Megan Stielstra's Blog

Christopher needed new shoes so we went to Michigan Avenue, which was, of course, packed with a gazillion people saying silly things, so we spent the day writing down all the good dialogue overheard in stores. Example: in H&M, one girl was looking at a long flowery dress and her friend said, “That’s nice. I mean, it’s a little Mary-Kate, if you know what I mean” (and people! I DID KNOW WHAT SHE MEANT!). Anyhow, in the car on the way home, Christopher said, “I'm going to blog about all of this stuff, which brings my list up to thirty-EIGHT.”

I know a challenge when I hear it.

So, I came home and read back over everyone’s wonderful suggestions of things I can blog about in order to beat my husband in the great blog race we’re having in my head (because he doesn’t even have a blog). So anyhow, thanks for your suggestions.

From Kim:

1) How lovely your friends are.

Last week I was really stressed out and Amanda made me hot chocolate from scratch. I sat on her kitchen floor and she stood at the oven, bringing chocolate chips and milk to a slow boil, stirring continually with the whisk and listening to me bitch.

Tuesday I’m going to San Fransisco to speak at this and I’ll be staying with Dia. Every week for the past two months she’s sent an email saying, I CAN’T WAIT TO SEE YOU COME NOW.

Jeff and I were somewhere very swanky and highly intellectual, and I was supposed to be acting very swanky and highly intellectual, and sometimes in those moments I wonder how the hell I got here. “I feel like a fraud,” I whispered, and he whispered back, “You feel like a frog?” and I started to say, “I’m not a FROG!” but what I said instead was “I’m not a FRAUD!” and as I said it I realized I wasn’t.

I got a telephone call from the guy at the video store saying, “Hello, there’s a girl here named Kat who says she’s your roommate, is she authorized to use your account?” I said yes, and he said, “Okay—wait, hold on (pause) She says to ask if you need anything from the video store. And—hang on—(pause) she says she’s got two bottles of wine and stuff to make soup so you don’t need to get anything for dinner and—(pause) if you’re free later there’s a show at the Empty Bottle so think about it and she’ll be home in ten minutes.”

There’s so many more things I could say here, about the lovely friends I’m lucky enough to have, I could go on for pages, for novels, for libraries about their loveliness, especially the loveliest of all my lovely friends, the lovely friend I married, who—as I sit here typing this—is out doing work for Rebuilding Together and I’m thinking about how much I admire him, how being with him makes me want to be a better person.

2) How your blog can beat up Christopher's blog.

I’m going to bookmark this until he gets his blog going. You know. Size up the competition before I launch my attack.

From Byron:

1) “ … and, totallllly about the vulnerability thing with blog vs. journal.”

If Jeff were here, he’d tell you this story (I’ve heard him tell this story about a thousand times, and even though I don’t exactly remember it, I do have the journal entry to prove his words): “When Megan and I were in grad school, we’d take the train back to Wicker Park after class. We’d always be really worked up and excited from talking about stories for four hours straight, so we’d get on the el and write in our journals all the way home. So one time, the train was really crowded and there were all these nuns—like, real nuns in black robes with the habits or whatever those things are called that nuns wear on their heads—and I looked up and notice that one of them is reading over Megan’s shoulder as she’s writing in her journal! So I started reading over Megan’s other shoulder and she’s writing something with lots of nasty language or whatever, something not very appropriate for nuns, and the nun has this horrible shocked expression on her face and Megan—without even picking the pen up from the page—writes: ‘There is a nun reading over my shoulder as I write this! A fucking Nun is reading my journal! How DARE she! How RUDE!’ The nun walks away in a huff, and I said, ‘Megan, how could you do that?’ and she said, ‘It’s my JOURNAL.’”

Whenever I hear him tell that story I think two things: 1) I was such an asshole when I was twenty but 2) in this particular instance, I was a right. My journal is just for me, and I very purposefully do NOT invite readers into it, be those readers nuns on a train, or my friends, or husband, whoever. It’s a place for me to try things out and not worry what others think, not censor myself, not check myself by thinking, “Huh. I wonder what so and so will think? Will they think I’m a bad writer or a bad person, I just want them to like me!” But the blog? The blog has a big ol’ welcome mat at the door, and I’m standing here June Cleaver-style with a martini and a smile. “Hi there! Come on in, folks! Have a seat! How was your day? You wanna see the new shoes I bought this afternoon?” etc.

I’m more cautious here. This probably isn’t the place where I’d tell off a nun.

Unless she did something really bad.

From Mary:

1) Your favorite spot in the world.

The lake behind my dad’s house in Chelsea, where Christopher proposed. The pier off Peterson Avenue in Roger’s Park, where he first kissed me. The Charles Bridge, Kavarna Meduza and Ungeldt in Prague, and Hruba Skala in Czesky Raj. The stool against the far wall in Webster Wine Bar during 2nd Story. The back booth at the Bongo Room in Wicker Park, where I’ve eaten lunch every Sunday for nearly a decade with some truly fantastic girls. The semi-circle in a Story Workshop class, where I can make something out of a daydream. Danny’s, Avec and the Montrose Dog Beach. It WAS Erbus Orbus on North Avenue—I guess I’m showing my age here, ‘cause that place has been gone forever. I MISS it, it was ideal, all hours of the night with a cup of coffee and a journal, people-watching, reading, growing up. Nowadays it’s at the laptop, still with coffee, upstairs at the Bougeois Pig on Fullerton. At the laptop, with coffee, in the backroom at Metropolis on Granville. At the laptop, with coffee, upstairs at Myopic Books on Milwaukee. Myopic Books on Milwaukee, and Shakespeare & Company in Paris, and Boboli Gardens in Florence and Guell Park in Barcelona and Flipnotics in Austin but, mostly, my favorite place in all this world is Macondo.

2) Your greatest accomplishment:

My marriage.

3) Your favorite things about Chicago:

The people. The diversity, the ingenuity, all the benefits of a big city but still the Midwestern kindness and ease of character I grew up with in Michigan. I like the opportunity—the DIY mentality, the fact that it’s not as expensive as New York or California so I’m not just working to pay the bills, not just living from paycheck to paycheck. I can live comfortably on my salary. I have time to write. I can explore.

I answered the ‘What’s your favorite spot in the world’ question first, and I’m happy to see that most of the places on that list are in Chicago. My home.

4) The best advice you've received.

From a former teacher of mine, Patty: “Shut up and write.”

5) What gives you a feeling of peace.

When Christopher and I both have a morning off, and we take Mojo for a walk in Humboldt Park. It’s so beautiful there, all windy paths and nature preserves and families, old men fishing and sunshine on the lake and you can almost forget you’re in the city (my dad, reading this on Kodiak Island, Alaska, is probably laughing. How can you forget you’re in a city? he’d say. You can still hear the traffic! Can see the Sears Tower over the line of the trees! There’s people everywhere you look—that’s not being in nature! What would Henry say? Henry would say I should take it where I can get it, Dad, and when you spend your weekdays in the South Loop, Humboldt Park is as close to Walden as I’m gonna get). It’s about an hour walk from one end to the other—assuming we’re being leisurely, letting Mojo sniff where he wants to sniff, letting him off leash in the tennis courts for a while to chase rubber balls, stopping in the formal garden to check out the flowers—and there’s a great diner called Flying Saucer at a perfect diagonal from our apartment. We go in for coffee-to-go, and if the weather is nice we’ll get take-out and eat on the grass. We’ll talk, about things other than stresses and plans and day-to-day chitter-chatter, the kinds of talks we had when we lived in Prague and didn’t have to wake up every day at six to make it to work on time, and—at least for right now—that’s peace for me. Little kids will run over and ask to pet the dog. You run into your neighbors. You walk and walk but not ‘cause you’ve got somewhere specific to go. You can go anywhere.

From Neil:

1)“You mean... friends in your real life actually read your blog? Every time I tell a friend to read my blog, he answers, "Can't I just call you up on the phone?"”

HA!

Yeah, many of them DO read the blog, and they ALSO call me up on the phone, and a couple of them even live in my HOUSE, and one of them sleeps even in my BED!

From Viki:

1) Things you love about teaching.

Everything my students notice that I don’t. We’re all different writers, and we have different instincts, so different things are going to jump out at us. If you’re in a room with twelve other people all talking about the different things that grabbed their attention, you’re getting so much more information! So many more ideas! We can also call this phenomena “Learning,” but I figured if I answered the question ‘Whaddya love about teaching,” with “Learning,” you’d thinking I was copping out, taking the easy road, when really, it’s the truth. I love all the fucking learning. I love it when my students get it—you can SEE those moments! The lightbulb moments! In class last week, Mary even said, “Shit! Can you see the lightbulb going off over my head!” and I wanted to give her a high-five. I did give her a high-five, I think. It’s such an exciting thing to SHARE—this excitement about learning something, figuring something out. So, I love passing that on to others but also taking it, GREEDILY, for myself. Like, “Ohhhhhh! So what Bradbury is talking about when he says make your characters want something, and then make them run, and then follow their footprints in the snow (thanks, Amelia) is like in Ellison’s Battle Royale when the narrator wants to give his speech and that want drives the story all the way through the whole sequence of fight scenes to the end of the movement! How can I use that in MY work? What does my character want more than anything, and how can that want drive him/her through?”

2) Things you don't love about teaching.

Well, if you haven’t READ the Bradbury or the Ellison, you’re not really going to know what the hell we’re all talking about. Which means you’re going to be sitting there, worrying that your teacher’s gonna KNOW you didn’t know the reading (which we do, FYI) instead of learning, and it seems to me that’s an awful big waste of time. And energy. And money. To be spending class worrying instead of learning?

4) An insightful piece about how you manage to write really long sentences that make perfect sense. Like a how-to. Because my long sentences rarely make sense, but I can't seem to stop myself from writing them, and eventually I just lose track of what I had started off saying, and just type a period, and that's that.

I write really long sentences because A. it’s how I think/speak/act (ergo, my voice) and B. because I read lots of books where writers write long sentences and I study them, ‘cause, see, I want not only to write honestly (again, ergo, my voice) but also WELL—well crafted, well controlled. If you sit down for an hour with Light in August by Faulkner, you’re going to learn a little something about constructing the longer sentence. Also, Last Exit to Brooklyn by Hubert Selby Jr. is a good way to go, and, after you’ve read both of those, look back over them and figure out how one reads slow-motion slow and the other reads on hyper-speed even though they’re the same LENGTH. That’s what boggles my mind. Why does it take twenty minutes to read a nine-page Selby sentence but two hours to read the nine-page Faulkner? It has nothing to do with one being harder or easier or whatever, it has to do with pacing, and dialogue, and word choice (Selby’s words are mostly verbs and Faulkner’s mostly adjectives, maybe? I’m over simplifying the issue) and, I’m sure, lots more things I’m still trying to figure out and to further complicate the issue I read Virginia Woolf’s diaries and Tolstoy and Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Elizabeth Crane—I read a ton of Elizabeth Crane—who reads a ton of Rick Moody—who reads Cheever—etc. etc. etc.—and, as I’m sitting here thinking about it, I’m also lucky enough to get to talk to Elizabeth Crane on a regular basis (I can call her up right now and say, “Betsy, hi, how ARE you!” and she’ll say, “I’m groovy!” and I’ll say, “When are we going to have breakfast?” and she’ll say, “How’s Thursday?” and I’ll say, “PERFECT”) and she talks the same way that she writes which brings me back to the A up at the top of this paragraph in which I indicate that long sentences are a natural part of my voice, my self, my thought process (back in the day when I was twenty-two and all sorts of self-deprecating [having something to do, I’m sure, with all The Smiths I listened to], my teachers would tell me, “Trust that the sentence is going to end,” and I would think, What the hell are you even TALKING about? [because I was twenty-two and had all the trust issues that went along with that, trust issues not only with people but also with myself—mostly with myself—with myself in my writing—with my writing] but later, when I got all old and full of wisdom and shit, I realized the truth in those words [I loooove those lessons! The ones people taught you years ago and then all of a sudden you get it, like D’UH! That’s what she was saying when I had my head too far up my ass to get it!]; here, listen: trust that the sentence will end, trust that the sentence will end, trust that the sentence will end) (and Viki, while I think it’s nice that you said my sentences make perfect sense, I also find that comment highly debatable).

7) Your most favorite meal to eat ever. And then, let's go eat it in a restaurant together.

Steak and potatoes at Perseus in Florence. Chorizo-stuffed dates at Avec. The duck confit and spinach salad at the Bongo Room. Coconut shrimp and Jalepeno porkchops at Café 28. Fondue at Geja’s. That crazy chocolate martini desert at Mas. That crazy banana and eel appretizer at Sola (I KNOW. BANANAS AND EELS). Steak frites at Bistro Campagne (garden seating, please). Chicken Scherma at Sultan’s market. King Salmon caught off my dad’s boat and grilled with pepper and lemon. Oysters on the half shell at Boka. Oysters on the half shell at Cartouche in Prague. Home-cooked caribou/moose/elk/venison stew (whichever meat dad had a permit for). Wine and cheese at Webster’s (shit, wine and cheese anywhere). Mango martinis at Red Light. Bruscetta at Entoca Roma. Tempura green beans at that little Thai place on Chicago Avenue, bratwurst and brown bread from that stand near the Astologer’s Clock in Old Town Square and most of all, pork loin slow-roasted with fresh peaches which Christopher makes sometimes for dinner.

8) Something about how your husband keeps walking around in your dining room/kitchen with a level, mumbling under his breath about how things aren't level, and how he keeps feeling the wall and saying things about "not plumb" and then you hear him scribbling on said wall with a pencil.
My husband paces up and down the length of our hallway, talking on his cell phone to freelance clients, explaining PHP formats, saying things about “turning an array into a string either to pass the value appended to a URL or to convert a comma-delimited text field into separate parts,” and then he goes into his office and I hear furious typing and Daft Punk or Cliff Martinez or, lately, Iron and Wine.

9) Something about impending homeownership?

VIKI! Are you outing me on my very own blog?

I’m superstitious, people. Don’t want to jinx anything, so, I’ll keep the real estate stories to myself until we’ve officially closed on the place. In the meantime, Viki, you and your husband and his level and knowledge of plumb and not plumb are certainly welcome to come over and help with the FLOOR TO CEILING BOOKSHELVES that Mister PHP Format is going to build.

From Betsy:

1) Mojo

2) Movies

The Departed is amazing. AH—mazing. I need to see it again to figure out how it was done, ‘cause I got so lost in the story the first I didn’t pay attention. I really enjoyed how you knew, from the absolute start, who was who—the good guys and bad guys—and how those lines kept blurring and getting more complicated. The story itself wasn’t about WHAT was happening, it was about HOW it happened. No tricks. No flash—just strong characters and a good story. Awesome. That said, I would’ve liked a little more about both Billy and Sullivan’s relationships with the girl. As is usually the case, she’s used as a technique to get at the main characters’ more vulnerable sides and isn’t really developed/utilized, and—it’s not like I’m some screaming feminist or whatever—I just think how someone acts in their romantic relationships is pretty vital to their character.

The Prestige is also amazing, and I for one am amazed that I saw TWO movies that were amazing IN the same week. Hopefully, this is the beginning of a trend—a trend of great movies as opposed to a trend of schlock. Anyhow, I’m going to give the Prestige another watch, as well, ‘cause there’s some stuff that I’d like to figure out (POSSIBLE SPOILER ALERT! Bale as two guys?) plus Christopher and I got there five minutes late and while it’s a safe bet that you can walk in five (or ten or forty) minutes late to most Blockbuster films these days and figure out exactly what’s going in a matter of seconds, it’s not the case of The Prestige. Which I loooove. Which also, incidentally, made me want to get some of those dresses that push your boobs up to your chin. In case those dresses are called corsets. In which case I’m not interested.

The Science of Sleep was … Okay. Here’s the thing: I loooove Michel Gondry. He directed one of my favorite movies, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and started that whole bullet time cinematography they used in the Matrix to make a mere second of time pass by even slower (I’m trying to rip that off in a story right now. Going that slow in TEXT is super-fun) PLUS he directed this and this and this, so I was REALLY excited for Science of Sleep and I really, REALLY wanted to like it.

There wasn’t any story. There was beautiful imagery and lovely quirkiness (the skiing scene is GORGEOUS, as are the cotton puffs that float in the air when he plays the piano), which I appreciate, hence my love of Gondry’s music videos, but the major difference between a movie and a music video is about an hour and fifty-seven minutes, and if I’m going to sit through an hour and fifty-seven minutes I need a story. For example, in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, there was a story. Charlie Kaufman wrote it—and I was on the edge of my seat because, amidst all the beautiful imagery and lovely quirkiness, I really cared about Joel and Clementine. I could identify with their heartbreak and confusion and inexplicable urges. I couldn’t wait to see what would happen next: which scene from his memory are we going to now? No, Frodo, don’t manipulate her like that! And I thought about the horrible moments from my own past, and how I wouldn’t want to wipe them out because they made me who I am, and some of them are really beautiful in the middle of all that horror—but with Stephane and Stephanie, I thought, “Oh. That’s neat how the water is made of cellophane,” and, “That pony is very cool-looking.”

3) Monkeys

were my favorite at the zoo because sometimes they swing right up to you, so there’s only that glass wall separating the two of you, and you can see all their fingers and knuckles and everything, you can look right into their eyes, and then they pee on the glass wall and it dribbles down like water on a shower door and you think, “this is profound social commentary.” But I haven’t been to the zoo in a long time.

4) M&M’s

are good.

From Huxley:

1) video store? they still have those?

HA. I didn’t space out our Netflix properly (re: sent all three back on the same day, so this was one of those three-day dry spells before the next batch arrived). It’s funny how the red envelopes sit there unopened on the coffee table for WEEKS and you can’t find the time to watch them, but as soon as there’s none in the house you can’t imagine how you’ll possibly get through the night. In case of such an emergency, I hold a membership at North Coast Video at Damen and Division, this great little indie place with the following sign in the window: “If you want to pay $4.99 for the same movie, blockbuster is 4 blocks east or 5 blocks north.”

Posted by Megan at 8:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Viki tagged me to talk about books. I'm supposed to fill out the following questionnaire which reminds me of that first chapter of Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler which you should read if you haven't (the first chaper. Not the whole book. But, knock yourself out) because it'll make you want to read. Or else maybe hide. Here goes:

1) One book that changed your life:

Excuse me very much, but ONE? That’s a joke, right?

Somebody gave me a copy of Salinger’s Franny and Zooey when I was fourteen and I was amazed to read my thoughts in those pages (which were, of course, very much like Franny in an I’m too Spiritual/Intellectual for the World So I’ll Cry for Hours on the Sofa sort of way). A couple years later my English teacher, Ms. Holmes, assigned Swift’s Modest Proposal, which is the first time I remember being awed by the power of language. Then there was Geek Love, which turned me on to what I know think is literature’s greatest gift: understanding different points of view, different sorts of people, different lives. Richard Wright wrote about this idea in chapter seven of Black Boy (when he gets a library card and starts reading for the first time ever, and novels helped him to understand the white men at the office where he worked, and Dreiser’s Sister Carrie helped him understand his mother, etc. etc), just this idea of how a story can open our eyes a little bit. My life has been profoundly affected, over and over, by that knowledge. Take O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, which helped me understand my dad. Philip from Of Human Bondage, which helped me understand all those friends who’ve ever obsessed about someone totally wrong for them. Most recently, I experienced it through the Iranian professor-narrator of Reading Lolita in Tehran (it’s crazy now, to think that realization first originated from the narrator of Geek Love, a teenage blind albino freak-dwarf). Then there was One Hundred Years of Solitude, which made me think about magic—magic within the normal, day-to-day maneuvering of my life—and, oh man! Love in the Time of the Cholera (maybe the best book EVER) which REALLY rocked my world because it made me understand, for the first time, that my life is this big long series of events that connect and something done years ago may very well touch what happens tomorrow, and also the power of love which is certainly no small-time news. Bastard Out of Carolina made me horrified and sad and furious, I wanted to scream on some roof after that read, so that one makes the list because horrible things DO happen in this world, and if we discuss them maybe we can fix them, and if we can observe someone else’s strength and hope (like Bone’s) maybe that can give us strength and hope to push on—it comes back to that same idea from Franny Glass years ago. At the time, that felt like MY story, and knowing I wasn’t alone made it easier, somehow. Hopefully, Bone gives that same feeling to people who’ve been in her situation, but what makes that book such goddamn genius is that all the characters are painted with depth and care, so, even as you sit there hating Daddy Glenn, you still feel sorry for him. Because he’s real. He’s human. He’s words on a page—chicken scratches on a piece of paper—but he lives and breathes. And then—THEN—there’s the whole slew of books that changed my life because of what I learned about writing (and could, hopefully, then, make myself a better writer, a life lesson which I strive to relearn every day): Anna Karenina and Fall on Your Knees and Last Exit to Brooklyn, East of Eden, Hairstyles of the Damned, When the Messenger is Hot, Interpreter of Maladies, Cavedweller, Middlesex, The Things They Carried (again. That book took me on this whole What is Truth spiral) Kafka, Kafka, Kafka and mostly, geez oh Pete’s, Light in fucking August, which I could go on for several pages about but since I’m guessing it’ll be the answer to most every question here I’ll pause for now.

2) One book that you’d read more than once:

All of them. I try to read once just to lose myself in the story, and then a second time, sometimes a third or fourth, to figure out how it was written. The best part (now that I’m actually old enough to do this) is NOT having picked up a book in several years and rereading it, and then finding all the new stuff I didn’t notice the four times I read it years ago because now I’m a totally different person and a totally different writer.

3) One book you’d want on a deserted island:

A blank one (preferably a 5.25X8.25 graph-paper Moleskin, but if I’m on a desert island I doubt I’d be so picky about the specific brand of journal so long it’s not one of those fancy Indian-print jobs from Urban Outfitters because ink seeps through the homemade paper) so I’d have a place to write, as opposed to writing in the sand with a stick and getting pissed every time a tropical storm or the tide or whatever wiped away my story, like when your hard drive crashes (which mine hasn’t ever since Christopher made me switch to a MAC—FOUR fuckin’ PCs I went through in my life and I want to cry when I think of all the work they ate!) and you’re so, so, so terribly sad.

4) One book that made you laugh:

I’m with Viki: Sederis always makes me laugh in the funny/haha kind of laugh, but there’s also the books that make me laugh in a funny/NO F’ING WAY kind of way, like in Nice Big American Baby when the Mexican immigrant character thinks that as soon as you cross the border into the United States someone gives you a free dishwasher. Or You’re Ugly, Too by Lorrie Moore, when the professor gets all these student evaluations that talk about how she skipped into class singing show tunes and then offered the class sips of her hot chocolate. Or in Video, by Meera Nair, where the uber-traditional Indian man (accidentally) watches an American porno and sees a blow job for the first time in his life and never, never had he even IMAGINED the possibility of such an act and he can’t get the image out of his head and you’re like, WHAAAA? A GUY who’s never heard of a BLOWJOB? Or in Drinking Coffee Elsewhere by ZZ Packer, when the narrator gets a psychiatric evaluation ‘cause, when forced to play some trust-building game with other Yale freshmen where she had to pretend to be an inanimate object, she wanted to be a revolver. And, you know, wipe out the human race. That’s super-funny, but in a really uncomfortable way that’s just too true to life, you know? You laugh, not because it’s rip-roaring hilarious but rather because awkward laughter is the only thing that’ll break the tension of how horribly honest it all is.

5) One book that made you cry:

That scene in The Things They Carried with the baby buffalo. I lose it every time.

Also, Where the Red Fern Grows. That scene where the dogs die. My fourth grade teacher read it aloud, and apparently lots of parents called in really upset that their kids came home crying. My mom called and thanked him for giving me such a power introduction to literature (score one for Megan’s mom!).

6) One book you wish you’d written:

I’m working on it, I’m working on it!

7) One book you wish had never been written:

blah blah I’m glad they’ve all been written ‘cause they’ve all contributed to blah blah. That said, here’s my real answer: either the stupid shit by celebrities (Yes, Nicole Ritchie, this means you) or anything by Henry Miller.

8) One book you’re currently reading and (since, for me and my crazy schedule, #8 and #9 are the same question with #9 being more of a "Books you've been meaning to get back to" sort of thing) 9) One book you’ve been meaning to read:

Again with the ONE book? Here’s the answer: Brothers Karamazov by Dostoyevski, Sight Seeing by Rattawut Lapcharoensap, Take the Cannoli by Sarah Vowell, Living to Tell the Tale by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Sons of the Rapture by Todd Dills, America’s Report Card by McNally, Meno’s The Boy Detective Fails and about six anthologies are sitting on my desk right now, some just begun and others halfway through and others almost done, and I’ll come back to whatever’s grabbing me in the moment. That said, it’s conference time at both schools so mostly I’m reading student work—lots of student work—and when I have free time what I want to do is not so much read but rather watch action movies.

10) Tag five people:

Kim, Byron, Mary, Jeff (even though he doesn’t do this sort of thing on his blog) and Molly (who doesn’t even have a blog so maybe that’s not fair, but she’s a big reader so she can just do it and post it on the No Touching site until she starts her own blog).

Posted by Megan at 8:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Last night, in the car, driving home from the video store.

CHRISTOPHER: You blogged today finally!

KAT: I want to start blogging.

ME: DID YOU SEE THAT ASSHOLE JUST CUT ME OFF?

CHRISTOPHER: I'm going to start a blog. As soon as I get time. I've been making a list of things in my head I want to blog about--so far there's thirty-seven.

KAT: I'm kind of scared, though. I don't know if I could put myself out there like that. If I could be that vulnerable all the time.

ME: Thirty-seven?

CHRISTOPHER: You don't have to make yourself vulnerable. Most of the blogs I read every day don't even TALK about their personal lives.

ME: You have a list of thirty-seven things to blog about?

KAT: Is this list written down somewhere, or is it in your head?

CHRISTOPHER: Kottke doesn't talk about himself. Neither does Ze Frank, or--

ME: Will you give me this list so I have something to blog about? I'm getting all these emails from people asking why I'm not blogging--

CHRISTOPHER: NO! Those are for MY blog!

ME: You don't HAVE a blog!

KAT: Megan does.

ME: Megan does what?

KAT AND CHRISTOPHER: Write about your personal life.

ME: Hmmmmm.

Later, while watching the Seven Year Itch:

ME: But I don't write about the things that make me feel vulnerable.

CHRISTOPHER (from his office down the hall): THAT CONVERSATION WAS FROM LIKE FOUR HOURS AGO! HAVE YOU BEEN THINKING ABOUT THIS FOR FOUR HOURS?

ME: I DON'T! IF IT MAKES ME FEEL VULNERABLE I WRITE ABOUT IT IN MY JOURNAL-JOURNAL--

KAT: What's a journal-journal?

ME: --I DON'T PUBLISH IT ON THE BLOG!

KAT: I'm going to get some ice cream, do you want some?

ME: AND GIVE ME THAT LIST OF THIRTY-SEVEN THINGS RIGHT NOW!

CHRISTOPHER: I CAN'T HEAR YOU ALL THE WAY DOWN THE HALL!

KAT: Marriage is interesting.

Later, while blogging:

ME: I'M GOING TO ASK THE THREE PEOPLE WHO READ MY BLOG TO HELP ME COME UP WITH MY OWN LIST OF THIRTY-SEVEN THINGS IN THE COMMENT SECTION SO THERE!

CHRISTOPHER: I am not listening to you. I am sleeping.

Posted by Megan at 9:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (11)

Yesterday, I posted for the first time in a while, and this morning woke up to all sorts of emails saying, “It’s about TIME! Where have you BEEN?” which always feels good (like, They like me, they really like me!) and is also sort of funny—interesting/funny, not haha/funny—because an interview about this blog went live yesterday and I’d forgotten some of the things I said, namely that I started blogging in the first place because having an audience keeps me working.

Nothing like reading back over your own words (in quotations, no less!) to issue a kick in the ass, eh?

Posted by Megan at 9:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Barefoot Productions is a Chicago-based company committed to the collaborative process. One of their many projects, Static, is a temporary collective pairing artists of different mediums around a certain theme. In the case of last week, I had the pleasure to tell stories in tandem with the visual art of Theatser Gates and the sound design of Todd Carter. Our theme: the green line.

"Mecca," I said to one of Barefoot's three directors (Mecca, Joanna and Jena. Powerful ladies, great visionaries and kick-ass dressers. What more can you ask for?). "You want ME to tell a story about the green line?" I've been off the blue line for nearly ten years. I'd never even BEEN on the green line before this project. "All the better," she told me. "It's the new perspective. The different perspective--I don't want you to speak for people who live off the green line, I want you to speak for yourself, and we'll see what we all can realize through different eyes."

So, Mecca and Theaster and I (and Mecca's little boy, Masani, who is two but will soon save the world, mark my words) took the green line one day a few months back, and told all sorts of stories, and I watched out the windows at this whole section of my city I'd never before seen and, for the upteenth time, chastized myself for rarely moving beyond my one little corner of the world. I say to my students: Get out into the city! Get out of the South Loop and Hyde Park and be a part of it! It breathes, this city! It lives, it moves! See it, see it! And while I've listened to my own advice in the past, I've only done so in one direction: North.

I remember, after I came back from a year in Prague, thinking that I knew THAT city better than I knew THIS city (granted, it's smaller, but you get my drift). We went EVERYWHERE in Prague--from the center straight out to the border of the Czech Republic. And yet here, my home, I haven't even discovered the half of it.

A thought-provoking experience, to say the least.

Anyhow, here is the story I told at Static, at the Old Market Gallery on Dorchester, last Friday night. Todd wired the walls with speakers and, standing in the hallways, you can hear the train all around you, and Theatser's sculptures and video installations fill the rest of the space, including a map of the CTA made of rubber wire that encourages you to mark your own home along its route. The work will be up for another month if you'd like to check it out ... more info on that is here.

"I just saw the craziest thing on the green line. This guy—he was all fancy suit and briefcase, all kinds of style, like, if he didn’t have some serious cash flow going on he knew how to fake it, like maybe one of his women worked at Neimans and he rocked that discount or some loaded Aunt kicked it and he signed the inheritance check over to the Barney’s Co-op—so anyway, this guy stands up and says, real loud over the voices, the bodies, the in-and-out and coming-and-going and steady static of train on track, “Excuse me, ladies and gentlemen, can I have your attention please?” We’ve just left Clarke, heading South to Ashland&63rd. Now, if you’ve never been on the downtown green line, it moves above-ground through the Loop. High-rise buildings are stacked up on both sides, you can’t see where you’re going or where you’ve been, and sometimes, when you’re between platforms, you can pretend there’s no track beneath you and you’re flying, levitating, suspended in mid-air Today—six p.m. on a Friday—the train was half full, all us nine-to-fivers who stay an extra hour after work so we can avoid the rush-hour jam, hundreds of tired, business-causal people sardine-packed together on the cta headed home. It’s the fucking WORST. Ten hours on the job and you walk out of work, into the pulse of that crazy crowd moving through the streets towards the nearest underground access and all I want, in that moment, is to be I Dream of Jeannie, to cross my arms in front of me, nod my head and—BOINK— there I am on my couch in Humbolt Park, martini in one hand and remote control in the other. What I wouldn’t give for travel to be that EASY—BOINK—there I am at rehearsal—BOINK—there I am at the grocery store—BOINK—there I am reading my story at Static—but, and I hate to break this to you all, I’m not a genie in a bottle. I don’t have that kind of magic. What I’ve got is a UPass, a backpack, and, tonight, the green line.

“Excuse me!” this guy was saying. He’s standing in between the two parallel exit doors at the far end of the train, his arms open wide like he’s leaning on some invisible podium. I’m sitting right in front of him, in that first row that makes a right angle with the elderly and handicapped bench. I’m facing the opposite direction of the train’s forward movement, so out the window to my left I can watch the Loop zip backwards away from me: the white, old Chicago architecture; glass and gray stone skyscrapers; brown-red brick walk-ups with their windows caged in fire escapes. I imagine the city built up around the train line, like in Sci-Fi movies where public transports glide through thin air. The green line, it should be noted, does not so much glide as rattle, shivering on its tracks like some turn-of-the-century roller coaster. The sound is intense: this constant, animal growl at the low end; the shuffle of people sitting down and getting up; chunks of conversation flowing in and out like, “Can you believe he said that?” and “I didn’t know she—”and “Sammy, get yer butt over here!” and that metallic, robotic baritone telling you that “This is State,” “This is Randolph,” “This is Madison/Adams/Roosevelt—“ shut your eyes and listen. It’s like an audio map of the city. You can see it—that great red, blue, green and brown grid that connects us all.

“I don’t want to bother you, ladies and gentlemen,” the guy continued, and all around him, people were working overtime to pretend he didn’t exist: reading the paper, reading books, staring out the window, dicking around with their iPods. They all know what’s gonna happen next, right? First, he’ll tell us he’s not a drug addict. Then he’ll talk about his family, tell us how many kids he’s got at home. “Can you help me?” he’ll ask. “Any little bit will do.” He’ll try to meet people’s eyes, then, and some people will look and some people won’t. They’ll make a choice—to see what’s going on in front of their face, or not to see anything at all. We make that choice everyday—do we notice that hungry kid or that lonely friend, those people down the street or that country on the TV—I’m not going to lie to you. I look away a lot. There’s been many a ride on the blue line staring into my book, ignoring what’s right in front of me, but today—Today—I chose to see. I looked up at him, and we looked at each other, and this is what I saw: he was … really good looking. He doesn’t look like the guy who’d be asking for cash, cute as was, dressed as swanky as he was, smiling as much as he did. I told myself for the gazillionth time: Megan, stop with the assumptions. Stop thinking you know what’s what, Jesus Christ, you’re thirty years old, that’s old enough to know that soon as you think you’ve got a thing pegged, it’s gonna veer a total one-eighty from everything you’re so goddamn sure about.

“I know you take this train every day,” he said, first just to me and then stepping back to address the whole train. “This is how you connect. It’s how you move. It’s how you can live and work and everyday you take it and every day is the same, it’s Roosevelt, Cermack, 35th, the same, monotonous, day every day—“ the people trying to ignore him were looking up by then— “but today,” he went on, “TODAY—my friends. TODAY is going to be different.”

I glanced at the guy sitting next to me, then at the guy in the elderly and handicapped seat and the woman sitting next to him and, then, back around at the people behind us—we were all sorts of people, all sorts of lives and families and colors and purposes, and in this moment we were all thinking exactly the same thing: what the fuck is this guy talking about?

“Today,” he went on, “I’m going to give you something different. I call this piece, ‘Black Professional Man Laying Down on the Train.’” And with that, he lay down on the ground, arms crossed over his chest like he was floating in a swimming pool, and didn’t move for the remainder of the ride.
The silence was something huge—even with all the noise of the train. Everyone just sat there, staring at this man laying on the ground. Oh my God, I thought. I gotta tell the people at Static about this. I knew y’all wouldn’t believe me, though, and so—because I, like most folks, am a slave to modern technology—I got out my cell phone and took a picture.

“What are you doing?” asked the guy sitting next to me. I told him it was the craziest thing I’d ever seen on the el, and he said, “Girl, you ain’t seen NOTHING—” and then launched into the craziest thing he’d ever seen on the el. When he was done, the guy in the elderly and handicapped seat told us the craziest thing HE’D seen on the el, and when he was done, the woman in the next seat leaned over and started telling her story, and then lots of people were listening and talking and laughing.

I looked back out the window: it’s fall now, and getting dark, but I could still see the ground rumbling by below me—the parking lots and wild grass and wide, open sky overhead. It was so different out here, at 51st, 55th and 63rd. I could see the Sears Tower off in the distance, it looked so far away we could be in Indiana for all I knew—so much open space, empty, abandoned lots full of trash and broken glass next to pop-up condos and fancy SUVs. I’d never been in this neighborhood before but I was familiar with its story: the same inevitable tale as when I’d first moved to Chicago ten years. I rented a one-bedroom, shit hole of a garden apartment in Wicker Park for three hundred dollars a month—If you ride the blue line past that apartment now, you’ll see a fancy SUV parked behind it. It rents for thirteen hundred dollars now—I ran into my old landlord on the street—and I moved West. West of Western, West of California, West of the Boulevard, West of Kedzie, and now, West of Kimball to my current place on Pierce. Next door is a seventy-year-old grandmother named Mz. Diaz who lives in a single family home with her two daughters, their husbands and all their kids, and also her sister and her sister’s son and his kids. They all work except Mz. Diaz—she stays home with the little ones—and we talk everyday when I walk my dog. I have a two year old pit bull named Mojo, and whever Mz. Diaz’s grandkids see him they go nuts: MO-yo, mo-yo, they yell, running up to us, and then they stop and ask, “May I please pet your dog?” very politely like I taught them when I first brought Mojo home. “Some dogs aren’t very nice,” I told them, “don’t ever pet a dog you don’t know.” Mz Diaz looked at me and nodded her approval, as though I’d passed some sort of test, and we’ve talked every day since then. I know that, as I push West, so does she, and West of us are more folks pushing West, and there on the green line, riding high into open space, I see the same chapter being written out below me.

This afternoon, walking the dog before coming here tonight, Mz. Diaz said,
“You are always going somewhere.” she is small and wrinkled, always smiling. “Where to today?”

“I have a reading on the South Side,” I said. “I’m going to take the bus downtown and jump on the green line.”

She shook her head gravely. “You should drive,” she informed me, her voice all authoritarian like she was my grandmother, too. “The green line is dangerous. Very dangerous for someone like you.”

This wasn’t the first time I’d heard that. The green line is dangerous for someone like me. So is the orange line. And the red line South of Jackson. And all of the South side, for that matter, and the West Side, too, and also Humboldt Park and Wicker Park ten years ago and the city of Chicago and every city and most non-English speaking countries and if I’d of kept still every time I’d ever been told, “that’s dangerous for someone like you,” shit, I’d never of learned a thing in this life. I’d never of sat there on the green line, hearing all those stories, and traveling to a place where I could share them with all of you.

Right before I got off at 63rd, I knelt down on the floor near Black Professional Man Lying Down and whispered, “I’m glad I can’t be I dream of Jeanie. I’m glad I saw something different. I’m glad of all there is to see.”

Posted by Megan at 8:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

My husband (I’m still getting used to that word. Husbandhusbandhusband) said, “You have not blogged since September 20th. He said this with a great deal of reproach, as though I hadn’t paid the electric bill since September 20th. Or picked up Mojo’s Heartguard. Serious things, you know?

Something else he said was, “Instead of Halloween it should be called Halloweenis.” Our roommate Kat had just showed us a photo of Dracula biting a girl in the neck and suggested Christopher and I dress up like this for Halloween which would, I imagine, involve me getting a white dress from a thrift store, making a gruesome latex bite on my neck and dousing myself with fake blood.

Good times.

I asked Christopher, “Can I blog that? How you want to rename Halloween Halloweenis because Halloweenis rhymes with penis?” I’ve started asking him if it’s okay if I blog about him. He’s made it very clear that it’s okay if I WRITE about him, i.e. in my “work,” my “fiction,” but it’s usually assumed I’m making stuff up there, whereas people generally think my blog is true. Right? Do y’all think my blog is true?

(insert long monologue about truth in writing, with various James Frey references, a couple mentions of Tim O’Brien and a particularly heavy paragraph about Kant and truth being the highest moral obligation of human beings in a philosophical sense).

“Don’t misinterpret my words,” he said.

“What am I misinterpreting?” I asked. “That’s what you meant, right? Halloweenis rhymes with penis?” but really what he means, or maybe what I mean, is that it’s necessary to laugh about something stupid as we sit at the dining room table, drinking wine and reading about North Korea. Sometimes, when one is reading about North Korea, one drinks wine—

(insert another long monologue about point of view, specifically a mid-sentence jump from first person to the greater distance of third, in which Kafka is quoted from Wedding Preparations in the Country: “And so long as you say ‘one’ instead of ‘I,’ there’s nothing in it and one can easily tell the story; but as soon as you admit to yourself that it is you yourself, you feel as though transfixed and are horrified.”)

(insert speculation that perhaps, based on the two previous inserts, one is spending too much time teaching and not enough time living)

(insert clarification that what one is horrified about is the situation in North Korea—one, you see, is very paranoid indeed, yet even if one WASN’T, even if one was the picture of calm and ease, one is still familiar enough with her country’s recent history and also basic human nature to know that whenhappens, there’s a reaction to that happening. And to that reaction, there’s another reaction. And another and another and so on, and this is what one is currently pondering—not my husband’s rhyming of Halloween and penis).

—and yearns for levity. One’s husband rhymes Halloween and penis, and one laughs very hard, and reaches under the table to hold one’s husband’s hand because she is a little transfixed. And horrified. And tired and trying to hold it all together.

It’s in that moment that Kat joins us at the table with another bottle of wine (Yaaaaay, Kat). “You guys,” she says, and we look up from the news magazine with all its pictures and headlines and terrible, terrible words. She has a big smile on her face, like she’s just set up a big joke and this is the pause before the punchline. “Hallowed weiner!” she says then, and Christopher grips my hand under the table as we laugh, so goddamn hard we almost fall out of our chairs.

Posted by Megan at 10:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

This is the greatest.

Posted by Megan at 9:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)