My photo was in the paper, featured in an article about bike commuting in Chicago. I was part of the queue lined up outside Working Bikes, the local used-bike co-op, last Wednesday.
Except I’m the guy sitting on the ground, stuffing my face with White Castle.
Oh well.
She took me to a show to see a musician she knew from her college days in Nashville, an acoustic singer-songwriter I had never heard of. Doors opened at 6.30 and it was 95F outside, so by the time he took the stage, the crushing hordes of undergrads and high schoolers were too much for even the industrial-strength air conditioners. Before the show, she had told me how this was the soundtrack of her life, and that while this was nominally my birthday present she felt guilty that she this was definitely her thing. I’m sooooo excited, she kept saying, with that little jumpy-head-shake-thing she does when she’s giddy. She knew all the lyrics and sang along to every word while I mostly just stood behind her, smiling when she would turn around and ask me if it was great or what. Well, with a single exception: during one of this last songs, one that all the kids there knew, something about where green meets red meets blue, he started jamming on an old song about how love is a temple, a higher law, a song to which I most definitely know the lyrics, and it was her turn to stand mute with her hands in her pockets while I sang my head off.
One of rooms in the British Museum contains a series of reliefs originally carved into the walls of a palace by the Akkadians, or Assyrians, or something equally ancient and Mesopotamian. They depict a lion hunt, what the guidebook describes as the ’sport of kings’, where a bunch of guys in chariots chase starved wild animals in an enclosed area and shoot them full of arrows. There entire sequence is probably over 50m long, a giant panorama of stylized animal slaughter taking up an entire room. We had wandered that particular wing purely by accident. I was immediately taken aback by how incredibly cruel it seemed.
Jeez, they really don’t hide the gore, do they?
“Wow, I think this one is puking,” Nick says, pointing at a carving of a particularly arrow-studded lion which was in fact vomiting.
Urgh.
“The placard says the animals were kept caged until the riders were ready, and then goaded and provoked until they attacked.”
Jeez. Wow, the zoology major in me is really not liking this right now.
“Look at this one, David,” Gloria says, pulling my arm. She points to a dead(?) lioness being run over by a chariot carrying two bow-wielding hunters. “Poor lion.”
Grace walks over. “This is so sad.”
God, this is kind of making me, sick, I say. Fuck cultural relativism, this is ridiculous. I can’t look at this anymore.
So I’m in the hostel lobby by myself, writing post cards. The Greatest Hits of Sting and the Police is playing over the speakers. I’m alone because my siblings are off ostensibly shopping on this the last day of our travels, but since I accidentally found the birthday cake they inexpertly hid in the room last night, I’m fairly certain they are off making whatever preparations they have planned for the ’surprise.’ Not that I don’t appreciate the gesture, I do. I just would have hidden the cake better. I need the time alone, anyway.
I’m trying not to make it obvious that I’m staring at this absolutely gorgeous brunette standing by the reception desk, the one with the wide belt slung loosely over her low-rise jeans, her long wavy hair stuffed under an askew conductor hat, the one with the amazing smile. It’s wonderfully distracting.
I really don’t want to go back to Chicago–I’d rather just avoid certain things indefinitely rather than confront them. Soon, the consequences of certain decisions I made in what might be described as a mania of hopefulness will soon become unavoidable, and I for one would honestly just prefer to avoid that issue altogether for the time being. I’ll win the lottery, quit my job, and just hop from hostel to hostel talking to Australian iPhone users and French backpackers and American girls with improbably silly names and never have to go home. Sounds fantastic.
I’m in England with my siblings and cousins. It’s going great so far. I brought 8GB’s worth of memory cards for my camera, which now seems like complete overkill. Nobody actually remembered to buy a voltage converter. We ate lunch at an organic soup and sandwich place in St. Pancras Station without realizing the Cornish Pasty shop was next door. (Idiots.) The weather’s been surprisingly beautiful lately. I had the fabulous idea of going to Leicester Square on a Friday evening, which apparently everybody else in the entire city decided to do as well. Chav styles confuse me. The American girls at the hostel, while cute by most measures, are retarded, even while sober. I stopped paying attention to their male companions after two of them decided to have a loud, completely factually inaccurate discussion (read “attempt to impress the girls with their knowledge”) about how the internet works last night. I’m meeting Maria for dinner tonight. I fully expect her to be either late, lost, or both. It’s like 2005 all over again, but in a good way.
