What is found there

9th May 2012

As I write this, my parents are selling my childhood home. They’re at the settlement now.

When I was younger, I lived in mortal fear of this day. I couldn’t imagine my family existing anywhere else, and constantly sought their reassurance: ”We’re not going to move, are we?”

Of course, now I’m older and feel fine with what’s happening. I’m even happy for my parents. It’s not that I grew up and learned to accept change. It’s just that that particular change stopped mattering so much.

It’s still such a pretty place. I’ll miss you, Battles Lane.

9th May 2012 | 35 notes

uchicagoadmissions:

Pep Rally

Gimme the speed of light ……C
Gimme Planck’s constant………H
Gimme root negative one……….I
Gimme carbon………………….C
Gimme the Bohr radius…………..A
Gimme the gravitational constant….G
Gimme the additive identity of a non-trivial group…O
What’s that spell? ……………CHICAGO!
(if you said CHICAG0, you are a true Maroon)

25th Apr 2012 | 2 notes

Now That I Am in Madrid and Can Think

Frank O’Hara

I think of you
and the continents brilliant and arid
and the slender heart you are sharing my share of with the American air
as the lungs I have felt sonorously subside slowly greet each morning
and your brown lashes flutter revealing two perfect dawns colored by New York

see a vast bridge stretching to the humbled outskirts with only you
standing on the edge of the purple like an only tree
and in Toledo the olive groves’ soft blue look at the hills with silver
like glasses like and old ladies hair
it’s well known that God and I don’t get along together
it’s just a view of the brass works for me, I don’t care about the Moors
seen through you the great works of death, you are greater

you are smiling, you are emptying the world so we can be alone

4th Apr 2012 | 8 notes

Last Supper, Charles Wright

april-is:

Last Supper
Charles Wright

I seem to have come to the end of something, but don’t know what,
Full moon blood orange just over the top of the redbud tree.
Maundy Thursday tomorrow,
then Good Friday, then Easter in full drag,
Dogwood blossoms like little crosses
All down the street,
lilies and jonquils bowing their mitred heads.

Perhaps it’s a sentimentality about such fey things,
But I don’t think so. One knows
There is no end to the other world,
no matter where it is.
In the event, a reliquary evening for sure,
The bones in their tiny boxes, rosettes under glass.

Or maybe it’s just the way the snow fell
a couple of days ago,
So white on the white snowdrops.
As our fathers were bold to tell us,
it’s either eat or be eaten.
Spring in its starched bib,
Winter’s cutlery in its hands. Cold grace. Slice and fork.

(Martha’s annual poetry project is one of my favorite things about April.)

(And, hi! I’m back.)

16th Feb 2012

I seem to have this deep-seated superstition that the quality of a day is determined by the quality of the breakfast that begins it. Or, at least, whenever I face a day of really daunting tasks, there’s a tendency to spend an unusual amount of energy preparing breakfast. (Alternate theory: it’s a convenient procrastination tactic. Much like Tumblr.)

Today is such a day, and breakfast was epic enough that it’s worth documenting:

A breakfast sandwich consisting of two sunny-side up eggs and melted Otter Creek spring cheddar and a Spencer’s pork & herb sausage on a Bagel on Damen onion bagel (toasted and then friend momentarily in the remaining butter/sausage fat, just to be decadent). (Look, I know a real foodie would post a mouth-watering image here, but I wasn’t about to sacrifice 30 seconds of optimum hotness for a photo.)

Will this breakfast of champions be enough to get me through 20 pages of book chapter writing today? Let’s find out.

14th Feb 2012

It is marvelous

It is marvelous to wake up together
At the same minute; marvelous to hear
The rain begin suddenly all over the roof,
To feel the air suddenly clear
As if electricity had passed through it
From a black mesh of wires in the sky.
All over the roof the rain hisses,
And below, the light falling of kisses.

An electrical storm is coming or moving away;
It is the prickling air that wakes us up.
If lighting struck the house now, it would run
From the four blue china balls on top
Down the roof and down the rods all around us,
And we imagine dreamily
How the whole house caught in a bird-cage of lightning
Would be quite delightful rather than frightening;

And from the same simplified point of view
Of night and lying flat on one’s back
All things might change equally easily,
Since always to warn us there must be these black
Electrical wires dangling. Without surprise
The world might change to something quite different,
As the air changes or the lightning comes without our blinking,
Change as our kisses are changing without our thinking.

- Elizabeth Bishop

3rd Feb 2012

there will be snacks

I know we’re gonna meet someday

in the crumbled financial institutions of this land

there will be tables and chairs

pony rides and dancing bears

there’ll even be a band

‘cause listen after the fall there’ll be no more countries

no currencies at all

gonna live on our wits

throw away survival kits

trade butterfly knives for adderall

and that’s not all

woah!

there will be snacks, there will

there will be snacks, there will be

there will be snacks

I have a habit of becoming obsessed with a certain artist or album and listening to it exclusively for brief, intense period. When I later try to listen to that music again, I often find it almost uncomfortably evocative of that earlier period of my life for which it was a soundtrack. (There are songs from particularly dark or lonely times that actually have the power to make me instantly nauseous.)

My first couple month in Chicago in 2007, I listened to almost nothing but Andrew Bird, native Chicagoan who I’d recently seen at that year’s Hideout block party. Thanks to the serendipitous force that is iTunes shuffle, I found myself listening to Armchair Apocrypha again for the first time in four years this morning.

It instantly transported me back to those early months of post-college semi-unemployment, when I would go running for more than an hour every afternoon, exploring my new neighborhood: the natural grandeur of Humboldt Park, the bleak urban landscape south of Grand, the splendid mansions on Hoyne, the Parisian boulevards of Logan Square, the factories and smelting plants of Goose Island. It was all very foreign and strange then. Now it is undoubtedly Home.

I never got really into A Bird—which is why I took a four year hiatus from his music—but I always really loved this song, Tables and Chairs. Even when everything in life is uncertain, there’s still the simple, comforting promise of snacks.