Sunday Edition: Cocktails

Yesterday involved more apartment hunting, and produced unsuitable results ranging from "Lovely place that's a bit too far north" to "Filth-hole with cat and ferret piss inhabited by a freaky meth-addict".

To recover, Sunday thus far has been more about drinking in the afternoon and not putting on pants:

How are your Sundays?

"In other news, cheese is still delicious...
But what does it matter, when we can never know the future?"

That Summertime

This afternoon is dull, and this is what I came across:

What I'm going to call - the very long book list.

So here are the rules: bold what you have read, italicize what you started but couldn’t finish, and strike through what you couldn’t stand.

1984
The Aeneid
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
American Gods
Anansi Boys
Angela’s Ashes : A Memoir
Angels & Demons
Anna Karenina
Atlas Shrugged
Beloved
The Blind Assassin
Brave New World
The Brothers Karamazov
The Canterbury Tales
Catch-22
The Catcher in the Rye
A Clockwork Orange
Cloud Atlas
Collapse : How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
A Confederacy of Dunces
The Confusion
The Corrections
The Count of Monte Cristo
Crime and Punishment
Cryptonomicon
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time
David Copperfield
Don Quixote
Dracula
Dubliners
Dune
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
Emma
Foucault’s Pendulum
The Fountainhead
Frankenstein
Freakonomics : A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything
The God of Small Things
The Grapes of Wrath
Gravity’s Rainbow
Great Expectations
Gulliver’s Travels
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
The Historian : A Novel
The Hobbit
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
The Iliad
In Cold Blood : A True Account of a Multiple Murder and its Consequences
The Inferno
Jane Eyre
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
The Kite Runner
Les Misérables
Life of Pi : A Novel
Lolita
Love in the Time of Cholera
Madame Bovary
Mansfield Park
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlemarch
Middlesex
The Mists of Avalon
Moby Dick
Mrs. Dalloway
The Name of the Rose
Neverwhere
Northanger Abbey
The Odyssey
Oliver Twist
On the Road
The Once and Future King
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Oryx and Crake : A Novel
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
Persuasion
The Picture of Dorian Gray
The Poisonwood Bible : A Novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Pride and Prejudice
The Prince
Quicksilver
Reading Lolita in Tehran : A Memoir in Books
The Satanic Verses
The Scarlet Letter
Sense and Sensibility
A Short History of Nearly Everything
The Silmarillion
Slaughterhouse-five
The Sound and the Fury
The Tale of Two Cities
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
The Three Musketeers
The Time Traveler’s Wife
To the Lighthouse
Treasure Island
Ulysses
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Vanity Fair
War and Peace
Watership Down
White Teeth
Wicked : The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West
Wuthering Heights
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : An Inquiry Into Values

And I'm going to follow with ten books that, I think, should have made the list:

1.) The Idiot
2.) The Red and the Black
3.) The Golden Bowl
4.) Bartleby the Scrivener
5.) Discipline and Punish
6.) Cold Comfort Farm
7.) Waiting for Godot
8.) Jerusalem Delivered

9.) Swann's Way
10.) Hamlet

Land of Nod

As the Great Apartment Hunt continues, I find myself spending a great deal of time on Google Maps: eyeballing distances to the Blue Line, trying to remember if that street with the surrealist bar was Divison or Damen.

What's been providing the most glee is seeing, in map-inches, the distance by which my commute will be reduced. Hyde Park = 6 1/2", Ukrainian Village = 3".

Something that will be lost, however, is the invariably entertaining morning chat between J.A. and I, when he is just barely awake and I'm slightly more so. For reasons best known to himself, my getting out of bed in the morning is frightening, so he usually calls to see if I'm okay when I close the bedroom door.

This morning, on the other hand, featured this exchange:

Me : (Returning from shower)
J.A. : Oh, are you okay?
Me : Yes, why?
J.A. : Did I wake you up?
Me : When?
J.A. : Last night. I thought I was kicking you.
Me : No, I didn't wake up. (Pause) But I did dream of the Ukraine

He went back to sleep, and it was then that I remembered a rather involved dream of kidnapping and organized crime syndicates. Connected? Maybe.

A Not-So-Ordered List

1.) J.A. is a lame pseudonym. And "Mr. Right", while entertainingly pun-y, is too schmaltzy by the half. I've been tossing around the idea of dropping the pretense altogether; but I'm sure that as soon as I do, the perfect apt-erudite-entertaining handle will occur to me. And then it's too late.

2.) This made my afternoon. Eleventy times over.

3.) I went to my first baseball game in at least six years with Doctor Aunt, Rock-Star Brother, and J.A. (See! It's a lame pseudonym). J.A. happens to bear the peculiar affliction of causing whichever team he roots for to lose. He's got a tragic story of being crushed by the Oregon Trailblazer's defeat at age 10 or 11, ask him about that sometime. So to counteract this, I'd bought him a White Sox hat for his birthday. It proved ineffectual, but did result in some entertaining heckling from some other fans and vendors. "Get your Ice Cold Beer! White Sox Kryptonite!"

And I ended up feeling that I wasn't so much a Cubs Fan, or even a baseball fan, but a Wrigley Field fan. And that's mostly because the age and stateliness of the place made me want to shout old-timey insults at the players. "Off the field with ye, slobberchops!" or "You hit that ball like a gentlewoman with the vapors, by jiggery!" Obviously I need to work on my old-timey insults.

4.) I'm SO excited for our apartment hunt. And, maddeningly, the newly-placed ads for places available in September are all for neighborhoods I've largely written off. Lincoln Park: Too pricey and full of drunken white people. Ravenswood/Roscoe Village/Rogers Park: Too far north and too boring. Evanston: Too not in Chicago, probably covered in bees, etc. So I'm crossing my fingers and waiting for the northwestern Trinity of Bucktown, Wicker Park, and the Ukranian Village to start appearing.

What's truly exciting about moving, apart from the prospect of leaving Hyde Park and my excessive commute in the dust, is that Chicago has some bitchin' real estate. In New York, my income would probably have me thinking something like "Ooh, I think I can afford to live in a cupboard with both a light and a door!" But out in the Midwest I find myself browsing among apartments with fireplaces, interesting woodwork, and even backyards.

5.) La vie en beau!