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?

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.

Pen Fifteen

Two thoughts on childhood, triggered by recent trips to NYC:

1. A friend and I were discussing pranks and jokes that kids play on each other.  Or, more precisely, we resurrected our absolute favorite: Club Pen Fifteen.  In case you don't remember or in case this somehow passed you by in third grade:

A: Do you want to join my club?
B: What is it?
A: It's called the Pen Fifteen Club.  It's awesome.
B: How do I join?
A: It's easy. All the members just have the club name written on their arm. I'll do it right now for you.
B: OK, I'm in.

Person B then spends the rest of the day with PEN15 fancifully written on his or her arm, then finds another unaware and uninitiated youth, and advances to the role of Person A.

Genius. Comic genius. Perhaps the only joke from elementary school that still makes me laugh.

2. I am forever delighted when I hear a song I used to sing along to as a kid, and realize that there are a number of metaphors that really passed me by. Monday in the car I heard this song and realized it was not about driving but actually about coke. That blew my mind:



This in turn reminded me about something else great: misunderstanding song lyrics as a child.  Like how I thought a second Eagles song was about hiding lion eyes.  And how I thought this one went "Every time I poop I lose":



That one still really cracks me up, by the way.  It gets stuck in my head all the time, unprompted.  And it takes a whole lot of self-restraint to not belt out all of "Every time I poop I lose" when this happens.  I am laughing right now just thinking about it.

I argue, I posit, I demonstrate, I contend ...

I am deep in the trenches of dissertation grant applications right now, which means that I really want to do anything but.  This includes tending to my neglected blog and its three readers.  Sorry, guys.

I wanted to blog about two things today, one being this: why the hell I wake up at 6:13 am every single morning.  This has happened every morning for the last two weeks, and it's starting to make me feel slightly nuts.  My alarm does not ring until 6:45 on weekdays and 7:30 on weekends, so what on earth is rousing me from much-needed sleep every morning at the exact same minute is really beyond me.  Ideas welcome.

The other subject I'm mulling over is my lifelong obsession with cities, which would make for a much more interesting and thoughtful post.  But it will have to wait until this application is done.

In the meantime, please enjoy this adorable music video about cuckoo clocks (I think?) of which I understand about every fourth word:

Gearing up for the weekend

<drum roll>

BOO!

Did I scare you?

*

More early film.  I am obsessed, I tell you.

Early film:

I should know more about it.

Desperately searching for a film (1906) called The School Children's Strike, described as "a film in which rebellious youngsters take revenge against the strict discipline of the principal by burning down the schoolhouse." Will love you forever if you can help me find it.

In other news, I stumbled upon this during my search -- which is arguably even cooler:

Pookie!