Tue Mar 08 09:55:37 leaving town:

In mid-June, alh and I will be leaving Chicago, destination: California by way of the Northland. We'll be moving home for a month, give or take, and then out to Southern California for school -- law school for alh at Pepperdine (she's doing their Strauss Institute program for dispute resolution) and I will eventually be getting a masters in Computer Science from somebody down there... maybe Frankie's Back Alley University (FBAU)... who knows.

The reality of moving away is really starting to sink in now... I've begun to admit to myself that we will probably never get the office really cleaned up until we box everything up and move away. Embarassing.

Tue Mar 08 10:04:52 thumbs up - thumbs down:

I've been living in Chicago now for over eleven years and thinking about leaving soon has made me want to make a list of things I will miss and things I won't miss about the Second City on the Third Coast. I'm going to try and make a post every day with that topic in mind -- in no particular order. Here's my first entry:

<b>will miss</b>: Having such a spectacularly funny mayor. Every time Daley is on the television, it's comedy gold. Ask anybody.

won't miss: the rustling of plastic bags in the trees. Living in Chicago, you actually think that maybe plastic bags *do* grow on trees. Unfortunately, I'll probably get plenty of that in LA... maybe they'll just be in palm trees or something instead of mulberry and catalpa. I hope not.

Wed Mar 09 11:47:18 yea, nay:

will miss: My job. I really like the people I work with, and the different kinds of challenges I have every day. I'll miss the opportunity to have input over the direction of the department and the campus infrastructure, and I'll miss the laid-back attitude. While I'm ready to not spend almost every day of my life at $UNIVERSITY, I'm going to miss the friendly faces and community I've established here... after all, I've lived here for over a third of my life (this fact is still shocking to me). I'm afraid of ending up in an inflexible job I don't enjoy and/or don't find challenging. Sometimes this job is not challenging, but that's about the worst thing about it I can think of.

won't miss: the smell of the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal. Actually, I'm not sure if the canal smells itself, but up on the North Side where I live, it runs along the parks and up into Skokie next to several water reclaimation plants and I think the Deep Tunnel project. Anyway, the unmistakable smell of sewage is impossible to separate from the canal, at least in my mind.

(1) Thu Mar 10 08:53:13 blinding your ears with science since the 1970s:

The onion has a nice article with Thomas Dolby Robertson of 80s synth-pop fame. Essentially, Thomas Dolby Robertson is a hacker and has been since he was soldering disco lighting consoles to synthesizers for "She Blinded Me With Science". Then he started the company that makes the polyphonic ringtone engine for many major cell phone manufacturers. (via the Diner)

Thu Mar 10 11:28:45 it's bittersweet... sweet and bitter, bitter and sweet:

I'll miss WXRT, one of the coolest and most original radio stations I've ever listened to, commercial or otherwise. They have their niche, which is really several niches including blues, and for being a big city radio station, they really feel down to earth and in touch with the city. They play a lot of local music, support local artists, bring in good concerts, have lots of great on-air appearances, and break interesting artists. Right now they're sponsoring a program with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra which is essentially street-level music education with WXRT people and CSO performers. I'll miss the personalities, especially Marty Lennartz (and The Regular Guy movie reviews, coincidence...?). It's a station you can almost always count on to having something good to hear.

I won't miss Q101, "Chicago's alternative since 1992." Wow, you almost gotta blow the dust off that slogan! 13 years is a long time to be an alternative, and like other alt.stations in the nations, Q101 has stayed Staunchly Alternative -- but as we all know, "alternative" has become it's own kind of mainstream, one which I am not a fan of anymore.

When I was coming to visit NPU as a high school senior, I thought that Q101 was the coolest station on earth; they sounded like our local college station! But then the music industry changed, much like the Borg refactoring sheild and phaser frequencies.

I won't make disparaging, out of touch old guy remarks about "what Alternative is" or "what Alternative isn't," but I will say that when Alternative stopped being an adjective, got a capital letter and became a noun it stopped breaking molds and started, to turn a phrase, "thinking inside the bun." Yuck.

I think I would almost rather listen to any other station in Chicago, maybe even B96. Not because Q101 "sold out" and I have something to prove (I think that was inevitable given their narrow-yet-demographically-lucrative scope), but because now, 11 years later, I'm just not interested in the alternative they offer. It took me a while to realize that, but now I almost never tune in to Q101. Especially not during "Love Line."

(1) Fri Mar 11 10:25:28 president's choice vs. safeway select:

I will miss Jewel grocery stores.

I won't miss Dominick's.

That's the truth, but it doesn't make much sense. Jewel and Dominick's are the two main grocery store chains in town (local brands now owned by Albertson's and Safeway, respectively). In my neighborhood, the Dominick's are not very nice compared to the Jewels, and Jewel was always where we'd go from NPU because it was the closest. But I'm sure in other hoods that situation is reversed. It really comes down to the luck of geography and many memories of grocery shopping at 1AM, chatting it up with Mel, the night cashier. She told me about how they get their music piped in via sattelite or cable or something -- which I had asked about after hearing a pretty obscure rock song on their in-house system twice (The Day Brings, by Brad) -- and how one morning at about 5AM somebody upstairs decided to start piping in classical music over the feed, and how cool she thought that was. I wish I could have been there to hear it. (It seems kind of Kubrickian to me, shopping in an empty grocery store in the middle of the night with classical music coming in over the PA.)

While we're on the subject of grocery stores, sometimes when I'm walking the aisles I would have a fantasy (this fantasy would strike me when I was grocery shopping at 1AM) where I would run down the aisles of the empty grocery store with my arms out scraping a swath of food down off the shelves making a huge mess. I would throw big bags of rice and flour and pasta up in the air so they would burst on the floors and generally wreak havoc. I'd go up and down all the aisles and then I would race out one of the exits. I wouldn't actually condone such an act, and I hope that no one actually does this. I also suppose that realistically, someone (probably the one-handed Osco night manager) would tackle me and I'd get arrested, but in my fantasy I run out into the cool night and walk home, laughing. I think this fantasy is related to the daydreams where I imagine things blowing up.

Mon Mar 14 12:21:41 friendly confines vs. us sellout field:

I will definitely miss Wrigley Field.

I will not miss U.S. Cellular Field (formerly known as Comiskey Park).

In Chicago, a lot is often assumed based on your answer to the question "What baseball team do you root for?" It's a little, but not completely, ridiculous. There's a lot of history and ugliness that goes into the question. What side of town do you live on. What kind of money do you have? Who is better than who?

The Cubs play on the North Side in Wrigley Field, the second-oldest (by 2 years to the Red Sox Fenway Park in Boston) ballpark in Major League Baseball. [Wrigley Field was originally called Weeghman Park when it was built for a new baseball team in the ill-fated Federal League]. The Cubs are now owned by the Tribune Company, which publishes the more traditional, white-collar, and philosophically conservative Chicago Tribune. The Park is smack dab in the bustling North Side near Lincoln Park, the lake, and sandwiched between the hip Belmont and Irving Park neighboorhoods. You can fall off the bleachers at Wrigley and into any one of a number of hip sports bars or comedy clubs. This is because the North Side of Chicago is the so-called "right side" of the tracks, and the Cubs have -- if you believe the hype -- the support of the wealthy, the snobby, and the white.

On the other end of town, across the freeway from the projects (no, really), stands Comiskey Park... I mean, U.S. Cellular Field (U.S. Cellular bought the naming rights a few years ago). It is way down past the loop in the middle of run down housing projects, industrial areas, and 8 lanes of freeway traffic. If you fell out of the seats at Comiskey, first of all, you'd die the seats are so high, but secondly, there's nowhere you'd probably want to go unless you're comfortable with the neighborhood. And if you believe the hype, White Sox fans are all blue collar or minorities (or maybe just South Siders).

The truth is always more complicated than the stereotypes. Simple geography means that most North Siders root for the Cubs (or at least attend games at Wrigley), and most South Siders root for the Sox (or attend at Comiskey) -- it just takes too long to go to the other park. And hey, don't we like to have a team to cheer for and a team to boo for? What's a little cross-town rivalry among friends? Also, as it stands *nowadays*, the North Side (at least where Wrigley is) is economically better off than the South Side (at least where Comiskey is). Property values go up and down, and that affects ticket prices and availability. Wrigley is smaller and supply and demand makes ticket prices higher, and it hasn't always been that way. Comiskey is huge and rarely sells out, which keeps ticket prices cheaper in comparison to the Cubs.

But the truth is also that socioeconomic and geographic and historical realities dictate that the crowds at Wrigley are whiter and wealthier than crowds at Sox Park, and that reality is hard to miss. Unfortunately, the factors that have gone into creating that reality are not just chance and the invisible hand of the market. Perhaps someday, if we all live long enough, rich cyborgs will all go to Cellular field to watch games and the poor will scrape their credits together and go to Wrigley. Who knows.

I'm not making light of the disparity -- honestly, it disgusts me -- and frankly, the worst part of Cubs games are the obnoxious, fratty fans. But I think the ugly side to the Cubs/Sox rivalry is really a symptom of a larger inequality -- and the stigmas associated with both teams (depending on what side you're on) won't change until the underlying inequalities do.

So I guess that one more thing I won't miss is all the crap and analysis and guilt and evil that goes into just saying which baseball team you like more.

Anyway, I'm going to miss Wrigley Field, and I'm not going to miss Comiskey.

Wrigley Field is how baseball was meant to be played. The park is beautiful. The outfield walls are covered in ivy and you can see Lake Michigan from the stands and as the sun sets at the end of a day game it makes you feel like you're in a dream. You really can feel like you've gone back in time and you're sitting in those seats in the 1920s watching Babe Ruth call out his homers. Sox Park by comparison is a gigantic, ugly, concrete monstrosity out of the 1990s. The upper deck seats are so steep, you really feel like if you stood up and fell, you might land on the field. Plus, you're so far away, it's like you're watching from the Goodyear blimp. Worst of all though, the seats are so narrow, you can't help but invade other people's personal space. Even most of the die-hard Sox fans I know lament the loss of the historic Old Comiskey park.

The Cubs are the North Side's team. Due to whatever history (good, bad, and indifferent), I ended up living on the North Side, and that's the team we root for up here. I'm sure that if I lived on the south side, I'd root for the Sox. I just wouldn't like my ballpark as much. I'd probably make cracks about those cake-eating Cubs fans. And Cubs fans would annoy me even more than they do now.

Lastly, I'm a sucker for the loveable underdog. And the Cubs have definitely been that... they haven't won the Championship since 1908.

(1) Tue Mar 15 09:51:07 sports stadiums part II: old soldier field vs. new soldier field.:

I will miss the old Soldier Field. It was a great looking building with classical styles.

I won't miss the new Soldier Field. It really looks like a UFO crash landed in the middle of the original Soldier Field. I don't really care about football, so I don't really care about any of the reasons why it's a better football stadium now, nor do I care about the economics and politics that led to the redesign.

Google Images Of Soldier Field

I guess that's the price of progress, and there is a coolness factor to it, and it's nice that they didn't have to tear it down completely or leave it abandoned... but when I think of Soldier Field, I'll still think of the original -- I'm a nostalgic kind of guy.

Wed Mar 16 12:00:29 politician's names everywhere vs. the cta:

I will miss the CTA (and the RTA). It's not the greatest public transit system in the world, but it's adequate. I'll definitely miss the big old noisy trains rumbling all over the place on their age-old rusty riveted steel tracks. I'll miss transferring to the Red line at Belmont. I'll miss jogging up Ravenswood with Metra trains zooming by. I'll miss catching the Foster bus to Jeff Park to hop the Blue Line to O'Hare. (I won't miss the busses being late all the time.)

Anyway, there's something very cosmopolitan about being in a place where rail transit is a practical necessity. It says something about the kind of city you live in, what it affords and requires, and it's a neat engineering feat, which the geek in me likes. I also like old, rusty things, so I like the CTA for what it is -- commodity parts made into a city transit system. None of these "West Coast" welded rails for us, by gum! Ooh, I'll also miss that big junction downtown in the loop. I like to sit in the back of the train and watch it go by -- it almost makes you feel like you're part of someone's model railroad set.

I won't miss seeing Politician's names and faces everywhere. Richard M. Daley. John H. Stroger. Jesse White. Politics in Chicago is a machine, and the first thing that inhuman intelligence learned was that voters vote for people they know over people they don't. And thus began the practice of the Name Game in Chicago -- slapping a mayor, attorney general, judge, commissioner or president's name all over anything it could possibly be slapped on. SO you drive down the street and see a forest preserve sign, underneath that it will say, it says, "John H. Stroger, Commissioner." Or a sign for Chicago, "Richard M. Daley, Mayor" -- or anything that has to do with the Department of Transportation, and you'll see Jesse White's name, and (for added recognition) usually his face, too! I don't really have anything against Jesse, but there he is, smiling broadly, in front of an bright American flag. At our local DMV on Elston, there are probably 15 portraits of Jesse White on the walls... I don't know if there are even 15 pictures of Jesus on the walls of my church.

Wed Mar 16 17:59:43 on vacation:

I'll be on vacation until March 26th and I don't think there will be any Net access -- no entries until then.

Mon Mar 28 09:29:09 special travel edition of "will miss, won't miss":

We're back from Kaua'i; what a great trip in a beautiful place.

Here's the special "travel edition" of "will miss, won't miss."

I won't miss the old Midway International Airport. Or as I used to call it, Midway Imitation Airport. It's like they took an old high school and converted it into an airport terminal. It really used to be the smallest, goofiest airport ever. Like, the Duluth International (Canada) Airport is more immediately recognizeable as an airport compared to the old Midway. It was so small, and the main part of the terminal was a big gym-sized room that literally looked like it was a soundstage set up for a 80s sitcom scene in an airport, like where Vanessa would be complaining about missing the prom for a trip to Hawaii, and Rudy would get lost after riding the luggage carousel or something.

It's always been nice because if you can fly out of Midway, it's usually much cheaper than O'Hare, but it's also about an hour's drive from where I live (whereas O'Hare is about 30 minutes away)... and if you're taking public transit to Midway, plan on at least an hour and a half.

Still, one of my favorite memories of my freshman year was driving a North Park van down to Midway to chauffer the Jazz Band off for some trip. I had never really driven in the city before, and I didn't know where we were going so I had to follow the guy ahead of me pretty closely. He knew where he was going and was doing about 80 on the freeway. But that story is more about driving and not about missing Midway.

Several years ago, they did a lot of great improvements on Midway and so now it's really quite respectable. But in the old days, boy howdy.

I will miss O'Hare. O'Hare International Airport, formerly O'Hare Field, airport code ORD, newer than Midway.

Many people think that the ORD is from O'Hare Field, but it's actually from the name of the old North Side millitary WWII-era airport it replaced -- "Orchard Place." It was named O'Hare after Butch "Bucky" O'Hare, a WWII war hero who was the son of one of Al Capone's lawyers. The legend has it that he turned informant and quit the mob because he didn't want that life for his family and was bumped off. Incidentally, Butch O'Hare was shot down by friendly fire in 1943 in the South Pacific. Or was it a mob hit? You decide.

I'll miss O'Hare for that story, but also because as a kid I was wowed by the fact that O'Hare was the busiest airport in America. I always wondered what that must be like, and then one day I moved to Chicago and went to O'Hare all the time. It seemed like a cool thing to me; it made me feel important, or that I had arrived somewhere. It's funny what we think is important.

Anyway, O'Hare really is a great airport. I'll miss catching cheap flights -- the kind that are always at the last gate at the end of the last terminal, about 10 miles from where you parked. And I'll miss that crazy underground tunnel with the neon, people movers, and piano music (a variation on the theme from Rhapsody in Blue, which United uses as a theme song). If a space age tunnel doesn't say big, important airport, I don't know what does.

Tue Mar 29 09:50:17 special lincoln edition:

I won't miss Lincoln Park. At all. It's the ritsy, yuppified neighborhood towards the lake and downtown from here. Parking is terrible, everything is expensive (especially rent), and I just don't fit in. Everything's too tall, costs too much money, and even if it didn't cost too much money I wouldn't want to go there! There are some nice stores, but nothing that I can't find somewhere else. I actually can't think of one thing in Lincoln Park (the neighborhood) that I will really miss. I know there are good things there (DePaul students especially can probably come up with a long list) but in my time here in Chicago I haven't stumbled across anything there I will really remember fondly.

I will miss Lincoln Square. It's the neighborhood I live in now. It's located around Western and Lawrence (The Western stop on the Brown Line) and has one of the coolest, psudo-european neighborhoods in the city with a quaint shopping street full of German boutiques and european delis (Meyers, Merz Apothecary). There's a great square with a fountain, a classy indoor/outdoor cafe on the square (Cafe Selmarie), a creative toy store (Timeless Toys), one of the best burrito joints ever (Garcia's), at least two independent coffee shops (The Grind and The Perfect Cup), a comics shop, at least 3 24-hour diners, a cheese shop (The Cheese Stands Alone), a movie theatre (The Davis), a used toys/collectible store (Quake Collectibles), a library, the Old Town School of Folk Music, tons of great restaurants... and much, much more. And to top it off, while it's got a "cool" vibe, it doesn't have the same kind of trendy gentrification vibe that other neighborhoods have. It also has a great statue of pre-beard Abraham Lincoln, sealing it's place as the best Lincoln-named neighborhood in Chicago.

Hat's off to you, Lincoln Square! (And rats off to you, Lincoln Park!)

(1) Wed Mar 30 12:37:59 coolness factor edition:

I'm super busy today so this will have to be a quick one.

I will miss Cabaret Metro (usually called just Metro or the Metro). It's one of the coolest places to see a show in Chicago, and almost all of my favorite concerts took place there, like Kings X, Damien Jurado, Low, Chris Whitley w/the rhythm section of Soul Coughing, Sunny Day Real Estate, and Barenaked Ladies (my first concert in Chicago in 1994. A lot of awesome and historic concerts that I didn't go to also happened there, like the last Smashing Pumpkins show, Dylan, the Stones, etc.). I don't know what exactly makes it so special, but it is.

I won't miss The Alley. The Alley is THE "Alternative Gear" shop in Chicago, and is just a little more than a half mile south of the Metro. It started out small but expanded into this gigantic business. It's not so much that they "sold out" that bothers me -- it's their terrible ads -- they say things like: "Shoes your mother would HATE!" Who goes and buys shoes with the express purpose of antagonizing your mother? Apparently the demographic that The Alley reaches out to. Talk about being a caricature of yourself. Either that or they're brilliantly and shamelessly self aware.

For that matter, I won't miss the whole Belmont/Clark neighborhood, with the exception of the Vic, Chicago Guitar Exchange and Pick Me Up Cafe. (All three of those aren't even right in the thick of things. For a second I thought I would have to list Stars Our Destination, a great sci-fi (and other) bookstore but they moved to Evanston and later closed.)

I won't miss the Army Navy Surplus Store (which now has about half a floor of very limited so-called "surplus" -- the rest is hip name brand streetwear). The used record stores are overpriced, the vast majority of the boutiques are really not my style and the vibe is just... very 1995 Meets Starbucks.

Thu Mar 31 15:07:06 still busier than a bee:

Harsh, but honest: I won't miss people asking for my help with computer jobs unrelated to my actual job. That's one new leaf I plan to turn over when we get to LA -- not getting sucked into outside work that only makes the actual work-day longer or less productive and usually just adds stress to my life and some money to my pocketbook. The money is nice, but time is money, and your life is only made of time.

I will miss having history and a ready-made community. I feel respected and appreciated and that's nice, if a little petty. But I also feel like I've grown into some bad habits here having so much independence and history; I'm looking forward to getting to start over in a few ways.

Gotta go fix some stuff.

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