I think I’ve had more than my fair share in life, but I still love surprise birthdy parties 🙂
British atmospherics
Theron and Todd with the TARDIS
With Catherine, Jason and Katie’s cake!
Nolan, Chrissy, Robert, Thomas
One more with the TARDIS because Katie took such great photos
With the person who organised it all 😉
Thank you so much to everyone who came: Billy, Taylor, Agata, Emilie, Ellen, Robert, Julie, Shelby, Benno, Calvin, Nolan, Chrissy, Brandon, Carolyn, Theron, Catherine, Jason, Ramya, Abhishek, Karol, Kevin, Corey and ESPECIALLY to:
- Todd, who organised a British-themed trivia quiz (which my team thankfully won else I’d never hear the end of it)
- Katie, who baked cakes and took photos and decorated and is generally awesome
- Randi, who masterminded the whole thing and is (a) untrustworthy (b) amazing ❤
And also to my sisters who contributed British phrases in advance! (Did you know that “lost the plot” is not part of American English? That’s a real loss.) I love all of the above.
Turning 26 means I’ve been living in Chicago for a little over a year, and I am still blown away by the warmth and generosity of the people in my life here. It’s sad that immigration is never seen in these terms back at home. Instead it’s all migration statistics, spurious debates about welfare and tough talk about border controls. If we spent a fraction of the time celebrating instead what it takes to make people feel welcome, we’d be a happier people.
The 606 (with guests)
A smorgasbord of things to post about:
- Improv comedy featuring fellow megachurch attendee Kannan in Fucked Up Family Reunion. Sadly my family isn’t nearly interesting enough to qualify, but another audience member stepped up to the plate to provide material.
- Take the Armenian genocide, mix with a dysfunctional marriage and you get Beast on the Moon – an unsurprisingly intense play about two survivors living in 1920s Milwaukee. Bonus theatre points: the playwright turned out to be sitting behind us.
- Hayao Miyazaki’s swansong, The Wind Rises, was first released in 2013 but Katie tipped me off to a showing and I was delighted to catch it in the cinema. Like his other films that I’ve seen, My Neighbour Totoro and Spirited Away, the imagination and wandering narrative is quite different to most Hollywood films, and the film’s thoughtful and nuanced approach to Japanese engineering during WW2 is probably evidence that ‘losing’ countries make better art. Plus the short, angry boss character is quite wonderful.
- After another term of SPARK mentoring, I attended another ‘Discovery Night’ where students in the programme present their projects to classmates and parents. Huge thanks to Katie for stepping in midway through to mentor!
- At Simon’s suggestion, Randi and I caught the Chicago leg of Scott Bradlee’s Postmodern Jukebox tour – vintage covers of Taylor Swift, One Direction, Magic! and more. It was a lot of fun, even from the nosebleeds.
- We also saw Ex Machina (along with Kevin and Nolan) which was creepy, wonderful, and left me deeply disturbed and distrusting of everyone around me in case they were actually vengeful robots with AI.
- And finally, today was 06/06/2015 – or, in American dating formatting, 06/06/2015. Which was nice, because (a) it doesn’t make my new t-shirt look stupid, and (b) it was also the opening day of Chicago’s new elevated ‘Bloomingdale Trail’ or ‘The 606‘. Basically, it’s like New York’s High Line, but in Chicago, and about double the length at 3 miles (so there). Opening day was fortuitously sunny and pulled in large, good-natured crowds with some very reasonably priced beer, live music and some free memorabilia. Looking to take a Chicago visitor on a good stroll? It’s been a long time coming, but the 606 has finally arrived, and it’s a pretty great addition to the city below.
At the 606 launch with Randi, Katie and Brandon
Campaign Finance Reform! In game form!
For Randi’s birthday on Sunday, I thought it would be fun to make a video game. (That might sound crazy, but she thought it would be fun to run a half-marathon: at least my craziness can be done sitting down.) To do this I chose Construct 2, a lovely bit of software from London-based start-up Scirra. It took a couple of weeks to get the whole thing done, but the learning curve is gentle and the basics quickly understood. If you’ve ever had the itch to make a game yourself, this is an easy yet flexible way of doing so.
I still get tingles from the power of the tools available to us today. It’s something I see with the kids I mentor with, too – with a little effort, it’s remarkably easy to quickly pull together a project which would have required feats of organisation and specialist equipment in the past. I can just about remember doing a primary school assignment on Greece, say, with an out-of-date edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica, a Compton’s CD-ROM and possibly a colour printer if it wasn’t out of ink.
This makes me sound so old, I know.
Collect cash, beat turtles, avoid cars, kill zombies and more
Tomorrow night we embark on a long Memorial Day weekend to the West Coast, knocking out two more states from my travel list. I can’t promise to get to 50, but I can try 😀
Well.
Five years ago, I posted some photos of the election night drinking and party games we kept busy with as the unhappy outcome rolled forward. So in the spirit of consistency:
Trying to explain to Jason why we weren’t all that interested in Plaid Cymru
Exit poll sadness
As the night wore on, some imported British chocolate became necessary
Cameron cracks a gag about being a One Nation Tory
Last time I also managed to see the positive side. It’s not something I can really repeat this time. It’s almost the worst possible result: a Tory majority, but not so big that Cameron won’t be beholden to the madder fringes of his backbenchers, and with no moderating influence. The Scottish rift will be used to further cement Conservative power in England, if it doesn’t end the Union entirely. And in two years, we’ll teeter on the brink of isolation from Europe. Quite frankly, it’s enough to sit in exile in the US for a while…
At least Galloway’s gone.
It was fun introducing Americans to some of the stalwarts of British general elections on the BBC: David Dimbleby, public constituency counts, joyously absurd graphics (the Lib Dem house of cards a particular favourite this time around) and lost deposits. (One unfortunate Lib Dem candidate in Essex secured a miserable 80 votes: surely you’d just know more than that in person?) I also realised that all three constituencies I’ve lived in are now Labour, which says something for the happier circles I inhabit. London Independence Party, anyone?
Very much enjoyed seeing John in The Upstairs Concierge last week. It didn’t get great reviews, but I was just so pleased and so ready to see a farce again – and I even followed along with most of the baseball references!
Speaking of farce – it’s almost time for the UK election. Five years ago I posted my first general election vote and crossed my fingers it would actually get there, and this time around I’ll be relying on my mother to vote by proxy on my behalf. (I’ll have to take it on trust that she doesn’t slip up and accidentally vote for UKIP or something.) I’m still looking forward to the day when I can actually do it the ‘proper’ way with a pencil and a cross and a cheerful looking volunteer at the polling station who’s just pleased that someone has turned up, but – in compensation – I do get the nerdish excitement at six extra hours of BBC election night coverage before I give up and go to sleep. Thank you, timezones.
With less than a week to go, then, here are some thoughts:
- I am pleased with Ed Miliband’s performance in this campaign, especially against a tough (although pleasingly sharp) crowd on Question Time the other night. I especially respect his refusal to give in to the EU referendum bandwagon – the ‘trust the people’ soundbite is comfortable to say, but it’s also disingenuous. In a representative system, politicians should stand on a platform and argue for something. And if you really believe that a one-off referendum on the status quo trumps all other issues, don’t vote Labour. Otherwise, I urge you to give him another look.
- Watching the debates from the US, it’s a particular point of pride that – despite our many, many faults – a consensus for universal healthcare, free at the point of use, still prevails in British politics. Let’s never ruin this.
- If we are permanently in an era of multi-party politics, then the Westminster system must adapt. I’m not really sure whether this will be intrinsically ‘better’ or not, but it’s just a statement of fact: just as individual votes must be respected, then general patterns of voting must change things too. More devolution of power and budgets – not just to Scotland, but to English cities – should be part of the answer here.
Incidentally, if you check the sidebar of this blog, you’ll now see ‘anniversary posts’ from the eleven (as of last Monday) years of blogging archives. Easy nostalgia, and part of my motivation for writing this: it’ll serve as a useful reminder to future-me of what I was hoping for this time around. We’ll see.
Finally – my family lost someone very close to them last week. It’s been weighing on my mind, and I will miss her terribly. It feels a strange thing to write that for someone I barely knew, but with some people you just feel the goodness, and the fun, and the kindness. Di was someone like that – someone whose presence enticed teenage-me me to stick around and pull up a stool when my parents ‘had friends over’, because she was always worth the time. My thoughts are with her family.
Todd on 2024: My Year In Books: “I know what Glass Hotel is about. It’s about a bunch of loosely connected, barely developed characters, with their timelines…” Jan 4, 17:17
