on a tragic note:

There was a shark attack in San Diego on Friday that killed a swimmer at a cove I used to swim at with my team during the summer. That hits a little too close to home.

this is not a political blog...

Nor do I want it to be. But this article/blog is my favorite of the week and I couldn't resist posting it:

Drop Out, Obama

R.I.P. Banana

I was eating a late dinner last night at the little green folding table in our kitchen while talking to my little sister on the phone, when I happened to notice out of the corner of my eye that my roommate was up on her knees on the kitchen counter, with her head jammed in the little space between the window and the cabinet and her butt sticking straight up in the air. There was a faint smell of banana wafting past my nose.

"Uh, what are you doing?"

"I dropped a banana. And it didn't just fall on the windowsill, it fell behind the cabinet. These things only happen to me!"

I sighed, hung up with my sister, and left my dinner half-eaten on the table while she jumped off the counter and started furiously opening and slamming drawers and cabinets. Short of dismantling the cabinets, there was no way get behind the cabinet from the front, so we'd have to get there from the back: a one-foot wide by three-foot deep space under the counter and behind the cabinet, mostly obscured by a metal bar across the top and the wall below the window. Or risk the return of Nelson (formerly known as Squeaky) and living with a kitchen that perpetually smelled of rotting banana. We got to work.

I held the flashlight and my roommate, a coat hanger. The banana was sitting about three feet down in the middle of a graveyard of never-again-played CDs, dust, and scraps of paper. When the coat hanger proved useless, I bent it a different way a tried again while my roommate held the flashlight. With each pierce of the metal coat hanger in the bruising yellow skin came another whiff of the future smell of our kitchen, made all the more dramatic by the dull thump I heard each time I tried to lift the hanger and the slick meat of the banana slipped off. We opened the window that hadn't been open since last summer, hoping we could unscrew the gate over it and get through the hole from a different angle. We were greeted by a shower of pebbles.

I taped a spatula securely to the end of the coat hanger and fished around while my roommate pawed through our drawers, looking for a pair of tongs, a barbecue poker, or anything more sturdy than a coat hanger. She stuck her arm down the hole as far as it would go, her head jammed awkwardly against the windowsill, one leg stretched straight up in the air. Her arm and taught fingers were just slightly too short to reach the now black banana. The circle of the flashlight bounced around in the hole while I giggled, my roommate teetering dangerously on her one hand on the counter, shaking from laughter.

We found a metal pounder of some sort, with a long handle and a sturdy base held by a triangle of metal arms that was just thin enough to maybe, just maybe, stick under the banana. I stuck my finger in the loop at the end of the instrument, stuck my arm down the hole, and very carefully scooped up the banana. We stifled our laughs and tried not to make a sound as I slowly raised the banana, my roommate ready with her hand to grab it. She did, and it ended up, like the mouse, securely fastened in a plastic bag, black and furry with dust, waiting to go down to the dumpster with the rest of the trash.

I finished my dinner. But I'm not sure I'll ever look at bananas the same way again.

remember the earth

It is Earth Day. Just in case you haven't seen enough top-10 tips on reducing your carbon emissions lately, I'm going to add my own to the mix. I am by no means an expert on the environment, but I have picked up a couple of easy and environmentally friendly practices that I have, for the most part, added to my routine, and I hope you will try to add to yours. In no particular order:

1. Walk, bike, run, or take public transportation instead of driving. If you must drive, drive a car that gets good gas mileage.

2. Use reusable cloth bags instead of paper or plastic at the supermarket and during other shopping trips.

3. Replace all of your light bulbs with energy-efficient fluorescent ones.

4. Turn off the lights when not in use and turn off and unplug all all electronics when not in use. Buy energy-saver appliances and electronics when replacing old ones.

5. Turn your heat cooler a few degrees in the winter and your air conditioning a few degrees warmer in the summer. You will save energy and money on your utilities bill and you probably won't notice the difference.

6. Take shorter showers and don't leave the water running when you're brushing your teeth or washing the dishes. Run the dishwasher only when it's full and don't rinse the dirty dishes beforehand.

7. Buy local whenever possible (buy your produce at the farmer's market instead of at the supermarket). Buy fair trade.

8. Use Tupperware (or the equivalent non-brand version) to store food instead of plastic bags. Try to reuse them if you do. Use a reusable lunch bag or an old plastic bag as a lunch bag and garbage can liner instead of a brown bag. Buy a reusable water bottle for your water instead of single-use bottles. If you use a single-use bottle, recycle it.

9. Buy secondhand whenever possible. Buy books at used book stores or borrow them from the library.

10. Don't print this list out. Commit it to memory. Try to read most electronic documents on-screen. If you must print, use scratch paper or recycle it after you're done with it. Buy food and items with less packaging and recycle whatever isn't trash.

If you have any other easy tips to add, please do comment below!

more about water...

An addition to my post on water: The New York Times had a story today that further explains why certain plastics could be dangerous (specifically, the plastic that's used in Nalgene bottles).

Yes, I realize I could drive myself nuts by trying to understand and eliminate every object and activity and material and food in our world that may, in some cases, cause cancer. But if it's an easy enough fix, why not?

the unifier

A few times per month, or whenever I can, I venture down to volunteer at the unassuming storefront that is The Boring Store and its hidden 826CHI. (Pause for me to get out my journalistic writing style:) Founded in the Bay Area by the brilliant (my own editorializing) contemporary writer Dave Eggers, 826 exposes children of a variety of ages and skill levels to a variety of different styles of writing through free field trips, in-class visits, and workshops at nights and on weekends. It encourages excitement about literacy through these programs, along with its free tutoring program, in a creative and non-academic atmosphere. In short, it's amazing.

(Pause for me to ditch the fact-laden journalistic writing style in favor of something more descriptive:) Its sign is a confusing mix of words and sentences that do not amount to any understanding whatsoever of the organization inside. In the window is an uninteresting collection of brown boxes and some question marks. The first time I walked by I thought it was a box store, lacking any better explanation for the windows that stand adjacent to a row of old-fashioned furniture store neighbors with wrought-iron security gates. In the store is a random and creative assortment of supplies for spies, each displayed with its own personal brown box. Every aspect of this place is meticulously thought-out, from the mannequins equipped with black spy mustaches to the one-way mirror into the store from the classroom. And kids go wild upon entering. Even I, an adult (who admittedly retains some childlike impulses), like the brightly colored floor and the 50-something spy cameras that point toward the front door and the old-fashioned cash register.

Last week, on my once-a-month day off, I got up early and made my way to 826 as I often do for a field trip with a first grade class from the South Side. Without going into too much detail about the experience, the class goes on a field trip to 826, which, we tell them, turns into a publishing house during the day with a very mean and mysterious boss named Moody. A volunteer teachers the kids about what goes into a story, the class creates the beginning of an often very strange original story which is illustrated by another volunteer (once a second- or third-grade class wrote about a trilobite festival, creatures I had never before even heard of) and each student is directed to finish the half-finished story and create illustrations.

This is all beside my main point in writing about 826, which I am finally getting to. In this class of first-graders from the South Side, there was not one white student. There were maybe two Hispanic students, but the rest of the twenty-something kids in the class were black. The teacher was young and white. All of the volunteers and the full-time staff at 826 were white (and the majority young and female).

In the confines of the store, and even in the real world, none of this really matters, of course. Any kid, any class, regardless of location of the school in Chicago's rather strictly segregated North, South, and West Sides, regardless of parents' income and anything else, obviously gets the same program and the same number of volunteers, and the same professional-looking bound and "published" books at the end of the field trip. But the reason I bring it up, I guess, is to illustrate Chicago's persistent problem with gentrification and segregation based, unfortunately, on income and race. I don't know exactly what kind of area this school is located in or anything about the home-life of the children. I won't venture any explanations or solutions, as growing up in SoCal, diversity outside of white or Hispanic or Asian isn't really my specialty.

I will, however, keep volunteering.

taste of summer

It is the warmest day of the year so far--69 by my last count--and the streets are teeming with wanderers reluctant to sit in their offices and there's not a cloud in the sky.

Yet Chicagoans, perhaps some of the most resilient folk in the country when it comes to weather, are strangely attached to their coats. Even today, when skirts or dresses without tights, when short sleeves, when even sandals are acceptable attire, the vast majority of the street wanderers still have all their skin covered and they are still wearing their coats, myself included. A jacket has become almost an extension of oneself at this point: we have been carrying around jackets, big and small, for the past six or seven months, and to go without one now is a bit uncomfortable--or even risky. Just like going without an umbrella in summer is inadvisable (due to those mid-afternoon or evening downpours), going without a jacket between approximately October and May is like taking walking on the wild side. Literally, at any moment, even on the warmest day of the year so far, the temperature could start to drop and the warm, happy non-jacket wearer could find him or herself not so warm and happy anymore. It wouldn't be the first time the temperature has changed 20-30 degrees in one day. So we cling to our jackets and our tights (yes, I am including myself with the Chicagoans--I am wearing a skirt with tights and a jacket today), even when they make sweat, even when they seem unnecessary in the face of the bright light sun. It is not summer yet.

all about water

Apparently, there is no proof that water is actually good for you. What they forgot to mention is there's no proof it's bad for you either. What does this mean? Keep drinking water. Obviously, everyone makes their own rules, but I say, if my body is made up of mostly water, it makes sense to put some water in, especially if I'm thirsty.

There is also no proof that the plastic in Nalgene bottles is bad for you, but it might be. And there is proof that single-use water bottles are not meant to be reused, and that steel water bottles emit no questionable chemicals into the water bottled inside. I have been an avid user of Nalgene bottles in all shapes and sizes for about two years now, and I'm making the switch to steel.

diet decisions

For the past seven-plus years, my not eating red meat, and my usually not eating pig-products or lamb, and my occasional rejection of any meat or fish whatsoever has been a fairly easy and "just understood" sort of choice. Everyone who knows me knows I don't eat these things, and most of my friends are vegetarian anyway, so it's not an issue. And if it, for any reason, becomes a not-so-easy choice and I run out of ways to explain it or I'm just not feeling it anymore, I'll adjust my dietary constraints accordingly. I started eating poultry instead of being a vegetarian, I started eating pig-products and fish in Spain, and now, while I still eat poultry and fish and shellfish and don't eat red meat or any other strange kinds of meat, I will occasionally have a piece of good Spanish ham, or prosciutto, or a piece of bacon on a sandwich.

Lately, however, I have been thinking about becoming an occasional beef-eater, making it an occasional treat like prosciutto or good Spanish ham. I don't think I'll ever be the type to eat a steak, or even ever really order beef at a restaurant or make it at home, but it might be nice to eat a real meatball every once in awhile, have a real hamburger, try a bite of corned beef or pastrami, eat a famous Chicago hot dog... I feel there are some culinary delights out there that I have never tried, and maybe should before I decide to reject them.

That said, there were a few times this weekend when I could have eaten a bite of beef. Corned beef, which frankly looked delicious on marble rye, pastrami on a novel pretzel-style roll at one of my favorite sandwich restaurants in Chicago, veal-that-looked-like-chicken at a German restaurant in my neighborhood (Now that I think about it, though, I don't think I'll ever want to even try veal, judging from the bad things my parents have said about it my whole life, being that it's from a baby cow and all). Even though I had the opportunity to become a full-fledged meat eater this weekend, I didn't. My excuse was what it normally is: "I haven't eaten beef for seven years and I don't know how my stomach would react." This time my theory was debunked by a doctor who insisted that a human stomach is equipped to digest meat, whether or not it has been getting the practice.

Regardless, though I'm curious about certain beef-based items, I realize the reason I rejected my opportunities to taste is because I don't actually want to become a beef eater. After reading The Jungle, after recently becoming more and more concerned with the environment, I don't need it and I don't really want it.

Strangely enough, in the same train of thought that I think about eating beef occasionally, I also think about becoming vegetarian again. Or "fishatarian." I rarely ever make meat of any sort at home, so it wouldn't really be too much of a change. But maybe I like having the freedom to eat the occasional turkey sandwich, chicken tortilla soup... philly cheese steak?

Evidently, I'm no closer to a decision.

eyelids droop

This is rather a bad habit I've developed, probably due to years of writing articles late into the night at the Daily Nexus office and writing essays after that while the dark waves crashed on the invisible beach outside my window. I can't seem to produce quality work during the day, but in the middle of the night, when I seem to have all the time in the world to edit and re-write, my writings, or in this case, my articles, move along swimmingly. Not only do I not get paid enough to spend eight hours working and another three writing at night, but I do not start work late enough to be able to stay up until the early morning and still be high-functioning in the morning.

Having recognized this, I could now go to sleep. But this might just be the highlight of my work week, writing along to the quiet drone of my 109 Ani DiFranco songs on shuffle as my eyelids droop.