Look Around You

Look Around You is some sort of brilliant British spoof on those ridiculous educational films we all had to endure in the 1970s and 1980s. Here are links to a few episodes:

Look Around You: Maths

Look Around You: Iron

Anyway, I've had the introduction to these episodes lodnged in my brain - the part in which the narrator calmly repeats "Look Around You" to the bad synthesizer soundtrack - as I spend more and more time wandering around my neighborhood. Note that this wandering is not because I did not pack a lunch, though I can promise you that there will be an On my way to Trust Market post tomorrow. Instead it has been because I am moving in a few weeks, and the real estate company who owns my current apartment has been showing it every other day, and I do not want to be present for this. Thus for an hour or so in the evening I go find something else to do.

Mind you, there is no rule that requires me to be out of the apartment when prospective tenants come by. But I feel it's best for everyone involved. When I moved to Philadelphia last year, I only had a few days to find a place, and there was just not a lot available. I took the best of what I saw, but this apartment has tons of problems. It's very poorly insulated and doesn't get enough sunlight. There are repairs that need to be done that the management company has ignored. I could go on, and I could also point out that the ads for my apartment on Craigslist list the rent as over $200.00 more than what I currently pay, which was already too much for a place that's falling apart. But anyway it's because of this that I don't want to be home when they show the place: I wouldn't have the heart to lie to prospective tenants and tell them the place is great, and I wouldn't have the nerve to be honest in front of the people who still owe me my security and refundable pet deposit. It's a real moral quandry, and so I've opted out of it every time I get a (less than 24 hours notice) message telling me when my apartment will be shown.

Many of these times I have just gone to a friend's place to hang out, or done some work in my office. Today, though, my friends in the neighborhood were not home and I really didn't want to go to work on my day off. And in observance of Labor Day, nobody was laboring and so all the coffee places were closing up when I needed a nice place to sit for an hour. So, I decided to take a walk around town, knowing that I couldn't go too far because I had things to do up the street soon after today's showing.

In large part I was enthusiastic about this wandering. My Trust Market project has made me realize how little of my neighborhood - which itself isn't terribly large - I've actually deeply explored. In particular, that little hobbit door (mentioned in my most recent post below) prompted me to look around me - I have crossed that intersection so many times and never actually managed to notice that door, which is just absurd. I want to know my neighborhood in such a profoundly deep way - the kind of familiarity that allows you to notice when someone has painted their front door a different color, the kind of looking that will end with a mental map of historical site markers, every corner deli, all the good graffiti, quirky architectural details, funny bumper stickers on cars regularly parked on certain blocks. I love Philadelphia so much, and making a point of learning it like this will help me love it all the more.

Today I discovered an Indian restaurant I didn't know about. And I also saw these two wonderful things:

1. A stair railing of decorative lyres

2. The weirdest window décor ever

I mean, what is up with that? It is not a shop window unless it's an unmarked storefront. I even walked around to the block parallel to this to make sure it wasn't a building that went through the block - it isn't. Is there some cultural reference I'm missing - is this a narrative that makes any sense to anyone? And moreover, why would you do this to your front window? And most important: how long has it been four blocks from my house?

On my way to Trust Market, sort of

I did not pack my lunch today, but my boss bought us lunch and brought it back. Why, you ask? Because he's that awesome, that's why. I'm not sure what this means for the picture-taking contract I made with myself, but I did see something so fab on the way to pick up some toothpaste at the drug store after work that I have to post it. So maybe this should be called On my way to Rite-Aid, but that's just not as great-sounding.

 I seriously can't even tell you how tiny this door is. We're talking maybe two feet tall. I'm going back with a person for scale and taking another picture at some point, because this really cracked me up. What pushed it over the edge from just weird into hilariously weird is the doorknocker. It's so fantastic. I really hope there are leprechauns living on Spring Garden Street. Oh, that would make me so happy.

*

There will be no more On my way to Trust Market posts this week, and I'll tell you why. This lady got herself a F*A*R*M*S*H*A*R*E this week! Thanks, M.C.! I mean, C.C.!

I have spent the last three hours cooking batches of this stuff and figuring out what I will make with the rest. I'm most excited about the corn and the dillweed, but not together. Also the yogurt is super tangy and delicious and will make me and A.T.M. some super good popsicles in M.C.'s popsicle maker while she is away this weekend  tasted great in a mango smoothie I made earlier this evening. It was also the base for a lemon-dill dressing, which will garnish the salad I packed for lunch tomorrow. So there, photo project!!

On my way to Trust Market, part 3

Someone worked really hard to shove that pizza menu in between those doors.

On my way to Trust Market, part 2

Trust Market: for when you can't decide between a jar of pickles and a steno notebook.

Hurricane thoughts

1. I remember being in at least three of these as a kid, and back then I lived less than a quarter mile from the ocean. Far from my mind as a child were the things that usually trouble people during big storms: mortality; property damage; an entire refrigerator full of rotten food; clearing heaps and heaps of brush from the lawn; lost crops. My main memory of these storms was this: This is really, really boring.

Looking back, "boring" was really a good thing, as it meant that our roof didn't blow off or anything dramatic. I think we lost a few windows here and there to high winds, and the yard was a total wreck - a potpourri of fallen branches, fallen trees, and who knows what else, all heavy with water. It's just that there was nothing to do. My parents, my slightly a.d.d. little brother, our two cats, and this mysterious old lady neighbor who only seemed to come over during hurricanes would all huddle in our basement, beginning well before the storm hit and lasting long after it seemed reasonable to go back upstairs. I'm pretty sure this old lady came over becaue her house didn't have a basement level, but it always made the quarantine even more uncomfortable as she was clearly one of those adults who hated children (or maybe just the stir-crazy, locked in the basement with no electricity kind).  While the power remained on I was okay. I'd bring a pile of chapter books down to read, and other than the cement floor issue and the inability to shut my brother out of my space, it was more or less how I would spend any other day.

The trouble always began for me when the lights inevitably went out. My brother would get even more fidgety and sitting in the dark with this old lady I didn't know kind of gave me the creeps. And of course there was the plain fact of not being able to read anymore. I wasn't allowed to read by the one window in case the glass blew in and I wasn't allowed to squander flashlight batteries on keeping myself entertained. The radio was on but it was forever news, news, weather, news, weather and it bored me to tears. I tried to just go to sleep but that never worked, either, probably again because of that whole lying on a concrete slab stuffed into a Care Bears sleeping bag business.

A bathroom and food break was permitted as necessary, but the best time to do this was as the eye of the storm passed over. For those unfamiliar with hurricanes, this is when the winds and rain stop and everything gets eerily quiet and still. With the imminent threat of smashing glass and trees tumbling at a standstill, I could go to the bathroom and get a snack without my mother shrilly calling from the basement for me to hurry up and get my butt back down there.

Even once the storm ended, the boredom didn't. The power stayed off for days - once over a week; the phone lines were out almost as long. The yard was off-limits, and the meals got stranger and stranger as we plowed through whatever we had in the house. I remember one time just begging and begging to go to McDonald's - which I didn't even particularly like - just becuae I had heard that morning over the radio that they had re-opened and this seemed like a viable way to get the hell out of the house.

*

Now I am an adult with a few (though not all) of the adult-type storm worries that never concerned me as a child. But I will say this: even with the internet, and the power still on, and adulthood levels of patience and nobody here to interrupt my reading I am still bored.  So now I have the perhaps paranoid fear / nervous anticipation of my windows blowing in or a tornado striking plus an unfocused attention, a strange inability to just zone out and get absorbed in a book. I could even read by flashlight later if I wanted, or turn the radio on to rock-n-roll. These are the choices I can make as an adult, but at this particular moment this revelation is alarmingly not as gratifying as I'd imagined.


2. Another thought, 12 hours later: Irene, thank you for being such a wienie. I didn't even lose power. The basement didn't flood. Thank you for that.

On my way to Trust Market, part 1 of many

My dear six readers of this blog,

I need to get better at packing my lunch.

In order to offer myself a lunch-packing incentive, I have a new self-imposed rule. Here it is:

On days that I neglect to pack a lunch, I must take a photograph of something on my way to buy a sandwich at the neighborhood deli.*

Oh, and I have to post the photographs on my blog. 

And so it begins.

*In most cases, probably with a crappy cell phone camera. Also you should know that the deli is three very short blocks (about two normal city blocks) from my work.

Photo Booth Lament

I am in Washington D.C. this week for work, and it is swell. During the workday I am in and out of various archives looking at pictures, poring over documents, and meeting other people in my field. In the evenings I return to my sublet and get tons of work done that I've been putting off (and also blogging that I've been putting off). The only other person I know in town is the woman from whom I am renting a room, and she is busy packing to move next week. The only things I brought with me are my laptop and clothes. This leaves me free to sit quietly and think in the evening without feeling guilty about how I should be out having drinks with so-and-so or cleaning my apartment or going to the gym. Not that I mind these things, but it's nice to just shove them aside for seven days and attend to other matters.

I was here last summer, in the very same sublet, but for a much longer stay.  I spent each morning and afternoon looking at photographs in the lovely study room in the Library of Congress, furiously taking notes and jotting down ideas and generally having a good time of it. But after hours of careful looking, I always needed a little time out to recharge before heading back to the sublet or going out with friends (I know more people here last year). For me, a bona fide city rat, the best space to regroup was always the most chaotic, and so just about every day I would drag my ass through swampy 105 degree weather to Union Station, sit down with a raspberry lemon smoothie, and do the wretched Metro crossword puzzle and process what I'd seen that day. Where possible, I always sat at the same table in the lower level under some stairs, because it offered a great view of the Presidential Photo Booth.

Old routines are hard to break, and so today when I left the National Gallery I walked to Union Station and went to my old table, only to find that the photo booth was no longer there. This particular photo booth was not really a true "booth" in the first place; it was digital and had a big green screen monitor that allowed others to watch the sitter getting his or her picture made. It was presidential insofar as the sitter posed in a tableau with the president of her or his choice, provided that she or he chose George H.W. Bush or Barack Obama. Most of the people partaking in this activity were evidently politically left-leaning; I watched scores of kids throwing up the peace sign with Obama and Michelle or pretending to moon W.  The photo historian in me wondered what scholars in my field would think a century from now if they found a cache of these pictures at auction, or in someone's attic, or in some weird archive. What do they tell us about vernacular photography now? The fact that there wasn't a curtain built into the kiosk is of course telling; no phone booths, no photo booths now. Everything is just loud and out there and public in 2011 in a way that it was not even twenty years ago.

I harbor secret hopes that they simply moved the photo booth, and so tomorrow after a triumphant (?) return to the LC I shall search for it. But probably the company folded, which tells us as much about photography in the present as politics in America right now, I think. Looks like I'm going to have to amend my routine for the next few.

And now for something completely different

No words (except these). Just a song that has lodged itself in my brain:

College the First Time

It lasted all of a year, and then I dropped out.  At the time I told myself I was just taking a little time off - and, in fact, five years later when I finally went back and loved school, this was actualized. But for a long while in between college round one and college round two, "dropout" would have been the more appropriate term.

I hardly ever think about college round one, but it comes up often enough, mostly when people I meet in an academic context get super confused about how I am in my 30s but only earned my BA five years ago. Earlier this week I was really put through the ringer about the whole ordeal, and so it's been on my mind. I'm trying to piece together what I was up to then, and how to account for how different things were for me when I was 17 than they are now.

College the First Time was a small (I mean really, really small) liberal arts school in New England. My assigned roommate and I were the very best of friends until suddenly we were worst enemies; looking back, I should have known from the start that she was kind of nuts and just kept my distance. She played the guitar, which I had no interest in doing (although took up in my 20s), and was an artist, which I suddenly had every interest in becoming. I arrived with an arsenal of bad poetry and short stories and was determined to churn out many more, not realizing until much later the the medium in which I would eventually find the most creative expression would be non-fiction. During College the First Time I added to my repertoire of creative endeavours drawing, set design, pottery, and photography. I was truly convinced that I had something to say, but I had absolutely no idea what that thing was, and only through photography did I come even remotely close to figuring that thing out. But even there I failed.

Under the guidance of my new roommate and in a gesture of feminist solidarity I hacked off most of my hair the first week of school. There was much pomp and ceremony involved, and needless to say it really confused many of the people I'd just met. I went through this awkward total butchy moment that I look back on as pretty sincere and endearing but also as kind of the worst choice ever. I was up to my ears in mid-1990s nonsense like overalls and combat boots and thrift store t-shirts that said things like "I love everybody and you're next." When my hair grew back I dyed it fire engine red. The cassette player was always blasting this or this or this or this or this, and it was never not blasting. I spent a lot of time in diners, writing more bad poems.

I'm almost certain I went to class sometimes. In the more traditionally academic courses, I remember a lot of things seeming like they could be super interesting, but paradoxically I wasn't that interested in them (or anything else). I found many poets taxing, was intrigued by Emma Goldman, adored Chaucer, and adored Charles Dickens even more. But that was really about it. Art history - which became my love and my career much later - was not taught because the faculty didn't want the past to taint our creative processes. The one professor who wouldn't stand for this was the man who taught photography, and so as a photo student I was required to take a zero-credit three-hour lecture on the history of photography once a week. The history of photography has become my field, and I would love to say that these lectures way back when informed this decision in some way. But I can't. I hardly remember them. I wish I did, because it would make me feel loads better about still paying off my College the First Time student loans.

By the middle of my second semester I knew I wasn't going to return the following year. And by the time I went back to school - this time, armed with a goal and firm ideas about what I wanted out of the experience - I knew I would transfer to another very different institution. At a rough-and-tumble large urban state school I fell in love with academics. Thank you, College the First Time, for showing me so early what I didn't want.

Get your pets spayed and neutered, people (redux)

I know I've blogged somewhere down there about The Price is Right, but here I am doing it again. Just bear with me. And if you're one of my co-workers, and you think this blog post is going to be about the time last week in Arizona when I had to go swimming with my boss in a pool owned by someone named Bob Barker (not the actual game show host) -- think again. I would never.

Nope. This blog post is about last Monday, when I took my first ever for realz sick day from work.

I know what you're thinking - you're thinking, but A.B., you've been working for a million years at so many jobs -- how can this be? But it's really true. All the jobs I had between undergrad round 1 and underground round 2 that afforded me sick days made it truly impossible to actually take them. They were the sorts of employment situations in which very few people could replace you, especially last-minute, and you were absolutely integral to things not falling to bits. It was Really Frowned Upon to call out, and generally so doing would mean begging a coworker to cover for you and then owing them tenfold in shifts later on. These were the sorts of jobs that on paper were forty hours per week but really ended up being sixty, and so time off was sacred. Calling in sick meant disrupting someone else's sacred time. It was a real problem.

And then when I was putting myself through college, I had two hourly jobs. Calling in sick would disrupt the very delicate balance of barely being out of debt and being in debt. It was all very complicated, and so I always went to work even when I felt like total ass.

Now, however, I have a real(ish) job with a lovely boss at which I am not expected to show up if I don't feel well unless something really and truly dire is going on. I had no idea what to make of this, and so Monday when I woke up after my Sunday evening "I'm in denial about my scratchy throat" South Philly water ice [look it up, non-Philly people] crawl and felt even worse, I definitely lay in bed for about an hour willing myself to get up and get in the shower and drag myself to my desk. I had the same debate an hour before about bagging on my morning run, but I felt certain that I would make it to my job. But at some point I surrendered, and left an all-too-long and over-explain-y voice mail for my boss, and then a worse one for the department administrator, about how awful I felt. And then I went back to sleep.

It was amazing.

Around 11 I woke up and really needed to watch an episode of The Price  is Right, like the good old days of middle school mornings spent home sick. I was hoping to turn up some 1980s episodes with Bob Barker, but the internet did not provide. Instead I watched a recent one on CBS with Drew Carey as host. I was pleased to find that he threw out the same Barker tagline at the end about spaying and neurering your pets, though it didn't have the same je-ne-sais-quoi that Bob's got. It's also worth pointing out that the Price is Right mystique that I recall from childhood - aka "How the hell do they know how much this shit is worth?!" was not solved by my graceful entry into legitimate adulthood. Put a six egg boiler or a steam shower or a speedboat or a vacation to Hawai'i or some Fiestaware in front of me, and I still can't tell you if it costs $5 or $5,000. They need some sort of secondhand store version of this show. At that I'd be a champion.

FWIW, I'm on the mend now. And that sick day sure helped. Thanks, my job.