Diving

Today, my roommate and I drove past a dumpster. A beautiful ray of light danced off the edge of a treasure leaning up against it. "Probably nothing..." I thought to myself, but three blocks later, I couldn't get it out of my head.

"Aly!" I eventually blurted out, "On the way home, we have got to take this exact same route and stop by that dumpster we just passed!" She looked at me like I was crazy, but agreed to it.

An hour later, the treasure was still there- a message board in a opening frame with lock and key. There a few others like it, but I choose one and promptly decided it would become my new method for storing jewelry- my necklaces would dangle from it in an oh-so organized manner sometime in the near future...

Just as I'm hauling it back to the car, I hear shouting from down the street. A short little man with big curly hair and a hawaiian shirt walks up. He's yelling and laughing all at the same time. He's obviously a tad crazy. Picture Sean Penn in Sweet and Lowdown...

"Girl, I just got off the bus to come pick up those boards, and here you are! Imagine that! You know how much you could get for these boards? Sure! You could make some dough offa these. These are real aluminum. Sure! You could earn a pretty penny off a these."

"Uhm. Well, I just forced my roommate to take the long way home so I could come back and get this, so..."

"Ah. That's alright girl. You go ahead and take that board."

Now I feel like a jerk. After all, the guy just wasted a bus ride for the boards. Plus, he could apparently make a lot of money off of it... "No, it's okay, you can have it."

"Yeah? These probably worth 'round four bucks each."

My eyes narrow. Seriously? Four dollars? "Actually, I'm going to take this, okay?" And with that I grab the board. I try to be nice, however, and point out the other cool stuff in the dumpster- like a great old handpainted plywood sign, resembling an old movie poster.

"Nah," the guy says, "thats a piece a junk. Prolly real heavy. Now looka this! This is prolly worth a lot!" His eyes widen as he pulls out a piece of wood with four wheels attached to the bottom. "Oh yeah, these wheels prolly worth ten bucks each," he says as slaps one and watches it spin. Suddenly he looks up at me- "Hey, you gotta boyfriend?"

"Yes!" I immediately declare (total lie).

"Ah, thats too bad. You should ditch him and go out with me. We could have fun. We could go dig through dumpsters together and stuff. That would be fun..."

I laugh, tell him thanks for the sign, and wander back to the car.

On second thought, though, I'm having a hard time finding the downside of one of my favorite activities, dumpster diving, on a date with a Sean Penn look-alike.

Grassy

Segway

My roommate and I rode our bikes downtown to see a concert at Millennium Park. It was a pretty popular show, it was free, and it was a nice day out, so what do you expect but lots of people riding their bikes?

We arrive and the bike racks are minimal, and those that are around are literally stuffed full already. But, if you know Millennium Park, you'd agree that there are tons of fences around to which one could lock his or her bike. 

Once we find a spot on the fence, we begin to walk away when we hear a 'swish' and a 'swooosh'- a breeze blows through the trees- there's a flash of yellow from behind...

Whoa! Is it a superhero? No. It's a segway security guard coasting to a stop on the sidewalk and hovering over us with a goofy grin on his face.. 

"Hey," I say as the nerd balances on his behemoth piece of machinery. The segway elevates him, making him a few feet taller than me, but he seems to believe this point of view is simply part of his genes. He obviously thinks he's better than everyone he's zoomed by throughout the day and the giant rubber wheels on his transportation-contraption are an extension of... well, whatever other giant things he is lacking. As he stares down at us, he adjusts his belt around his big belly and begins to pull a pad of paper out from his pocket.

"Uh. What are you doing?" I ask. 

"I'm about to write you a ticket," the jerkface says.

"Uh. For what?"

"Locking your bikes to this fence."

We proceed to argue a little... I tell him that this stupid park should be more accommodating to bikers and at least post a sign on the fence if this is the rule. He proceeds to tell us the ticket would cost us $300. I say this is stupid. He proceeds to say he was just kidding- our lock would just be cut and the bikes would go to city lost and found if we didn't move them. I say this is also stupid. He proceeds to tell us we should get a segway, because they're just plain better than a bike. I proceed to ask him where he would lock up his segway if he had to. He proceeds to claim he never gets off his segway. I proceed to punch him in the face... not really, though.

In the end, the guy won. We shoved our bikes in somewhere else and he scooted around on a major power trip. So it would seem that today I got bossed around by the most disrespected form of authority the United States has ever known- a security guard on a segway.

Typical

(Over-flow of 'i love my kitty pictures' coming at you. Brace yourself if you mind gush.)

My kitties are pretty typical...

Boy kitty is drunk most of the time.

Girl Kitty is into turn-of-the-century feminine literature.

Boy Kitty is always leaving the toilet seat up.

Girl Kitty is always messing around with someone else's balls.

But in the end, they really love each other.

Pot

I was riding my bike West on North Avenue today when a car pulled up next to me. The passenger, an older woman with a middle-eastern accent, leaned out her window and proclaimed "We got pot!?" 

I looked at her a little befuttled and acted as though I didn't realize she was talking to me. 

But she insisted again- "We got pot!?"

"No thanks," I said, beginning to wonder to myself  'geez, do I look like such a huge pothead that people are now soliciting me while driving?' Thoughts started simmering in my mind, like 'shoot, I should probably take off this stupid floppy hat I decided to wear today' and 'phew, thank goodness I just returned those Birkenstock sandals, because those would be a dead giveaway.'

"No, no," the driver leaned forward, pushing the woman passenger aside, who was presumably her her mother, "Wicker Park? We're looking for Wicker Park..."

"Yis! Yis! Wigot Pot," declared the mother.

Ah! And with that, I pointed them straight ahead. 

Swat

Today, I was sitting at the local organic bakery up the street from where I live. It tends to be a busy place, and the crowd ranges from neighborhood hipsters, to, well, uh.... neighborhood hip(sterish) families.

As I sit on the patio, enjoying an ice tea and cookie on this lovely summer's day, I spy a massive police SUV pull up and illegally park in front of the little bakery. Out march two giant men in green army fatigues with bullet proof vests and other assorted and intense looking armor.

"Whoa. The SWAT!" mutters some nerd sitting behind me.

Indeed it was the SWAT. What could they want? Is there a bomb inside the bakery? Should I grab my cookie, hop over the fence, and flee as fast as I can? No. Probably wouldn't impress the cute guy sitting in front of me by doing that...

Shortly thereafter, one SWAT member emerges. He is not covered in dust, clutching a fistfull of detached wires. He is, however, carrying a little baggie with a chocolate chip cookie inside. He's swinging it back and forth as he heads towards his vehicle- happy as a little kid! The second SWAT member then steps out, holding a tiny coffee cup, full of what I like to imagine was a cappuccino. 

Ah! So this is the sustenance needed to fuel the men who I picture rolling around in the dirty underbelly of Chicago, firing massive uzis at terrorists, and saving the world, every, single, day.

Self Help

The ride home on the bus tonight seemed particularly accentuated with people studying self-help books. And much like a dog tends to look like it's master (or vice versa) the self-help books tended to reflect their reader. 

The first person I noticed was a pallid and frail looking woman crouched over her book: 

Your Guide to Vitamins

I moseyed down the aisle and grabbed a seat next to a nerdy looking boy with wire framed gasses and a khaki polo neatly tucked into a pair of khaki pants. His book of choice:

Sex, Love, and Courage (The two chapters I noted him flipping through were Cougars and Office Romances.)

As I was sitting and staring at my seat-mates book, an overweight woman arrived at her stop. Low and behold, as she arose and passed by me, the smell of pizza.. or chicken... or chicken on a pizza... or chicken covered in pizza sauce... wafted towards me from a brown paper bag she was carrying. And what else was in her hands but a copy of:

When Love Equals Food

So many problems, and so many solutions.

I wonder what my blatantly stereotypical self-help book would be... Probably:

So You Want To Be a Hipster?

Chapter 1: Hair- Beards for Boys, Bangs for Girls

Chapter 2: American Apparel is Your Friend

Etcetra Etcetra...

Cousins

Him

So there we were, my friend and  I, sitting in the grass near the pond in Humboldt Park. We get together occasionally to do a tarot card reading, which usually just means we have a bit of a therapy session and talk in depth about what's going on in our lives, our little problems, and how we can improve things.

The problem today is the same problem that seems to consistently emerge in most girls' lives- boys. My current dilemma is boys who make me really happy, boys who are super attractive, boys who are wonderful in so many ways, but boys who might not be quite right for me. So do I settle for someone just because he's so nearly close to being Him? (Not him as in God, just Him as in the person in my life who's name gets to be emphasized because I feel a capitalization or a punctuation or an italicization in my stomach when I hear it.)

"No!" says my friend. And I agree. So the only solution is to keep looking. "You have to picture him, then. You have to manifest him into your life," she says. Okay then! "Tell me who he is. Picture him and tell me exactly what he looks like."

"Well...." I close my eyes and he appears in the dark like lines on an etch-a-sketch. "There's this really dashing smile. It indicates his sense of humor, I suppose. It means he's lighthearted. And laidback. There are these soulful eyes. I could look into them and know what he's thinking, and when he's thinking about me his eyes are stormy and passionate. He's talented. He's happy.. He's interesting... He's unique...." I start to go off on a tangent and my friend drives me back onto course- "Stop," she says. "Don't tell me about his personality, just see him physically and tell me what he looks like."

(And anyone who knows me, knows what's coming next...) "He's got this really wicked beard, " I say.

Then I open my eyes...

Down the little pebbled park path comes a  beautiful bearded man out for a stroll with his pet dog. The sun beats down on him. He's all a-glow. My eyes widen... "Oh wow. Oh boy. Oh geez." I sit there stunned, realizing that if there was ever a moment in which a coincidence could be a bit more than simply a coincidence, this might be that moment.  Yet I can hardly manage to push out a meager smile as he meanders by.

So it would seem that today the universe created the perfect man instantaneously upon my request and plopped him down directly in front of me. And I let him stroll down the path, into the trees, until I couldn't see him anymore.