High Ho! - My First Metalsmithing Project

It's a flower ring! I made this in three hours in my first jewelry class!

The Downside of Writing Notes To Neighbors...

This is a note I got from my neighbor when I arrived home last night:

Hi Miz M!
I used two of your pots outside... if that's not cool please let me know!
You are welcome to take a bit of the harvest...
Tomatoes, nasturums (flowers that taste like radish, good in salad) and various herbs.

Hope your enjoying the flowers,
xxxxxx

Only thing is... what? I've been super busy with work, and I'm not home that much. But I live in a small enough building that my neighbors know when I'm home. (Also, their two dogs bark everytime I come and go.) So, I'm wondering why my neighbor didn't just ASK me about this BEFORE she planted her crap in my pots. I actually DO want to use these pots, and I AM actually pissed that this chick didn't ask me before she decided to use them. I mean, come on. Pots cost like $2, and I know she went out to buy the plants.

It almost becomes one of those things that I want to make a big deal out if it just out of principle. And what will I lose? Access to surplus "flowers that taste like radish." That's a big loss.

World Cup - Where to Watch During the Work Day?

I've been getting into the World Cup a bit this year. I watched the U.S. v. Czech Republic game on Monday and found it to be really exciting. (Until the Czechs scored goal #2. Then it was just depressing! But the drama! The tension! The "Goooooool!" yell on the spanish channel playing the game...)

The athletism of soccer is amazing. The players are so agile. And, well, hot. (Though some of those guys on the Czech team need a visit to the team barber.) So, with the desire of being a temporary superfan, I'm on a quest to find a good place to watch a portion of the 2:00 p.m. games on my lunch hour. I work in the South Loop and tried the Billy Goat Tavern yesterday. What a bust!
The game was on, and the sound was being piped into the place, but the drunken yahoos were just too rowdy for a Wednesday afternoon.

Bald Is Still Beautiful in the Lakeview Neighborhood

The Marshalls store on Clark and Diversey is full of gorgeous, gender-bending bald people! Apparently, a bald head is a requirement to work there?

The fitting room attendant was a ferocious round bald black man with super thick combed brows and magenta lipstick. When he stepped away from the dressing room, he was then replaced by a tall, lanky, strong, androgynous bald black woman with gorgeous lips but no lipstick.

At the check-out was a talkative white, bald precocious lesbian with a lot of tattoos, who was working her baldness with a lot of style. Now if only Marshalls made "bald is beautiful" a national campaign...

Love of Words

I was hanging out with some local artists on Saturday night and they were telling some hilarious stories about different arty and cultural groups - puppeteers, carnies, and "renies." But they were really complaining about the artists known as poets. Because they are undisciplined - "I wrote this on the train" - and egotistical - "Everything I do is genius."

I don't really understand that much poetry. And I don't believe that there are still existing "poets." Call me a cynic, but if someone introduced himself/herself to me as a poet, my brain would automatically translate "poet" into "crazy." But I can be judgemental like that.

So I thought it was really funny when I woke up on Sunday morning dreaming about reading a poem off a printed page. As I was waking up, some of the words came to me, as did the meaning of the poem, and I thought them brilliant in a special lucid way as I could only in the moment emerging from a dream. I pulled the creative words out of the dream world, and wrote them down on the back of an envelope near my bed. Unfortunately, I only remembered the second stanza, but the pure joy I found in the flow, structure, and meaning of the words when I was waking up gave me such an immense feeling of sastisfaction. "It IS genius," I thought! "I am a poet!" Genius! Ego! How easy it is to believe oneself a poet.

Surfing in Lake Michigan? A girl after my own heart.

I saw this girl swimming on her surfboard on my way home from work on Wednesday. I couldn't figure out what she was doing. There weren't any big waves for her to practice on, but she was swimming on her board really fast along the Fullerton/Diversey beach areas. It was a beautiful surfboard, and she looked like she was having a ball.

Eye Empathy

I've always had a condition called "eye empathy."
Self-diagnosed.

I explain this to people by saying that when I see someone with pink eye or watery eyes or something, my eyes start to itch, or water, or do whatever gross thing the other person's eye is doing. I also have an extreme fear of those tests at the eye doctor when they take a picture of your retina, or squirt the puff of air in your eye. I totally panic. Not sure what this fear has to do with eye empathy, but let's just say there is a psychological connection.

Eye empathy.

I went to the eye doctor today after work. I've always found the doctors and dentists in Chicago to provide super-great medical care. This eye doctor was no exception. Except, the visit made me wonder, do doctors make people more paranoid? Maybe the doctors here are so good, that they give you a bunch of extra stuff to worry about that they can now detect with their added knowledge and cutting edge technology. Is it truly helpful to us patients?

I have a lot of friends who consider themselves hypochondriacs. I usually poo-poo this condition. If I paid attention to every little pain I had, I'd be a hypochondriac too. But I just ignore it, and 9 times out of 10, the pain and the accompanying paranoia go away.

So my eye doctor told me that the tiny little oil glands in my lower eyelid were getting clogged and creating little (invisible to me) bumps. However, I can treat this by putting a hot washcloth over my eyes every night to unclog the glands. Gross! But also, weird? If I don't do the hot washcloth preventative, I may get a sty, said the doctor. If I get a sty, I would have to do the hot washcloth treatment on my eyes 4 times a day.

"This might explain why your eyes are dry," said the doctor.

So, of course I come home tonight and do the hot washcloth thingy thinking, "Hmmm, my eyes are really dry. They feel tired. Maybe I'm sleeping too much which is why I have insomnia and I'm not really tired when I go to bed but just my eyes are tired 'cause the little gland thingys are blocked with oil and stuff."

Is identifying this problem really helpful? I probably won't keep up the wash cloth thingy, definitely not every night, and now I have to think about getting a sty? Or maybe I'll never get a sty and my eyelid glands will unclog themselves. Is knowing better than not knowing? I think this may be a case of ignorance is bliss...