Oot of Toon

I'm going to be in DC for the next little bit helping my mom get ready to move, so I probably won't post for a few days.

My apologies to anyone who finds this weblog terribly interesting.

Memo to Axl Rose

To: Axl
From: Ellen
Re: The VMA's

Dear Mr. Rose,

You clearly blew out your voice several years ago.

You are out of shape to the point where you cannot even hold the wan notes you emit because running around like you used to makes you wheeze to the point of almost having an athsma attack.

You still have gajillions of dollars from when Guns 'N' Roses were good.

Even Slash got fed up with your bullshit.

Get off the stage. Please.

We all want to remember you kicking ass, not falling on it.

Sincerely,
-Ellen

Bad sign

So I'm going home on Saturday to help clean up my room for my mom's impending move out of the house I grew up in.

Mom, of course, chose this as the best time to trip over a box and fracture her wrist, so that she can't lift anything heavier than eight ounces.

I got the following IM from her today:

mom: greetings from the home for the frustrated--so much to do and so much i can't do. glad you're coming--very glad. love, mom

Shit.

Ah, mockery

Dave Weigel, who is a nice guy despite the fact that he edits the Chron, has mocked Northwestern's decision to change the name of my school from the School of Speech to the School of Communication.

This would have been a revolutionary name change had they done it in about 1974.

The Great Hot Dog Debate continues

To add ketchup, or not?

Mark Brown follows up on his previous article.

I still think this is all ridiculous.

Remembered two things

Since nothing really, truly odd happened today (well, aside from a surreal debate on how the term "whoop ass" was spelled [me: "whoop-ass", Lummis: "whoopas". As it turns out we were both wrong, but I'm sorry, the latter sounds like a bad Star Wars character]), I have a couple things from yesterday.

Remember the muffin stumps episode of Seinfeld? Well, there was a mysterious person who had been slowly eating the tops of muffins at work, and it was driving me nuts.

All they left were the stumps, which as the above-mentioned episode points out, are the worst part of the muffin. So I noticed yesterday that someone had begun picking away at one of the muffins, and I said to Erica, a fellow intern, "Who in the hell keeps doing that?"

30 seconds later, Vanessa, the receptionist, comes in, and rips a big chunk off the top of the muffin.

Erica and I had to try very hard to keep from cracking up until she left.

Bizarre incident #2 came when I had to go to the bank to get petty cash.

Carrying $530 in small bills wasn't what bothered me, though it did make me kind of nervous about getting mugged or something and trying to explain that to work. "Yeah, some guy mugged me..." They'd be like rrrrrriiiiiiiiiight.

The $83 in quarters was the problem.

I didn't have a bag, so I had to stash this all in my pockets (thank god for cargo shorts). Eight rolls of quarters weighs approximately fifteen pounds, and the bank is a good half-mile from the office.

So I'm walking through downtown Chicago, carrying over six hundred dollars and about seventeen pounds worth of cash on me, trying to act nonchalant while desperately hoping that my pockets held up when I had to run to not get hit by a car because I couldn't walk fast enough to make it across during the walk signal.

I like my job in general, but I'm glad this is my last week so I'll never have to do that again...

Chicagoans are weird

I love Chicago, but sometimes I wonder about the people in it.

Example: Putting ketchup on a hot dog is considered sacrelige here.

When I was at the White Sox game last week, I got 2 hot dogs and a bag of chips, and asked where the "Ketchup and stuff" was. The woman gave me a weird look and said, "Uh, the mustard and relish are over there." There was ketchup, but it went unmentioned.

Expounding on this phenomenon is Mark Brown of the Chicago Sun-Times, who has gone so far as to instruct his kids to never put ketchup on a hot dog, even when not in his presence.

And there really is no explanation for it, other than tradition. Mike and Bryen were in at work today. Mike is a native Chicagoan, and Bryen is from Michigan. Bryen took my side in the "What the fuck?" camp, and we tried to get an explanation out of Mike.

"Because you just don't do it!" was the best Mike could come up with.

If anyone can explain this to me, please, email me and let me know.

Don't shout too close to a naked man

So me, Miyuki, Cleo, Eddy, and Jack were walking to Giordano's from my apartment.

At the corner of Chicago and Grove, Cleo suddenly shouts, "Oh my god, that guy is naked!" really, really loud, and points at a shirtless man in the first floor of apartments in the building on the corner.

The man then turned, looked down to see all of us looking back up at him, and turned bright red.

I was like, "Um, Cleo...I think his window is open..." And we laughed all the way to Giordano's.

On the way back, we noted that the blinds had been pulled and the lights were off in the apartment. Cleo was terribly disappointed, having wanted to try a slightly altered version of the Rapunzel fairy tale...

This toddlin' town

I love Chicago. Fuck moving.

I had been thinking (and still am, half-heartedly) of moving away from Chicago to try and get a job in my field, when I realized 2 things:

1. There are no jobs in my field anywhere, so moving is not going to help.
2. I really love this place.

Miyuki, one of my best friends from high school, is in town, and we went down into the city to wander. It was so beautiful today, only about 80. In D.C. (and all over the East Coast, for that matter), it's pushing 100.

We wandered around Grant Park, we walked all the way from Buckingham Fountain to Navy Pier (a distance I would estimate at about 2 or 3 miles, particularly with the rather backasswards route we took) and back.

I just couldn't wipe the stupid grin off my face. I have a feeling she's going to tell me to shut the fuck up about how much I love Chicago soon, since I mentioned it several times. Although she clearly remembers my severe tendency to say things or tell stories repeatedly...

Getting to be a tourist in your own town is always an interesting experience, because you get to learn things that you otherwise wouldn't know. For example, did you know:

- Grant Park is actually built on the rubble from the Chicago fire of the late 1890's?

- Chicago roughly translates, in some random Native American Language that I can't remember, to "Stinking Onion"?

- The Aon building was originally covered in the same type of stone that Michelangelo's David is carved out of. Problem was, said stone couldn't withstand Chicago weather, and was replaced, at the same cost as originally building the damn thing, with North Carolina granite.

- Streeterville is named after a crazy Civil War vet who, until 1918, had constant shootouts with police, claiming that he was an independent state, responsible only to the Federal government?

I learned all of these, and many other random, bizarre, and useless facts on a little boat tour we hopped on at Navy Pier. I got to walk along the Lake downtown like I haven't been able to since I came here as a tourist making college visits.

I was reminded why I love this place, and reminded why I'll take any job that keeps me here.

Say it with me: Fuck moving!

About last night...

I would only like to make the following statements about my post last night:

1. Impressionable is spelled with two s's, and that's about the only spelling error I noticed. I find it sad that I am so anal about spelling that I even make an effort to do so when drunk. I should have gone to Medill.

2. In addition to all the people I apologized to last night, I'd also like to apologize to Miriam, who walked me back in order to prevent me from walking into a light post, and who had to listen to my drunken ramblings.

Surprisingly, that's about it. I stand by my (drunken) statement, though there are parts of it that, for sanity's sake, I probably shouldn't even begin to try and clarify.

Interesting

I was at camp five years ago, and they filmed a reality show for the Disney Channel called Bug Juice. I was poking around on the internet and found out what the production company that prodcued that series is doing now:

Gay Weddings.

I hope, at least for the guys' sake, they still have Stacey, the Camera Guy Who Is A Cross Between Mel Gibson And George Clooney, Only Not As Much Of An Ass As Either. All the female counselors tried to get with him (and I believe at least a couple succeeded). It was pretty amusing.

Ah, nostalgia.