With Nolan and Grisel at Common Room
I feel a bit like Benno’s groupie for going to see Common Room‘s inaugural shows two weeks in a row, but the concept is so lovely you’d need a pretty rad alternative to give your Wednesday night to anything else.
For a mere $5 – which includes beer and cookies – you’re treated to scenes from a couple of plays and shows going on in Chicago at the moment, performed by their actual casts. Interspersed is live music and a couple of skits and performances by the regular hosts. And it’s all done in one of those little, intimate theatres which are basically always better than the big ones.
The idea they’re playing with is that theatre is hard to discover and navigate compared to, say, going to the cinema. How do you really know what’s on, and whether it’s any good? My answer in London was basically ‘go to the Tricycle’, but I do need a new strategy now, so the concept is perfect for me. And I feel lucky to have such a cool workplace where people do stuff like this.
Also pictured: FOOD
In other news… tonight I also caught up with my something-cousin-something-removed Sophia (who cares about the specifics). Last meeting was in California, three years ago! And it totally just whets my appetite for the great big family reunion in October for Jamie’s wedding – can’t wait 😀
Rooftop View
On Wednesday, I moved into my new home. Anyone fancy some wine and cheese with me on the roof?
Despite my last post, I have been doing other things alongside flossing. Such as:
- Improv! At The Armando Diaz Experience, a large gaggle of performers improvise on stage, triggered by short sections of a comedian’s monologue. It’s the second time I’ve seen improv in Chicago and I was impressed again by its cooperative nature. Unlike shows like Mock the Week – which are really collections of solo stand-up acts – you never get the feeling that people are just waiting to interrupt each other. This keeps the whole thing funnier and lends a nicely collaborative feel. Oh, and it’s all super-cheap. Recommended.
- Gig! Or as numerous people put it, “the most American experience you’ve had so far”. This was Made in America. Budweiser’s attempt to repeat the word Budweiser so many times that you’ll continue drinking Budweiser long after the free Budweisers have run out. Also – and I’m really not making this up – 3D glasses so giant animated Budweiser logos and glasses of Budweiser can zoom into your face. I think someone called Girl Talk was playing as well. But yeah. Budweiser. (Property of Anheuser–Busch InBev of Belgium, incidentally.)
Our flat: me, Nolan, Brett
- Film! Although I don’t have much to say about Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, really. I haven’t seen any of the earlier films, and was so sleepy that at one point I think I dozed off while the humans and apes were making some sort of pact. (At least that’s what I deduced had happened afterwards.) Anyway: it was OK. I would have liked a song or two.
- Fish! With Grisel, Agata and Emilie at the Shedd Aquarium, which is also home to creepy snakes, adorable otters and not-taking-enough-exercise penguins. (Bit rich to type that from a rocking chair, but there we are.) If you were weighing up a visit to Chicago and the presence of a good aquarium would tip the balance, then take note.
An underwater Acromantula
My endless Craigslist trawling has also come to an end, because I’m excited/relieved to say that I’ve found an apartment for August onwards. More details later, but the most important thing is that it has a truly spectacular rooftop view 😀
I was also planning to say that I haven’t really felt homesick yet – although plenty of nostalgia for days, places and people of the past. That was until today when Cat sent me a photo of the rest of the ex-flat and plus-ones having dinner together in Josh’s garden, and then yes, I did feel a smidgen of homesickness. And a yearning for wine. But maybe that’s just because my private supply of PG Tips at work ran out today, and carrying on without a supply of proper tea close at hand is an emotional highwire act at the best of times.
The first in an occasional series of posts in which I can justify anything I do as anthropological research.
I’m sitting in a dentist’s chair opposite the window. I have a great view, because I’m 19 floors up in downtown Chicago. Opposite is Donald Trump’s controversial sign in giant letters on the side of a skyscraper. I’ve already filled out a host of forms, including a pointed reminder that I have to pay for anything not covered by my insurance, and we’re going through my family history for risk factors.
“Any history of cancer?”
“Well, my grandfather got lung cancer eventually…” I reply, “but he smoked all his life.” Satisfied, she notes this down as a risk factor, and I wonder how often he went to a dentist when he was my age.
We move on to my own health, and she asks if I have elevated stress levels. I say no, and then equivocate. I get stressed at work, I guess, but it’s mostly fun stress? “A lot of people with stressful jobs say yes, with a note that it’s work related”, she suggests. “I think I’ll leave it at no”, I decide. Having not bothered to go the dentist for years, I already know where this is going; if I’m going to do US healthcare, I want to start gently.
She leads me into another room where I place my head as instructed in the midst of a fancy spinning diagnostic machine. “WELCOME TO THE WORLD’S MOST ADVANCED DENTAL PHOTOGRAPHIC SYSTEM” boasts a somewhat sinister recorded message, before playing some classical music around my head. I smile at the absurdity, and the dentist smiles back, which is heartening. If someone in the 1960s had drawn a futuristic comic about a Space Dentist set on the Moon in the year 2014, they would have included this machine.
After much prodding at my teeth later, we’re ready to discuss my results. My teeth are great, but my gums are terrible, and there are helpful videos to illustrate what could happen if this situation is allowed to continue. Reluctantly, I concede in my own head that this seems legit. I’m going to have to start flossing – something which I’d previously dismissed as a conspiratorial joke between dentists. In the UK, when a dentist told me to floss, it was a bit like rebellious teenagers promising not to hold a wild house party when their parents left town for the weekend. Neither side really meant it, it was just something they had to say. But this woman really does want me to floss, and I’m a little scared what might happen if I don’t.
Then the dentist who runs the place arrives, and re-examines me, and agrees wholeheartedly with the existing diagnosis. (I suppose it would be awkward if he didn’t.) And if I agree to stick to my side of the bargain, I can come every three months over the next year to get everything deep-cleaned and fixed up. “Your mouth will feel better… your whole body will feel better!” he says brightly, which is going a little far for me – but as I say, the basics are sound. I don’t doubt that this is going to be good for me. I just want to know about costs.
Costs are handled by a third person, who comes in separately to talk about my insurance. (We’re almost two hours in at this point.) Their charge for all of this work over the year is $1000. She’s going to phone my insurance company to find out if they will agree to this fee. If they will, then they’ll pay 50% of it, after a $50 deducible. So already we’re down to $550, and I smile because I still have time to upgrade my insurance to a slightly-more-expensive but much-more-generous option, now that I know it’s going to be worth the money. Not everyone is so fortunate.
The nonsense of an insurance system is painful. There is no effective control on costs, and a great deal of needless waste and bureaucracy, for something which is fundamentally unsuited to an insurance model. Everyone needs medical care eventually. It’s not some rare event you can protect against by pooling risk, which is what insurance is for. That’s like having an insurance system for food, ‘in case you happen to get hungry’. And because I have a good job, I’m going to pay less than someone on lower pay with a worse job, which you don’t have to be a Marxist to realise is clearly ludicrous.
Equally as sad is that the relationship between the people in this room is all out of kilter. To be very clear: I have no doubt that I’m surrounded by good people who take some professional pride from their skill at stopping my teeth from falling out, and for that I am truly grateful. But due to forces beyond their control, we find ourselves in a consumer relationship. I have come to shop, and they are upselling. Only in this case my decisions are supposed to be life and death, based on claims I can’t possibly evaluate properly, which isn’t quite the same as deciding whether you can afford the smartphone with the better camera.
Fear works, too. When I got back to work, I also opted into vision insurance. I don’t have glasses, I don’t wear contacts – this is purely so that if I wake up and serendipitously decide I want an eye test, I can. More bloated costs, more waste, more fear. Just imagine what the US could achieve if it put its collective spend – by government, companies and individuals – into a real healthcare system.
The collective principle asserts that the resources of medical skill and the apparatus of healing shall be placed at the disposal of the patient, without charge, when he or she needs them; that medical treatment and care should be a communal responsibility; that they should be made available to rich and poor alike in accordance with medical need and by no other criteria…
Society becomes more wholesome, more serene, and spiritually healthier, if it knows that its citizens have at the back of their consciousness the knowledge that not only themselves, but all their fellows, have access, when ill, to the best that medical skill can provide.
By. No. Other. Criteria.
Jeff DuBowe on Haarlem globetrotters: “One of our favorite spots. Super walking city. I think we were the ones who told your In-Laws about it…” Oct 14, 15:15
