Posts by Berck

So I’m back in Norman. But not for long.

Originally, I’d planned to drive to Chicago and visit Sydney, Mom and Noell. After leaving Chicago, the vague plan was for me to drive to Nashville where Dad is these days, and he and I would go out to California to pick up his Miata and some of his stuff.

On Wednesday, I was outside the Smart Museum in Chicago, which is the University of Chicago’s little art museum with free admission and a pretty nifty little collection when Dad called.

I’m going to spare you the logistical details. They’re simply not very interesting, extremely complicated, and I don’t understand them or the resulting decisions myself. The basics are that Dad needed me to get his Miata from California to Nasvhille because he sold it.

What eventually happened is that Dad sent me money, and I bought a plane ticket on Thursday night for a flight leaving at 6:50am the next morning from Chicago-Midway for Los Angeles.

After buying the plane ticket on Thursday night, I left Noell’s apartment on the loop and called Sydney. It was now 5:00pm, and I told her I’d meet her at 5pm at her workplace so we could go to her friend’s apartment for dinner. I wasn’t sure how long it was going to take me, but I guess about half an hour. I told her I was going to be late, and I could just meet her at the final destination. She said, “I didn’t expect you to actually get here at 5pm. And we’re still busy. So just come here. Take the State bus from Noell’s apartment to 13th Street, which is right by my office.”

“It’s rush hour, are you sure I should take the State bus? I could just take the red line southbound…”

“I take the State bus all the time. It goes right where you need to go.”

“Okay.”

I waited for 20 minutes for the State bus, number 29. Every other bus in the world seemed to come by a dozen times. This was ridiculous. It takes me three minutes by bus and fifteen minutes to walk to the nearest L station. I called Sydney and asked if she was sure that the state bus was actually running, and if she was sure I should take it. She said yes.

Finally, at about 5:30pm bus 29 pulled up. I got on and we rather slowly made our way down Illinois and then south on State. Very slowly, as the traffic was pretty bad, it being rush hour. At this point I’m feeling pretty stupid for listening to Sydney.

In Chicago, especially at rush hour, there are traffic cops everywhere. They stand in the intersections and generally just wave at traffic to do the things that the traffic lights tell them to do. I’m not really sure what their purpose is, but my experience with police officers indicate that traffic lights do a much better job than they do anyway. But surely there was something better for them to do than simply translate a traffic light into arm waving.

And then I saw one that told a line of cars to stop at a green light. I think that she’ll think twice about doing that next time, since the car she told to stop didn’t realize it until she was very close to the intersection. The driver locked up her brakes and slid withing a few inches of the traffic cop. The car behind did the same thing. Meanwhile, I thought I was going to be on the 29 bus forever. And ever.

I finally got to 13th at about 6:10pm. Sydney and her friend Meagan were just finishing up things anyway, so it didn’t seem to matter than I was so late. Sydney’s transit card had expired, so we had to go get a new one. For whatever wonderful reason, you can only buy transit passes at Jewel Grocery stores and currency exchange places. They cannot be purchased at a CTA stop where you’d buy a fare card. This seems very strange to me, but no one else is bothered.

Sydney admitted to having given me bad advice.

And we road the train to Meagan’s house, where her roomate Racheal had prepared a most interesting pizza. Toppings I could identify: pears, arugula, goat cheese, some sort of nuts… It was quite Italian in spirit and Rachel’s crust was better than mine. It turns out Rachael is vegetarian. She decided that there wasn’t enough arugula on her piece, so she piled mounds of it on top.

Dinner was good, and it was nice to meet people who could carry on conversation I found remotely interesting, which seems to be rare these days. An enjoyable evening.

Unfortunately, we stayed for dinner until nearly 10pm, and then I had to go get stuff out of the Solara which was parked at Sydney’s apartment, and then go back to Noell’s where I’d been staying. I wasn’t staying at Sydney’s because Noell’s in a better location, has a shower that works, and Mom was staying with Sydney. I didn’t get back to Noell’s until about Midnight. It took me another hour to finish doing some laundry and pack. And then I couldn’t sleep. I think I fell asleep around 2am. And my alarm was set for 4am. Noell works at Starbucks and had to be there at about 5:15am. I walked with my backpack and everything else all the way to the red line station. The loop is eery at about 4:45am. It’s completely quiet, and there’s almost no one around, just a few joggers. I got to the airport at about 6am. I figured it would be early enough. How many people could be flying out of midway at 7am on a Friday? A lot.

I printed out my boarding pass from an electronic ticketing machine just inside the terminal, and walked to security. My boarding pass had SSSS on it, like I knew it would. I’m not sure exactly what the origins of the code are, but it means you’re a “selectee”. A sure-fire way to be a selectee is purchase your ticket less than 24 hours in advance. Clearly, terrorism is a spur-of-the-moment activity, and no terrorist would buy tickets more than 24 hours in advance.

While in most places, SSSS generally means you’re going to spend a lot more time in security, it seems that this isn’t the case at Midway. I was routed down a special line with a magnetometer and a host of TSA suits. The advantage was that it looked like the lines for the normal-people magnetometers were very long.

There were only three people in front of me a the SSSS magnetometer. So it only took them 15 minutes to get to me.

The Department of Homeland Security is probably the worst government organization on the face of the planet. Since I was a selectee, I knew I’d have to take my shoes off and be wanded regardless of the outcome of the magnetometer beeping or not. I would really like someone to explain the point in having me walk through a magnetometer which, of course, did not beep. They went through my bags, felt me up, messed with my laptop, and generally did their best to annoy me. The thing I hate most about the whole ordeal? The TSA agents who have the audacity to pretend that they’re doing this for my own good. The folks who say, “I’m sorry, I’m just doing my job,” I can understand. What I can’t understand is the people so stupid to think that they’re accomplishing anything. Just go through airport security and tell me that the “Evil-Dooers” haven’t already won.

I got to the gate just as they started boarding, so it was pretty good timing. I’d selected a bulkhead aisle seat, or so I thought. When I got there, I realized that it was instead an aisle seat with a bulkhead behind it, meaning that the seat wouldn’t recline. Fortunately, I managed to swap seats.

ATA had the audacity to try to sell me “breakfast” consisting of a $5 Cinnamon bun and a fruit cup. And then they tried to sell me headsets with which I could listen to the audio portion of some old television.

At least the flight attendants were courteous and efficient. Even if ATA has Pepsi products, but no Dr. Pepper. Or Root beer. I drank off-brand cran-apple juice and did my best to sleep. I hate flying.

To be continued…

I’m enjoying a much-needed break from Oklahoma. I’d been planning to come to Chicago for awhile, and it seemed like Sydney’s birthday was as good a day as any to do it, especially since Mom was here as well.

We went to a Steppenwolf Theatre production of “The Dresser” which is about someone who dresses rather than a piece of furniture. It was well-produced, though the meta-play thing really seems overdone. It had what had to be one of the most elaborately constructed sets I’d ever seen. And Fraiser’s Dad.

I spent most of yesterday at the Art Institute of Chicago. After the Met, it’s probably the best survey museum in the country. And I’ve never been to the Met. The University of Chicago apparently has its own art collection, which I’d like to see, as well as the contemporary art museum which I haven’t seen since the first time I was in Chicago, in ’98.

The more exciting things at the institute included a Magritte quite different from any I recall seeing and two Magritte sculptures. He didn’t do much sculpture, so that made me happy.

There’s a traveling exhibit from U of Indiana of Art Sinsabaugh. 90 prints of the American landscape. He traveled around with a large format banquet camera and took landscapes with it. He’d take the negatives and crop them to 1″ x 20″, which is a very strange format so very well suited to the midwest. I liked it a lot.

There were three “Exquisite Corpse” drawings, which were combined efforts of the likes of Man Ray, Tanguy and others. Several of them were really good. “Exquisite Corpse” was a popular surrealist game, where the artists would get together and draw on a folder sheet of paper. Each artist would only see the fold he was working on, though he would extend the lines of his figure just barely over the fold for the next artist.

Museum shops annoy me. They never have posters of anything I want.

I saw Napoleon Dynamite tonight. I’m not sure if I can recommend it in a meaningful way. It’s not really offensive at all, I think it was made by Mormons. It’s basically a hilarious character portrayal of many seemingly impossible characters. I was amazed that it’s being so widely distributed. It needs to be appreciated from a standpoint which is so very different from most of cinema these days.