Yay, more snow! We had a few more inches of snow overnight and it was the wet, sticky kind driven by strong winds. The result is magnificently beautiful.
Now go away winter!
Category Archives: Chicago
A Brutal Commute
An affluent neighborhood. 7:30 in the morning. 5 degrees and sunny.
Public transportation is awesome. Except when it’s not. This morning, it wasn’t. I get on to the train platform just as a train is leaving the station. This is not a big deal. The trains come every five minutes or so. Not today. The train immediately after the one I just missed broke down somewhere before my stop. At first it was just a delay as they try to fix equipment problems. This is not unusual for cold weather and the weather was a crisp 5 degrees this morning. Then they announce that they’re emptying the defective train and have to move it out of the way. Awesome.
From start to finish, it takes them about 45 minutes to accomplish this. And soon, the defective train is rolling slowly past my station. My feet are burning with cold at this point. In the meantime, they take an outbound train and turn it around to try to get things back on schedule. Only they choose the stop after mine to start. Nice. Finally, a train pulls into the station but it is jam-packed like you would expect a train to be after a 45 minute backup of people. It then has to sit at my station for 5 minutes as the defective train gets out of the way somewhere up ahead. Another train comes and there is just enough room for a few people to squeeze on and I make sure I am one of them. Love your neighbor, people! No time to be shy.
My connecting train pulls into the station the same time we do and I think the nightmare commute is finally over. This train is also full, but I manage to squeeze on. It should be smooth sailing from now on. But wait, why have we stopped? Equipment problems with the train directly ahead of us, you say? Wonderful. Add another 10 minutes to the already double time commute. Ugh.
All told, a commute that normally takes 40 minutes door to door took just over an hour and a half. The burning cold in my feet is only just now leaving my body. Happy Monday!
How Old Is Your Building?
I love people with too much time on their hands. They are the only reason why things like this map of Chicago homes color coded by when they were built ever see the light of day. The data is by quarter century only, but you really get a good feel for how the city was built. It would be a cool bonus feature if they would give each year a separate color. Even better would be a time-lapse showing the buildings being built year by year. You can also see the neighborhoods that were gentrified by identifying the areas where individual homes were rebuilt. It’s pretty nifty.
Marriage Equality Comes To Illinois
A same-sex marriage bill passed both houses of the Illinois legislature yesterday and Governor Pat Quinn has promised to sign the bill. This means that gay couples will be able to marry each other as of June 1st, 2014. Bam! I wonder what it was like in Boystown last night. Probably a bit crazy.
This makes Illinois the 15th state to recognize same-sex marriage. The tide is really turning. There was a recent poll out of South Carolina that showed only 52% of residents are against same-sex marriage. You might think, “well that’s still a majority”, and you’d be right, but this is South Carolina! For a bit of perspective, in 2006, South Carolina passed an amendment banning same-sex marriage with 78% voting in favor of the amendment. South Carolina, you’ve come a long way, baby.
And the beat goes on.
The Closest Chicago Comes To Mountains
Chicago is as flat as my singing, but with a warm lake and cool air above, we sometimes get a feel for what its like to have mountains in the distance. Observe:
Oh Noes Snows!
Flurries have been spotted in the Chicagoland area raising the ire of its residents who are still grasping at the last wisps of the summer that was. Suck it up, Chicagoans! You’re embarrassing us all! I’d swear I lived in Atlanta or something.
Many seem to think that it’s way too early for snow to be spotted in Chicago, but that’s not true at all. The average first snowflakes in Chicago fall on Halloween so we’re a little earlier than average. It’s not until mid-November that we normally get any measurable precipitation and it’s not until December 1st that we get our first inch of snow.
So this is a perfectly normal occurrence in what has so far been a perfectly normal fall in Chicago. Unlike South Dakota which had a freak blizzard at the beginning of the month which may have killed over 100,000 cattle and dropped over 19 inches of snow in the area. The cattle were without their winter coats and inches of rain has already fallen on them before the temperatures dropped and the snow began. Hypothermia because of the 70 MPH winds and suffocation from getting caught in snow drifts were the two leading causes of death for the cattle.
I Am A Bitch Ass
I have always strongly suspected such, but it was confirmed to me on the train ride in to work this morning. I am a bitch ass.
I get on the train this morning and surprise of all surprises, there is a seat available right behind the conductor’s compartment. None of the standing people seem eager to take it so I swoop in and sit down. A connecting train comes in and a few more people get on including an older woman who is legally blind. No one near the doors offers her their seat so I get up and walk over to her and offer her my seat and guide her over. I am now standing up in that awkward part near the front of the train car where there is a lot of space but not much room to hang on. There is still space in front of the two seats that face the middle of the car so I grab onto the pole and start reading my book.
Seated in the space right next to the pole is a lanky teenage looking kid with legs spilling out farther into the aisle than is necessary. It’s not a big deal, though, he has room and I have room. He leans over and mumbles something to me in a sleepy, half awake voice but I can’t understand what he’s saying.
“Sorry, what?”, I ask him.
“Could you move somewhere else? There’s room in front of the door.”
I look to the door that people will be entering and leaving from and there is, indeed, some room. But it’s the door that people use to get on and off, there’s supposed to be room.
He continues mumbling, “I don’t like people standing in front of me.”
I’m sure at this point I had some strange expression on my face; half bemusement, half incredulity. I’m not sure if the guy is high as a kite or just tired and I don’t think it would be very productive to explain to him the finer points of train etiquette and my philosophy of proper standing arrangements given how full the train is currently and is expected to be. So instead, I answer, “That’s tough. Sorry.”, and continue to read my book.
The young man proceeds to mumble stuff under his breath with the only intelligible words being “bitch ass” making the woman sitting next to him more uncomfortable than he’s making me. He also stretches out his legs making sure that they come in contact with mine. Being a train riding veteran, bodily contact doesn’t bother me. I just smile and continue to read, a “bitch ass” softly rising to my ears every once in a while.
The very next stop, one of the sitters gets up and leaves the train. The woman that is standing in my favorite standing spot tells me that I can have the seat so I sit down. The young man immediately sprawls his legs into the aisle in front of him making it impossible for anyone to use that space to stand. He looks my way every once in a while with a “bitch ass” on his tongue before pulling his cap over his eyes in an attempt to sleep.
As I exit the train at my stop, I pass the young man and he makes it a point to stare directly at me as I leave the train. “Bitch ass” greets me as the train doors open. I meet his eyes and give him my best grimace smile as I walk out the door.
The Porno I Would Make
One of the major train lines into the city was shut down this morning due to a suspicious package being found at one of the stops. This, of course, got me to thinking about pornography.
If I were to make a porno, it would be called “Suspicious Packages”. In it, a crack unit of the police force, all female of course, would be called in to investigate suspicious packages throughout the city. The packages in question would be men just laying around in bus terminals, train stations, and airports. The women would have to poke and prod them to try to figure out what makes them tick (Which we all know is an impossible task, am I right ladies?). They would then have to work on “disarming” the men all while engaging in conversations about various feminist issues. There would also be a guy that the women can’t figure out how to disarm and they would have to call in a specialist which would end up being a gay guy. Because my pornos would be equal opportunity pornos. There would be jokes about controlled explosions and premature ejaculation and such as well. One of the guys would “explode” leading to the hospitalization of some of the ladies and they would have to go to the hospital to be nursed back to health. Oh, and there just HAS to be a scene with a bomb disposal robot.
A sex-positive, female-positive, funny porno. This really needs to be made. Time to start writing a script!
But The City Is So Unsafe
If you know people who live in the burbs or the more rural areas of our fine country, chances are you’ve had a discussion about if it’s safe to go to the city. There is this widely held belief that large cities are areas of barely controlled anarchy, that you’re taking your life in your hands just by going there. Actually, it’s likely more dangerous where you live than in the big city.
I know someone who lives way out in the boonies and has worked in downtown Chicago every day for years. The amount of crime that has occurred to his person while in Chicago can be counted on zero hands. And yet, we had a conversation where he had to ask me if it was safe for his teenage daughter to come to Chicago with her friends. I answered his inquiry the way I always answer it, “Are they coming to buy drugs? No? Then they’re as safe here as they are in their home town.”
Unsurprisingly, a lot of the problem is the news, or more to the point, what makes the news. News organizations tend to be in big cities and big city stories tend to get covered more as a result. Gang shootings on the South or West Side and “black thug flash mobs” get much more play than the meth lab bust in Kankakee.
The other problem is what we subconsciously choose to remember from the news we ingest. There is a tinge of soft racism to this with most people. It is amazing to me the amount of people who think that there are roving bands of black youth prowling the city of Chicago. All because there are a couple of high profile instances of it a year. But out of a million plus people that visit downtown Chicago every day, there are very few instances of actual violence.
And that brings us to the biggest factor in people thinking cities are more dangerous than the burbs: statistics. Or, more accurately, a gross lack of understanding of basic statistics. “But we’ve only had one murder in 10 years!” Yeah, but you live in a city of 1000 people. Guess what, your murder rate is the same as Chicago’s.
None of this is to say that Chicago is safe. It’s just likely safer than wherever you’re from. It doesn’t exactly make a great motto. Chicago, you’re less likely to get killed here than whatever backwater you came from.
Teach For America Is Evil
Teach For America sounds like a good idea. Train young people to teach and send them to places where they are most needed. Places like rural areas or low income areas where nobody is willing to teach. Places like Chicago.
Wait, what? Chicago? The place that recently laid off over one thousand teachers? The place that closed a whole bunch of schools because of low attendance? Yep. Chicago signed a contract with TFA to add 325 new teachers this year while firing 1,000. Where is the sense in that?
Union busting, plain and simple. It’s brilliantly Machiavellian. Get a bunch of mostly idealistic highly privileged youth and sign them up with promises of changing the world for our most underserved citizens while bringing them in to localities that have a strong union presence and don’t need new teachers. This combination makes TFA almost immune to criticism. You can almost smell the righteous indignation in the air. “How dare you criticize me! I’m doing it for the children! We do a lot of good! Look at how well the kids are doing! Why do you hate the children?”
Look, this isn’t difficult. You can be performing a very visible societal good while at the same time performing an invisible societal evil with equally dire consequences. It’s easy to ignore the evil that you can’t see for the good that is right in front of your face day after day. What’s happening in Chicago is the best example of that generally hidden evil.
Teaching is one of those few jobs where two (or even one) years of experience makes a huge difference. No amount of schooling in the world can adequately prepare you for putting yourself in front of 30 kids for the first time. What’s happening in Chicago is the removal of one thousand union teachers who have that couple of years’ experience and replacing them with a couple hundred non-union rookies who have none. This is not in the best interests of the children.
One of the major counter-arguments you will hear is that TFA is building for the future. Sure, these are new teachers, but they’re people who WANT to teach as opposed to teachers who are just doing it for a job. These TFA teachers often stay on after their two year contracts. That may be true, but they don’t want to stay in teaching in any greater frequency than their unionized counterparts. Plus, who’s to say that Chicago will decide to keep you? There’s already a precedence for firing experienced teachers and hiring TFA teachers. Why should that change?
There are many things wrong with how we educate our teachers. A teaching degree is filled with mindlessly wasteful courses only to be followed by a year of slave labor (aka, internships). Those things need to be fixed, but TFA is not the solution to the problem. The solution will likely look like this: Allow anyone with an advanced degree to be hired as a teacher at locally comparable cost of living wages and pair them with a rotation of experienced teachers to show them the ropes for a year. At the end of the year, the teachers vote on if you have what it takes to teach.
TFA does nothing to solve the various crises our school systems are suffering from. They only exacerbate the problem by allowing places like Chicago to bust unions and drive down already low teacher’s salaries. I can only hope that TFA gets morphed into something like I describe above because there is a lot to be gained by broadening the pool of available teachers but TFA is only succeeding at replacing the pool.