Literally freezing

I don't think last winter ever got this cold. Today, it is 3 degrees--without accounting for a bitter wind. Patrick and I decided to bundle up and brave the weather to check out the landscape at Promontory Point, which juts out into Lake Michigan just a little bit. Usually we walk there, but today we drove. Thank goodness for new boots (a purchase at the closing of the flagship State Street store of Carson Pirie Scott, one of the original pioneers of the department store as we now know it)! My thighs, on the other hand, have never been so cold. It was hard to use my camera, since gloves are so clumsy, and without them, Patrick kept threatening that I was going to get frostbite. I did manage a few photos, though. It reminded me of salt flats and petrified trees. But colder.

Go Bears!

happy summer!

So I finally got to stop going to school. Patrick and I moved into our condo, and it's wonderful. Gwen, who lived here with her husband, Clint, left us a lot of stuff: these stiff lacy window dressings, a dining room table, a huge old desk, a cool lamp. Silk flowers to put in the kitchen because the lamps under the cabinets killed the real ones she had at first, and a catalogue for more silk flowers, just in case. Labels for the mailbox and buzzer, two versions of each: Louie/Iber and Iber/Louie, so we have a choice. A chart with all our neighbors' names and little descriptions of what they do. Cans of paint labeled with colors and which rooms they go to. It's amazing.

My mom came out and helped paint the dining room, which is still yellow but a much milder tone. She's still here, just hanging out with me, the good people of Dahn Yoga and Dahn Mu Do, and Mrs Gomez (who I am now supposed to call "Diana"). We went to see the da Vinci exhibit at the Museum of Science and Industry. Leonardo sure had an impressive mind. I wonder if he ever got lonely.

Patrick's mom drove up last weekend, too. We took a walk in Jackson Park and saw tons of birds. Barn swallows, an oriole, a great blue heron, a night heron (seeing a lot of them lately, despite their supposed elusiveness), some kind of goldfinches, redwing blackbirds, eastern kingbirds, canadian geese, purple martins, house sparrows, monk parakeets, a cardinal, mallards, rock doves. I'm really enjoying the birding in Chicago (even though it makes me feel very elderly). I'm curious to go back to San Francisco and see if I've been missing all kinds of birds or if there just aren't as many species there.

I started using the handblender I got a couple of months ago (after extensive research into various makes and models on amazon.com). It's great. I made yam and peanut soup (tell Sarah thanks for the recipe, Dustin!). It was delicious.

On another random note, my sewing machine broke. It was made in 1948. I paid Singer Sewing Machine Repair on Milwaukee $60 to fix it. I figure it's worth it. After all, I got it for free, and the use I've already gotten out of it is worth at least that much. 1948 was a long time ago.

I'm leaving on Monday. Tel Aviv--Buenos Aires--Santiago de Chile--San Francisco. Bay Area from August 3-8. Holla atcha girl!

June Festivals

Every time I think about California, I miss it. But summer has come to Chicago, and I am loving being here. We've had a great weekend; yesterday, we hit up a bunch of Hyde Park yard sales (didn't buy anything) and the 57th Street Art Fair. The fair was expensive, but we got some really good corn on the cob and saw some cool stuff. My favorite booth was "kinetic sculpture" by Jeffrey Zachmann, which provides us with the image below. Basically, he makes beautiful whirring Rube-Goldberg machines.

His website is pretty cool. You can see more of his machines, including some gigantic ones that seem to fill up entire rooms. There are links to movies of them working, but I couldn't get any of the movies to play. Maybe you'll have better luck. You can also commission a piece from the website--but I wouldn't suggest it. The small ones we saw in his book at the fair were thousands of dollars already!

I liked some of the photography, too. A San Francisco photographer was there with serious and beautiful shots of Gui Lin. There was a also a fun series of miniature people-figures doing funny things, by Audrey Heller.

If you look closely, you can see the tiny broom that the tiny woman is using to sweep up the crumbs.

So that was yesterday. Today, we went to the Printer's Row Book Fair, which was awesome. We met up with Isabel and spent all afternoon wandering around the three or four blocks of booths. We got an armful of books and visited Printer's Row Fine and Rare Books, a small but absolutely beautiful bookshop with books that are indeed fine and rare (autographed copies of books by Kerouac, Hemingway, Melville, etc.). I picked up some supercheap art books. There were some neat posters, too. We bought an 1863 map of South America, showing Bolivia back when it still had access to the Pacific (before Chile took that part of it, along with part of Paraguay). We avoided buying a poster that I was immediately drawn to, in a love-hate way; it was probably about fifty years old and very big, and it advertised the glory of the Cultural Revolution with bold colors and the smiling faces of our comrades. It cost $40 and was gone by the time we went around its booth again at the end of the day. I didn't want it, really, but it made me feel horrible to think about some college student tacking it to their dorm room wall as a monument to kitsch. Communism, as it has existed on this earth, terrifies me.

Anyway, I had a wonderful weekend. Now it's time to get back to writing my end-of-trimester narratives! Oh but before I go, one last treat: hands on stanzas, a poetry center where one of Isabel's friends works (until next fall, anyway, when she will begin the MFA Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa). Their latest project has been to get the poems of some of their elementary school students printed big in bus stops. The project is called "elevated verse," since the CTA (Chicago Transit Authority) is famous for its El (short for "elevated") trains. The poems are side-splitting and heartbreaking. More so than Dave Eggers, I would dare to venture. One thing that makes me mad, even furious about it though is that CTA put all the posters in nice neighborhoods (thinking I guess that the program would be more interested in advertising itself there?). The kids whose poems they are won't even see them unless they venture out of their neighborhoods. And the whole spirit of the project, to bring poetry to people who don't have much of it, is lost.

Anyway here is a sample.

Homework

My work has been done
to experience the city.
The big city sits in
land. Far away from Chicago
sits Texas. To day
dream far away in a
land of big. Bigger than an
ocean. My eyes fold to
see a surprise so big.
I start to think I own
that place. I feel like I've
even been there.

by Jonathan R.
Bernhard Moos Elementary School


Dear Tree,
Tree! Where were you
yesterday? I miss you.

My friend Book, he told
me all about you.

I hope you come back
soon so we could have

a big party today at 5:45
Your friend, Air

by Loc N.
Helen C. Peirce School of International Studies

New Snow

We went for a nice walk earlier today to Promontory Point to enjoy the sunshine and the fresh snow. It's hard to communicate what it really looks and feels like, but here are some pictures anyway. The walk to the Point is noisy; the streets are busy, and the snow crunches underfoot. But when you get to the lake, the sounds of the water crashing on the rocks drown out the city, and it's peaceful. We saw lots of skinny squirrels and some goldeneyes, diving ducks with beautiful black, white, and red-brown plumage.

A lot of the snow has already melted, but you can see where it has frozen on the shady side of the trees.


For some reason, these structures supporting the man-made lake edge fascinate me. I wonder how old they are. Parts of it look much newer: you can't see any bolts at all, just smooth concrete. The City wants to re-do the whole thing like that, but I hope they don't.


Patrick is doing very well. He loves his research, and is actually disappointed that it's Saturday because it means the archives are closed! I, on the other hand, am grateful for the respite. I worry that I will fail to find the academic/professional satisfaction that Patrick is enjoying. When we browse at the book store, I am struck by my lack of knowledge and expertise in every area, and it seems impossible to find somewhere to begin. I did find an interesting article on ethnic minorities in China; it was in a book that was mostly about Pakistan. What I came away wondering, though, is how is an ethnicity defined? What makes 93% of China's population Han, and what separates the rest? According to the essay, there was no way to say "ethnic minority" in Chinese until the early 20th century. With the Communists came campaigns of assimilation ...

I feel like my interest in education is waning. I have fewer questions now than I did at the beginning, I suppose because I'm currently preoccupied with being frustrated. I am putting less care into my 8th grade class, and it's showing; my lessons are less well-organized, and though I feel this should be an engaging unit with very accessible work, things are just not coming together. On the other hand, I should say that they are; though students' listening skills are no better, they have stayed more on-task lately. It's just a particular project that I assigned too early, and they aren't quite ready for it. And then I think there are wonderful things happening with the 7th graders, but only in one section. The other section can't stop complaining long enough to have a discussion and actually learn something. We discussed this habit itself last Thursday, and I still get worked up thinking about some of the things they said. Two of the girls said that the class was boring, and we just do stuff they learned in 3rd grade--and of course, when I looked at their work afterward, it was sloppy and incomplete, far from demonstrating the mastery they claimed. It made me even more infuriated with them to hear the brave words of another student who responded to them by saying that she was struggling with the work, and she knew she wasn't the only one, and that it wasn't fair of them to keep interrupting instruction because she was trying to learn. Her remarks were inspiring, and in a way, I can't wait for Monday because I am going to kick out half the class if I have to. I will send student after student to the office until it is quiet enough for us to really think together, and maybe then we will be able to come to some of the awesome discoveries that the other class has made.

The odd thing about it is that this all comes at the same time that I feel I have had two important realizations about my work. 1) I may see very little progress, especially socially, but that doesn't mean that the efforts I am making are not having an effect. It's simply that any effect will take years to manifest itself in an observable way. 2) I am actually very lucky to have the students and parents that I do. Even if many of them don't behave as I would like them to, almost everyone really cares about their academic success, and even about what their teachers think of them. These are such great assets.

So much is strange. I've been watching the 7 Up series on DVD; in it, a selection of British children are filmed at 7, 14, 21, 28, 35, and most recently, at 42. The basic question is how much one stage of life reflects on future stages, I guess. At the end of every episode, the narrator says, "Give me a child of 7, and I will show you the man," or something like that. Anyway, I just saw 28, and one of the most striking things is how the people I worried about or disliked when they were 7 have turned out OK. They have healthy relationships, jobs ... it isn't true across the board, I suppose, but overwhelmingly, people are resilient and decent and what more can you ask for. So part of me questions whether my work really makes a difference.

I am feeling very selfish, and I would just like to find something that might or might not make any difference to The World or Society but that would make me happy to do. That would make me excited about getting out of bed in the morning, and keep me up late at night without begrudging my wakefulness. It's only the very, very lucky who find work like that, eh? Maybe teaching will become that for me once I've figured some more things out. I don't know.