kafka on the shore

I ushered at a performance of Kafka on the Shore, adapted for the stage, at the Steppenwolf Theater. A few years ago, I read and jumbled its plot up in the swampy area of my brain reserved for Haruki Murakami's whimsies, complicated ice cream-based desserts, and early twentieth century Russian music - i.e. the place where nonsense goes to die - so my memory provided no guidance for me as I watched. I'm not sure I got anything out of the play except for a sense of Murakami's weirdness.

I stuffed programs sitting next to a funny young man with an angular face who wore a suit. His name was Patrick. He told me he worked in a spy store. I said, What the hell is a spy store? He said, Think of something a spy would have, and we sell it there. I said, Shoes with daggers that come out of them. He said, Well no, we're a kid-friendly store. Turns out he was talking about the "Boring Store," which is a place about a five-minute walk from my house.

Patrick said he tutored kids in creative writing and was applying to graduate programs in creative writing himself. He also said he moved to Chicago from Indiana to try to be an improv actor. He was not obnoxious like the one other improv actor I have met: that one subletted a room from A and just got stoned and drunk with his 22 year-old friends every night to prepare for "psychadelic improv" and would do things like fall asleep sitting upright on the couch with his mouth wide open, cradling a two-thirds empty jug of generic brand whole milk. In contrast, Patrick was friendly and funny, and he tore tickets while I passed out programs and said, "Watch your step! Enjoy the show." over and over again.

He had funny mannerisms that endeared him to people. I studied them. He said, "Howdy!" really loudly when taking their tickets and gesticulated in slapstick ways (e.g. he flicked the ticket with an exaggerated motion of his index finger when telling patrons where their seats were located) and most people walked away from him with a smile. We sat together during the show, and then I left during the post-show Q&A.

Several months later, I walked into the Boring Store. I heard Patrick's voice (he was helping out a customer) but I did not see him. I turned tail and fled the storefront, because I became suddenly afraid of not having anything to say to him.

dogs

While I sat in the park with R and C yesterday, two different dogs approached me. Both fell in love with me. The first was a squat young dachshund who stood off to my left and stared soulfully right into my eyes. We never touched. The second was a white Scottish terrier who clawed up my left leg in an effort to love me. It looked like a polar bear and wriggled. Its owners walked it away from me before I could stuff it into my mouth. Dogs love me.

Then R told a story about a donkey named Rosita that fell in love with him when he worked on a farm one summer. He described her as having a sweet face with long eyelashes and a deep emotional life. Rosita had miscarried years ago but continued to mill around the spot of earth where her fetus was buried. She backed up into R several times, but he would only pat her backside and move out of the way.

These are not exactly stories about conversations with strangers, because animals are too guileless to be strangers, but they belong on this blog because connections with animals are equally, ineffably wonderful.

vendor

The ice cream vendor outside the Met sold me a $3 strawberry popsicle that was so hard and so cold that my tongue stuck to it when I tried to eat it. It was like licking a light pole on a winter night in Milwaukee, or so I have read.

It was humid and in the mid-80s in New York, and I wanted to know how my popsicle stayed so cold in the vendor's cart when there didn't seem to be any electric-generated cold air circulating through it.

He opened up his cart and showed me the blocks of ice within. He said, You can touch it. When I reached out to touch it, he said, Oh no, you shouldn't touch it, because it will hurt. It was dry ice sublimating in plumes of white steam against the city heat. It cost $26/pound, and he had to buy almost four pounds each day for his cart.

You have to sell thirty-three popsicles before you even start making a profit? I said. He shrugged. I left and he sold four popsicles to a crowd of panting tourists who had just exited the museum.

guggenheim

The Frank Lloyd Wright exhibit at the Guggenheim, which I saw this weekend, was a chore. I don't thrill at Frank Lloyd Wright to begin with, mostly because his large-scale planning seems so naive and car-centered. Also, pressing your face up to glass boxes displaying drafting paper to discern the faint pencil markings of an architect's drawing is not the best way to experience architecture.

Halfway up the spiral, I wanted to take a break from the hazy palimpsests, so I stopped at the gift shop. Another woman had the same idea as me, so we paused at the entrance while we tried to figure out who would enter the slim doorway first. She was a light-skinned African-American woman in her mid-to-late thirties, and voluptuous in a motherly way. (I had seen her partner and children go into the gift shop already.)

She gestured to indicate that I should proceed. I responded by bowing and sweeping my hand rightward to welcome her in like a maitre'd. There was a pause.

The woman grabbed my left hand marched us in through the doorway together. We then laughed together, uproariously, spontaneously, and were both in the gift shop. I said nothing to her, but smiled and went off. I bought three postcards and left.

At the top of the spiral, I ran into her again. We exchanged a look that said that we had experienced something funny and surprising together. Her partner and kids were looking at a model of the Taliesin West campus; they had no idea. Nobody had any idea.

Then I buzzed down the spiral out the museum and found my friends sitting in the shade outside Central Park, and I never saw that woman again.

sailor

On Sunday night, I went out to a bar in Manhattan with a friend. It was Fleet Week, I had been loudly proclaiming my intention to kiss a sailor before the end of the weekend, and there were sailors inside the bar, so the atmosphere felt a little giddy to me. I found a lonely sailor named Carlo. He was stationed on a boat docked on the west side. He was Guatemalan and had family in New York. From him I learned that the all-white uniforms with button-up shirts would be replaced with the navy pants/khaki shirt combo in November, but that the dress uniforms (Sailor Moon outfits with neckerchiefs and the navy blue-outlined cape-collar) would be unchanged. He let me try on his hat.

He bought me a Budweiser. We chatted a bit, danced a bit, and kissed a bit. He had nice muscles, which I gripped with great fervor as we danced. He kept saying that he didn't know how to dance to this kind of music. (It was hipster rock.) I said, Because you prefer Latin dancing? several times, because he couldn't hear me. I could barely hear him.

My friend found the sailor's friend and danced with him. She also scored a few photos with the sailor hat and an indiscreet peck on the lips. Our sailors chatted with other girls, but there was no jealousy or competition because sailors during Fleet Week are the silliest thing to compete for. We urged them to have fun with the rest of the week as they traveled on to the next bar.

My friend and I continued dancing. A girl introduced herself and said that she had gone to our law school but had graduated a year later. She introduced us to the rest of her friends, and we danced near each other, but not together, for a song. Meeting people in a bar makes it less scary and less loud, which I appreciate.

I saw two young hipsters dancing nearby - they were male and female, but they looked queer rather than heterosexual - so I thought I would extend the bonhomie to them as well. I had been mulling over pick-up lines for most of the evening, and I decided to try them out on the young hipsters. I approached the boy first and said, Hey, that's the worst sailor costume I've ever seen! He said, What? because he hadn't heard me.

We were bouncing in synch with the awful music. I said, I said that's the worst sailor costume I've ever seen! He said nothing and his friend interceded. What did you say? she said.

I said, I said, you guys have the worst sailor costumes I've ever seen!

She rolled her eyes in disgust and yelled, We're not sailors!

And then they moved away from me on the dance floor.

I probably should have said best, not worst, sailor costumes. But who takes such an obvious extension of friendliness as mine literally?

I hate them.

six points

I biked to an outdoor festival yesterday but was surprised by the $5 entry fee. I refused to pay. There was no sense in paying to stand under a tent with fratty northsiders when the sun was shining, so instead I unlocked my bike and headed up Lincoln. I wanted to ogle the vintage Telecasters at the Chicago Music Exchange, but my day had started late and the store was already closed by the time I got there.

Having been thwarted twice, I had nothing left to do but meander over to the Lakefront Path via Lincoln Park sidestreets. Chicago is laid out in a sensible, logical grid. The streets are evenly spaced: eight blocks is one mile. Every fourth street is a major street (for commerce/traffic), and all the streets in between are smaller and more suitable for residences. The blocks are large enough that their perimeters can be lined with homes and they can be bisected by back alleys for access to the garages behind the living spaces. As a bike commuter and car-disliker, I don't like how car-centered this allows Chicago to be, but it must be convenient for those who drive.

The north-south streets intersect with east-west streets at perfect ninety degree angles, creating a grid for easy navigation: State and Madison Streets form the 0 N/S 0 E/W intersection, so if I told native Chicagoan I lived at 1200 north and 1600 west, he would know that I lived at the intersection of Division Street (1200N, twelve blocks north of Madison) and Ashland Avenue (1600W, sixteen blocks east of State). This makes it extremely easy to know where you are and to gauge travel distances.

In addition to the north-south and east-west streets, there are a few streets that run diagonal to the grid, including Milwaukee, Elston, Lincoln, Clybourn, etc. These streets are also sensible because (1) it's faster to travel on the hypotenuse of a triangle than on its two legs, and (2) diagonal streets intersect with the north-south/east-west streets to form six-point intersections around which commerce and public transportation can cluster. The Damen-North-Milwaukee intersection near my house is one such example. Traffic around it slows to crawl, but that has created the conditions for a dense and lively constellation of bars, restaurants, bookstores, and boutiques. I missed out on the gentrification of Wicker Park, so I have no nostaglia for the grimy past nor resentment of the shiny present; I am just happy to be able to walk to two nice independent bookstores (Myopic and Quimby's) and two of my favorite music venues (The Double Door and Subterranean) in fifteen minutes.

These six-point intersections can also be nightmarish to cross, however. Because of the way the lights are timed, a pedestrian might have to wait for three sets of traffic lights to rotate through their full cycles before crossing over to the other side of the street. It's dangerous for bikers, walkers, and drivers.

Yesterday I found myself at the intersection of Belmont (E/W), Ashland (N/S), and Lincoln (diagonal) trying to figure out which way to head to the lake. Though it was sunny, the air that blew through the loose neck of my t-shirt felt cold and windy. An Asian man pulled up on a bicycle next to mine and said, Boy, I never know where to go at this intersection! I responded, It's my first time at this intersection! He said, Which one is Belmont? And I said, I don't know for sure, but probably that one running slight left up there.

The light changed, and we rolled across one street and stopped at the next light, waiting for that one to change. The man on the bicycle said again, Jeez, this intersection is always like this, isn't it? I said, I don't really know, it's my first time here!

Then the light changed again and we rolled to the third traffic light. This time I was in front of him on my bicycle. I heard him saying something behind me. I said, What? He said, I said, you look like my cousin's friend, but not really, but from a distance I thought you might be my cousin's friend. I said, Oh, ha ha. He asked me again where Belmont was, and I pointed at the street I had gestured at earlier. He took Belmont east and I took Lincoln southeast. Have a good weekend! he shouted at the back of my head. You too! I shouted back as I churned my legs toward the lake.

Writing this down has made me think of a joke I read in a book of noir stories set in Chicago. (An awful book, try not to buy it. I will send you my copy if you want.) The joke goes Q: What are the streets in Chicago that rhyme with "vagina"? A: Paulina, Melvina, and Lunt.

What I like about this joke isn't the crass punchline, but the fact that in Chicago, "Paulina" is pronounced "Paul-EYE-na." Now that's a riot!

taxi

Out of habit, I thanked my cab driver after I gave him directions. The plexiglass divider between the driver's seat and the back seats was pulled shut. He said something that came out muffled. I said, What? He said it again, again muffled. I said, What? He repeated it a third time. I still did not hear him. I said, What?

He pulled open the divider as he drove and shouted, I said you're welcome! Then he shut the divider again. I said, Oh, and buckled my seatbelt. 

We drove the eight miles between Midway and my apartment in silence. I turned off the video feed on the screen embedded in the divider, but the screen saver still cast an unpleasant light into my eyes. 

Three blocks from my apartment, I said, My house isn't all the way to Division and Ashland, it's two blocks before.

He opened the divider and said, Your house? Did you build this yourself? I said, No, I meant my apartment. I sometimes say house.  He said, Are you rich or something? Are you a rich girl?  I think he was trying to make his tone bantery, but instead he just sounded accusative. I said, No, I am not rich, I am sharing a rental apartment with another person.  

Why don't you have a house? he said. I said, Because I am not rich, and it is not my goal to be rich. He huffed.

The tab was $24.85. I gave him thirty dollars. Five dollars is a standard tip for a ride from the airport. As I exited the cab, he said, Good night, rich woman.  He was practically spitting. I walked in a hurry the half block to my house.

dog shit

The Bloomingdale Trail is a defunct elevated train track that the city of Chicago has attempted (but thus far failed) to convert into a linear park space.  Its eastern terminal is a short walk from my house. Because it is not yet a park, there are no legal or structured access points to the trail. Once I climbed a wall, Prince of Persia-style, to an embankment that led up to the trail. There is also a hole clipped into the cyclone fencing around the interstate through which the trail is accessible.  Recently I noticed that somebody had built a rickety ladder with plywood so that it was no longer necessary to scale the wall at Paulina. On one of the steps of the ladder, somebody had written: "Please don't remove this! We built it so that the trail could be a public space!" I don't expect it to last long, because it looks like a tort in waiting. Past Leavitt, there is a much easier walk-up access point. 

The rail ties are rusted and overgrown with weeds and there is broken glass littering the entire three-mile length of abandoned track. People seem to enjoy drinking beer up on the trail and also leaving their beer cans behind. On the trail I have found a pair of leather child's shoes, the clip of a clipboard, rail spikes, interesting graffiti, and a parakeet's nest under the Blue Line, which is elevated above the defunct elevated line. The parakeets were green and looked like aliens. Apparently a pet store had released a bunch years ago, and they found happy homes in Hyde Park and Bucktown. 

Today I went up on the trail with a camp chair with the intention of writing letters to some friends. Near Winchester, I came across a couple with two roaming mutts playing on the tracks. The dogs were unleased, but they were friendly, and they trotted around me. The owners were inattentive.

One of the dogs dashed off to the side of the track and hunched over to evacuate its bowels. The male owner looked back, and then quickly looked away. I was walking behind him, and I said, in a polite, but firm voice, "Hey, your dog is pooping. Do you need a plastic bag?" The obvious message of this question was not that I was offering a plastic bag, but that I disapproved of dog shit littering the trail, and I wanted him to pick up his dog's shit.

The beaming idiot smiled back at me and said, "Oh no, we just let our dogs poop on the trail! It's biodegradable!" 

I was so startled by this response - cheerful idiocy - that I just shook my head and kept walking. After I got past the owners, I formulated several responses, any one of which would have sufficed to voice my disapproval more firmly. "Yes, but you also enjoy walking on a dog shit-free trail," or "Please pick up your dog shit" or "You smug, irresponsible twat." But it was too late, and I had walked on, and I only had my bitterness to console me. I walked until they were out of sight, and it was almost sunset, and found a quiet, dog shit-free place to compose my letters.

Two weeks ago, a hipster couple was walking a potato-sized chihuahua down Cleaver Street as I sat outside on my stoop drinking my Saturday morning cup of tea. These owners were also inattentive. The dog was so light that the owners didn't notice, as they kept walking, that the dog was crouched in its shitting position and digging its nails into the concrete to resist being dragged forward. It laid a little brown turd directly in front of my stoop, and then a few more aftershocks as the owner's dragged it on. I said, loudly, "Hey, aren't you going to pick up your dog's shit?" because it's really not preferable to leave your dog shit in front of somebody's stoop as she sits there drinking tea. The male hipster, in his purple frock and sideways cascade of hair, said, "Oh, I guess, yeah." He looked dumbfounded for a moment, then found some waterlogged junk mail in the gutter, and scooped up his dog's tootsie rolls and walked down the block looking for a trash can. I really enjoyed watching this as I drank my tea. 

I was not as successful with my badgering today, and just ended up feeling angry.

kalyan

On a midday midweek flight from Chicago to San Jose, I took a window seat and a young South Asian man took the center seat next to mine.  I only glanced at him when he sat down, and saw only enough to stereotype him as a first generation immigrant, probably an engineer at a microchip company in the South Bay, probably with excellent Anglo-Indian-accented English, probably not married. These were the things I could tell from his flight destination, his modest physique, his moustache, his clean generic polo shirt, and the way he smiled politely at me when we happened to look at each other.

I slept fitfully for the first half of the flight. I had two pairs of rolled-up shorts stuffed under my jaw to keep my head from lolling around. Occasionally my elbow jabbed his on the armrest, and I apologized. Each time he smiled politely and said, Oh no.  

We were served seltzers and Coke somewhere over the Rockies.  After the drinks were cleared, the man pulled out a laptop computer. I looked over at him and gestured at the two half-opened windowshades to my left. Sunlight came streaming through them onto our tray tables. Would you like them to be up, or down? Because of the laptop? I said. The man smiled and said, Oh no, whatever you'd like. I said, Whatever is best for you, it makes no difference to me. He continued smiling but expressing no real preference, so I said, Let's just leave them halfway up and down. The man slowly played chess against the computer and won. 

An hour or so later, I began reading a stack of briefs on a copyright case. The issue was whether a federal court has jurisdiction to hear a state legal malpractice claim where the underlying event was the attorney's failure to file a federal copyright claim before the statute of limitations expired - the merits of the unlitigated copyright claim would have to be explored by whatever court ultimately heard the malpractice claim. It was extremely tedious and I took notes in the margins to keep myself awake. 

The man kept glancing at my papers in a way that suggested he was not only interested in what I was doing but searching for an entry point for conversation.  Finally, he said, Are you a law student? I said, Oh, I am a lawyer. He said, But you look so young! I said, Well, I did just graduate from law school last year. But twenty-eight is not really so young. 

I said, And you, what do you do? He confirmed that he was an electrical engineer in a South Bay microchip company, and that he lived in Santa Clara. I asked him where he was from, even though sometimes that question can be tricky, and I hoped I would not offend him. He said, India. I said, Where in India? He said, Hm, well, it's in the Bombay region. I said I had lived in India for a few months, so he said, more specifically, that he was from Andhra Pradesh. I said one of my best friends was a second-generation Indian-American from Andhra Pradesh. I couldn't remember if R's parents were actually from there, but I wanted to make my new friend feel comfortable. I may have just sounded patronizing, but it's hard to know whether first-generation immigrants feel as irritated by the well-meaning conversationalist's hunt for thin geographical connections as their second-generation children do. He asked if I was from China, and I said no, my parents were from Taiwan.

My neighbor wanted to know about the time I had spent in India, so I told him I had lived in Delhi for two months but had taken a 40-hour train trip from Delhi to Chennai to visit a dear Tamil-American friend, with whom I then traveled to Kerala. He asked if I had seen the statue of Thiruvalluvar in Kanyakumari, and I said that the tip of the subcontinent was one of the most beautiful places I had ever seen. He seemed very proud when I said this.

He was not coming from Chicago, but from Florida. There had merely been a layover at Midway Airport, so he couldn't say whether he liked Chicago or not. He had just finished a brief tour of East Coast destinations with his parents, who were visiting from Hyderabad. They had gone to Niagara Falls and then to Florida, where he had cousins. His parents remained with the cousins to enjoy the beach a few more days, but he had to return to San Jose to get back to work. Work was project-based and usually 9-5, but this week he had to put in a few more hours. 

I offered my name and then asked his. He paused, then said, Kalyan. I teased him: did you forget? No, no, he said. But many Americans seem to have a hard time with my name. Did I say it correctly, I asked. Yes, you said it just fine, he replied. Then many Americans should just try harder, I said. 

Kalyan had studied for a two-year master's degree at Arizona State University. He said, in response to my question, that it was a party school, but the electrical engineering program was quite good and was ranked among the top thirty in the nation at the time he applied. I didn't realize until much later that my asking whether it was a party culture suggested to him that I didn't value his degree highly, so that he felt compelled to defend it by stating its ranking. But his tone did not betray any impatience or insecurity, just patient explanation. We exchanged pleasantries about the weather in Phoenix. I told him that my dad had come over to study for a electrical engineering master's at an American university also. 

He said that if he were to be laid off from his job, he would have only ten days to find a new job before his H1B visa expired. I hadn't realized the window of opportunity was so slim, and I told Kalyan that the government should be doing all it could to recruit and retain educated professionals like him, and that a 10-day window was senseless. He concurred. I told him that 65% of my dad's company had been laid off and that he was worried about the same. I couldn't tell if all of my signaling to him that I was sympathetic to him, his life path, and his immigration status made him feel any more comfortable with me, but I was trying.

The captain came over the intercom to tell us that we were about to descend into the South Bay. Kalyan and I did not speak much more after this announcement. He gathered up his belongings and I looked out the half-opened windows, giddy in anticipation of the fine weather and family time. After we had landed, as we stood side by side in the aisle waiting to deplane, he turned, smiled and said, It was nice to meet you. I said the same, and smiled.  

We walked off the plane together, and then I walked fifteen feet behind him until I grew tired of my snail's pace, and then I darted ahead and speedwalked past baggage claim to the ground transportation curbside.

nails

I told the woman who rang up my tea this morning that she had nice nails. I noticed them when she handed me the change. They were deep blue. I said, Nice nails! She said, Oh thank you!

neville

As often happens, somebody decided he wanted to talk me tonight, which I didn't mind. That's one nice thing about being more or less single, not minding when people want to chat. I squeezed onto a barstool between him and an old man at this little bar, and settled in to watch the band. When I sat down, I caught his eye and said hi. This sort of greeting is something I do quite regularly now that the economy is so bad that it makes me think that natural disasters or terrorists with Kalashnikovs or roof collapses could happen at any time, and it's always better to acknowledge strangers so they feel less inclined to trample you when it comes time to rush for the inward-opening exits.

He was wearing a single earring in his left ear that was five pieces of chain maille linked together. It was also our entry point for conversation. He offered me a beer, I politely declined, then I asked him if his earring was chain maille. He didn't seem to understand that I was testing for the medievalist geek connection - I did after all spend an afternoon last week browsing websites for war hammers; I am in the market - and instead said he'd had the links in his ear for twenty years. It still didn't give me a clue to his age, since his face was youngish and bright and he wore a black cowboy hat that hid all (if any) evidence of hair loss. He said he owned the photography studio that did all of Crate and Barrel's catalogue photography, and I made some stupid crack about coffee press glamour shots that was mercifully swallowed up into crowd noise.

We got started talking about bikes and you know where that always leads, for me at least. He had recently purchased a low racer recumbent and a three-speed English cruiser from the estate of an Internet bike personality whose website I've often visited. So I listened to this man explain the mechanics of an internal gear hub in that patient and patronizing way that men talk to women whose brains they don't want to hurt. It wasn't offensive; it was just interesting to observe from a half Corona hazy distance this thing called masculinity. It also wasn't entirely undeserved since I made some stupid comments about post-and-beam construction and then referred to sprockets as "thingies." I liked him, anyway.

My favorite story of his involved his job long ago as the caller for pig races at county fairs. He said that he had traveled around with this county fair and taken care of the pigs. One day one of the pigs got sick because it had eaten up a bunch of woodchips with its slop. The pig got bloated and cried, and was obviously in pain. The only way to help the pig was to (he said this euphemistically) reach into its lower intestine and pull the woodchips out. So he did. And then, "because like dogs and people, pigs die alone when they're sick," he slept in the shed with the pig for three nights. After that, the pig followed him everywhere, like a dog. Once it sat in his lap as he sang karaoke. At the end of the job, he left the county fair. The pig was transformed into bacon.

We got to that slushy point where you lay your hand on someone's arm to emphasize what you're saying but you're not really doing that because what you're saying needs to be emphasized. I decided to leave because I was not prepared to explain to the man at the bar why I was not willing to get beyond that point. About 3% of the conversation had involved me talking about myself, mostly about my occupation, so it wasn't as if I was ready to discourse about my recent aversion to pussy/interest in only Germans/accumulation of emotional impedimenta and my long-abiding paranoia about the oral transmission of herpes. These things, suitors, are the dragons you slay en route to your broad-shouldered princess. Nor was I prepared to explain in Denglish to a Bavarian man what "It didn't mean anything" meant.

So I drained the lime pulp from my Corona and left before the second set. I said, "It was nice to meet you but I am turning into a pumpkin" and a left with the vague promise of taking him up on a $5 bet to ride his low racer recumbent. He was disappointed that I didn't stay longer, and then he gave me a powerful hug that reminded me of when I was on the boy's wrestling team in high school and accidentally matched with the 265-pound sophomore who bent my elbows in the wrong direction and compressed me like a panini into the Ensolite. He is on Facebook, so maybe he'll join the other 343 people whom I barely know but whose profiles I can view.

lollipops

The bubbly woman from the mail room has changed her hairstyle three times, and each has been genuinely cuter than the last, so I give her a you-go-girl kind of comment when she comes in. This comes out of my mouth like marbles because my natural affect is sarcastic baritone, but I am trying, you know. I bought forty lollipops from the intern (whose school is trying to raise money one $.50 lollipop at a time for the $8,000 shortfall in their prom budget!) and have been pushing them on everybody who comes into the office. Just now, the mail room woman walked out with the whole sack of them, saying she'd distribute them to the mail room workers. Cavities for everyone in the Dirksen Building! Perhaps I will buy another forty lollipops because people seem to like you more when you push free lollipops upon them.

ups

I forgot the UPS guy's name but he is very friendly to me and has a repaired cleft palate and has told me how much he loves fishing in Minnesota. Yesterday he came in in shorts, and I said, Whoa, shorts! He said, Yeah, it's hot outside! I said, Summertime!

french toast

The waiter who served our drinks and French toast at the third bar we went to on Saturday night was obviously in love with the bar back with spectacles. On my way to the bathroom, I found our waiter wiping down glasses, and I said, Hey! Are you gay? He looked a little sheepish and said, Yeah.

I did not wait a beat before saying, Okay, are you in love with that guy with the glasses? He said, Oh...yeah, I kind of am. I said, I could tell! Everybody could tell! He said, Yeah, but he's like totally straight. I said, Don't lose hope! He doesn't look very straight to me! He said, Aw, you're sweet.

cigarette

I asked a stranger on the street outside the Flat Iron for a cigarette. My two friends kept walking, and his two friends kept walking in the other direction, but we stood in the middle of the sidewalk and looked at each other.

He lit the cigarette for me, and then I thanked him and said that I was only "borrowing" the cigarette. He said, "Oh yeah? You can have my address if you want to send it back to me!" I said, "Ha ha ha!" and we both caught up with our friends and continued walking. I was so drunk, I only got three pulls on this cigarette before accidentally dropping it on my coat.

nutmeg

Recently I was at Jewel, slowly deciding between buying the Jewel-brand nutmeg or the name brand nutmeg, both of which were astoundingly expensive for being tins of smelly powder. It must have been winter because I was wearing my puffy coat, the one with a little tied-yarn doll dangling off the zipper.

A man standing nearby was also inspecting the spices, but he kept turning to stare at me and my chin. I didn't understand why - I had forgotten that the dangly was there - until he said, slowly, "Hey, where did you get that?" I realized what he was pointing to and said, "Oh! In New York, just at a booth." What I said didn't make much sense, but it was enough to start a brief chat.

I said, "Are you familiar with these things?" He said, "Yeah, you see them all the time at comic conventions." I said, "Oh, are you a sci-fi kind of guy?" He said, "Well yeah, sci-fi, fantasy, you know." I said, "I went to ComicCon last year in New York! It's always nice to meet another geek!"

Of course, our conversation didn't go quite as smoothly as this, because we were both geeks, but it was nonetheless pleasant, and the memory of how the conversation ended has been pleasantly obscured. It can't have ended not awkwardly. I remember being surprised because I could count the number of black comics nerds I saw at ComicCon on the fingers of one hand.

david

The website listed 8:30 pm but bands didn't actually play until 9:30 pm, so I got there 45 minutes early, ordered a mediocre nut brown ale, and killed time by writing frantic notes to myself on scrap paper. Some excerpts: "The carbonation is too sharp and the hops is strong enough to make it more bitter than sweet, but the aftertaste is medicinal" and "On my mind tonight is, of course, Abraham Lincoln's unexpectedly high-pitched voice, which worked to his advantage against Stephen Douglas because it carried further and was therefore heard by more potential voters" and "Sitting at a bar alone skews my sense of what I can expect in my life."

The bar was empty when I got there except for two men playing pool, two men talking to one another at the bar, and a black cat that paced the length of the bar and stopped near me to lap up water from a whiskey glass filled to the brim. I could not relax enough to write a proper journal entry, since I was too self-aware to focus on anything except the awkwardness and pretentiousness and loneliness of sitting alone at a bar writing to oneself about Abraham Lincoln's voice. I also texted friends frantically, seeking entertainment, failing at the extroversion I have recently boasted of. Raj graciously responded with some comments about a YouTube clip of sharks eating seals in slow-motion.

Soon the bar filled with clusters of patrons. Some were obviously in the bands; they dressed as you would expect amateur musicians to dress (hair short enough to be straightedge for work, but long enough to be tousled for play, and big belt buckles). Some were the bandmembers' lady friends; they wore dresses and boots. There were not many unaccompanied people. There was another loner down the bar also pretending to text message, whom I ignored because of his Ed Hardy-like t-shirt. There was a heavyset mid-thirty-something man in a Nirvana t-shirt and torn jeans who looked so desperately awkward that I had could not stop watching him: he fidgeted with his neck, then put his hands down at his sides, then shoved them into his pockets, then brought a pair of ridiculous oversized sunglasses out of his pockets and put them on his face, then adjusted them, then took them off and hung them off his front left pants pocket, then crossed his arms, then looked around him, then slowly traced his collarbone with one hand, then lolled his head around. He slouched, he shifted his weight from one foot to another. Nobody else saw this but me, because nobody else was paying attention.

A youngish man sat down at the barstool next to mine to order a drink. I looked briefly at him, smiled, and decided that he would be the one to fulfill my daily quotient of talking to strangers. I started the small talk (easy enough: "Are you in one of the bands? No?") and then he reciprocated awkwardly with his own small talk ("No - just here to hear music!"). We chatted and it turned out that we had both developed the same strategy for how to cope with weeknights in Chicago: bookmark the websites of the music venues, check them each day, listen to the MySpace pages of the bands, and select a club. He wore a corporate logo on a button-up shirt - these are the shirts that end up en masse at Goodwill - which provided entry into some new topics of small talk, and soon we were nattering on about construction industry newsletters (somebody must review the suppliers, I learned), the University of Iowa (there is a nice independent bookstore in Iowa City, but it is a party school, and probably not worth the visit, I learned), and rock-influenced pop (nothing to learn here). The conversation was halting and tedious, but it produced enough preliminary intimacy that we moved together to the stage and sat together for the next three bands. As usual, I asked questions and listened, and the stranger talked. But he was not a talkative one, so mostly we just occasionally smiled at each other and noted briefly how pretty good and how not so bad the musicians were. He said he had studied "computers something" in college but would have preferred to have studied "how groups of humans interact."

The first band was decent. I was turned off by the bassist's metal chain necklace and tricolor wristbands, and the rhythm guitarist's guitar-face. He was only strumming chords, for God's sake, no need to shit a brick. I am extremely judgmental, especially about vanity. The second band was older and at one point had eight musicians on stage, so they were better at rocking, but still only decent. Their bluesy guitarist was very nimble and their lead singer had an excellent blue-eyed soul voice, but the histrionic way he mimed the actions the lyrics were describing brought up unpleasant memories of my sixth grade drama class. The third band seemed lackadaisical, or I was just tired, and I left my new friend with a friendly pat on the shoulder and a "Maybe I'll see you at another one of these venues!" Not bloody likely, my friend, but maybe. He extended his hand awkwardly, and I prematurely grabbed for it, so that only three of his fingers were involved in the hand-pumping.

And then I put on my gloves, my blinking bike lights, my reflective pants-cinching slap anklet, and coasted home on a quiet residential street in six minutes. The night was not so bad, and totally unmemorable, so I thought I would write it all down here.

gary

When I got on the Metra train back to Chicago, the train car I chose already had another bike in it, so I had to negotiate a bit with the bike's owner where I could lean my bike. The bike's owner was an unaccompanied man, white, medium build, in his early 40s. He was completely bald, and since we were heading to Skokie, I thought he might be a skinhead. (This turned out to be completely incorrect, as he was an Israeli citizen.) I took the only available biker's seat, which happened to be right next my new friend's seat.

I immediately took out a Chicago Sun-Times, New Yorker, and Twix bar out of my backpack, and started gnashing away at the candy and reading intently about Burmese pythons spun out of their cages and into the Everglades during Hurricane Andrew. One would think this signaled unavailability - I really did want to just read, since I was too tired to maintain the chumminess that the sport of talking to strangers requires - but my new friend seemed very intent on talking to me, so finally I set aside my periodicals, shoved the last bite of my chocolate finger into my mouth, and said, "Hello, I'm [NAME]. What's your name?

His name was Gary. He started our conversation by saying several times that the conductor had asked him to lash his bike against the train using bungee cords he didn't have. Yes, but what's the worst the conductor could do if you didn't lash your bike down? I said, with a shrug. Gary replied, I don't know, pitch a fit? We laughed, and I said I could probably stall the conductor with sweet talk for the forty minutes it would take us to get back into Chicago.

We did the usual: where are you from, how long have you lived in Chicago, how do you like living in Chicago? Immediately the topic of conversation turned to Israel, because although Gary had lived his entire life in Chicago, he decided some years ago to become an Israeli citizen and had spent the last two winters in Galilee. I asked him if it was difficult to become an Israeli citizen. His answer: If you're Palestinian, yes; if you're an American Jew, not at all. It's probably too easy, in fact. This was interesting. Why do you think it's too easy? I said. He gave a thoughtful response about zionism and AIPAC, and I said some things to indicate that I had a grasp of the geopolitics. He said he wasn't sure he was comfortable with his own decision to become an Israeli, and then I said something anodyne about disagreeing with foreign policy from a global perspective but not judging the individual for his personal decision, and then there was a pause to commemorate our shared politics.

Gary had a return ticket for Israel in nine months, which seemed to me like an awfully long time in the future. It was a ticket, he said, but it was not a commitment to go back to Israel, since he could always just get a refund. He was trying to see if Chicago would take again, but already, in his second month home, he was starting to feel disappointed by the city's slow pace of change. He had taken the train today to the north suburbs to buy a bicycle, with the intention of biking home, but he got tired and hopped onto the commuter rail. I joked that his $150 bike might be enough to keep him tethered to Chicago. He said he would sell it.

He asked my occupation, and then confessed that he was thinking about going to law school. He was unemployed but had worked primarily as a bartender until leaving for Israel. He said he had consigned himself to never making any money. He considered himself a "wannabe failed academic," because of his interest in English literature, but decided to forgo the doctorate's debt and "the fifty-fifty chance, at best, of finding work on the other side." He wanted to try war crimes in the International Criminal Court. I'm aiming for the Hague, he said, but with a smile to indicate that this was something that would never happen. He confessed that he was more of a dreamer than a doer. I encouraged him by saying that it was difficult but humanly possible to get a law degree and be trying war crimes within five years. You would think this part of the conversation would be tinged with rue, but it was not. It was matter of fact.

He mentioned off hand that he hadn't done so well at keeping the jobs he'd had. Then I asked him a question I knew would be too personal: why do you think you didn't keep those jobs? "Personality conflicts" was his response. I pushed again: what sorts of personality conflicts? You see, the reason I did this was because I didn't get a sense from him that these topics were out of reach, and the conversation, even treading in this touchy territory, was light and quick. It is amazing how quickly you can become intimate with a stranger.

Gary's response to my second question was, Oh, you know. Anger management, rage, bitterness, problems getting along with others. To name a few? I said. He chuckled. We then talked about a recent job interview he'd had for a bar position, where the manager of the bar asked him a series of questions about the maximum capacities of the bars he'd tended, his philosophy for how to handle crowded bars, and something about a mysterious "positioning in the ring." I said this was absurd, since a bartender's ability to tend bar had nothing to do with his ability to answer questions about tending bar. Gary concurred, and then told me about the other hoops of fire he'd had to jump through for previous positions: drug tests, several rounds of interviews, questionaires, oaths, etc. We paused to commemorate our shared distaste for meaningless exercises of authority.

As we entered Chicago, I finally said a few barely personal words about myself. I was happy to have chosen Wicker Park to live in rather than Lincoln Park because I was not exactly the Lincoln Park type. He said, Yes, I knew when you came in that you were not that type. What gave me away? I said. He said, You didn't seem like a sorority girl. Sorority girls don't have bikes covered in mud. They can't speak intelligently about the world. (His exact words were not as patronizing as these.)

We arrived at his stop somewhat by surprise, and he hurriedly gathered his belongings and wheeled his bike to the door. Our last bit of chatter was me telling him I hoped to read about him leading the prosecution of Ivan Demjanjuk, the Cleveland Nazi. There was no pretending that we would exchange phone numbers or that we'd ever see each other again or that we even wanted to. We simply wished each other well, and then he walked his bike off the train.