O'Hare

Oh, and I like the United Airlines concourse at Chicago O'Hare almost as much as I like the Calatrava.

More Milwaukee

The Eero Saarinen building next door to the Calatrava holds most of the actual art. I like it too, but it has a definite mid-century fascist feel to it.



As for me--

A jaw problem has restricted me to eating mushy foods.

I am thinking about applying to graduate school again, but I'm getting more creative as to what kind.

I have a monthly gig co-hosting that industry party. The last one went shockingly well.

It appears that I have to spend the weekend sleeping in a tent with hippies and tolerating their folksy Gaia music. No, this has nothing to do with Burning Man.

And we are trying not to get evicted.

Milwaukee

As I've said before, it has an awesome art museum. The best part about it is the building itself.

First of All

How creepy is this piece of community art?

Newsreel

I AM co-hosting that party this weekend. "As co-host, what should I do?" I asked. She said, "Look hot and bring your girlfriends." One small problem: I have three "girlfriends"; two are in New York and the other's a lesbian who likes fleece and kayaking. I have a feeling I will make a lousy host.

**

FLATMATE Sam's girlfriend finally found an apartment after months of searching and practically living in our house. When she first went to see it, she thought it looked familiar. Then she looked around and realized that it was the apartment that M. and I used to live in two years ago. And her room is our old room.

**

I SPENT last weekend in a car with the screaming three-year old kid that my uncle adopted. I would not recommend such a getaway to anyone.

**

I'M OFF to the Midwest on Tuesday to visit M.'s mom. We will drink nothing but good beer and eat nothing but steak sandwiches and second-hand smoke for about a week. I am kind of looking forward to it.

Customer Service

One of the employees on the train actually pushed my boyfriend, for no discernible reason other than because he (M., that is) happened to be carrying a bicycle. Then, when M. asked him incredulously if he (the train employee, that is) was pushing him, the gentleman responded with a harder shove that almost threw him off-balance. And a muttered threat: "The next stop can be yours if you want it to be." Huh?

In all fairness, a train choked with drunk, screaming Giants fans is "hella" annoying, to borrow the local parlance. Especially when all you're trying to do is read the news or study some calculus after a long, boring day at work.

This weekend I'll be in the Sierras with my parents; Uncle Tomas, his wife, and my two little cousins; and my uncle David, his new partner, and the three-year old kid they just adopted. The last time I saw my uncle, in December, he was single and talking to me about how he doesn't want to have kids. He changed his mind awfully quick.

In the meantime, I have another party to go to tonight. Yawn.

It's a Small World, After All: Internet Edition

M. and I saw a picture of ourselves on the online advertisements for the Sunday party, so of course we had to go, workweek be damned. And, once there, of course we had to order two Chimays, the appalling state of our finances notwithstanding.

We'd been there for twenty minutes when one of my favorite bloggers appeared at the doorway. "Look, M., there's Moses (not his real name)," I pointed out. The guy is a local celebrity, immediately recognizable, and incredibly good at what he does. But that's not how I know who he is. Not at all. I know about him because I started reading his unbelievably funny blog after I stumbled upon it a few years ago. I found it by following a link from another of my favorite bloggers, whose popular site I also stumbled upon a few years ago. I found her blog, in turn, because it was linked to her boyfriend's blog. And I found her boyfriend's blog fully by chance, by clicking the "next blog" button on Blogger.

Tortuous enough? It gets worse. About a year and a half ago, M. threw a big house-party. Our first really big one, in fact. And it became a big deal by chance: my Boss's Daughter was in town, and M. ditched me for a few nights so he could go out to dance clubs with her and her close friend. At the time, he didn't want to bring me along because she and I were not on speaking terms thanks to a nasty blog-related incident that was my fault entirely. (The awkwardness has dissipated with time; I slept on her futon in NY, for instance.)

So, to get back to the convoluted story, M. went out with the Boss's Daughter and her close friend, Rachel, whom I also disliked at the time. And while out, he met one of Rachel's good friends, a petite gay boy. (I suspect that this "meeting" involved "dancing with at a gay club," but no matter.) This gay boy, "Raul," heard M. talking about our upcoming house party and informed him that he was friends with a DJ--one of the best-known in the city--who would probably be willing to spin at our party for a few hundred bucks. And more, a veritable army of partybot hipsters would arrive in his wake. (I know this sounds like a nightmare, but from a party-promotion standpoint, it's gold.)

When M. told me that he'd hired this DJ to spin in our living room, my natural response--as I hail from a particular demographic for whom this is second nature--was to search for him on Google. And one of the first hits was a link to one of my favorite bloggers, Moses.

Up until this point, I had no idea that Moses was local. I thought he was a Canadian, in fact. But, as I searched some more, creepy-stalker/Silicon-Valley-demographic style, I discovered that this DJ, as well as Raul, were both included in his immediate his social network. As was the DJ's girlfriend, who showed up at our apartment for our house-party that night, along with a posse which included a porn actress and a professional photographer who snapped dozens of pictures in our apartment.

And, to bring this more-or-less full-circle, M. has been working with this DJ semi-professionally, and his girlfriend is the one who's to blame for my half-accidental debut into Internet prOnulation. And for my possible status as reluctant Industry-party host.

(Here's another connection, actually: Rachel has been dating my DJ/Bartender flatmate, Sam, since she moved to SF from NY earlier this year.)

But let's return to Sunday night.

There we were, drinking Chimays we couldn't afford. M. was chatting with a member of a band that happens to be from M. and Sam's home town in the Midwest. (The band also does business with M.'s DJ friend, and it turns out that this guy and M. share some mutual friends back home.This is the chain that never ends.) Left out of the conversation, I watched Moses as he made his way around the bar. Wherever he went,someone would approach him and introduce herself. He exchanged phone numbers with several girls. One guy tried to take a covert camera-phone picture of him. Another posed with him, asking his friend to snap a picture with them together. I thought it funny that these people were treating him as a rock star when I've always known him as a blogger with middling traffic. Not compared to my traffic, obviously, but compared to what he's become famous for, it appears to be frightfully middling.

I buy more Chimays, for me, for M., for the DJ. Now I'm deep in the red, and it's late, and I'm drunk, and the prospects for work tomorrow look increasingly dim. I use the bathroom, hear three people sniffing something in the stall next to mine (gee, I wonder what they were doing?), and returned to the bar to find that M. was talking to Moses. Charmingly (ha!) inebriated, I leaned into the conversation and said (yelled?) something like, "whaddryouguys talking about?"

"My blog," he said. "It's so embarrassing when people tell me they read it. I'm embarrassed."

Uncharacteristically for me, even when drunk, I became halfway hostile. "I read your blog," I snapped, leaning toward him, and, I think, poking my index finger close to his face, which was wearing sunglasses.

"No, no," he fake-lamented, clutching his skull. "Don't tell me that, that's so embarrassing."

"Well, I've been reading your blog before I knew about the other stuff you do, so you should be EXTRA embarrassed."

I don't really remember how he responded--having been sozzled and all--but soon thereafter I know I raised my voice, pointed, and said accusingly, "IF YOU'RE SO EMBARRASSED BY YOUR BLOG, WHY DON'T YOU ERASE IT?"

Wow, what an ass I was; did they spike the Chimay or something?

Then the bartenders told us to get out of the bar, and Moses gestured towards the door. M.
asked if he could finish his drink. Bemusedly, Moses said OK, so M. and I shared it. It
was scotch whiskey, and a delicious specimen at that.

Someone invited us to the afterparty, but we weren't in the mood. Instead we walked home to make ourselves quesadillas. But even before quesadillas, M. sat down to leave a comment on Moses's latest blog entry. It was the first comment in the thread, which had been open for days. The following day, there was a response, posted only seven minutes afterward. (You really do live on the Internet, don't you, Moses?) In it, he described M.--facetiously? I couldn't tell--as "charming" and "handsome." Ha.

Right now I am sitting across from M., who is drinking red wine and crafting a response to that response.

When Blogland and real life collide, only hilarity can result. But if only. I've learned that there are other results, too. For instance: I must be an idiot for posting all of this, for who knows when the gods of Google and dumb chance will team up and surprise me with some far less amusing co-incidence.