Surprises in the Windy City

Wait a second...

Who's that in Chicago with Katie and Sarah (my suitemate)?


And what's with that bean thing?


It's Austin!

And Bean Security!


You guard that bean. You guard it good.

No, I don't have any better pictures. Yes, I suck.

Friday night Jamie Spiro called and told me Acceptance had a show in Chicago, so Austin would be in town. I didn't have money/energy for a show, so I didn't think I'd get to see him.

Last night my phone rang...I thought it was Ben, picked it up, looked, did a double take, and said "What the heck, it's Austin!" Turns out he had today off and was still gonna be in town, so he wanted to hang out, and I was definitely all for it.

This morning Sarah and I caught the 11:24 train and walked up Michigan Ave to find Austin in the lobby of a Holiday Inn (he wasn't actually staying there, but in an RV across the street, he just utilizes the HI lobby...ha).

We...
...got burgers and gyros at Navy Pier
...got caught in a torrential downpour and ended up soaked
...went to the huge mirrored bean
...mocked the 'bean security'
...headed to the fountain with the faces and got more soaked since it was already a hopeless cause
...mocked the 'fountain security'
...squelched our way through the Chicago Art Institute

Get this: They have a paperweight collection. And it was actually really freaking cool. We also spent alot of time in the photography and contemporary art sections. There were a couple contemporary pieces that were all sorts of weirdly symbolic and ask you to participate by taking a piece...so I got a piece of paper that's silver with a white stripe and a piece of candy...the candy represents the artist's partner who died of AIDS, and he said it was "finding something sweet in an unexpected place." I liked that quite a bit, I must say. I also loved the strange wire-protruding-from-frame THING that actually said in the description that it was meant to be 'awkward'. SO COOL.

After the museum closed we met Amedee (from my floor) and Christian (bro-floor) at Starbucks, headed back to Ogilvie station, said goodbye to Austin, handed off the damp 3x5 card with directions back to his RV, and got on the train. Ryan Trout and Daniel Creamer (bro-floor) were on it and we all sat around laughing at drunk sports fans and calling each other's cell phones...crazy fun day, awesome to see Austin and hear how he's doing.

More Salinger

I happen to know, possibly none better, that an ecstatically happy writing person is often a totally draining type to have around.

Yet a real artist, I've noticed, will survive anything. (Even praise, I happily suspect.)

Seymour once said, on the air, when he was eleven, that the thing he loved best in the Bible was the word WATCH!

Let him come out of this a trifle high. But what kind of high? High, I think, like someone you love coming up on the porch, grinning, grinning, after three hard sets of tennis, victorious tennis, to ask you if you saw that last shot he made. Yes. Oui.

One of the thousand reasons I quit going to the theatre when I was about twenty was that I resented like hell filing out of the theatre just because some playwright was forever slamming down his silly curtain.

All we do our whole lives is go from one little piece of Holy Ground to the next.

--Seymour - An Introduction

Salinger

"The crack had evidently resounded throughout the car. But at twenty-three I was the sort of young man who responds to all public injury of his person, short of a fractured skull, by giving out a hollow, subnormal-sounding laugh."

"'Look,' she said, in the spuriously patient tone of voice that a teacher might take with a child who is not only retarded but whose nose is forever running unattractively."

"In certain Zen monasteries, it's a cardinal rule, if not the only serious enforced discipline, that when one monk calls out 'Hi!' to another monk, the latter must call back 'Hi!' without thinking."

"I mentioned R.H. Blyth's definition of sentimentality: that we are being sentimental when we give to a thing more tenderness than God gives to it."

"He said he even wished everybody in the world looked exactly alike. He said you'd keep thinking everybody you met was your wife or your mother or father, and people would always be throwing their arms around each other wherever they went, and it would look 'very nice.'"

"...in Zen Buddhism a master was once asked what was the most valuable thing in the world, and the master answered that a dead cat was, because no one could put a price on it."

"I don't think he could see her for what she is. A person deprived, for life, of any understanding or taste for the main current of poetry that flows through things, all things. She might as well be dead, and yet she goes on living...I love her. I find her unimaginably brave"

-Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters

Random thoughts.

I miss the rain.

And yet I almost don't want it to rain, because it's too foreign here, it never feels quite like home. Seattle has the patent on rain I think, and they would sue if Chicago did a better imitation.

Humidity stinks.

Today I spent three hours kicking butt at Star Wars Monopoly.
I was Darth Vader ("Annikin Skywalker!" Ben insisted when he called and I informed him of the activity). I only bought two railroads (imperial warships) and one utility (Death Star), managed to trade to get the pinks (St. Charles Place, etc, called Hoth and such in this version) loaded up the hotels, and started raking in the cash. EVERYONE landed on them. Repeatedly.
I ended up with the purples too (Baltic/Mediterranean, Tattoine in this). When the floor closed (I was on a guys' floor) I had over 6000 republican credits, two monopolies, and all hotels. I rule.

It was nice hanging with some guys, I've found I get very sick of girls around here...especially after just growing up with brothers.

I don't like sharing a room with someone who thinks that that means all my food is theirs and they can loan it out to someone down the hall without asking OR telling me. Funny when a girl walks in with MY cocoa and hands it to Gretchen saying, "Here's your stuff I borrowed," and neither of them says a word to me. I hid it in my closet.

Dr. Penney is amazing, I laughed constantly in Greek today.

The Iliad is alot more interesting than I expected.

That's all for now, much love. Happy September.