time spent, time wasted

I have been doing a lot of thinking lately, sitting on the train or in my room or at my desk at work... just sitting and thinking. And it hasn't gotten me anywhere, really. I come up with ideas of essays I want to write, but I don't write them. I think of tasks I need to complete, but I don't do them. I even - finally - got a job offer after spending hours and months assembling applications and going to interviews and thinking about what I want out of life and assessing the types of things I would be qualified for, and I don't think I am going to take it.

I wondered today whether I have that condition that they are talking about these days - infomania. It is actually a real thing now, they've done studies. Basically, a person receives too much information at a constant rate and it causes the IQ to decrease, by an average of ten points. I think email and the internet are making me sick. Maybe, though, if knowing is half the battle, I could be halfway toward normal again. Let's hope so.

I'm going to go write some lists and stare into space now. That should get me somewhere.

creative brews

I came across this great weekly while I was doing some research for an article on Chicago microbreweries. Talk about different and imaginative... and yummy!

someplace

I visited New York and Philadelphia this past weekend, places that are "destinations", and I saw things that people "know about" - Little Italy, SoHo, the Brooklyn Bridge, the LOVE statue in Philadelphia, boathouse row - and I felt like I was somewhere.

It's funny, from the North Lawndale neighborhood (where I teach creative writing at a GED Learning Center) you can see the skyline of Chicago. Standing at the Central Park platform this morning, then passing through the Kedzie, Western, and Damen stops, I noticed the angle is just perfect. The Sears Tower is in the forefront, the Hancock off in the distance to the left, the AON jutting up between them. This is what people travel to see, and for us it is just part of the usual landscape.

But what struck me most about these sights - this weekend, and this morning - was what people are not there to see, what they avoid on their vacations. Between Philadelphia and New York, the landscape stretching on either side of the train route is filled with trash, rundown buildings, desolate towns, junkyards. In the "greater" part of Chicago - that which is not the museum campus, the Loop, Michigan Avenue - lie the neighborhoods, millions of people, homes, lives, stories. And a lot of the Chicagoans' stories I know, never come close to the top floor of the Sears Tower. One woman in my class has lived on the same street, Fillmore, for her entire life.

I wondered, where is somewhere and where is nowhere, and how do we get there and how do we leave?