here goes

Chicago - City of grit and hope

When the maple leaves start to turn orange and drop to the wet ground when the rains turn cold, I always think of my favorite city, Chicago. The perfume of wet, freshly fallen maple leaves takes me back to the mid-80s, when  I spent all my weekends in Chicago to escape the quirky college I attended in my least favorite town,Kankakee

My best friend lived on the South Side and she married a guy from housing projects on the Near North Side. She dropped out of college when she got pregnant and moved in with her in-laws. I was a farm girl and ate up all that urban grit. The knife fights, the make-out sessions with my friend's brother-in-law in the bedroom upstairs with the radio turn low, the showers with no water pressure, the pick-up basketball games, the gigantic blocks of WIC cheese, the problem of not being able to get a job because even your address wasn't good enough. My friends' joy of living, the passion for trying to make a decent life, a safe life, and their intense loyalty to a city that challenged and nurtured them was unlike anything I had known in anyone in the flat corn country where I grew up.

Back in those college days, we prowled the waterfront parks at night, haunted the cheapest diners, maybe went roller-skating or out for pizza at Gino's East when one of us got paid. As the lake crusted over with ice and the need for me to study and my friends to make money, we moved on and lost touch.

My life brought me to Chicago in an October 20 years later for one of the city's cursed marathons, I enjoyed the city even when I had money to go to restaurants, stay at hotels in the Loop downtown, and to take an architecture tour to gawk at the first skyscrapers ever built and the new ones being built. Chicago was like me! (Or at least I like to think so.) Chicago had succeeded just as I had. It felt like we reached a comfortable, prosperous middle age at the same time. The Millenium Park expresses for me the city's joy about being prosperous and talented and, let's face it, fun. That fountain with the faces that spit waterfalls? Who couldn't love that? The Bean, the highly polished stainless steel mass, reflects the entire skyline or your own face depending on where you stand. And let's not forget the night Obama won when thousands gathered in hope that Chicago's mojo would rub off on the world

With all the attention focused on Chicago in the past year, I started a novel based on my experience. Thinking of my friends made me long to try to make contact yet again and, once again, I search on Facebook. This time - about 20,000 words in, I found them!

We met again this year after twenty years and more apart. We spent time together as soon as I could fly to O'Hare and we spent the day sailing on Lake Michigan in their sailboat on a glorious summer day.The years slipped away and the joy returns when we talked of how much we meant to each other and how often we thought of each other and I try to stay only a little jealous that they never left Chicago at all. I was delighted they fulfilled their dreams, they have prospered and that my book could yet have a happy ending!

Multitasking too much is not smart and, with food, really not smart

Multitaskers are not as smart as they think, according to Stanford researchers. Something I’ve wondered about for a while is: are people who meditate, who try to focus on one thing or on nothing at all the smartest of all?

I live in California and know that quite a few of my friends meditate. I once asked a colleague to recommend a book on meditation and she pointed me to a book I largely found discouraging in that it urged me to meditate with other people. Stubbornly, I tried to meditate on my own anyway.

I got out my carpet scrap and my kitchen timer and sat on the cement of my patio contemplating lichens growing in the shade for ten minutes every morning for a week or two. It seemed to help me focus, but I did not stick with it. When I have trouble sleeping, I still measure my breathing: 10 counts to inhale, 10 counts to exhale. That helps me relax and sometimes fall asleep.

The book, Meditation by Eknath Easwaran, suggested that to be present with each moment, we should only do one thing at a time. I find this impossible when it comes to eating. Ever since I was a young person, I would read when I eat. Now, I read books, watch TV, or read news on my computer when I eat. Even when I remember not to eat while doing these activities, I cannot break the habit. I still decide to eat while doing these things. Whenever I cannot just eat, it makes me aware of how not smart I am.

I would like to lose a few pounds and, frankly, I should cut back on what I eat and savor every moment of food. I should focus on how it tastes, how it smells, on the pleasure of the flavors and how food turns my hunger to satisfaction. I should do this because if I eat while distracted by other things, I eat too much. Not smart.

If I eat while reading, I barely notice the taste of the food and I feel I am lacking when the food is gone. This is especially bad when I eat a sugary treat while also occupied with watching a humorous TV news show. I'll think "That handful of Milk Duds did not last long. I scarcely tasted them. I will get another handful.” In the time it takes from one commercial break to the next, the box or bag of candy is half gone.

I don't know if meditation would help me not lose my focus when eating. I can try by going to Chozen-ji Zen center in Hawaii in November through my kendo dojo. I heard stories from people who took the trip before that they had to meditate for three hours each day and eat massive quantities of rice. The rice-eating would be difficult for me. Sitting and thinking of nothing for three hours a day for three days doesn't concern me. However, the idea of eating four cups of rice at each sitting worries me a great deal. I don’t care for rice and, sometimes, I have food sensitivities to it. I can just imagine myself with an allergic reaction clearing my throat all afternoon at a meditative retreat. That doesn't sound good.

Between now and the time to decide whether or not I will go meditate in November, I'll try to multitask a little less, especially where food is involved. It's too late this morning, but at lunch for sure.

Accidental photos - better than the planned ones

I've had my new Blackberry Pearl almost four months now and I'm just starting to feel comfortable with it. Even though I miss the radio and stopwatch my Sony Ericsson had, I do find some of the user interface features to be more convenient and well thought out - like if you call one number for a contact, the interface gives you the option of calling other numbers without making you go through the whole contact lookup procedure again.

The camera is a bit less sopisticated than the Sony Ericsson phone was, and the camera interface is more prone to taking accidental photos. Even more irritating is that the accidental photos are better than the ones I mean to take.  Here are a couple of the most interesting and appealing ones. The gray and green one is my new wallpaper.

Does anyone else ever find decent accidental photos on your cell phone?  Any you'd care to share?

Paroxysms of risibility: NYT researches its own hard words

The NY Times web interface lets people look up words as they read articles and they have kept track of which words people look up. Attached is a graphical display where the most frequently sought words are largest.

Why do I mentioned uncontrollable laughter in my post subject? No reason other than it's abstruse phrase using two of the words. If only I would remember, I could use it more in conversation. I was pleased to use "elide" in an email over the weekend.

Now, if only they could get people to use "ensure"/"insure" correctly.

Death and all her relatives

Death has been on my mind, and I haven't even been riding my motorcycle lately. My first and foremost sad news is that my close female relative died suddenly about three and a half weeks ago. My father and I just finished a weekend visit. I arrived on a Friday night. By Saturday afternoon, we drove the sixty miles to her nursing home and set up residence in the facility's guest cottage. My father had not seen her since before Christmas and he spent all the time he could spare sitting in her room and chatting with her. She had had a rough winter, with many changes, a loss of freedom and no very clear memory of why she had lost her apartment and was strong-armed into a one-bedroom apartment without so much as a refrigerator or even a door that locks. While my father and I read or worked crossword puzzles or asked her about the old birthday book we found, she lay on her bed in a fetal position sleeping. On Sunday, we spent time the same way, except that she made to the church service down the hall with us. On Monday, she napped less and even wanted me to wander the halls with her to see he she knew who might be visiting their relatives in the parlor. I went with her and we found a lady wearing green for St. Patrick's day who smiled at her. My aunt said “Hello. I saw you smiling at me, so I we must know each other.” I found it very sweet of her to think that people who smile at her are her friends and to have every expectation that she would find a friend where ever she goes.
We said good-bye Monday morning. We spoke by phone Monday evening. By dawn Tuesday morning, she was dead.
She fell during the night on Monday, hit her head against the concrete floor covered with a thin carpet and no padding, and died of a cerebral hemorrhage seven hours later. The blood-thinners that kept her blood from clotting in the veins in her head caused the blood to fill her brain cavity very quickly once it started seeping out there. Instead of going to the airport, I went to the hospital and the funeral home that day, St. Patrick's day.
Several weeks before my close relative died, I found that my godson, who I had not seen since 1984, died in a fire as a teenager, ten years ago.
Last night, I saw Leonard Cohen perform in concert. To say that death is a theme in his songs is an understatement. Many of his songs and poems address death and loss in at least some form. One of his songs, “Who By Fire?” is a variation of a prayer recited on the Rosh Hashanah, the Day of Atonement. It lists the various circumstances around which a person can die. As I sat not too far from the stage, enjoying Leonard's gravel-voice and the bright blue glow of the theater's argon lights, when the litany of fates overcame me and I wept right there for the first time that night.
Today, we went to the Page Museum to pay tribute to the animals that had died in the La Brea tar pits. Oddly, no raccoon bones have been found, but the tar pits were especially dangerous for the scavenging dire wolf. The wolves, seeing easy prey in the pit, would attack and become victims themselves. One wall of the museum was lined with hundreds of skulls from all the dire wolves who had died and been found millennia later. The skulls, mounted backlit in orange, all faced the same way as if the wolves saluted death and reported for reassignment.
Only one person so far has been found in the pits, a woman, who received only a couple mentions in the museum. She found herself stuck and sinking, waiting to die. The pits are still there, all potentially deadly, but their threats mitigated by eight-foot iron fences. We all can and do anticipate our own deaths, but we do not feel the weight of our fate until we are mired in the circumstance we feel will be fatal and that uncertainty saves us. It leaves us space for our tears, our hope, and our joy and sadness.