On Not Knowing What to Do Next

Last weekend, I called my mom from the National Gallery’s Sculpture Garden, and because I rarely call my parents unless I need to ask them something, she expected me to launch into an explanation of the latest bureaucratic mishap, minor illness, or disaster in the kitchen. Instead, I told her, “I’m bored.”

“I’m bored” was a ridiculous thing for me to say at that exact moment. The reasons are as follows:

1. I was listening to free jazz in a notable cultural institution.
2. I was sitting across from a sculpture that was probably worth more than my lifetime earnings.
3. I was drinking sangria that was too sweet and not fruity enough to be considered good but still made me feel super cool anyway.
4. Even if the jazz was too abstract for me to really appreciate it, I had The Luminaries, which, with its 800+ pages, is impressive both in a literary sense and its ability to kill the occasional scary spider that crawls from the bushes.

Yet somehow, I’ve run out of things to do. Or to be more accurate, I have convinced myself that I have run out of things to do.

In most cases, boredom, especially the inattentive or dismissive kind that comes from confronting something that is simply uninteresting, usually leads you to pursue possibilities. The mind wanders, daydreaming of the ways the passing minutes could be better spent or plotting the next move. At a certain critical point, you eventually take a next step towards doing something else, and nine times out of ten, it’s something marginally more riveting. But in recent days, I’ve been experiencing a restless ennui that feels like a craving for a mysterious snack food that you can’t describe or find in your kitchen cabinets.

The terrible part about this particular brand of boredom is that rather than truly leading me to something else, it blankets possibility in blandness. Yes, I could walk around the Jefferson Memorial or grab a free ticket to Winter’s Tale or wake up early enough to beat the crowds at the Holocaust Museum’s permanent exhibition. I could also do absolutely nothing. All these choices have become equivalent.

The best part about this particular brand of boredom is that it does lead you to wander, albeit listlessly. Usually, these are the times when it’s best to take a walk or go window shopping, where you can look at a dress on a mannequin or a book display or a scarf on a sales rack, items that don’t seriously demand your attention. Or maybe it’s a brightly painted Victorian-era house or the dog that comes to investigate your ankles. Eventually, something snags a neuron, and this snag is enough to remind yourself how to find the world interesting again. As you continue with your walk, you remember that dress or scarf or house or dog and wonder what is next.

My Love Letter to UChicago

I’ll begin with the chairs. My plan had been to run some errands and then find a shady park bench on Harper Quad to read  a couple of chapters of my book (The Black Book by Orhan Pamuk). My finals were done, my room half-packed, my time blissfully unscheduled. I have an obsession with the Main Quad because even after four years, I’ve never gotten over the fact that it’s just so pretty. In all seasons–covered with snow, dressed with bright flowers, slick with muddy rain–there’s just no getting over the majestically gorgeous buildings, the neat diagonal walkways, the careful landscaping. Which brings me back to the chairs that they started setting up for Convocation. As I walked across the Quad, there were strange people setting up rows of plastic folding chairs, an invasion of ugly lawn furniture in the places where students once threw frisbees and read Freud in the afternoon sun. Last week, it had been the white marquees and tents for Alumni Weekend, and when I finally reach Harper Quad, I discover that the benches had already been taken away. When I finally decided to go home, I walked by those chairs again, more annoyed and upset about their presence than I could have expected them to be.

Mostly, it’s because I wanted the Quad to look exactly how I always want to remember it–those sunny afternoons after class that I spent on those shade-covered park benches, eating lunch or dodging the occasional wasp while I finished my Turkish homework, notebook open on my lap. There were also the times during the winter when I walked from the Reg from office hours or a newly checked-out book in my bag to Harper, the snow-covered lamps and the aching cold catching my breath. Autumn was always my favorite season. There is a peculiar kind of joy that can only be found when you walk to class surrounded by the bold, blazing colors of aging ivy and fallen leaves.

If you asked me what I love so much about UChicago, I would give you all these fragments. The iced teas and hot chocolates I’ve bought from the Div School cafe, where the drinks are always better and twenty-five cents cheaper. Those terrifyingly old couches in the Breck lounge where I stayed up talking to my friends until the sun rose, just because I could. The stacks of the Reg, where it was easy to get lost in so many different ways. How we walked in the frozen streets after Snowpocalypse to grab dinner at the dining hall. The awe that came from learning my Civ professor chatted weekly with Sartre in the Parisian cafes on the Left Bank. All the tacos, lasagna, and stir-fried chicken that I made and shared with my roommates around our island counter.

There are the things I learned. Facts, figures, Foucault. My bookshelf testifies to the knowledge that is now lodged somewhere in my brain. But there are other things too. I have also discovered that yes, I can write a 12-page paper if given twenty-four hours and an absolute deadline. It is also possible not to feel the cold if you wear enough layers. Along the way, I’ve learned how to distill a life’s worth of belongings into a couple of cardboard boxes, how to run across a busy intersection to catch a bus, how to gracefully cry in a public place, how lucky it is to have perfect timing on the CTA. I’ve learned about how capable I actually am, even when everything seems to be crumbling like dry cookie dough (and in most cases, everything is never that messy anyway).

Perhaps most importantly, there are the people, especially those crazy brilliant kids who I have the honor of calling my friends. It’s cliche to call anyone unique, but I think I’ve found the group of people who fit the definition. I can always count on them for a clever pun and a get-out-of-Hyde-Park adventure. They are just as excited as I am when I chatter on about a book I’m reading for class or a weird factoid that I discovered on the Internet (or at the very least, they humor me for which I will always be grateful). They will argue with me when I’m wrong. They are cosmopolitan–we’ll be scattered across three continents next year. They know so much about so many things. There have been too many moments to count when I’m simply so happy that they have made their way into my life.

I’ve spent a week writing this note, piecing it together sentence by sentence during the few short breaks I had to myself. I realize now that this is not really a love letter in any traditional sense, but I will say that my four years here at UChicago have still been a love story of sorts. I can’t imagine my life without this place constantly hovering in my mind. I’ve grown more than a little attached, and Convocation, with all its goodbyes and separation, will hurt my heart. But this heartache is to be expected if you’re leaving a place that has felt so much like home. My four years were an education in every possible sense of the word. It has been such a privilege to have lived through all of this.

A Half-Day Excursion, Part 2

I walk into the office on Friday and discover that there is absolutely no one is there because I missed the memo saying that I had a four day weekend for the Fourth. I have done a multitude of silly things during my internship so far, but this one ranks pretty high on the list.

As quickly as I walked into the office, I walked out of it and wandered into Greeley Square. I sat on a park chair for the better part of forty-five minutes because I was sleepy and I didn’t quite know what to do with myself. I picked a terrible day to wear jeans with temperatures creeping close to the 90s, and I’d left my camera at home. I also didn’t have any directions or a list of things to do, so naturally, the best thing to do is get out my subway map and pick a place that sounds interesting.

I decided to head to Little Italy and then take a walk towards Chinatown. I got off at the right stop, but wandered into Chinatown and was too lazy to double back and retrace some semblance of a route. Then, my attention caught the sight of majestic looking buildings, so I walked in their direction. Following a map posted on a street corner for the benefit of tourists, I meandered towards what was known as the Civic Center. (I also stopped for red bean bubble tea, which was quite tasty with red beans replacing with the typical tapioca.)

The majestic buildings turned out to be a New York Supreme Court building, the Office of the City Clerk, and a variety of administrative-type places. It reminded me of the Chicago’s World Fair with all the classic architecture surrounding a neat little square and fountain. I took another break on a park bench and sipped my tea. On a cooler day, I would have climbed the steps of the Supreme Court Building, but I lounged under a tree instead.

In the half hour that I spent sitting, I watched four newlywed couples take pictures. I wondered whether there was a wedding venue nearby until I remembered that I was near a courthouse and getting married was one of those things your could do there. I had always expected courthouse weddings to be casual affairs with not too much ceremony, but the brides I saw wore white dresses and carried bouquets while their grooms were also dressed nicely in neat suits. Little groups of friends and family wore pastel colors and snapped lots of pictures. I liked the idea of having something small scale like that. It seemed simple, and everyone was smiling. I wondered: is it a thing to just get married at the city clerk and then head over for a full-scale reception? I don’t know, but it seems like a fun idea that would make people’s lives easier.

After I finished tea and ate the lunch I had brought with me, I kept following the short trail of majestic looking buildings until I came upon the entrance of the Brooklyn Bridge. There were throngs of tourists, a couple of joggers and serious-looking bikers, and peddlers on the pedestrian walkway. Having only driven through the bridge, which is kind of lame because it’s slightly claustrophobic and feels like you’re going through a cage, I decided to follow the crowd. I didn’t have the energy or inclination to walk across the whole thing, so I stopped at the first tower. The view of the East River was hazy and bright. The whizzing cars below made loud wooshes, and as I leaned against the railing, I kept imagining what would happen if I accidentally dropped my phone and held onto it tight as I used it to take a picture. I liked looking at the bridge’s cables and how they traced neat triangles of the sky. Bridges are one of those engineering marvels that I don’t quite believe can exist. The Brooklyn Bridge was built in the late 1800s, which boggles the mind a little. I’m impressed.

I was impressed for about ten minutes and then decided I wanted to go somewhere with air conditioning. Back on the subway I went, and I emerged at Herald Square. I got distracted by the Gap and H&M before heading to the famous Macy’s where I pretended to shoe shop so I could sit on one of the comfy chairs in the shoe department. I climbed the escalators all the way to the tenth floor; there were displays of patio furniture and a post office. On the top floors, the escalator steps were made of wood panels instead of metal.

When 3:00 rolled around, I went back on the subway to meet James at the MoMA. What I really wanted to do was go see the Rain Room, which is this cool exhibit that lets you walk through a shower of water without getting wet. Motion sensors detect where you walk and stop the flow of the water in the space you occupy. However, the wait was said to be four hours, so that will have to be a work in progress. The MoMA had a lot of interactive, video game displays in its design section, and a few new acquisitions. I revisited old favorites and dodged the crowds.

All in all, the day felt like Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (with a few adjustments). I think I know where things are, and I can tell you which subway lines to take if you want to get to Penn Station. A step in the right direction.

A Half-Day Excursion

To give you an idea of how often I take the subway in New York, here’s what happened when I wanted to exchange my old MetroCard for a new, usable one.

The teller pushes it back to me and shouts, “It’s been expired for over a year. You’ll have to mail it in.”

Well, that wasn’t going to work. I grumbled back to the ticket dispensing machine and grumbled as it made me pay an extra dollar to spit back a MetroCard that looked exactly like the one in my pocket, except this one expired on September 1, 2014 and not fourteen months ago.

I’m used to seeing the city from the window of a car. In my family’s trusty 1996 Toyota Camry, I have crossed the Brooklyn Bridge, the George Washington Bridge, the Queensboro Bridge, FDR Drive, and the Long Island Expressway. Parking is always a hassel, but I know it is possible to find free street parking if you look carefully on Sundays. It’s one of those weird times that driving with my family to fun city activities is cheaper and more convenient than taking public transit.

But this afternoon, I was on my own. In an early celebration of Independence Day, the office officially closed at 2. Everyone else around me was still finishing up something, but I was free to go. I wound up staying until about 2:30 anyway. Just as I was thinking about leaving, the skies opened, and sheets of rain fell from the sky. I did have an umbrella, but I hate negotiating puddles and wading through water that had been tinted grayish brown by unfathomable things. It was still pouring when I finally decided to leave, even though weather.com had promised me to expect dry conditions over the next six hours.

The rain subsided when I emerged from the subway and arrived at the Upper East Side. Throughout the rest of the afternoon, clouds and sun competed for celestial real estate. Although it was still pouring, I could see patches of clear blue and rays of light all around. It made for a very strange walk to the Met.

I was long overdue for a visit to this venerable institution of art. When I arrived, I paid a dollar for my ticket and was handed a slip of paper and a sticker with the museum’s logo and today’s date. I glared at the sticker and begrudgingly stuck it on the front of my dress. (The Met has stopped giving out its little colored buttons, and my chance to collect all the colors has disappeared forever.)

I grabbed a map out of habit, but I have been to the Met enough times to have seen most of its permanent collection at least once. I aimlessly wandered, starting from the Costume Institute’s latest exhibition called “Punk: Chaos to Couture.” There were some interesting Vivienne Westwood t-shirts, a black dress held together by safety pins, and voluminous evening gowns made from painted pieces of fabric. Next, I walked into the European gallery and scanned the Impressionist paintings, which then melded into the modern wing. Somehow, I managed to end up at the Arms & Armory section, where they had life-size suits of armor mounted on fake horses in a sun-filled room.

After an hour and a half, I was ready to go, so I headed to my next destination: an Eric Kayser bakery. Yes, it’s the same bakery that fed me multiple breakfasts and lunches while I was in Paris. A couple of days ago, I was feeling some wanderlust and wished I could somehow find a way to go back to France. (Do you call it homesickness? I don’t think that’s quite the right word – Paris was never an actual home, home.) If hopping on a plane wasn’t a feasible option, finding a fresh baguette would have to be the next best thing. The walk took 15 minutes. The bakery was just as busy as its French counterpart. The food was good, but there’s nothing quite like getting bread that is still warm from the oven.

I like walking. It makes you pay more attention to the people walking their dogs and babies, the toursits with their bulky cameras and shopping bags from the gift store. You begin to appreciate sidewalks and how long (or short) a single block stretches. In a car, you’re only waiting until you find the right place to turn. And subways? There’s some great people watching, but the windows offer nothing but darkness.

Fun Facts From Work

 

• The Netherlands is below sea level.
• The Semantic Web – it’s a thing.
• Some Starbucks locations now serve beer and wine.
• There is a prominent sociologist named Walter Reckless. He wrote about juvenile delinquency.
• Margaret Wise Brown, author of such classics as Goodnight Moon, had a number of tumultuous love affairs, including one with Michael Strange.
• The Pennsylvania system was a penal system based on the premise that solitary confinement fostered repentance and encouraged criminals to reform their ways. Prisoners were kept in isolation for their entire sentences, which did not always work out so well.
• Baby rabbits are called kittens.
• I kind of, maybe, perhaps have an inkling about the intricacies of the eurozone crisis.

 

Where Does It All Go?

We have landfills for garbage, and they are astonishing in their magnitude.  Mountains of waste. Never ending seas of debris. The manifestation of all that is unwanted. It sits. It rots. It takes up space and does nothing. Garbage is a scourge because it is volume with no purpose. We like to pretend that it does not exist. We push it piles in far away places. We hide it in holes deep beneath the earth.

What if words had that kind of substance? What if thoughts in the form of letters and symbols had the same kind of bulk? Where would we put it all? What would the environmentalists say if local wildlife were pushed away for the sake of words?

In some sense, this has already happened. We have books. Most people will never read every book in their local libraries. Just imagine all the world’s libraries put together and those millions of copies that are printed every day.  Then consider the different translations of a text.  Add the newspapers, the pamphlets, the travel brochures, and junk mail. Now, think about all the school assignments you’ve written in your lifetime and multiply that amount by the number of schoolchildren in the world. Sprinkle in the handwritten birthday cards, the receipts to McDonald’s stuffed in jean pockets, shopping lists – the detritus of everyday life.

People write all the time  Every moment, more words are spilling out of our pens and computer keyboards. This blog entry alone will send a few hundred words into the universe. Even if they are not read, they will sit in the plane of cyberspace.  If words had their own tangibility, we’d be drowning in them.  They would swallow continents.

Sometimes, it seems so wasteful that the world is bursting with words, thoughts made coherent and given form  There is too much. There is too much to read, to comprehend, to process. The amount that the human brain can produce can overwhelm and smother.  You can swim in an ocean of syllables, but you’ll never really be able to see it all. Audiences are too small. Eventually, they  too will disappear and all those unsold paperbacks will sit in a recycling bin, or a landfill, if they’re unlucky.

It strikes me as strange that the books I read and the shows on TV will lose their relevance.  Think back fifty years ago.  There were plenty of New York Times Bestsellers, I’m sure, but I am also sure that I’ve never heard most of them. Yet while there is no way to guarantee an audience for the phrases we string together, all the text that surrounds us still waits in patient anticipation to be comprehended. And with the advent of computers, cyberspace is the ultimate waiting room. Words,  it seems, do not have to go anywhere.

Finals Week

1. Pack a bag with study essentials, such as dense texts written by long-gone thinkers, headphones, laptop charger, etc.  Take said bag with you to the library, which you haven’t set foot in all quarter.  At the library, feel like a college student having a quintessential college experience.

2. Open a blank word document.  Write name, professor, class, date, and “Title” where a cool, catchy one-liner will summarize your masterpiece of a paper.  Decide this is a good progress and open Facebook.

3. Catch up with old high school friends.  Hey, you haven’t seen them in a while.  You might as well.

4. Read New York Times articles and click around on NPR.  Current events are important.

5. Consider blogging.  Actually blog.  Realize that blogging takes thinking too.  Close web browser.

6. Open web browser again to check email.  Just in case.

7. Plug in headphones to drown out dead silence/friend’s conversation/heavy breathing of anonymous person sharing your table.  Put playlist on shuffle and rediscover music collection.  A surprise with every listen!

8. Read Anna Karenina.  Feel accomplished because reading a Russian novel that can bludgeon hippos to death cannot possibly be form a procrastination.

9. Think of a Brilliant Idea.  Spend the next half hour perfecting a paragraph by including the important tenants of the Brilliant Idea.  Decide that there is productivity in anonymity.  Find value in your expensive college education because you understand the Big Ideas.  Repeat sporadically over the course of five hours.

10. Wonder why you decided to attend the University of Chicago.  Wonder why your reading period is only two days.

11. Look up in alarm as a crowd of adults snap pictures of the library and exclaim loudly about insignificant things.  Glare angrily.  Remember that it is Alumni Weekend.  Remember that it is also Finals Week and glare even more intensely.

12. Quick: yogurt or potato chips.  Which one is the better snack food?

13. Half-ass a conclusion.  Reread paper and proofread.  See that it is not up to standard and close laptop in resignation.  Reread it again later and decide it’s fine.  You would rather watch Disney movies for the rest of the day anyway.

14. Wake up too late the next morning and spend two hours at breakfast anyway.  Begin work by deciding how to color code your math notes.  Call it an afternoon well-spent when you’ve finally made your decision.

15. Freak out because your math exam is tomorrow, and you know nothing.  Memorize theorems.  Flip through papers desperately.

16. Remember that math exam is actually not tomorrow.  You’ve lost track of the days because time really doesn’t seem to work normally under these conditions.

17. Revel in newly found free time.  Feel that anything is possible and act responsibly by taking advantage of the day and going to the museum instead of reviewing notes.

18. Around midnight, stop thinking, not because you’re tired, but because your brain has actually stopped reacting to the outside world.  Finals Week has become a state of mind.

19. On some specified day, print and turn in paper/write email/take math exam/conduct inventory of writing utensils afterward/curse yourself for forgetting the answer to supposedly easy question/tell yourself to stop thinking about the paper or test/feel vague sense of relief that it’s over.

20. After two hours, forget everything that has happened and carry on with life as if the last week were no big deal.  Later, describe the time to your friends and family as “all right” and “not too bad”.

Never Say Never

There was a moment in time when I convinced myself that I would never be able to have a blog.  I have a tendency to start projects that sound fantastically fun, but after a few days pass, the excitement dies down and I forget all about it.  If I were a more motivated person, I’d probably have a collection of knitted scarves in my closet and become an avid stamp collector.  Instead, most of my ideas go through their lifespans in my mind.  I’ve made lists, so I could perhaps go back to these ideas someday.  I have yet to do that and the list keeps growing.

Taking advantage of a sudden need to do some self-improvement, I actually took an idea that came into my mind and executed it.  The result is what you see here, an ordinary blog that the vast majority of the world will never know see.  There is nothing particularly interesting or insightful.  In my mind, this is literally a blog about nothing.  I guess in some ways, it is a glimpse inside my head although there isn’t anything here that I wouldn’t explain to you in person.

In some ways, this is a self-preservation thing.  There are a billion things that I would like to write down, so I won’t lose track of it in the future.  It’s impossible to write down everything that goes through my head and I wouldn’t want to anyway.  Still, I’ll write because at least I can make a dent, and besides, I’m having fun with this.