In the street

[muckefuck]

Too much stuff I'm letting pile up! (My fault for not having a PDA with internet connectivity on me at all times.) Let's tackle this thematically:

Recent urban encountres

Sitting in the Starbucks in the Uptown Bank building (not my first choice, obviously) talking with my realtor, I spotted what I thought was an old work buddy walking up Broadway. (He distributes needles to addicts in Blood Alley in his spare time, so his presence in the neighbourhood is entirely plausible.) Dignity restrained me from rushing out after him like a loony, but I thought he might toddle by again while I was waiting for the 36 bus. Nope. And no bus neither.

Then a bulky, bearded shape on a bike meandered across the street and sort of eddied to a stop at Lawrence bus stop. I went up to the guy and said, "Did you used to be at U of C?" He had. We reintroduced ourselves. His bag was ajar, revealing some handwritten Han'gul, so I said, "OOH, Korean!" Turns out, it was a flier for an upcoming talk by a former political prisoner at a nearby cafe. He asked me if I could distribute some for him and I said no. Then he said:
"How likely would you be to attend an event held by the Green Party?"
"Not very."
"Democrat? Republican?"
"Agnostic."
"I'm a rabid Chomskyite."
"Isn't the 'rabid' pleonastic?"
"Hey! At least I admit it!"

And admitting it is the first step, boys and girls! So cute, so sweet, and yet a hopeless freak. sigh

********************

Sunday afternoon. Bryn Mawr el stop. As monshu and I exit, there's the usual knot of sketchy types lollygagging about the entrance to the station. One skinny woman jumps in front of my man--presumably because he's smoking and she wants a cig--and starts panhandling him. He brushes her off and charges down the street, so she tries me instead, keeping pace as I try to catch up with monshu. In her idiolect, "no" apparently means "try harder". Finally, I halt and put out my arm to hold her at bay.
"Hey," she says, "I'ma citizen of the U-nited States."
"So what?" I replied, "So am I."
"No you're not!"
"How do you know?"
"I can tell! Yo' not from around here!"

I turned away and she continued after me.
"Stop following me!"
"Followin' you? Why would I want to follow yo' ugly white ass? I'm goin' this way."
"Then stop talking to me."
"You stop talkin' to me! [incoherent screamed invective]"

When I caught up to monshu, he said, "See, that's why I don't like to get out at the Bryn Mawr stop." He then wondered if such an aggressive panhandling style ever paid off. I opined: "There are some con artists, but, in general, I don't think people panhandle because they're good at it. I think they do it because they don't know how to do anything else."

She was proof.

Comments

[mollpeartree.livejournal.com]

I think sometimes the idea is to get you to pay them to go away. It probably works on tourists.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

I would think tourists would be too terrified by the whole encountre to even consider reaching for their wallets. Weren't they warned never to take them out in the city anyway?

[mollpeartree.livejournal.com]

Who is telling tourists not to take their wallets out in the City of Chicago, and has the Chamber of Commerce been notified?!

[prilicla.livejournal.com]

talking with my realtor
So have you seen anything that looks interesting yet?

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

Should I start a new journal just for discussing my house search? It would be like "A House Story" on TLC, only with more scatological comments.

[prilicla.livejournal.com]

Hey, if you want to write it, I promise I'll read it just as obsessively as your regular journal. You can think of it as a public service--periodically, lhn and I think about looking for a bigger place, and you can help remind us what an enormous pain it would be.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

Do y'all really have any space issues that couldn't be solved with off-site storage?

Thing is, it hasn't been a pain yet. The most painful thing has been overcoming my own resistance to getting started and you two are already over that.

[lhn.livejournal.com]

Off-site storage means effectively inaccessible most of the time. While we of course have plenty of rarely-used crap, the major motivator for more space is that the wallspace for bookcases is finite. (We just managed to find the space for two new ones, and depending on how desperate we get there are other options, but there are limits, and the publishers aren't going to give us decent e-books as a default option this decade.) The Books Must Be Accessible. (And I'd like the comics to be more accessible than they currently are under the bed, not less)

(Ideally, without completely lining every wall with bookcases from floor to ceiling. We like having some other furniture and art and such. While we don't have a huge amount of art, we're already short on space to display it.)

Beyond that, it'd be nice to have another few rooms, or larger ones. I wouldn't mind moving the exercise equipment out of the bedroom and living room, for example. (Though I don't even know if the weight machine could be moved without destroying it, which gets back to "enormous pain" above.) It'd be nice to have a computer room that wasn't a guest room, or vice versa. Or, now that my brother has kids (well, kid-and-a-quarter or so right now) it would be good to have someplace to put the kids when they visit other than the living room.

Someplace to barbecue also wouldn't be bad. (I keep wanting to have some sort of party, but during the winter it's a pain for the pub trans people to get to OP, and a barbecue is de rigueur for all the warm-weather holidays.)

It'd also be nice not to have to worry about whether we're bothering the neighbors with noise. (Not that we've had any complaints, but then I don't watch movies at in surround sound at the volume I'd prefer as late as I'd like to. :-) ) But we like where we're living, and a freestanding house in northwest Oak Park isn't something we'd be willing to make the tradeoffs to afford, assuming it could be managed at all. (I don't know where prices have gotten to recently.)

So yeah, we could use more space, in a wish list sort of way. (And prilicla assures me that we need to deal with the growing mass of Stuff in the closets in a somewhat more imminent way.) But inertia is a mighty and powerful force for such as we, and ever-rising prices for anything we might want to buy is another helpful deterrent. Barring a lottery win or a major change in priorities (internal or externally enforced) I doubt we'll be in the market any time soon.

[(Anonymous)]

There's always the "rolling rack" plan: outfit a second row of bookcases in front of the ones you have now, on rails and wheels. You would lose one shelf worth of space in order to keep the row behind accessible, you may constantly be moving shelves back and forth, and it might be kinda expensive, but it's an option.

- Economist