Always an alternate, never a juror

Why, yes, I can be the world's biggest whinerbaby at times. To my credit, I realised this even as I was writing up last night's entry. (To my discredit, I wrote and posted it anyway. Sue me.) So just in case those of you from countries where the duties of a citizen include a year or more in the armed forces were lining up to smack me upside the head, I'm here to let you know it isn't necessary. Nevertheless, you'll wish to skip the next several minutes of whingeing.

In the end, it was only as sucky as I thought it would be and no more so. I made it to the Forest Park station in an hour-and-a-half, which was less than I'd budgeted. Unfortunately, the bus to the courthouse was twenty minutes late, so that left me with more than a half hour to kill in an unheated terminal. I tried my best to think about the poor zhlubs who have to do that every day and stop feeling sorry for my privileged ass.

The map gives you an idea how badly sited the courthouse is--at the end of a long drive with no amenities for a half-mile--but it doesn't prepare you for the forlornness of that stretch of industrial road. The court seems to be tucked behind a granite works and a parking lot for defunct school busses. As for the building itself, it's every bit as stultifying institutional as you'd expect. Not only does the jury room lack the soaring views of the Daley Center, it lacks views of any kind, being a windowless lounge tucked into the basement. For all that, it wasn't that uncomfortable. I was pleasantly surprised that the number of douchebags yelling into their cellphones was limited to two--and almost unheard of ratio in this sick modern age.

What I really couldn't understand about the whole process, however, was the timing. The clerk explained to us that it's not until 11 a.m. that they even know if they need any juries, and that no trials begin before 1 p.m. So then why the hell does my summons say "8:30 a.m."? 8:30 is the time the doors open, so of course I arrived to find a massive line. At least the guard who searched was a really friendly lady who didn't get the least bent out of shape to find, of all things, two dead batteries in my pocket even after we'd been told like twenty times to take everything out of our pockets.

(After we were through, a fellow juror remarked that he hoped they were at least as thorough with the perps as with the jurors. It did occur to me on the way down that one of the pleasures of visiting a courthouse is that everyone gets treated like a potential offender. Very levelling places, they are.)

That one bright side to being assigned Maywood, according to the clerk, is that the trials there rarely take longer than a day. In fact, most are apparently over in less than two hours. So at least the awful trek out there is not one you'll have to make more than once. As it turned out, there were no jury trials at all there that day. Of the three candidates, one ended in a settlement, one became a bench trial, and one became a full-blown criminal trial to be conducted at a later date in a different location.

After we were dismissed, I briefly considered attempting to cadge a ride from someone (particularly the smokin' hot black-bearded baby bear). One thing I knew was that I wasn't standing another goddamn half hour in the freezing cold waiting for a Pace bus that might or might not show up, so I walked the couple miles back to the terminal. Besides, it gave me a chance to better acquaint myself with the lovely burg of Maywood (from the Celto-Saxon for "ass end of nowhere"); I can now state with some authority that it has all the charm of a severed limb.

This isn't to say that there were no compensations to the experience, but those are best left to a punchier subsequent post.

Eight Reasons Why Today Really Did Not Suck Much

1. Getting out early. For those of you keeping score, that's four summons, two of which were cancelled before I even reached the building, and none of which has even resulted in reaching the selection stage, much less enpanelment. Huzzah!
2. Altenheim. Part of the reason I was willing to walk back from the courthouse is that I was interested in getting a more leisurely look at Concordia Cemetery (a rather impressive field of obelisks) and the odd compound located on its east side. At first glance, it reminded me of nothing so much as a turn-of-the-century Catholic high school, but the picnic shelter and ornate front gate made me wonder if it could be a municipal park with a large community centre and conspicuous lack of signage. Actually, it's an old folks' home[*], a relic from the quaint era when siting these next to graveyards was considered more convenient than morbid. Sadly, there's no photo of the awesomely decrepit, Frankensteinesquely modified, shuttered building out back, which is so totally begging to be the locus of some Unknown Armies encountre.
3. Even the coldest wind can only blow one way at a time! The whole way from the courthouse to the main drag, I was cursing Odysseus' negligence. But because the route from court to terminal is almost a full circuit, I soon had the wind at my back and the sun over my shoulder. Go me!
4. It's not the ice, it's the fluidity. Yesterday's Celsius high, 11 (51℉), is today's Fahrenheit high.[**] This means, of course, that yesterday's puddles are today's ice rinks. But, as we all know, it isn't ice that's slippery, it's the thin layer of water on top that forms from the friction of your step. The colder it is, the less ice melts. So despite the fact that almost no one had salted, walking on the ice wasn't really any more hazardous than walking through a half-inch of powder.
5. Daddy's little boy. Round about Sheridan, a businessman sat his puffy-coated toddler son into the seat next to him. He then proceeded to pull a pink plastic package from his briefcase and unwrap it. The boy asked him something and the man replied, "That's daddy's newspaper." Next I glanced over, the toddler was holding the front page at the length of his tiny arms and studying it assiduously as his father glumly perused his Blackberry. I thought I'd about hit cute overload when the kid turned the paper over to study the front page's lower half. That alone made the entire commute downtown worthwhile.
6. A cup of Gemütlichkeit. The Bratkartoffeln and the Currywurst, I was willing to eat standing. But when it came to the Quarkkeulchen, I decided to commandeer one end of an empty table. Later on, after a baby-faced Pinoy had wordlessly taken a seat, I saw a young couple casting about for real estate. "I can move down and you can sit over here," I offered, and went back to eating in the best German ignore-thy-neighbour style. But no one had taught our displaced Californians the rules, and soon Ian, Michelle, the Pinoy, and I were discoursing animatedly about winter storms, political corruption, catching mutant fish in Lake Michigan, and everything else that makes this city great. Have fun in town, kids, and for god's sake don't break anything!
7. Christkindlkitsch. Yes, it's too much to pay for some silly gee-gaw my mother will only take out once a year, if that. But it exists at such a powerful nexus of restrained kitsch, thoughtful craftsmanship, and ethnic pseudo-nostalgia. Marry that to an affable salesman with a gonz doll lieba Austrian accent who instantly remembered me and was willing to spend all afternoon answering every question and demonstrating every item, and how could I not succumb?
8. Marzipan. Gnug gsagt, gell?

[*] Wow, dig the Web 1.0-ness of that garish website!
[**] For the Celsius equivalent, input the Fahrenheit into your calculator and hit the "+/-" key.)

आज का मुख्य समाचार

बग़दाद में बुश पर चले जूते
baghdaad meM bush par chale joote
Baghdad in Bush at gone shoes

1. पर par has several possible English translations including "at", "on", and "over".
2. The basic meaning of चलना chalnaa is "move, go", but in reference to weapons it means "be discharged" (guns) or "be brandished" (swords). I'm not sure which class of deadly objects a shoe is more akin to.
3. जूते joote is plural; the singular जूता jootaa can mean both "a single shoe" and "a single pair of shoes". Even though the shoes involved belonged to a single pair, the use of plural emphasises that they were deployed separately. Note that the intransitive perfective participle चले agrees with its subject in number and gender.
4. In English, the use of the participle without any sort of auxiliary would be ungrammatical outside of "headline style", but the above represents an ordinary full sentence in Hindi.
5. Hindi is to some degree a topic-prominent language. Moving the subject, जूते, to final position marks it as the rheme (i.e. the most important new information in the clause) and also stresses its indefiniteness, i.e. these shoes are not ones which have been discussed already. (Hindi lacks an equivalent of the definite article the.)