Death of Drivable Cars, and of News, Too

Is there any irony in the fact that the Chicago Tribune's newly redesigned Web site, unveiled today, made it difficult to find an online version of a story, not just any story, but instead a poignantly written cover feature about perfectly good, well built, still drivable vehicles being sentenced to death, a casualty of the government's immensely popular "Cash for Clunkers" program, offering a $4500 voucher toward the purchase of a newer, more fuel efficient vehicle provided that the clunker, and its emissions, will never drive again, or, in other words smashed, rendered to scrap.

A boon for pollution activists? Or new car manufacturer lobbyists? It was another side of the Cash for Clunkers program that I was not aware of, as I had only heard about it from my mother. She'd heard the ads on the radio, and was urging me to check it out. As I sometimes do, I went to the Trib site, the newspaper in my hand, and intended to link the Trib story to my Facebook page to hopefully prompt some discussion on the story among virtual acquaintances.

The top stories on the newly redesigned page involved a Chicago Blackhawk arrested for robbery, and assaulting a cab driver, an update on a dog fight, and a bunch of other stuff that was not on the front page of today's paper. I had to scroll a bit, and keep my eyes fixated on the busily designed screen to find the online version of writer Robert Channick's story.

Is news dying, too, just like the well built automobile cars of yesterday, its fate in the hands of younger, more-efficient-or willing- to- give-it-up -for-free writers? Or, does one just have to look a bit harder to find the kind of news they are used to reading, and expect from their city's top newspaper? It's also possible that the new design ranks stories by their popularity, and amount of clicks, which can be a dangerous thing when all the top pages are full of gossip.

It looks like I'm not alone in not being a fan of the new site. I clicked on "provide feedback," which should have just had a slew of comments like a story normally does. The extra click took me to a second screen that looked like a mommy blogger forum, with threads, and filed comments, which again required MORE clicking just to view the comments. Any site designer knows, the more clicks, the less likely a person will keep clicking. Did they construct the feedback portion of their site with that design tenant in mind??? It's a good thing that some people decided to put clear indicators of disapproval on their subject headers, using language like, "IF IT'S NOT BROKE, DON'T FIX IT."

In more irony, when I clicked on feedback, the url actually changed to an entirely different one: http://getsatisfaction.com/chicago_tribune

Get satisfaction? Maybe it's the heat, or the blisters on my foot, or other situations, but at least newspaper wise, I am confidant in saying I can't get no satisfaction online-- just yet. Now, off to read the newspaper version of the Tribune, which is so much different than the version I just linked. Why do I have a feeling one of these versions is playing for keeps, and it's not the one I care about?

Painful Lives of Knitters

So, I've been taking this knitting class for about eight months. Each week, we gather, knit together carefully, and sloppily woven projects, try them on, ooh ahh at each other's craftiness, take out some stitches, put in others, and overall, truth be told, it's a blast. I love knitting, always have. It's cheaper to knit than to go to a therapist, and you can learn a lot about yourself when you're knitting, and while in the company of other knitters.

Two gatherings ago, my wallet disappeared. It was inside my purse, which was unattended during a knitting circle break. The purse was resting on a couch by its lonesome, in a room of approx. eight knitters, half of which are unemployed, or underemployed. Due to its therapeutic powers, knitting attracts people in tough situations, both emotionally, and financially. People that need to knit...

It's possible I randomly dropped my wallet en route from a store where I purchased water at shortly before the circle began, or I somehow dropped it while pulling out my camera to take a picture of an exotic looking bird near the bus stop on the way home from the knitting circle. That is what I hope happened, and what I have convinced myself happened. I'd rather have lost a wallet via space cadet powers than harbor a seed of doubt toward fellow knitters.

So, I'd flushed the events of last month out of my mind. I'd canceled my single credit card, lost the lame, laughable single dollar bill that was in my wallet, and the bus card. A trip to the DMV to get a new license went surprisingly well. In terms of loss, I didn't lose much except the trust I had in my fellow knitters, and that is what I am mourning far more than the loss itself.

Yesterday I went to the knitting circle with a new attitude. Peace! Love! Forget about it! Unlike the final circle of the last term, where a few of the knitters had been absent, I smiled at them, back in gear, knitting needles ready for action. Frankly, it was good to see them, and all the other knitters, too. Like I said, I love knitting, and knitters.

The assignment was to knit about turning points in your life when you knew you would never be the same, and then to make a quilt out of them. As we went around the room sharing our turning points, most rooted in deep pain as turning points often are, without going into any further details a few of the knitters had had arrests in their pasts, some of the felony sort. A drunken altercation with a federal marshal on a plane, a drug arrest from being framed by the girlfriend of a friend, a marriage brokered to keep a lover, and an immigrant here in the country, a lawsuit from a dogsitting accident, and a bunch of other stuff that resurrected that seed of doubt I had buried, determined to not think about ever again.

I am looking forward to the blankets that these knitters will create based on their turning points, as I'm sure they will be outstanding, and powerful. Tough life experiences have a way of creating beautiful works of art, I'm convinced of that. Knitters are very talented, yet perhaps very tortured, too. Now that I've knitted about this experience, I am actually feeling better, and can finally put it to rest. The seed of doubt is dead.

My President, My Friend

Dear Mr. President,

First off, I think you're doing a great job, and please take everything I'm about to say with a big grain of Kosher rock salt.

Stop having so much fun.

I'm serious.

This is the worst American economy in over seven decades, in other words a crisis, and you are taking your daughters not just to work, but on a European vacation. From there, you are making it 'a birthday week,' with a weekend celebration on Martha's Vineyard, followed by a surprise visit to bring birthday cupcakes to a reporter of all people, granted she deserved the cupcakes, and you happen to share the same birthday, but was that feel good moment for you, or for the cameras that would undoubtedly be snapped?

And, those frothy beers with Cornell West, and that policeman who's name isn't worth remembering, what was that all about, and was it necessary?

Ah, yes, I almost forgot. It's great that you, and Michelle go on dates. But, quite frankly, that matters as much to me as the blow job Monica gave Bill.

Can we get on with it?

What's in a Day? Who's There?

This graph, featured in Sunday's NYT, illustrates how unemployed people, and employed people spend their days. , and I think it's astonishingly accurate, at least in my experiences. If production in the home got the same pay as production in the workplace, I think we'd be a much healthier, and happier nation.

Okay, back to sending out resumes... I kind of want to write about a woman whom I gave $10 to at Dunkin Donuts last night, though, which was a pretty stupid thing to do in retrospect given my own situation. It wasn't until she gathered her bags to leave that I noticed her hospital bracelet looked very old, like she'd been wearing it for longer than a few days, and perhaps she didn't just get out of the ER like she told me that she did, trying to get enough el, and Metra fare to get back to suburban Addison.

It wasn't until I took a closer look at her that I realized maybe she is 30 pounds underweight from drug abuse, and not from the stresses of living with an alcoholic like said she did. She seemed so relieved when I gave her the $10, and then went on to say that she had approached many other people while trying to get fare to get back home, and that they all had barely looked at her, saying, "I have no money!" and walking past.

"One guy wagged his finger," she said. "I hate it when people wag their fingers. You wag a finger to a child, not to an adult."

She had seemed indignant, insulted by the finger wagging. She told me she has a job, at a pasta place in Addison. I couldn't imagine her serving food, being so much in resemblance to a walking skeleton, the veins in her neck visible, her bright blue eyes somehow sunken in, yet bulging, too. I kept on reading the Sunday newspaper, which I seem to read on Tuesdays these days now that I write a weekly Monday newsletter, and she kept on interrupting. She asked me if I had any ideas for gaining weight. "Peanut butter?" I wondered. She lamented the weight loss, and said that she used to feel like putting on make up, and getting dressed up made a difference, but now, she said, it doesn't make any difference in her appearance.

She also lamented the fact that her hair is so thin that it takes at least three wraps of a hair bands to hold a ponytail, whereas her hair was once thick enough for one wrap, something I could relate to as well, along with her well articulated frustration with herself.

Part of the reason I also kind of believed her, that she wasn't high on coke, or meth, was that she was scarfing down a large amount of food, in a styrofoam carry out container like the kind at restaurants. She was eating quickly, and scooping up the rice into the little plastic spoon as fast as she could, hunched over, her lips close to the container as to not lose any grains. "Where did you get that?" I asked her. "A woman gave it to me," she replied. "I was starving."

She told me that she was in the neighborhood because someone from the hospital drove her here, and she was hoping to visit Mike, a friend of hers that lives near Dunkin Donuts. "The lady next store said he moved three weeks ago, I just missed him," she said. I asked her what she was doing here in Chicago prior to the asthma attack, which she said caused her to go to the hospital in an ambulance.

"A....a meeting," she replied, offering no elaboration.

"Look, I can take your name, your address, send you a money order for ten bucks," she said, kind of with a snort, like why go through the trouble for ten bucks.

"No, no, that's okay," I said. "I hope you get back home. Be sure to get change, because if you put all of that on an el card, you can't use it for the Metra, too."

Uh huh, she said, right. By then my money was in her emaciated hand, and I wasn't really believing her, as she had gone from sincere, to impatient, and I wondered if she was thinking about where, and how to get her next fix, what kind of high ten bucks would buy.

A high. A moment. Like the one we just shared, but much different.

What's in a day? Who is in a day? How does a day get spent? How many times can you fly, and handle the crash back down?

Ice cold, ice cold

A few days ago it was a street preacher at the corner, and today it's a man with a cooler like the kind you take on a family picnic, and it's full of bottles of water that he's selling for $1 each.

I don't know much about sound except that it travels. And, like the street preacher, the constant refrain of ice cold, ice cold is touching a nerve, and I'm feeling the man's urgency while at the same time wishing he weren't there.

We pioneer our own destinies, and what I fear most-- screaming ice cold, ice cold, myself-- has probably already happened. In fact, I'm pretty sure of it.

An understandable understanding

I am dating a man that doesn't understand blogging, which is understandable.

If I understood it, I probably wouldn't be doing it, either.

So, shoot me if I like expressing myself. Call me a narcissist, though keep in mind this is a far less obtrusive-- and much easier way-- to get the word out than trolling around open mics. Nothing against the spoken world culture, I just like to hide behind my keyboard, and count writing as an antisocial indulgence.

The newsletter forces me to be social enough, and that's where most of my energies formerly reserved for blogging have been lately, and frankly it's nice to focus on other people minutia for a change, while keeping active, and connected to the neighborhood. I've never been one to idolize celebrities, or figures out of reach, however, small business owners that go against the odds, and offer something different than everyone else rank pretty high in my book.

The Other Americans

Psst, you know the ones I'm talking about, not the ones that have paychecks, and direct deposit, but the ones that are wondering what tomorrow will bring, and not in a philosophical way, but actually.

The ones that were unfortunate enough to have worked in dying industries, and whom have exhausted their unemployment benefits. The ones that lost a home, or are in the long, drawn out process of losing it. The ones that are trying to make a dollar out of 35 cents, but are quickly realizing they've got a quarter if they're lucky. The ones that are looking at the care, and feeding of pets as burdens rather than joys. The ones that are thinning out their infant's formula, or potty training earlier to avoid the cost of pull-ups. The ones that have savings, and are charting the amount it dips each month, and when it will completely disappear if nothing is done. The ones that have jobs, but a cut in salary, an increase in workloads, and are the envy of no longer coworkers that were let go. The ones that can barely afford their mortgages, and will have to hold Mary Kay parties to pay the assessments. The ones that own small businesses, and wonder how much longer to keep the doors open, how may more dips they can take. The ones that aren't sure if they can keep up with the game face, the illusion that it's all going to be A- O.K.

A-OK traces its origin to journalism, or presidential elections, depending on which etymology one subscribes to, but it's a good term for this nation. Is America all correct? Is everything all systems go? Ask the other Americans. I don't seem to hear from them much. Misery has a way of not broadcasting itself, but it's felt, like an undercurrent, a chill.