Katie in Chicago

Morning in Tokyo

2009-10-29T01:31:13Z

I wrote this in an e-mail home when I went to Japan for a conference for work in August.:

I got up at 5:45 this morning and went to see sumo training.

No one spoke any English at the 'training stable,' as my guidebook called it, so I had the receptionist at the hotel write me a note in Japanese explaining why I was there.

I walked. I was afraid I was lost, but I happened to see a big man in a colorful robe with his hair in a top knot walking down the street. I followed him. He went into a building with a wooden sign written in Japanese kanji that looked like any other closed shop on the street.

I followed him through the door and passed another doorway to a room about the size of my living room. The floor was bare with a big circle carved into it with a pile of sand in the center. And stretching in the corner was an honest-to-goodness, giant sumo wrestler in a loin cloth. I started to walk into the room with my note, but someone else rushed over and stopped me at the door. It was a smaller sumo wrestler. I showed him my paper, and he guided me around to the back. I had to take off my shoes and kneel on a mat on a raised platform about knee-high to the wrestlers.

There isn't much talk at sumo practice. One by one, the wrestlers would come through the door in their colorful robes. They'd strip down to their sumo outfits in the hallway, come into the room and say what seemed to be the end of the phrase 'good morning' -- instead of 'ohio gozaimasu,' they'd say something like 'g-saimas,' and anyone else in the room would reply with the same.

One wrestler kicked the sand and spread it around the ring with a broom. Someone else sprinkled it with water from a watering can. They kept gathering, and eventually a critical mass of about 15-20 people were in the room. Somebody started the organized stretching.

They'd count up to five or 10, lifting a leg in the air and smacking the lifted thigh after each count. They did this for maybe 20 minutes. They traded off who counted each time they reached the end. I'm not sure how they knew who would go next.

More people came in. After an eternity of thigh-slapping, they moved into a few other stretches. They all crouched down and bounced, counting fast ichi-ni-san-ichi-ni-san-ichi-ni-san. Then they crouched again and shifted back and forth, extending one leg and then the other. A big guy slapped a smaller guy on the top of the head and demonstrated that he should crouch down further. He bowed and said 'hai.'

I stepped outside to try to get a picture of one of the wrestlers arriving in a robe, and I found two coming in -- on bikes!

I went back in to see more stretching. The wrestlers were getting sweaty. Then, seemingly out of the blue, everyone moved to the sides, and two guys got into the ring. Without discussion, they crouched down, stood back up and got back down again. One guy touched his knuckles to the ground. As soon as the second guy's knuckles were also down, they'd leap at one another.

The matches took less than a minute each before someone was pushed out of the ring, for the most part. Then everyone would say what sounded like 'des,' and somebody would challenge the winner. They did this seamlessly, without anyone seeming to be in charge.

After a while, a really big guy started training people by having them push him out of the ring as fast as they could over and over again. He would make a great, deep 'huhhhh!' sound when they pushed into one another, but then he wouldn't push back, just backed out of the ring.

Eventually they got back to the matches. One wreslter won maybe five matches in a row. His hair came down, and he was breathing like a grizzly bear that had just sprinted three miles by his last match. Everyone smiled when he started winning again and again, but they didn't seem to congratulate him after he was finally pushed out. They just kept going, saying only 'des' and, every once and a while, a big chorus of 'looooh' when a new person came in.

A couple of other spectators showed up after about an hour, two big Japanese guys who seemed to want to give everyone pointers. One of them brought a lanky, gray poodle. He would call wrestlers over, and they would listen to him and pet his dog. I'm not sure who he was. He had on a Hawaiian shirt and big sunglasses with brownish lenses. In a movie, he would be the guy who fixed the matches.

After a while, I started to get hungry, so I bowed and took off across the city to find breakfast.

Off the crack

2009-02-10T05:27:32Z

I changed chiropractors last month. I started going to the office closer to where I moved.

The head chiropractor at this office is an enormous man. He's at least six feet tall and built like a football player, with the beefy chin and everything. He reminds me of Elaine's meathead boyfriend from Seinfeld, even in the way he talks. His hair is coiffed like a Ken doll and his grin is so bright it's a weapon. His name is Dr. Arbuckle. I'm serious.

The first time I went, he had me lie on my back on the table with my knees bent up. He told me to kick one leg up, then the other, against his hand. It was harder to do with my right leg.

A longtime patient was watching. "It's her hips!" he said. "One leg is longer than the other."

Dr. Arbuckle pulled my legs down straight. "No, they're even. But it is her hips. See, she holds that one differently."

"What does this have to do with my neck?" I asked.

"You see, nobody gets in a car accident like this." He demonstrated a person getting their head knocked straight back. "Usually it's more like this," he said, knocking his head back to the right, "or this," he said, knocking his head back to the left.

"So your neck is a little crooked," he said. "But you don't want to hold your head sideways, so you adjust your shoulders. But you don't want to hold your shoulders that way, so you adjust your hips."

"She gets the blocks!" the patient said.

"Yes, the blocks."

He had me roll onto my stomach and placed what was basically a cube-shaped bean bag under each of my hips, the right one higher than the left.

"You're probably sore there," he said, jabbing a finger into my right butt cheek.

"Ow!" I exclaimed.

"But not there," he said, jabbing the other side.

"That's true."

"Just wait and let your weight do the work with those blocks," he said.

After three or five minutes, Dr. Arbuckle returned and took the blocks away.

"I bet you're not sore anymore," he said, jabbing me in the butt.

I was offended, but astonished. "You're right."

"Now try pushing up with your legs again."

Like magic, they were even. When I stood up, I even felt more balanced.

"That was...miraculous!" I exclaimed. He grinned. But he still needed to adjust my spine.

At the Wheaton office I'd had this short girl in her late 20s / early 30s cracking my back. She had to lift me up with her whole body and push me down on her knee to get my middle to pop. This guy just put a hand underneath me, told me to cross my arms over my chest, and pushed down the weight of a tank with one hand. CRACK CRACK!!

That's more like it. Except he wanted to crack my neck.

That little girl in Wheaton, she couldn't hurt me. This tree of a man could do me in, Steven Seagal-style. I was terrified.

I did not like it. He twisted my neck to an unnatural position and gave it a tiny shake before snapping it to the side. It hurt, just for a second. I gasped every time.

I came back three more times, and I never once got used to putting my head in the hands of a this man who could behead me like a Barbie doll.

After the fourth visit, I told him I was done.

At the Wheaton office, I had tried to same line. It didn't work. "Oh no, you're only half-recovered. Your neck is going to cause you problems again down the line and where will you be then, with no personal injury claim to pay for you?? You can't leave us! You must never leave us!!"

I braced for it. "Well," he said. "Do you feel better?"

"Yes."

"Have you met your goals?"

"When I'm driving I can turn my head to look for approaching cars without screaming, yes."

"Then you're done."

I was amazed. "That's it? I'm done?"

"Unless you don't think you are."

"Oh, believe me, I'm done."

"Hooray!" He patted me on the back with one giant paw and guided me out to the receptionist. "Put on some happy music; Katie is graduated!"

He flashed a giant, brilliantly white grin at me and lumbered back into the depths of the office.

"Aw, when will we see you again?" the receptionist asked.

"Nothing against you," I said, "but I hope never."

Snap Crackle Pop

2008-12-01T03:49:50Z

About a month ago I was in yet another car accident in the Chicagoland area.

This time I wasn't driving. My boyfriend, Nick, was driving me back from a salsa lesson he'd signed us up for. It was one of our first dates. As we approached an intersection with a green light, a cop on the road perpendicular to ours suddenly switched on his lights and siren.

There was a moment of indecision. Do we rush in front of the police car or try desperately to stop? Nick hit the brakes. The cop moved past us. I sighed in relief, still watching the road ahead of us. At this point, Nick told me later, Nick looked in the rearview mirror and saw nothing but grill.

He turned to say something. But all I noticed was that suddenly, I felt someone slam the back of my neck with a baseball bat.

The car skidded into the intersection. We had been rear-ended. We looked behind us and saw the other party -- a semi truck.

Nick pulled over to the side of the road and called the police. I rubbed the base of my skull, which had been flung into the headrest. I had just heard part of a radio program talking about how fighters who don't see a blow coming don't tense up their necks in anticipation and are more prone to being knocked out and damaging their brains. "My brain!" I kept thinking. "I need that!"

We talked to the police, and eventually paramedics showed up in an ambulance to check me out. They said we could go to the hospital, but that it probably would be nothing.

"Did you pass out?" they asked me while checking my blood pressure.

"No."

"Then you don't have a concussion. You're fine."

The back of Nick's car was dented, and we had to pry it from where it had squished into the left rear wheel, but it was driveable. He bought me an entire sack of ice, wrapped a few chunks in a wetted towel and sat with me while I chilled my sore neck.

It hurt for a few days, but I never got a headache, so I didn't worry about it.

A few weeks ago we had a health fair at work. One of the tables set up was for a chiropractor, and they were offering free massages.

I signed up. The back rub was fine, but as soon as the woman giving me the massage touched my neck, I yelped and held up a hand. "Too hard!" I said.

"I just barely touched you," she said. "See, this is how hard I was pushing." She demonstrated on my shoulder. She went back to my neck.

"Ow!"

I told her about the car accident. Apparently I was not all better. Of course she signed me up to come in to her office.

Now I've been by a few times. They determined that I had a decreased range of motion since the accident. I went through a seven-pose photo shoot with the x-ray machine, after which I was told that the vertebrae in my lower neck did not bend as much as they were supposed to. My cartilage is compressed at the top.

They prescribed three sessions a week for a month of spine adjustment. I told them they could have three times a week for three weeks, then I'd see how I felt.

I had my first adjustment last week.

"See how far you can turn your neck?" the woman told me, turning my head from side to side as I lay on the padded table. "Now all I'm going to do," she said, pushing my neck awkwardly up and to the side, "is put your neck like this and hit it really quick."

How reassuring.

I protested, but she did whatever she did. I couldn't really tell what it was she had done. I heard two pops and it was over. She pulled my head the other direction.

"Wait before you do the next one!" I said, trying to process what was going on. Pop!

She lay me back down. I expected more neck adjustments, but she was done with that.

"Now we're going to get to know each other really well," she said. "You give yourself a big hug. I'm going to pick you up and lower you down on my knee."

Crackcrack!

"What does that have to do with my neck?!" I demanded.

"If we just adjust part of your spine, it won't move enough," she said, turning me to the side.

"Now you're going to feel like you're about to fall off the table, but you won't," she said. "Straighten out the leg that's on the table and bend your other one. I'm going to pull you."

Pop pop pop!

She did the other side.

"There," she said with a satisfied grunt, "you've just had your first adjustment. I'll see you next week."

Uncle Herschel

2008-10-13T03:00:52Z

I stopped writing a few weeks ago when my Uncle Herschel died.

Herschel was a teacher. You could tell he really loved teaching. When I was in Moldova, he kept up with my journal and wrote back to me about his classes. I miss him.

I went to Ashland, Ohio, for the funeral. The pastor at the Lutheran church where Herschel went with other members of my family is so wonderful. Herschel wanted the musicians to play songs they play on Friday nights -- upbeat, rejoicing songs.

"Lutherans don't really dance," the pastor said, "but they do get to clapping and wiggle a little. So if you want to wiggle, these are the songs to wiggle to."

No one felt like wiggling and we sang softly, but the pastor understood that, too. I liked that Herschel wanted happy songs played on his way out. He was also a mortician and so was there to help lots of different families through the funerals of loved ones. He must have seen all kinds of ways to say goodbye, and that's the one he chose.

Apocalypse as good PR

2008-09-19T19:55:17Z

Someone sitting in the public affairs office just remarked, "Irrational alarm is a social lubricant."

He's totally amused at the idea that people think the Large Hadron Collider is going to end the world. And he's excited at how much it's invited the public at large into the dialog about the future of particle physics.

"What are those things that propogate themselves? Memes? This is a meme. It's been amazing to watch.

"That guy who started the lawsuit? Someone should have paid him."

The End-of-the-World Pajama Party

2008-09-17T23:25:06Z

Last week the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Switzerland circulated its first particle beam. It happened between 2 and 4 a.m. after my second day of work at Fermilab. And we had a pajama party.

That's just how Fermilab is. I knew when I first drove onto the property - almost 7,000 acres of mostly prairie - and passed an actual herd of buffalo that I had made the right choice coming here.

The only real office building on Fermilab property is this 15-floor concrete creation that slopes in from both sides at the bottom and is nothing but windows up the middle of the front and back. It's almost like two very thin buildings, one on the East and the other on the West, connected by glass. When you walk inside, you can see all the way up to the skylights at the top. All that sunlight sustains a whole atrium full of trees and plants on the ground floor.

Fermilab's first director, Dr. Robert Rathburn Wilson, had a lot of control over the building's design and also designed a lot of the metal sculptures scattered around Fermilab. There's the one I like to call the Fancy Donut at the back of the building, the obelisk in the reflecting pool out front and the one that looks like a twisted Chinese finger trap. I think Wilson also had something to do with the fact that the electric lines are held up by a series of white structures that look like the symbol for Pi.

Fermilab was the only place to have a live video connection with CERN early Wednesday morning - so we could watch it make us obsolete by doing what we do best, only better. (Okay, okay, Fermilab is still doing other important research and is a big part of the LHC experiment, but man oh man is America in trouble if we don't elect someone who cares about science.) About 400 people showed up; Fermilab was actually turning guests away.

I bought special PJs just for the event. I saw them as I was passing by the children's clothing section at Target the day before: greenish-blue, shiny, covered in fist-sized prints of multicolored owls. They were magnificent. I bought extra large, which would have fit if I were a few inches shorter. Oh well. I got fuzzy pink slippers to match.

My boss showed up in blue and orange jammies with footies. I love this place.

Before the LHC was turned on, some botanist was working people up over how it would create a black hole and swallow the Earth -- a claim that prompted some hilarious TV news graphics and inspired one pajama party guest to follow the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and bring a towel.

But if Mr. Botanist knew anything, he would realize that they weren't even colling any particles that night. They were just checking to see if beams would run all the way around both rings of the particle accelerator. The collisions start this week.

Yoga

2008-09-16T04:43:53Z

I started taking yoga at work.

I've never done yoga before, unless you count that thing we did once in gym class in which our teacher, the one with the she-mullet, had us sit on a mat, close our eyes and imagine the ocean.

Yoga is offered during lunch on the stage in the auditorium on Tuesdays at Fermilab. I bought a purple yoga mat at Whole Foods and some stretch pants from Target and I was ready to go.

The first day, about a dozen of us set up our mats in a circle in the constricted space with our instructor in the center, facing his audience. He had us go around and talk about ourselves for the first few minutes: What's your name? Why are you doing this?

About half of us had never done yoga before. The other half had reasons like, "My back hurts," and "Otherwise I can't stand on one foot."

When we got back to our instructor, a slightly scruffy guy in his early 30s, he straightened his back from his already bolt upright position and told us his name.

"And I do it because I have to," he said. "If I don't do it, my life slowly starts toppling out of balance, and I just lose all control. I have to. I do it because I can't not do it." He huffed out a laugh and then smiled and rolled his eyes upward, shaking his head in a private joke between himself and, I assume, God?

We began the class with some easy stretching and very controlled breathing. For almost an hour I did not take a single breath without this man telling me to. It was interesting. I never realized how much you can control your breathing if you think about it. At some points I started to get a little panicky, thinking I would run out of air. And that made me lose my rhythm. But it only happened a couple of times, and after that I got right back into the pattern of deep-breath-in, hold it, hooold it, releeeeeease.

He did different exercises in 20 minute intervals. During one, he had us holding our noses and breathing in one nostril and out the other. In-right, out-left, in-left, out-right. That made me the most panicky, especially since (and oh is this ever nerdy) I discovered during a Peace Corps medical test that I have a deviated septum. But I got it.

At one point, he had us lifting our feet in the air, which, if anyone remembers from track & field, really hurts your stomach. Nobody whined, but the instructor laughed after he told us what to do.

"Oh ho ho," he said, sounding slightly strained as he lifted his legs as well. "Abs 101. This is beginner abs! It's either beginner abs or no abs! I won't even tell you about intermediate abs! You can't even imagine intermediate abs!" He laughed a little more and told us to pedal our legs in the air as if we were riding bicycles. "Now go backwards! Haha!"

At the end of the session, he had us all sit up an put our hands together.

"Now we're going to give thanks," he said. "And any yoga instructor who does not have you give thanks at the end of the session, to God, to whoever you worship, to the Universe for letting us enjoy the gift of yoga, they're not a real yoga instructor. And even I, I don't even know, I'm just helping. I'm not there yet. I'm going through this the same as you.

"Thank you for allowing us to enjoy this yoga experience," he said, then ended the class.

"I teach a different kind of yoga," he said to no one in particular as we rolled up our mats. "Only one other teacher in the Chicago area teaches like this."

"What kind of yoga is it?" someone asked.

"Well, it's just normal yoga. It's Hatha Yoga. But if you start giving it a name people get all scared."

"Um, no, it's a lot scarier if you just tell us that," I said, but I don't think he heard me.

Well, it was good stretching. If I find out we're accidentally worshiping Satan, I'll see about a refund.

Yay SNL

2008-09-16T03:55:37Z

Starting again

2008-08-27T03:21:06Z

Today I finally met up with my friends Erin and Matt from Peace Corps for lunch in Chinatown. It was so familiar -- having to ask the hostess three times what she meant when we asked how long the wait was, hanging out with the two of them, trying to decipher a bill written in a foriegn script at the end of the meal.

And they laughed when I told them what I'd be doing this week: packing a bag and shipping the rest of my belongings home.

"So you do this like once a year now," Matt said.

I'm in my final week of grad school, the beast that almost managed to kill my livejournal. (I do apologize for the unannounced hiatus.)

Today I turned in my final Computer-Assisted Reporting article, and tonight I mailed my final required story to my Policy professor. I hope to spend the rest of the week working on an article to send to the Associated Press.

And then -- I'm off to Minneapolis. I'll be helping the Associated Press cover the Republican National Convention. I still don't know what the final balance will be between writing short articles and going on sandwich runs, but it should be incredible.

After that, I'm headed back to Chicago. (Hooray! No need to change the name of my blog!) I got a three-month internship to do science writing at Fermilab, home of the most powerful particle accelerator in the United States -- or, as Erin put it, "Isn't that that thing that's supposed to cause the end of the world?"

It's been a wild summer in D.C. I've covered Congressional hearings in the Senate and House. I've seen Barack Obama, John McCain and John Edwards speak. I ran into Ron Paul and interviewed him while covering a party thrown by his supporters at a Georgetown bar. I wrote my first column. I've gotten published all over Politico.com and the Tennessean. And I got an article put out by the Associated Press (and picked up by Yahoo! News, Fox News, ABC News and the Washington Post's website, to name a few!) I met up with Hilarie, one of my very first livejournal friends, at the Black Cat's Britpop dance night and had a smashing time.

Coming to D.C. might have been the best decision I ever made at Medill. To think, I could be stuck in Evanston rehearsing to present the Media Management Project right now, never having been published by anyone but the Daily Herald. Never listen to school advisors.

Looptopia

2008-05-04T21:02:41Z

Looptopia : Chicago :: White Nights : Russia

I went to Looptopia on Friday and volunteered to make a video for my friend Brad's news site, the Windy Citizen. I decided to hang out with fire-spinners all night. Here 'tis:

http://windycitizen.blip.tv/file/877646/

Chiditarod

2008-03-06T05:51:09Z

I know I never get around to posting anymore, but here's something I did put some work into:

http://www.methodsreporter.com/chiditarod/

I made the "No Bull" movie.

Kosovo declares independence

2008-02-17T19:21:41Z

Kosovo declared independence today.

You can read my summary of the news on my class blog.

I've been writing about news from Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan, but this story has nicely fit in with my topic since Russia's big argument against letting Kosovo break away from Serbia has been that it will give other breakaway republics ideas.

Georgia has two such republics: Abkhazia and South Ossetia.

The strange thing is: Russia is the only one who recognizes many of those breakaway republics. They get by because they have Russian trade and military support.

I understand that Russia is aligned with Serbia and that it might take it personally when it sees some plucky little country breaking away from a bigger one (remember the early '90s?). But it seems odd to me for Russia to bring up as its big fear that the very breakaway republics it seems to be supporting would want independence.

A series of events

2008-01-31T07:56:44Z

I almost died today. My life did not flash before my eyes. I barely even appreciated what happened.

This morning just after I pulled out of the driveway of my building, a small series of events occurred.

A woman pulled her car in front of my car. A taxi driver in front of her suddenly slammed on his brakes, screeching to a halt. The woman in turn slammed on her brakes, also screeching to a halt. I slammed on my brakes, screeching to a crunch.

The woman pulled over, and so did I. It wasn't so bad.

"Great bumper!" she exclaimed, taking off her sunglasses and hopping from one foot to the other. The sun was gleaming white, but the temperature had still not risen much above the -35 degrees of the night before.

"I didn't mean to stop so quickly," she said. "It was that taxi."

The last time I'd been involved in an accident with another vehicle was when an old lady dropped her purse under her brake pedal and scratched the side of my car as I drove past her driveway. We'd called the police and filed a report. This woman didn't seem interested in that.

I asked if she wanted to exchange insurance information.

"My car's not damaged, and it's not like it's my fault," she said.

"Well, let me at least get your phone number," I said. I added her as a contact in my cell phone then gave her phone a call.

With that, she took off.

I had been on my way to an interview at a hospital. I was going to talk to a 22-year-old girl with MS.

There were two paths: Keep driving and try to get to the interview on time or take the car back to my building, park, take the el to the downtown newsroom and do the interview over the phone from there.

My car didn't look all that bad. It was a little crunched, but everything still worked just fine. I chose to drive.

An hour later, I was going down the highway when I noticed my hood bouncing in the Chicago wind. I had another choice to make: Keep driving until the next exit then get off, do the interview by phone and call AAA or pull over to the side of the highway right then and call AAA.

With so many huge trucks whipping by, I didn't feel safe perching on the side of the road. I decided to drive to the next exit.

I pulled over to the right lane and slowed down, willing the hood to stay shut. I imagined the worst that could happen would be for it to flip open halfway, momentarily obstructing my vision.

But then all at once the hood shot completely upright, wrenching metal, slamming full on into my windshield and clinging there like a giant bug.

For a moment I kept driving forward, amazed to discover in the new darkness that I could still go straight. But I realized I could see the line on the side of the road in the two-inch unblocked space at the bottom of my windshield. I used it as my reference to pull over into the margin.

I turned on my hazard lights and called AAA. I sat waiting on hold, listening to classical music for a good five minutes before the phone rang and then disconnected me. At that, exactly four frustrated tears rolled down my cheeks, but then I pulled myself together and dialed again.

By the time I'd gotten an answer, a man in an orange jumpsuit with "Tollway" stitched onto the place where a breast pocket might have been had pulled up behind me in a yellow truck. He told me he'd get me some wire to tie my hood shut so I wouldn't have to get towed.

It was about time for me to do my interview, so I called and conducted it over the phone, writing with my notebook propped on my steering wheel. At one point I had to put the girl on hold to speak to a police officer who came to check out the scene.

Another man arrived to secure my hood. I thanked him, watching him tie metallic knots and jumping from one foot to the other.

I drove on to meet my interview subject. I had gone all this way; I needed to get my photo of her for the article.

I took pictures of her pretending to do her job, making coffee and sandwiches in a cafe. Then I sat in a public library, edited the photos, finished my article and sent it all in to the newsroom.

I had gotten my car all the way back to the body shop before I even called anyone to tell them what happened.

The guys at the auto shop were surprised there was no damage to my windshield. The thought that it could have easily shattered, flinging glass and frigid wind over me and probably causing me to crash into the divider by the entrance ramp or the truck on any side of me -- the thought had crossed my mind, but only for a second. The important thing was that it didn't happen. The time for that scenario to play out had passed.

When I called and told the insurance agency about the incident on the highway, the woman on the phone said with glee, "Oh, that's a separate incident. So there will be two."

"What? The second incident didn't even damage anything new. It just messed up the hood, which already was going to need to be replaced."

"Well I'll make a note of that," she said demurely. I'm sure she'd love to charge the deductible twice.

Everyone else who called asked if I was okay.

My professor called. She had already arranged for someone to drive me to our field trip the next day. And she had an offer for me.

A Web site and the medical school wanted a Medill student to cover a conference for them. I'd be there all day and write three articles for three different entities, all freelance. I'd be hanging around some top scientists and writing for a wide audience.

Because it's a freelance gig, they can pay me.

The woman offering the job asked my professor what she thought I should get.

"I kept my mouth shut," Abigail said. "I asked her, 'What were you thinking?'"

The woman stated her price: the exact cost of my deductible.

Eurasian moment

2008-01-14T09:46:59Z

Our first assignment for my new media storytelling class is to start a blog. We have to write at least five short entries a week commenting on new developments in whatever topic we choose. I came up with "The Politics & Culture of Revolution: News from Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan."

Tonight I went to Evanston for a free bachata lesson taught by the campus dance group. I stayed after to work with Felicia on our blogs.

I wrote a short summary of the political developments in the three countries after their color / flower revolutions. In all three countries, pushing out authoritarian rulers through relatively peaceful street protest seemed like the work that would earn them a fresh start. In all three countries, the rulers have turned out to be just about as fallible as their predecessors.

I spent several hours reading Eastern European news and finding bloggers and newspapers to link to. I reveled in the Slavic names and combed through Russian sites looking for words I understood.

On my way home, Chicago Public Radio was playing "The Voice of Russia," a program with overly dramatic introductory music and announcers with thick accents weighing on their tongues. It was lovely. I darted around the potholes on Howard and for a moment could imagine myself back in Eastern Europe. One of the commentators mentioned that it was New Year's according to the old calendar. I wished I had sent holiday greetings to my host family, partner teacher and students.

When I arrived home, a man with a severe limp held the door from the garage to the elevators for me. He smiled at me and, to my surprise, named my apartment number. "Right?" he asked.

He seemed vaguely familiar. We probably met in the elevator this summer.

"I remember you," he said with an Eastern European accent. "I'm in 24B."

"What's your name?" I asked.

"Zaro," he said, shaking my hand. "What's yours again?"

"Katie."

"Kitty!" he said, squeezing my hand with both of his. "What were you doing out so late?"

"I was studying," I said. "Nothing interesting."

"I was having a great time," he said. "It was Serbian New Year tonight."

"Oh it was!" I said, flooded with joy to have stumbled upon the holiday right in my elevator. "Happy New Year!"

The enthusiasm was infectious. He grabbed my shoulders and kissed me on the cheeks. After the second kiss I started to step back, but he went for the third.

"Three times in Serbia!" he said.

I wished him a happy New Year again as I stepped out onto my floor, grinning to have stepped out of my culture for just a moment to take part in the celebration.

Dance Class

2008-01-09T06:11:47Z

Last quarter I took a Caribbean dance classes on Sundays at the Old Town School of Folk Music, possibly my favorite place in all of Chicago.

We did painful ballet stretches and exercises for most of every class then cumulatively learned a routine for a dance recital that may never actually happen, as it has yet to be definitively scheduled and the class ended weeks ago.

I was sore in muscles I didn't even know I had every Monday. It was great.

This quarter I signed up for two classes. One is belly dancing, which I'm taking with my friend Felicia since she's in the magazine program and I'm a newspaper gal. We have suddenly gone from being in every class together to having completely opposite schedules in different neighborhoods.

I'm also taking hip hop, house and funk. I'd been hearing great things about the class and its instructor, a woman named Boogie. My first class with her fell on her 10-year anniversary of working at Old Town.

My class was her third of the day. It was packed with maybe 30 people, very different from my two- to four-person Caribbean class.

"Sometimes after teaching two classes I get in here and sound like I'm on crack," Boogie said. "But don't worry, I'm not on crack." The room was silent. "It's a joke!" she laughed.

She gave us the run-down on her philosophy for the class.

"What is the name of this place?" she asked.

A few people in the lackluster crowd, completely off balance with this bouncy woman, started to murmur, "The Old Town..."

"...School of Folk! Music!" she finished. "This isn't Tina's Dance Studio. This is about the music.

"This isn't a try-out for anything. I'm not even here to teach you something you can use in a try-out. I'm not here to teach you how to do the Soulja Boy."

She started jumping to one side and singing the song. "Supa-man!" she shouted sarcastically as she propelled herself forward in a flying pose.

"No, and I'm not here to show you how to dance like me. I don't want you to dance like me. I want you to dance like you... dancing. I want you to dance like you, dancing. If you start to look like me, you better change it up. Not too much, though." She laughed. "It's a joke!"

"I'm not here to show you how to shake your booty," she said, demonstrating. "You see that in hip hop videos, but that ain't hip hop. That's stripping."

She pointed to the wall-sized mirror lining one side of the room.

"You see that mirror?" she asked. "That is the scariest thing in the world, if you have the wrong attitude about it. If you come in here and try to do everything perfect, you will hate this class. You will leave this class in tears every day. But you know what? You already perfect.

"This is something I like to do at the beginning of every class. Go up to the mirror. Go right up to it."

We all stood and lined up in front of the mirror.

"Say it to yourself. I am perfect!" she yelled.

"I am perfect!" we all yelled, giggling.

"Say it again!" she said.

A single voice rang out in the silence: "You are perfect!" We all spun to see a girl in the middle still pointing at her reflection sheepishly. Poor thing. It was too funny not to laugh.

"No, all of you!" Boogie yelled. We said it again, still laughing.

Boogie had us turn this way and that and shake ourselves. "That's the worst of it," she said. "That's the most embarrassing thing I'll make you do."

One of the girls who had taken the class before whispered, "No, it's not."

The warm-up is always the same. "And we always start with house," Boogie said, "Because this is Chicago!" She turned on the music.

The veterans of the class had it down cold. I was utterly lost. Half of it involved clapping or bouncing or rolling your body in various stages of a stomach crunch and hurt like the dickens. I don't remember everything else she had us do, but at one point we did a push-up, after which we lay face-down on the ground with our knees bent and our feet in the air and had to pull ourselves forward then push ourselves back.

"It's a push-up and a pull-up!" Boogie yelled. "Oh no! What is she making us do?!" She laughed.

After that and other acrobatics I don't think I'll ever master, we started dancing. Boogie would run us a few steps at a time through a little routine then have us repeat it several times to music. We bounced back and forth, walked in circles, dropped down and shuffled back up and did the electric slide. It was hard to remember, but it was a lot of fun.

"This is not an aerobics class!" Boogie yelled at one point. She starting taking bouncy steps from one side to the other, clapping and leading with a dramatic duck of her head and flip of her thick ponytail. "I've taken aerobics. I know this is what they do. This is not aerobics. Be chill about it. Be cool." She switched to snapping, taking smaller steps with more lean. We laughed.

We stretched in pairs, then Boogie taught us to move across the room with a few different steps, using three different tracks of nothing but beats. Then she taught us another routine that combined the new movements with those from the first routine.

We did it a few times then she put on "Stronger" by Kanye West and had us do it faster. At the very end she split us into two groups and had one clap for the other. We had to limp off the "stage" at the end. It was hilarious.

"See, you all knew what you were doing!" Boogie complimented us at the end.

"Not me," I said to the second-timer next to me.

"You think you can't do it after the first class," she said. "But then you come back the second time and you can." Hope she's right. Even if she isn't, it's still fun.

back to it

2008-01-06T18:09:51Z

Last quarter I went on a police ride-along while researching my beat for class. I was sent along on a cold Thursday evening (thank goodness for warm bullet-proof vests) with two cops, one of whom was 6 foot 7. I couldn't stop starting at his enormously long legs.

They weren't usually partners, so I got to be a part of their getting to know one another. The first thing they did was stop at Dunkin Donuts to pick up coffee.

We got called to a domestic dispute in an apartment complex. I expected to have to stay in the car, but the officers told me I could come along. One held the door for the next, who held the door for me. I didn't realize the door was so heavy and let it slam behind me.

I lingered half a flight of stairs behind them when they knocked on the door to the apartment. They were let in, and the second officer told me to stand outside the door, which they left open. I could hear everything, but was out of sight.

The couple had been married only three months. They had been having their first big fight when the wife called the police.

The fight had started when the wife saw the husband talking to another woman on the street. He argued that she had gone overboard with her jealousy. But the real issue, it seemed, was that the husband had been calling his wife names and insulting her since they got married.

"Look, there are, what, seven pictures in here with the two of you holding hands," one of the officers said. "Obviously you're in love."

After some discussion, they got them to apologize to one another.

When they started writing their report, they asked the man for an i.d. The woman took one of the officers out into the hallway.

"Oh," she exclaimed when she saw me standing at her door.

"She's with us," the officers said. How bizarre for this poor woman.

I retreated back down to the landing and heard the woman telling the officer that her husband, who was African, was applying for citizenship and that she hoped this wouldn't affect his chances. He said it wouldn't.

That was our most interesting call of the night. Otherwise, the officers wrote up a report of a minor car accident and bought me Cuban food for dinner, and we spent the rest of the time speeding and slowing over Chicago's "speed humps" toward calls other officers got to first.

We talked about the officers' wives, one Chinese and the other Italian. We talked about traveling. They answered my questions about police cameras and where to find information about fire-related incidents. We talked about journalism - one of the guys worked in broadcast on the side. At dinner, we made fun of their fellow officers, one of whom accidentally went into the women's restroom, which was clearly labeled in not one but two languages as such.

For some reason we talked about British accents, and by the end of the night they were both using "well" (as in "That was well good") more or less correctly. It was fun hanging out with them.

After my ride-along was over, they drove me to a fire station to try to get me a report about a fire that had recently occurred. They had told me the street where it had happened was lined with buildings that hadn't passed code. I was hoping to write an article about this, but the quarter ran out before I could process a Freedom of Information Act request.

We didn't get the report, but it was so nice to have someone official backing me up when I went into the station. Afterward, they drove me back to my car and waved goodbye.

Hilarious Police Report of the Day

2007-11-02T04:22:19Z

Someone reported this week that he came home to find his house "in disarray." He was missing more than $500 in power tools, a $100 chain, a box of Hefty bags, some light bulbs, a jar containing $30 in change, and, out of the fridge, a tub of ice cream and a pizza.

Beat Reporting

2007-11-01T06:51:02Z

Despite the fact that we started beat reporting today, we also had a morning lecture. That meant we had three hours less to work on our stories. Way to go, whatever nameless being decides these things and fails to inform half the staff.

But time restrictions don't pose a particular problem to someone on the "public safety" beat. Unless I'm investigating something more in-depth, all I have to do is go down to the station and charm my way into looking at the police reports.

No one I spoke to today tried to harass me out of finding information. Also, everyone I spoke to today was female. Coincidence?

The first report I read listed the offender as wearing a Michael Myers mask.

"Are you kidding me? Like from the 'Halloween' movies?" I asked the officer helping me.

"Oh there's more," she said.

We started combing through the reports together and managed to find three more good ones for my story: a guy in a skeleton costume burglarizes a home; four men dressed as doctors and nurses beat up two guys on the sidewalk; and, the best of all, a guy in his 30s dressed as a pirate - eye patch, hat, plastic sword and all - steals an LCD screen from a cash register at a Burger King. Yarr.

My editors loved it. Tomorrow I'm invited to the "real reporters" meeting at the station, in which we all get to fight over the reports for the week together. Good thing I have a head start.

Next Up

2007-10-30T03:29:04Z

We're going to start beat reporting this week. We've gone through weeks of writing different types of stories - the meeting story, the speech story, the budget story, the feature story, etc. Starting this week, our class will function as a newsroom Wednesday through Friday.

Two students will be the "slot" people who manage the newsroom. They'll have to come in at 8 a.m., having read the local papers, listened to the radio and watched the news. They don't have to file a story. They have to talk to all of us, make sure we've all got a good story to work on, and tell us when the stories are due. They plan a budget of how stories will be placed on our Web site and place them when they're turned in. They also provide lunch.

I requested the "public safety" beat, which means cops and fire. I've never really felt comfortable writing cops stories, so I'm hoping this will toughen me up.

I'm already getting started. I talked to the commander at one of my two districts on the phone last week.

Me: Hello, thanks for calling me back.
Commander: What? People don't usually call you back?
Me: Wha? Well... not on a Friday. So you got my message that I'm a Medill student?
Commander: I'll try not to hold it against you.
Me: Okay. My professor said he knows you. His name's ***.
Commander: Who?
Me: You might know him as ***. He said he used to cover your district.
Commander: What?
Me: Well in any case, if you know him you can get me in trouble with him if I mess up.
Commander: Oh I'll be yelling at you if you mess up.
Me: Fair enough.

Good gravy. I'm going over to the station tomorrow to meet with a review officer and possibly introduce myself to the commander in person.

A Week in the Life

2007-10-19T04:33:30Z

I am so glad I took a few years off to work between undergrad and grad school. I know that at the end of this year, life isn't going to continue to be as busy as this.

I texted my summer co-worker Chris last week to tell him I'd stayed up late working on a freelance story, which I finished during class while writing another assignment on deadline. I told him we have class from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. on Mondays and that we even have assignments due on the weekends.

He texted me back: "Man I miss school."

He's right. I love it. We may be just barely keeping on top of our workloads, and some of our morning lectures may be useless, but most of the time I feel like I'm getting better at something I'm passionate about.

Mondays we have our law & ethics seminar in the morning, editing in the afternoon, and journalism by the numbers in the evening. Tuesdays we only have editing lab, which for my class meets at 1:30 p.m. Yet I have never had the chance to sleep in that day. Wednesday through Friday we have a lecture in the morning and methods lab the rest of the day.

Every weekend we work on a multimedia project for Wednesday's methods lab. We've taken photos, done an audio interview, and are now working on audio slideshows. Next up: video. I don't feel like I'm learning this multimedia stuff all that well, but I have to admit it's nice to have some experience with it I can build on in the future.

I got lucky. I've got professors who severely oppose the program's new market focus. They'll put up with the technology, but they said they're not going to make us do more than one audience report.

We've been divided into groups, each of which has been covering a certain Chicago neighborhood. Next week we'll get our beat assignments and will start covering a certain topic in all three of the neighborhoods covered by our class.

During the hours we're not in class, we're often on an assignment covering a meeting or a speech, investigating our neighborhoods or doing man-on-the-street interviews (otherwise known as AAA, Ask Any - well, you can guess). I've somehow managed to write a couple of freelance articles for the Health & Family section of the Pioneer Press, and I also took a work-study position tutoring three Chinese students in English for a couple of hours a week.

Fridays after lab we go to the bar with our professors. And then we do something wacky like singing at a Korean karaoke bar or watching 30 plays in 60 minutes at the Neofuturists theater.

I'm glad I stayed here this summer. Not having all that many friends just gave me a stockpile of interesting things I couldn't wait to do once I made some more.

First Day

2007-09-25T04:30:07Z

I had my orientation today.

There are only 63 students in my grad program, and only about half are in the reporting and writing concentration with me. There are maybe 10 guys in the program total.

One of them stood up and pointed himself out as the one person in our group who had been to Iraq. He went in 2003-2004 during part of the seven years he was in the Army. As he presented himself during the hour-long getting-to-know-you part of the morning, he said, "Some of you may have heard of General Petraeus? Yeah, I know him. I wrote him an e-mail just recently wishing him luck on his address."

I was the only Peace Corps volunteer of the group (which I found a little disappointing). But I declined to point that out when later he told a small group of us at the closing reception, "You know how in a boy band there's the rebel one and the pretty boy one? I thought I'd come to this group and be the Army one."

Everyone must've cringed because he quickly added, "I'm sure everyone has something unique, though."

Another guy stood up and declared that he was going into broadcasting because "My friends always told me I had really good teeth and hair."

There were a few characters like those two, but in general I liked the group. Probably a third of us majored in journalism or communications for undergrad, and another third majored in English. In the "other" category, we had some poli sci majors, science majors and even a couple of repentant lawyers returning to school to pursue social change from a different angle.

There seemed to be a lot of students going into the broadcast sequence. I'm impressed that they'll be going through the same journalism methods quarter as the writer types. We're going to have to try our hand at broadcasting, but only once.

We're divided into four lab groups. None of the people I befriended today are in my group, but we passed out phone numbers and made vague plans involving karaoke.

I found one OSU grad who went to the OSU bar in Lincoln Park by herself on Saturday to watch them pummel Northwestern. She won't be alone this week.

Our undergrad / homestate rivalries played a surprisingly big role in today's interactions. I had run-ins with one Duke grad and one Duke basketball fanatic. But the grad described himself as a "self-hating Dookie," so he's alright with me, and the fan girl is from North Carolina, so I had to like her.

We had people from Ivy League schools, but we also had a surprising number from small liberal arts universities - including Oberlin and Denison in Ohio. A few people were from California, and we had one girl from India and a guy from Spain. But most of us were from the Midwest. Accents ranged on the Minnesota side.

Thank goodness I'm not the only one nervous about the new dean. All three of the questions after his opening "Journalism is Great" speech could be rephrased as, "Are you sure you know what you're doing?"

The dean told us he would listen to our criticisms since we're helping to work out the kinks in his new curriculum.

But it didn't seem he'd done that for last year's students. During different information sessions, professors kept mentioning that recent graduates usually helped out with orientation. But this year the program was going through so many changes they decided they wouldn't be all that ~~positive~~ helpful in talking to us.

After our sessions, a smiling senior named Ryan with a talent for walking backwards guided us on a tour of the campus, stopping to receive shrieking reunion hugs with more than one passing female student.

He told us Northwestern sports teams had originally gone by the name "the Fighting Methodists," but luckily a sports writer inspired the change to "Wildcats."

Ryan described "Dillo Day," a celebration started by a couple of students hoping to raise appreciation for the neglected armadillo, that takes place every June. It involves a lot of drinking, fireworks, some '70s porn projected onto the side of a building, and no armadillos.

We also learned that when women were first admitted to the school in 1869, the administration decided their dorms needed to be located one mile from the men's dorms. So the sororities and fraternities are a track event apart.

We finished the day with a reception. At one point the guy serving drinks stepped out and a faculty member took over the bartending.

"What would you like?" she asked me.

"I'd like a beer, please."

"Which kind?" she asked. "The brown kind or the green kind? ...Oh I am the worst bartender ever."

I hope that means journalists make enough money to do without a night job.

Last Day

2007-09-15T04:26:55Z

Today was my last day at my internship. Sheila and Carol took me out to lunch at a golf course near the office. They sat on either side of me to give me the best view, leaving me in the sun but feeling a little surrounded.

I ordered a barbecue pulled pork sandwich, which almost stood even with its North Carolina compatriots but spilled out of the bun onto my fingers and generally made maintaining an air of professionalism a challenge. Later Sheila said she liked the card I gave her and gave me two hugs on her way out of the office, so I don't think I lost any points.

"You're a real doll," she told me. "I guess that's not PC to say. You're a great journalist."

I finally got over feeling intimidated by Carol. She always has an intense look in her eyes but speaks with such deliberation you can't help but wondering what judgments are spinning through her head. Once she asked me to come talk to her in her office about how my internship was going. I knew we were just going to have a friendly chat, but I couldn't convince my pulse of that.

Today the men at the tables around us were bonding over a game. We talked about potato salad.

"I used to just put a little mayonnaise in it," Sheila told us. "I was trying to make it healthy. But now I just dump it in and it tastes fantastic."

Carol said once before she got a job she had spent a summer perfecting a potato salad recipe. I told them about searching for good mayonnaise in Berlin.

We talked about writing. Sheila said she'd once gotten four chapters into a mystery novel then stopped. Carol said she'd love to just dive into researching a topic for a year. They're so businesslike; I had never really thought of either of those two as people who got into journalism because they just loved writing. But really, I haven't met a journalist who doesn't. We all debate over clever headlines and tell each other our best stories.

More than that, we tell each other our best details. Robert came into work the other day with his recorder. He had taped his son laughing. He's only about a year old, but he's got this manly belly laugh. His laughs go to the very end of his breath; you wonder if he's going to cough. You can't help but laugh, too, when you hear it. In the background Robert's wife spoke to her son in Spanish, saying, "Look at me; look at me."

I love talking with journalists. There is no end to the questions we ask one another. Robert sat with Chris and me in the lunchroom yesterday and told us about his dream of opening a fast-food chicken joint like they have in Peru, where he met his wife. We asked question after question, and I realized that if Robert had any other job, he would probably feel as if he were under interrogation. Lucky for us, questioners like to be questioned from time to time.

I'm going to miss that place. I made sure I won't be forgotten after the weekend, though. On Thursday the forever darkly amusing wedding announcement / obit ladies (whom editors often come back to ask, "You kill anybody this week?") were commenting on how messy our coworker Bob always leaves his desk. I told them we could probably do a complete study of his habitat with all the artifacts he leaves behind.

Before I left, I carefully labeled some of them with post-it notes.

"Much like the American chipmunk, the American journalist subsists on a diet of seeds and leftover coffee," I taped on one of his many Starbucks cups next to one of two bags of seeds on his desk.

On a stack of papers on his chair, I wrote, "The journalist creates bundles of paper, which he uses to mark his territory."

"The journalist seems to communicate by a system of hieroglyphics, now unintelligible to scholars," I posted on his notepad.

I left a few more, describing the AP Stylebook as his holy scripture and noting the way he stored food for the winter in plastic bags and cardboard cups.

If I can't be there, I at least hope somebody else is able to appreciate his reaction when he comes back to work on Monday.

In my card, I had commended Sheila on how she defended me when Gary told on me for using a calculator on my reporting test. As I finished my last article today, a young applicant looking awkward in a very white collared shirt took the test at Chris's computer.

Today

2007-09-11T13:11:21Z

I woke up to a voice on the radio saying this:

Some people think we should just go on with this day like it's any other day, and for the most part they're right. But we should also remember 9-11 and all the actions that have been taken subsequently as a consequence of it.

After this: sports, traffic and weather.

(cut to commercial)

Time seems to go more quickly when you have that extra day to mark the passage of another year. I guess Christmas and the 4th of July have the same function, but this day counts away from something. The years don't just cycle; they accumulate. It's been six years.

People have their own personal days like this. Three years since you started college. Ten years since your grandfather died. Thirty years since you got married. But this is a day that makes everyone stop and count.

When did people stop numbering years after Pearl Harbor or the Kennedy assassination? Or do other generations continue to count?

Amanda Visit

2007-09-10T05:13:10Z

Last weekend my college housemate Amanda came to visit for Labor Day, and it was the best time I've ever had in Chicago.

We made two nostalgic visits to Big Bowl Asian Kitchen, Amanda's former employer, and tried on bargain dresses on the Mag Mile with Molly.

We went with Molly, her friend Sasha, my friend Brian, and his roommate, Jim, to see an improv musical in Lincoln Park by a group called "Baby Wants Candy." The actors asked the crowd of about 40 people fit into the basement theater for a title then created an entire musical on the spot. Ours was "My Fair Lasagna." Whenever the three-man band on stage began to play, the actors broke into song.

The plot involved an Italian girl with an inexplicably American accent whose family sends her to America ("Oh, you came on the Italian boat?" multiple characters asked her. "I could hear you." / "Yeah, we like to sing.")

Once she arrives in New York, she gets a job working in a restaurant in Chinatown, which is at war with Little Italy. She falls in love with the mayor, who cannot decide whether to love her back or to hold onto his office by marrying the daughter of the mayor of Philadelphia, to whom he is betrothed.

The Italian girl tries to make peace between the Chinese and Italian restaurant owners, but the Italians blame the Chinese for the rain that has been flooding their building and ruining their supply of sausages. The girl says they are being ridiculous, but it turns out the Chinese restaurant owner controls a hurricane called Chow, which he unleashes on New York when his wife dramatically admits to having loved an Italian man in her youth.

In the end, both ethnic groups are brought together when they decide to declare war on the Irish. They bombard an Irish cop's nagging wife with a variety of food items, including noodles, tomato sauce and sausages. The mayor breaks out into song. "There's a peace. / And it's comin' up on ya. / And it tastes like / my fair lasagna."

For an encore, the group asked for a volunteer from the audience to come up on stage. Sasha raised her hand, and they called her down. She answered questions about her day and her life in general. They asked her who she had come to the show with, and she listed us all: "My friend Molly, her friend Katie, Amanda, Brian and ... um, another guy, but I don't remember his name." For the rest of the night, Jim vengefully referred to her as "what's-her-face."

After the interview, the group performed a musical version of what her nightmares must be like.

Molly, who will be leaving soon for a nine-month fellowship doing psychology research in Ghana, was worked into the plot as a poor pysch student sharing a train to Africa with a group of hobos. "It's too bad the only grad school I could get into is in Ghana," the man playing her lamented.

On Sunday, Amanda and I spent a few hours at the Art Institute of Chicago then stopped by the Jazz Festival in Grant Park. That evening, we decided to try the Kit Kat Lounge and Supper Club in Boys' Town.

The Kit Kat Lounge and Supper Club is a restaurant with a long list of sugary martinis (I recommend the Samoa Girl Scout Cookie and the Root Beer Float), offered at half price Wednesdays and Sundays, and a drag show every 20 minutes. You know it's that time again when the lights start flashing and the music gets loud. Our amazingly feminine drag queen with just a touch of masculinity in her cheekbones lip synched, strutted and posed to Rihanna, Brandy and Justin Timberlake in a different outfit each time. She appeared as a convincing, tipsy Whitney Houston and sang a touching rendition of "I Will Always Love You." In the musical interlude halfway through she ran outside to hungrily suck down a cigarette, to which she sang the final verses of the song when she came back inside. ("Iiiii-eee-I... will always... loveyou...")

We sat at a table right by the door and a large window, which gave us a perfect view when our performer plastered herself against the glass or took the show out onto the sidewalk, at one point enticing an obliging young man passing by to dance with her.

The next day, Amanda and I visited the Shedd Aquarium. It was more cartoonish than the Newport Aquarium, which smells of cleaning products and chlorine and leads you through white spaceship tunnels underground surrounded by shadowy tanks of sting rays and sharks. The Shedd is laid out more like a school, with different tanks all accessible from a well-lit central area. There's popcorn ground into the carpet. Bright pink, orange and green plastic corral flower up the walls.

The dolphin tank is interesting. A wall of windows facing Lake Michigan rises from the surface of the water around half of the tank, giving one the impression that it continues out for miles beyond the building.

The beluga whales, including the newborn baby beluga (in the deep blue sea...) are off display for the sake of the baby's development.

The penguins stink.

But there was one tank I loved, despite the Disneyland adornments in the area around it. You have to take an elevator down to reach it. It's covered on top and dark so that you aren't sure how far back it extends. The glass wall is maybe 12 feet tall and juts at a curve further into the water as it descends from the ceiling so that if you stand right next to it, fish can swim above your head.

The only light comes from the viewing area, so you can't see the inhabitants of the waters until they swim closeby. There are sharks.

There are salad-plate-sized fish, schools of them that swarm by, flashing silver. But I stood an inch from the glass, mesmerized by the sharks. Suddenly a two-foot-long, rectangular, white snout with straight white spikes like nails pounded into the sides of a plank of wood slid into view from the right, followed by a shark's body. I jumped. It was a saw fish. I had never seen one. When I told Brian about it he said he'd thought those were made up, one of a number of tool-related variations on a hammerhead shark.

That evening, Amanda and I were too tired to do anything but watch a French movie with Molly. I finally saw Delicatessen, which has all the color and whimsy of Amelie but is set in a post-Apocalyptic world in which people contemplate elaborate suicides and survive by cannibalism.

It was so nice to have someone to make plans with all weekend. I could invite everyone on the short list of people I know in Chicago to hang out, and even if no one else showed up, I knew Amanda and I would have fun.

School, Work and Griping about Photo Desk

2007-08-31T05:19:38Z

I visited Medill for the first time after work today. Turns out it's right on Lake Michigan with a stretch of beach and a park trail right beside it. The journalism building, a four- or five-story brick building draped in ivy, was unlocked. I walked in and saw pages of short biographies of former grad students illustrated with wallet-sized photos. Right on the end at nose-level I found a familiar face: Chris from work, with shorter hair and the same red beard.

I accepted my student loans last weekend. I didn't have a specific reason for deciding to brave the new dean, but I feel okay about it. I told Chris at the office the following Monday and the first thing he said was, "You're really going to love Medill. I loved it."

He'd never told me that before. Classes start the 25th.

My internship technically ended last week. Sheila told me she'd like to keep me on until classes started, so I talked to Carol about it, who sent me to Jeff, who pondered for a few days, shuffled papers, then sent me back to Carol. Carol didn't give me any new paperwork, just told me that as long as I kept turning in timesheets, I'd keep getting paid. Works for me.

Sheryl, the Health & Family editor, gave me paperwork to hire me as a freelancer. I told the paper my last day would be the 14th, and Sheryl already has an assignment for me the evening of the 18th. She said she'd give me $75 per feature story.

We've all had a crazy week at the paper, all because of last Thursday.

Chris and I met with the employees of New Trier Township, who endeavored to explain to us that they were actually an important layer of government. On our way out, someone mentioned that there was supposed to be a storm.

"Really? But it was just so nice," I said. I had worn my sunglasses on the drive over.

As soon as we got onto the sidewalk, it started to rain. Once we got to the car, it started to really rain. I was within a few blocks of the office when the rain began blowing hard against the windshield in sheets, blurring my view into streaks of blinking hazard lights. All the traffic stopped on the road. It began to hail.

When the wind let up slightly, all the cars began to edge forward. We eventually made it back to the office. I dropped Chris off at the door, parked and ran in with my flimsy purse-size umbrella. My hair was spared, but the rest of me was soaked.

I made one last crackly phone call to the cell phone of a man whose power was out. I couldn't type any notes because the server was down. Apparently, every floor but ours was busy taking shelter in the basement. The reporters are just supposed to work through it, I guess.

It took me more than two and a half hours to inch home through roadside rivers and blown-out traffic lights. I passed a large tree limb crashed on the side of the street. When I got even with it, I saw a car beneath it.

I have never been so glad I park inside my building.

I escaped the storm stories on Friday, but on Monday I was sent out on the ludicrous task of finding a storm clean-up photo for a photographer.

The photo editor failed to send a photographer to the groundbreaking celebration for a historic all-black church I spent all of Sunday hanging around with. He said, "We don't do groundbreakings."

I said, "But there were all kinds of good photo opportunities. There was singing and dancing. The mayor of Evanston showed up."

"You didn't tell us that," he said.

Since when do I have to sell the photo department on my assignments? We give them assignments; they send a photog. That's their job.

They said they have a policy against shooting groundbreakings. That's just fine, but if they'd bothered to tell me that, I could've told them that wasn't all there was to it.

Apparently the usual photo editor, with whom I've never had a problem, would have discussed it with me rather than just ignoring my assignment. But he was on vacation last week, and the other guy was covering for him.

So Monday I drove around for two hours looking for a Glenview resident with an impressively downed tree, preferably one that caused some property damage. But why were we still looking for photos Monday? What were the photographers doing all weekend while ignoring my groundbreaking story if they weren't taking storm photos?

I finally found an older lady with a tree that had split into three and fallen across her power lines. The added bonus was that she took diabetes medicine that required refrigeration, and she was unhappy with how the power company treated her.

When I called the editor who'd sent me on this quest, she told me the photo editor had decided to send the photographer taking storm pictures to a sporting event instead. I called to give photo desk a piece of my mind, and the editor found a stringer to take the shot.

Mr. Cheerful held my church story until next week. Supposedly, photo desk is sending someone to the Sunday service to get some art to go with the story.

If there weren't a union rule against reporters taking photos and photographers writing stories, people might not waste so much time. Good thing Medill plans to give me a half-baked seminar on photography.