Update

OW.

More to come.

Good Line

From one of Kim's students (2nd paragraph).

Out Of Commission

This weblog will be on hold for the next few days because of health issues.

Specifically, I have to have a pain in the ass surgically removed tomorrow: a cyst at the base of my tailbone.

The surgery itself is supposed to be fairly routine, and this problem is apparently much more common than people realize (probably because most people who have it don't really like to talk about it). The recovery will be a bit more interesting.

Because of the, ahem, location of the incision, it can't be closed with stiches, which seriously prolongs the recovery time. Basically, I'm not gonna be able to function normally (i.e. sit comfortably) for at least a week or two, and full healing is four to six weeks.

I will not enlighten you on any further details of the procedure, because having heard them, even I don't want to know them and I'm the person having this procedure performed upon me.

Mercifully, they did not even give me the option of using a local anesthetic, because I would have told them, "I will hit myself over the head with a baseball bat if I have to, but I am not going to be conscious for this."

Hopefully, with the aid of some powerful painkillers, I'll be able to post at least a couple brief updates on my sorry condition, and anything else that strikes my drug-enhanced fancy.

So long, my friends! When I reappear, I will no longer have a pain in the ass, I will simply be one.

Wow.

You know, when I heard a guy from my high school had joined the Marines shortly after September 11th, I was stunned, and I didn't believe it, especially because of the guy. One of the goofiest, silliest guys in school, I don't think he ever fought with anyone in his life, joined the fucking Marines.

I don't know him that well, so I don't know why, although it's come down the grapevine that he was apparently having trouble with school a couple years ago and was looking for direction. I'll bet he didn't think he was going to be directed to Iraq, but things never turn out the way you plan.

I was emailed a picture of him this afternoon, clean shaven and looking about five years younger than when last I saw him (he now actually looks younger than he is), and standing next to what appears to be a deuce-and-a-half truck somewhere in the desert.

I learned from the LA Times that he's now a Lance Corporal, and I learned from his dad's letter to the Washington Post that he's now actually in Iraq.

This is just so fucked up and bizarre I can't comprehend it. I should be able to, because most of the people fighting this war are my age or a couple years younger, but he's the only person I know of from my high school who's over there.

Granted, I went to a rich, snotty private school in ultra-liberal DC, and that's probably a huge part of why I don't know too many people who joined the military, let alone got shipped over to Iraq.

The other closest person I know in the military right now is my housekeeper/nanny's son Alex, who's still in South Carolina because he's an instructor in aircraft maintenence, and teaches hundreds of Marines a month how to fix shit when it breaks.

Nivia, his mom, was like a second mother to me for a long, long time, and I know how worried she gets about him. I remember how pissed she got at him when he lied and said he got shipped to San Diego for a month, when in fact he got shipped to Bosnia.

Ugh. Just when I thought I was juuuuuuust conflicted enough about this entire goddamn mess, there come these little reminders that make this shit really hit home.

I fight the urge to bury my head in the sand until this war is all over every day, because the fact that I want to ignore it this badly means it is something I simply cannot ignore. But some days, I really have to fight.

Those Silly Brits

Because I'm up at ridiculous hours of the day/night, I get to see things like the BBC's equivelent of the Today Show, which is currently airing on CSPAN, which normally covers the US Senate.

However, since the US Senate is currently off resolving to rename French Lick, Indiana, I got to see the following generalized (or should I say generalised?) weather forecast for England by a somewhat disappointed forecaster:

"Well, it looks like fog for much of England this morning..."

Stop the presses! Fog? In England? Surely they jest!

A Nice Day

I got up this morning and after sitting around until this afternoon, I decided I could not let a day as nice as today go by without going outside, as crappy as I feel right now (which will be explained in a subsequent post).

It was 70 degrees outside and sunny, and I looked at the forecast and saw that these conditions would not be recurring for some time, probably until about May. Days like today, however, reminded me of some of the reasons I like Chicago.

I went for an almost 2-hour walk down by Lake Michigan, which I live about four blocks from. The Lake was just spectacular today. On certain bright, clear days, Lake Michigan looks like the damn Carribean. I would have gotten in had the water been warmer than about 45 degrees.

Still, I got to walk on the beach with the wind going through my hair on a tourist-brochure perfect day...and I never have to worry about hurricanes, crabs, jellyfish, or any of the other things that usually drive me nuts about the beach. Frostbite, maybe. But not the rest.

Anyway, one thing I realized after my walk was that I forgot how much just going out on a nice day can make you feel better. It cleared my head, made me forget about all the shit that's been hitting the fan in my life and in the world in general.

Sometimes you run across song lyrics you initially think are inconsequential or silly but later realize that they make a whole lot more sense than you gave them credit for. I give you the closing lines from U2's "Beautiful Day":

What you don't have you don't need it now,
Don't need it now
It was a beautiful day...

And really, I see an absurd profundity in that set of lines that maybe wasn't even there when they were written. On a beautiful day, you can ignore that you're not happy about a lot of shit, because you realize you don't need it.

Maybe I'm just loony and/or misinterpreting. But the way I felt this afternoon, free of everything that weighed on me, made me think of those lines in a different light.

Sometimes I just wish things weren't so fucked up right now, and I could keep this feeling even on days where the weather sucks.

Riiiiight

Man Legally Changes Name To Optimus Prime, Ships Out For Gulf.

Stolen From Dave Barry

Two Silly Details

I forgot two of the best stories from the major San Antonio post.

First, Jared from Subway was the part of the halftime entertainment at the Bulls-Spurs game.

He shilled a bit and then helped out by providing two pairs of his old (ridiculously large) pants so that two teams of two guys could compete to see who could fling more foam balls backwards over their heads with lacrosse sticks and catch them with the pants.

As Dave Barry would say, I am not making this up.

He was a major celebrity. Cooper also posted this link to a transcript of a chat with him...It's kind of funny how this guy's diet has just taken over his entire life and existence, but he seems to really be enjoying it, so more power to him.

And slightly related, the Coyote mascot of the Spurs made a backwards, half-court shot in full costume. You'll probably see it on highlight reels for years to come. It was pretty cool.

The other fun story was the conversation we heard between a father and his approximately 7 year old son while we were at the caverns:

Father: (to no one in particular) Man, you could not be down here if you were claustrophobic.
Son: What's claustrophobic?
Father: Well, it means you're afraid of tight spaces or closed spaces.
Son: Oh, you mean like that lady on Fear Factor?

Mark and I had to try very, very hard not to burst out laughing, although both of us could not help but let out a little snicker.

Aha!

Cooper pulls the skills he's learned at CNN.com together to come up with a new conspiracy theory, and the funniest thing I've seen all week.

San Antonio

So, I should probably post my recollections of this trip before I actually forget them.

Mark and I decided to go to San Antonio, Texas for a few days. We came up with the idea after I quit on Wednesday night, finalized the idea Thursday night, and left Friday night.

Why San Antonio? A legitimate question, one that I really don't have a good answer to. The short answer was that it was about as far as we could go in five to six days (the trip was constricted by Mark's impending departure for Norway...well, today at this point).

It was also the only city we a) had both never been to b) could agree on actually wanting to visit and c) were convinced was warm at this time of year. Other suggestions included New Orleans (Mark's been), Pittsburgh (cold, I've been and never wish to return), and Toronto (cold).

So I picked Mark up after his last day as an intern at Playboy (insert Monica Lewinsky joke here...oh wait, E! News has one for me), and we took off.

Because San Antonio is about a 20 hour drive from Chicago, we decided to break up the trip a bit, stopping in Champaign, IL and Dallas on the way down. As Mark said, "Getting there is half the fun...or in this case, most of it."

In Champaign we stayed with my friend Elisa and her husband, Ray. They're fun to hang out with, and I wish I could make it down there more. It's only a couple hours from Chicago, and I'm an unemployed layabout (again). I really have no excuse.

Anyway, while catching up on what's going on, we found out that Ray, after competing in Indianapolis in a national...tournament?...is the 7th ranked diesel mechanic in the nation. Now I admit, until I found out he was in the competition, I had no idea there even was a competition. But it's still cool.

I still cannot get over the fact that they are married, even though millions of other people my age are married with (gulp) children, and I even attended their wedding. I still cannot grasp that I'm old enough for my friends to be married.

Anyway, when Elisa found out that we were considering driving all the way to San Antonio on Saturday (which, it turns out, would have been about an eighteen hour drive), she offered us a place to stay at her parents' house in Dallas, which we gladly accepted.

It was kind of funny having to call her dad and be like, "So Elisa has graciously offered us....your house!", but both Mark and I have stayed there before, right after September 11th when we picked up Elisa at the tail end of another ridiculous road trip.

As my mom IMed me when I got home, "What is it about you and Mark going on road trips that makes war break out?"

We stopped in Hope, Arkansas on the way down to Dallas, partly for gas but partly to at least get a picture of the "Birthplace of Bill Clinton!" sign. And Mark did, since I was a dumbass and didn't bring a camera.

Hope is a shit town in the middle of nowhere now, and I can't even imagine how it must have been when Billy Boy was growing up 40 years ago. Seeing it makes a lot of things about Clinton suddenly make a lot more sense.

Anyway, we rolled into Dallas incredibly late because of our dumb "Hey! We can see more of the scenery if we take this back road and we'll save time because it's shorter!" strategy. Unfortunately, it was much slower and the part of Arkansas it went through was pretty dull.

The only remarkable thing about it was the unnaturally green color of the grass. It seriously looks like a fertilizer ad where someone's turned up the green in photoshop to something just wrong. And it's only in Arkansas. Not Texas, Missouri, or Oklahoma, which are all right nearby.

Elisa's dad fed us some barbecue and we watched the Stars game, but both he and we were so tired that there wasn't much visiting, and her mom was out of town at her grandparents' ranch in Centerville.

We also got up and got the fuck out early Sunday morning so we might actually, you know, get to San Antonio.

The stretch between Waco, about 100 miles south of Dallas, and San Antonio, is surprisingly built up. Hundreds of random stores, just lining the highway like the entire stretch was a metropolitan area.

The stuff that's there has obviously sprung up since the highway was constructed, but similar stretches between Dallas and Waco and Dallas and Centerville (so named because it's halfway between Dallas and Houston) are pretty much desolate.

San Antoino itself is an interesting town. It's a lot like D.C. in that the Designated Tourist Area is really beautiful, but much of the rest of the city is poor, majority-minority (although hispanic here instead of black), and relatively dilapidated.

The general attitude is pretty much the same, too: "Hey, tourists! Look, it's beautiful! No wait, don't look over there!...."

There was an enormous amount of empty real estate, more than I've seen anywhere, even in this economy. I don't know if there was some sort of industry that collapsed in San Antonio, but it looked like people had just fled the city in the last 5 or 10 years.

Mark and I, of course, stayed in the Designated Tourist Area, at a little motel that was a sort of spinoff of a Days Inn called the "Downtowner Motel." It was kind of sketchy, but I've stayed in much, much sketchier.

The big advantage of it was that it was only a couple blocks from the Alamo and the Riverwalk, the two main things to do in the DTA. We immediately headed over and got some pictures of the Alamo, then walked about the Riverwalk and got yet more barbecue.

We had tickets to the Bulls-Spurs game that night, which was kind of silly in that neither Mark nor I had ever been to a Bulls game, and here we were seeing our first, but in San Antonio. It was strange, yet somehow totally appropriate.

However, we had a couple hours to kill before the game, so we headed over to the missions. San Antonio was a big center of Catholic missions in the early 1800's (the Alamo was a mission before it was abandoned by the Church and turned into a fort by the Spanish).

So there are 4 major missions that are still in various states of uprightness in San Antonio: One that's pretty much nothing but ruins, one that's in moderate shape, and two that are in surprisingly good shape for having gone through 200 years of wear and tear.

We went to the first two on Sunday, since we didn't have time to visit all four before the game. It's kind of hard to describe historical sites unless you're actually writing about history, and really, I don't feel like it.

They are beautiful, though, and the historical information and such that they have at each mission is pretty interesting.

We headed back to the other side of town to the brand new SBC center, which is a pretty nice arena (much better acoustics than the horrifically shitty ones at the United Center). People really love the Spurs in San Antonio, typical of a town with one major sport that's always a contender.

The Bulls, of course, lost. They're horrible this year. They'll be good in a few years when people grow up, although Jalen Rose provided an argument that they may never grow up by getting two technicals (and thus ejected) with about 8 seconds left and down by almost 20.

Monday, we got up and decided to go look at Natural Bridge Caverns, which we had seen advertised on the way in, since it was cloudy and kind of gross, and thus an ideal time to go underground.

The cavern was kind of cool, although I've been to an absurd number of caverns and this was probably one of the lamer ones. Part of that was because our guide was a) still in high school and b) on his second day on the job, and had no idea what the fuck was going on.

The one interesting piece of information he did give was to point out an eight foot deep pile of batshit. Apparently, the moisture in the cave keeps it from drying out. Fortunately, it is odorless, because otherwise this cave would clearly be off-limits to the smelling public.

We went back to the mission area and saw the two missions we hadn't seen after the cave excursion. They weren't quite as interesting or well-preserved as the ones we saw on Sunday, although one was now an active monastery again, which was kinda cool.

We then went back to downtown San Antonio and took the full tour of the Alamo, something we had decided to put off because of the vast tourist hordes the day before, when there was a line to even get in the museum portion of the Alamo.

The crowds were slightly smaller, both overall and in stature, because apparently all the elementary schools in Texas were on spring break, and people decided to educate their children about the history of Texas for spring break.

There's your standard set of objects in plexiglass (Davy Crockett's rifle, bibles belonging to various revolutionaries, bullets, etc.) in the museum, but they also have guys giving talks about every half-hour giving a much more vivid description of the history.

I don't know whether it was the fact that the lecture was short, well-presented, or what, but for some reason I found the presentation Mark and I listened to much more interesting than 90% of the classes I had at Northwestern.

Maybe it's just the fact that now that I don't have to learn, I actually want to.

After we were done, Mark got about four thousand pictures of the Alamo, probably two of which did not also feature tourists standing in front of it.

We discussed this point later: Why do people take pictures of themselves in front of landmarks? To prove they were actually there? I can't say I'm not guilty of this myself (hell, I had someone take a picture of me in front of the Grand Canyon).

But what compels people to not just take a picture of a landmark, but to take pictures of themselves in front of the landmark? I find it difficult to believe that people will not accept that you've been someplace if you simply show them a picture of a landmark.

"Oh hell, anybody could've taken that! I demand to see you standing in front of it, wearing a t-shirt that says SPRING BREAK 2003, smiling dippily and waving." Granted, I purchased one of these shirts, but at least there are no pictures of me in front of the Alamo in it.

Anyway, Monday was also St. Patrick's day, which meant the one thing it generally can mean in San Antonio: Margaritas. There was a grand total of one Irish bar in the part of San Antonio we were in, and people were damn near falling into the river it was so packed.

So what to do in a dire situation like this? Have 30-ounce margaritas, of course. Mark and I each had one, and it took me an hour to finish mine (granted, I had 2 12-ouncers at Casa Rio, an excellent Mexican restaurant on the Riverwalk we ate at earlier).

I got good and drunk because I can't hold my liquor (tequila in particular), and then stumbled up to the Alamo so Mark could get some night pictures and have fun with light experiments. He kept apologizing for making me wait, but he forgets: I'm a film major.

I was born to wait.

San Antonio was fun, and I think a visit of only a couple of days was probably just the right length, especially for someone of my incredibly short attention span (why do you think it's taken four days for me to write this?).

Anyway, we got up and got the hell out on Tuesday morning because we wanted to try and avoid rush hour in both San Antonio and Austin (succeeded in the former, failed miserably in the latter).

In another reprise of our last major roadtrip, it started raining just north of Dallas and pretty much never stopped. We stopped at my uncle James's in Springfield, Missouri. He's very amusing to stay with, because he always has some wild stories.

James is a funny guy...it's kind of difficult to elaborate on why without meeting him, although a large part of it has to do with his continued perception of himself as a 25-year old who can conquer the universe, despite the fact that he's a 56-year old cardiologist.

Anyway, we got out of Springfield again early in the morning since Mark had to get back and do some work before he left to go to Norway. It poured rain almost the entire way back to Chicago, but we managed to get back just before rush hour, so that was a plus.

All in all, it was a fun trip. I know it sounds nuts to drive 2700 miles in about five days to spend only a day and a half at your destination, but to me, that's what it's all about. Flying somewhere, you feel nothing concrete.

Driving, however, is theraputic, and much more connected than simply flying. It would have been a lot faster and easier to fly to San Antonio (though obviously not cheaper), but in my book, it's so much better to drive.

You never get to see the absurdly green grass of Arkansas, or pass by the birthplaces of three Presidents (we passed Eisenhower and Truman's birthplaces on the way back to Chicago), or even just realize how fucking flat the entire state of Illinois is from 30,000 feet.

You also get to know your friends a hell of a lot better when you drive more than 40 hours over the space of about five days.

Mark's been pretty much abducted by the journalism grad program here, and my life's just been a chaotic mess lately, so it was nice to actually be able to talk for more than about half an hour for the first time in a few months.

All in all, it was an excellent trip. I can't wait to do something this loony again.