo, and everything else that is great about this world.

16. Coupons! Not only can I pilfer coupons from four different Sunday papers, but they mail me coupons for stuff in the area literally every week.

17. Ikea. I may have to spring for furniture made with real wood now.

18. My apartment faces West, and in the evenings that I get to be home, everything glows pink.

19. I kind of like the central time zone, now that I've gotten used to it.

20. Chicago pops up in a lot of rap songs, and I could always relate.

Eye just don't know.
Mood:  not sure
Now Playing: Cubbies at Twinkies.
When I first went to my optometrist last year, I was a little put off by two things. First of all, when I called to make an appointment, they asked if I wanted to come that very day. If not today, then tomorrow, or how about the next day... they were much too available. Secondly, when I did go there, the office was smack dab in the middle of a big grocery-store-laden strip mall, and I'm just not that hip on a medical facility that may or may not have been a Subway sandwich shop in a former life.

But the people there were fairly nice, including a little Asian lady who always remembers my face and calls me "Miss Lisa," and the contacts were cheap. So I stayed for that appointment and a year or so later, partially out of laziness, decided to go back again (yesterday).

I had gotten over all of my previous reservations and had given this set of doctors the benefit of the doubt, when they sat me down and had me fill out another form... the typical fare where you write in your name, address, insurance information, etc. Well, this three-page form they gave me was used already. I mean, a previous client had filled out all the information, and someone had painstakingly colored over their swirly responses with a White Out pen. Filling in my name was like carving it in white, plastery (overly frugal) stone. I can't imagine why you'd recycle a form with the approximate value of... 3 cents? 5 cents? Don't you have a Xerox machine? Was the staple made of gold? I said something to the secretary about it, and she just replied something about how the person had filled it out but didn't stay for an appointment.

Probably because they recycle forms. Or maybe because their magazines are really old. While I waited, I read a two-month-old Oprah, or O, whatever it's called, which I had never touched before that day but picked up because someone had colored in her face on the front a fascinating shade of green, and I wanted to see what else the kid did to the magazine.

Op/Ed
Now Playing: Cake
For the first time, I may be published in the paper. I wrote a response to this letter to the editor published on Thursday.

Flag-rant Foul

Many in this diverse community think it's inappropriate for area residents of Mexican origin to display their country's flag and celebrate their holidays.

Maybe they're right. But while we're at it, let's get rid of ALL the superfluous flags we've got waving around.

Blowing outside my apartment complex are several sheets of red, white and blue material, but the stars and stripes they are not. They read "Welcome" and "Now Leasing." I've never heard of those countries, but I hope those Welcomians next door don't play their music too loud.

And at the McDonald's on the corner of Summit and Center Streets in Elgin, President Ronald McDonald has the nerve to fly his golden-arched banner just beneath Old Glory. That's a little suspicious to me: Does he expect our troops to intervene when the
Hamburglar comes calling? And do we have to honor McHolidays, such as 39-cent Cheeseburger Day?

Possibly the biggest disgrace of all is at Chicago's Wrigley Field. There are flags all over that place, with names of faraway places like Braves and Mets! And worst of all, the Cubs flag is almost never flown
at the top.

Who's to say which flags are the most offensive? So let's just put a windsock in it.

If I were magical queen of the universe...*
Mood:  hug me
Now Playing: Counting Crows
...when you'd get your hair cut at a salon, they'd take a digital picture and put a short description written by the hairdresser in a computer database, so that the next time you went back, if you wanted the exact same haircut again, they could do it without you having to try to describe it to someone else who didn't exactly graduate from the Harvard school of communication.

...construction in residential buildings wouldn't start until after noon.

...belts would be taboo. I figure the reason every company in America is making ladies shirts so short is so that a woman can show off a belt. This creates the unsightly problem (in some cases) of belly overflow. Get rid of the belts and lengthen the shirts.

...the vacuum cleaner would play songs or blow bubbles instead of droning out that mechanical hum (which, in mine's case anyway, is right on pitch as an E, and yes, I did test this theory with a tuner).

...the government would lift the tax on alcohol and instead apply it to something that really drains society, like the Oprah Book Club, Everybody Loves Raymond dvds, or John Mayer.

...guys named Brian would just go ahead and change the name to Brain because that's always how I type it anyway. And because Brain was a funny character on Inspector Gadget who was probably supposed to be Brian, and they just made a typo in the script. Detroit would be Detriot, and prescription would be perscription.

...more songs would be about monkeys.

...public school systems would start teaching classes on ATM and self-checkout usage, because I'm sick of getting behind folks who just can't seem to figure it out in any expedient manner. Hey, it's the same drill every time: same options, same buttons to push. How do these people work for a living?

* "Magical queen of the universe" borrowed from the very funny comedic stylings of Ryan Arey, and would be better performed in a cape.

Bouncing off the Walls
Mood:  not sure
Now Playing: Pete Yorn
The last time this happened, I was ten years old. I was in fourth grade, and, always the late bloomer, had just come down with chicken pox. That was the last time I was sick enough to miss an entire week of anything. Until now.

Thursday morning I woke up with that dizzy feeling you get when you jump out of bed too fast. Except instead of lasting for a few swirling seconds, it lingered for minutes. And the dizziness didn't go away until I lay back down. So that's what I did.

And for the next couple of days, that's all I could do... cautiously change positions between lying down, half-lying down, and sitting with my head perfectly still. I staggered around like I was drunk and slept most of the day.

And, while streaming in and out of consciousness, I watched a LOT of tv. And much of it was very bad. For instance, I watched hours of the Game Show Network. Call it a guilty pleasure.

Two episodes of Family Feud, every day. The first one was Richard Dawson-era Feud, and if you aren't familiar, he's the guy who kisses all the ladies on the lips. And I noticed that some of the female contestants were really, really ready for the kiss too. Like when it was their turn to introduce themselves, they did the whole shebang in a half-puckered motion. Desperate times call for desperate measures, I guess.

Then came an episode of Match Game: 74, from the year, you guessed it, 1974. And it got me thinking: television programming really isn't that much different these days. Match Game pretty much showcases the American Idol formula to success, with less Barry Manilow. Each is a colorful, elaborate production: MG an assemblage of orange carpet, plaid jackets and (my favorite) contestant platforms that spin and roll out onto a brightly lit soundstage. AI has the same type of thing, in a more modern-friendly blue stage lights, dapper-but-goofy-enough-to-be-likable host, B-list celebrities. So we traded Mad-Lib puns for teeny bopper Pop.

I went to the doctor. Before you could spell "prescription," he was able to determine that I had a sinus infection and some mouthful of a name virus in my ears that was screwing with my equilibrium. I was given a week's sentence of doing nothing. In fact, he wrote on my paper that I should "drink plenty of fluids" and "no sudden head movements." This made me feel as though I should wear a bicycle helmet everywhere I went. Which, as it turns out, was pretty much nowhere anyway.

The older you get, the quicker you tend to run to the doctor about something, I think. The older you get, these illogical thoughts creep in your head like "I've never been dizzy all the time before, and I've never had a brain tumor before; therefore, this must be a brain tumor."

Oh well, the Medicine Man's fluid-filled, no-head-turning, antibiotic, decongestant, anti-motion sickness drug combination must be working. Because today I think I can downgrade "dizzy" to feeling something more like that hazy, floating feeling you have after you've been swimming all day.

Soon, I'll be at 100 percent. And I'll have that euphoric feeling of finally being well again, like the way Mario is invincible for a few flashing seconds after he gets blasted by a goon. And it's a good thing. Because I am totally out of sick days.