2012: The Year I Resolve to Do Everything No More Than Three Days Late. (Or at least try).
New Years Eve ice skating at Daley Bicentennial Plaza; The Bean with East Coast friends
Introducing out-of-towners to reflective-bean-photography; Chicago Cultural Center
Festive friends; unbelievable NYE dinner (and sidecar) at Aquitaine in Lincoln Park
New year/new tie; aftermath: Clark Street, Chicago, January 1, 10 AM
It would seem, in between praying over our soybeans and attending meetings at our local mega-church, Midwesterners are also writing books. Books! Jennifer Wilson’s “Hello From Flyover Territory: 3 Midwestern Novels”–today’s installment in NPR’s “Three Books” series–gives quick recommendations and addresses “the curse of the Midwestern writer in action.”
Extra points for seamless reference of “The Mitten.”
(Sidenote: Wilson’s winky “Can you im-ay-gine?!” routine about Midwestern writers put me in mind of the June 2010 reviews published of books by Emily Gould, Sloane Crossely, and Meghan Daum, most of which, Choire Sicha points out, could have been seriously titled “Three Women Wrote Books?!”–except that Wilson is in on the joke.)
One of my very few Midwestern hangups (as my mother calls them) has to do with the coverage of weather events on the East Coast, particularly in New York. Weather there is always BIGGER, MORE, and WORSE than any weather anywhere else, every before, for as long as we all shall live.
I cite, as exhibit A, the snowstorm we had in Chicago (and other adjacent regions) this winter. Thousands of people lost power. I walked down the center of a totally closed Lake Shore Drive, past cars people had abandoned in the middle of traffic the night before. It took two people three and half hours to dig out my car a week later. I didn’t go to work for two full days because there was no physical way to get there.
And yet, the reports about “snowpocalypse” and “snowmaggedon” (seriously, these terms need to be forever stricken from any writer’s “potential descriptions of weather events” arsenal) were all about New York. When I complained about this in the days that followed, my mother patiently tried to describe how Everything Really Is Worse There. Too many people and too much infrastructure in a much smaller space. Six inches of snow really is a lot there. They don’t have a Great Lake in which to dump great piles of frozen refuse.
Sitting, such as I was, in three sweatshirts and a hat next to a radiator which is seemingly governed by it own unpredictable hormones, I refused to be swayed. And so I can’t decide today if I want New York to get truly, horrendously pummeled by this hurricane which is taking over every single website, blog, and news source I like to spend my workdays perusing, or if I want them to simply experience a gentle mist.
Even if it’s the latter–it will truly be the very worst mist that too many people in too small a space have ever experienced, forever and ever, amen.
(PS This is what it’s doing in Chicago right now. Happy Friday!)
The Accidental Chicagoan 