If I Ever Leave This World Alive -Flogging Molly

I thought it appropriate to use a Los Angeles-based band, and one of my favorites, as the title for my latest posting.

Grad school is soon upon me, and I like to have everything nailed down as much as possible. So, I thought that I had a place all lined up. It was cute, private, and close to school.

Then I called the property manager to check on whether the owner was agreeable to my lease terms and he thought that I had found another place and found another tenant! This is despite my pronouncement that I loved it and that I would take it. In the City of Angels where you can't throw a Variety newspaper without hitting a waitress-actress hyperbole is just bole.

This is not something you want to hear during the middle of your work day. I raced home and immediately hit Craig's List.

I've lined up a few prospects in a variety of situations: a thirty-something married couple, a grad school film student, a professor, and a recent grad whose parents own the house- all different, but all potentially good fits.

I enjoy variety including my living situations. I've mainly lived with one another person, but in may different places: the ghetto of Chicago, a nicer section of Chicago, an island off Savannah, Georgia, the Central Valley of California, and even alone in the suburb of Chicago.

And I've met a variety of people living in these different places: a vegetarian interior designer, a Scientologist "chiropractor", a fencing enthusiast/part-time nudist, a sociologist/music moron twin (I can say that I'm her "sister"), a graphic designer whose never met a rainbow she doesn't love, a landscape designer/ VW enthusiast, etc.,

As unnerving as it is trying to find a new place in a strange city, I've enjoyed meeting all kinds of different people as prospective housemates, or even potential friends? :) "Cold calling" prospective housemates feels a little like going on a blind date- putting your best foot forward, inflating your good qualities, etc., But sometimes things work out! I'll keep you posted. Happy 4th y'all!

Grow a Pair!

Haha! Got you! Please, I consider myself to be vaguely tasteful and this blog's subject matter is not worthy of Maxim, but more along the lines of Better Homes and Gardens. Sortof.

This is merely a rumination on my childhood summers, prefaced by a sensationalist title to capture the reader's attention. It worked, didn't it?

Anyway, as I have mentioned ad nauseum, I have lived in a lot of places growing up. But one of the few consistent memories that I had was my mom's love of planting and gardening, wherever we lived. Sometimes the properties we lived on were not sympathetic to a garden, but they would accept bushes, flowers, shrubs, etc.,

My mom is not a girlie girl. She is happiest digging in the dirt, planting new, er, plants, plucking a homegrown tomato off the vine for dinner, or cutting a few roses and putting them in a bowl to spruce up the dining room table. She enjoys other activities, to be sure, but this is one of the major activities that I believe give her a defined sense of pleasure.

I, on the other hand, despite my aspirations, do not like to garden. Despite being a latent environmentalist, I could take or leave plants for my own personal use. I go into Home Depot's garden section and fall over from sticker shock. $42 for a tree?! I could buy shoes! I had a topiary in high school, as I was obsessed with them, but not enough to water it. Mom nursed that back to health.

I have lasting scars from the time I tried to weed our rose beds as the weeds were getting as tall as I. And I had heard our landlady express dismay over how her prized roses were being overrun by weeds. So, seeking an opportunity to do a good deed, I pulled and I yanked and I got two 3-inch gashes for my efforts.

I also attempted to grow a little basil from seeds purchased from the dollar section of Target, but they started to look a little sad. So, I fed them just a little Miracle-Gro and that annihilated them. No joke. It was there one day looking a little peckish and dead as a doornail the next.

I think it all stems back from my childhood. My mom tried her best to get us kids (my brother and I) involved in gardening. She even let us pick out our own seeds and plant them. But Wisconsin soil is fickle and while green beans, tomatoes, and zucchini tend to proliferate- slightly more Utopian horticultural dreams like watermelons, do not. I think I also tried to grow something else that did sprout but was not as interesting on my plate as it was on the shiny seed packet. Probably spaghetti squash or something like that.

But for those of you who do not have black thumbs I urge you to try a little garden, even an herb garden. Especially if you have kids. As we get farther and farther from nature I think more and more kids literally believe that food only comes from restaurants and the grocery store and that dirt's only purpose is to turn into mudpies. Show them where it really comes from. I remember the incredible pride I felt as a second grader when my alfalfa shoots sprouted in my milk carton. I wasn't terribly taken by the taste of my labors, but I loved that I had grown it all by myself. Well, cheek to jowl with my classmates' milk cartons in that windowsill. But my alfalfa was mine alone! I had raised it up from the darkness and into the light! Hyperbole? Probably. But success? You bet your sweet bippie.

As my fresh cilantro becomes a weekly habit at 30 cents a week I am going to grow my own cilantro and try that basil again. Maybe even a little rosemary in honor of my grandma? I've already got the OK from my new property manager!

To paraphrase circa 1980's Sesame Street won't you come out and (grow something) with me?

GQ put out a very informative article in their May 2009 issue called, "Grow Your Own: a Man's Introduction to Gardening" Unfortunately, they did not provide a hyperlink to the article. So if you want to read it, leave me a comment and I'll send you a PDF or there's always ebay- Zac Efron is on the cover if that's any additional incentive. :) Happy summer y'all!

Also, I don't know him from Adam, but a Mr. Colin McCrate, founder of Seattle Urban Farm Company was mentioned in the article. Here is a link to their blog, http://sustainableseattle.blogspot.com/2009/04/seattles-colin-mccrate-in-may-gq.html

More Things I Have Learned From the Road

*The original draft was written at the 7th Street L.A. Greyhound station- right across the street from the American Apparel factory/non-sweatshop. But as I am too cheap to add an Internet option to my phone I am publishing it now. Enjoy*

I consider myself a pretty experienced traveller. I have literally been flying in airplanes ever since I was 4 months old- how else do you think they transport infant adoptees? FedEx?! I've survived cross-country trips with my family and trans-Atlantic flights with strangers. I enjoy trains and deal with buses because they're cheap and are the only mass transit vehicles that traverse the Grapevine- the foothills/mountain range that separate central from southern California.

But today (6-22-09) I learned something new. Greyhound will not print you a second ticket should you lose or misplace your original.

This came as quite a shock to me especially as I thought that I was all set to board my 2 PM trip without any hassles. (Another note- just like airplanes ALWAYS come at least an hour early!) Nope, what the person behind the counter at my departure location had failed to advise me was not to throw away my ticket because, unlike the airlines, but like life, this is the only one you get.

Usually, I don't throw away any of my travel stubs until I get home, or to my final destination- kind of a one-stop garbage purging if you will. However, this time, this ONE time! I threw away what I thought was just my Greyhound receipt and the little folder it came in, not even bothering to check if there was anything else important in there. O the folly of my ways! Think very expensive signed check in the pocket of your jeans, going through the wash.

I wound up spending the next twenty minutes frantically texting and calling my friend who was by this time en route to Santa Monica, while I was in downtown, making her also nowhere near her house in Mar Vista, where my ticket sat in her kitchen garbage can.

I was also wrestling with two medium sized bags, whose straps kept falling off my shoulder, rubbing down my arm and crating marks in their wake. I have very sensitive skin, and I bring this up not to sound like a wuss, but because the marks the falling straps left on my arm turned red and angry looking- like a cat had scratched me, or that I had pursued an unsuccessful half-hearted suicide attempt, entirely untrue but superficially embarrassing. Red, "cutter"-like marks on my arms did not exactly enhance my already frazzled appearance or contribute to anyone's assurance of the general condition of my mental health. Great.

It is ironic that this was definitely a case of be careful what you wish for- as I had said earlier in the weekend- OK, lamented, having to go back to my deliberately non-air-conditioned place, walking to work in the oppressive heat versus the rather balmy L.A. weather, and a job that is a means to an end. My friend had said that I could stay with her until it was time for grad school, but alas, money is my mortal master, and bills must be paid. Not something that happens while one slurps down lemon basil gelato in Silver Lake. Highly recommended place right on Sunset Strip. Exact name unknown at this particular moment. Will report back later.

I can't wait until I don't have to do this 4 hour schlep back and forth anymore. It's hard to be an environmentalist! Although I applaud Greyhound for not wasting paper, but I do find this occurrence of not printing out a new ticket for one that is most definitely lost, a tad arbitrary.

This blog doesn't have much at all to do with planning, at least the urban kind, but I thought that someone out there might find this vaguely amusing. And if it has, then my pain had a purpose. You have been warned people of Earth!

Welcome Back to Civilization! or Where Do We Go From Here?

I must confess that I was a little nervous on my latest bus ride back from L.A. this past Monday. For more on my other hijinks see "More Things I Learned From the Road" 6-25-09 I've taken the Greyhound from my current location to L.A. several times and I like to think that I am an old pro by now.

However, due to circumstances beyond my control, (see aforementioned blog) I didn't take a Greyhound Greyhound bus. Instead I took another line, which leaves from the same station. But this line takes fewer stops, which makes fewer checkpoints between civilization. The inbetween points are really long stretches of California farmland and undeveloped or undevelopable land, not much to see and unfortunately makes the mind, which has been exposed to too many slasher movies, wander and consider the potential for me to star in a real-life version of Jeepers Creepers.

But as I am writing this blog not from beyond the grave, I survived the trip. I was a bit too excited when I saw those 12-foot high fences that attempt to block the noise from the stone's-throw-away freeway while corraling the aesthetically-unappealling sprawling edge suburbs.

The reason I bring this up is because during my bus ride, and yesterday too, in the most unlikely of events- watching one of my favorite movies, Wedding Crashers, I was thinking about the future of development. In Wedding Crashers Owen Wilson and Rachel McAdam's characters take a charmed bike ride through the (probably) Virginia countryside. There are unpaved bike paths, rolling meadows, and centuries-old trees that fill the background. This is the kind of land that I can get behind, that I can defend, chain myself to a tree for, etc.,

But the barren, frankly ugly California countryside I could do without. If anything, it is prime real estate. Sections just like this have been developed an hour, two hours driving distance outside of L.A. One might think that I should be psyched about this. But the environmentalist in me bemoans how expensive the infrastructure is to support these fringe communities. The edge suburbs of L.A. are developed in the desert, not exactly land known for abundant natural sources of water. Then there are utilities, waste management, etc.,

I guess there is no truly perfect solution. Once that beautiful Virginia countryside is razed for development there is no turning back. A good example is one of the final scenes in the surprisingly anti-development movie, Evan Almighty where God, in the form of Morgan Freeman shows Evan aka Steve Carrell, shows what the land used to look like before his development was built. On the other hand, developing in the desert makes sense, at first, no one else is using it, there isn't much of an eco-system or too many animals to consider potentially displacing. But it's really expensive to establish and maintain infrastructure in a land that is technically uninhabitable.

But like the title of Barack Obama's autobiography/call-to-arms, one needs to believe in the Audacity of Hope. That there are solutions, but we need the audacity to hope, to believe that they exist, to look for them, and not to rest until we find some that are win-win for everyone.

Navelgazers Anonymous

I like to keep family matters and my blog separate, but a recent road trip my parents just returned from had me thinking about the nature of things.

My parents went to visit some college in the mountains of North Carolina so that my dad could see if said college would be a good place for him to teach at in the future. He was looking to teach actuarial science or business.

I assume that if he would teach a class, any class really, that he would include a concise history of whatever objective he was teaching- when did it first start, who has applied it, who has built upon it, etc.,

This is the complete and total opposite of my former discipline, art history, which as far as I can tell looks so far back it practically looks forward. One of the reasons I quit art history is because it never seemed to look forward, it was always pre-occupied with what had happened in the past. Sometimes in the ancient past, like BC or BCE, depending on how politically correct you want to be, past!

In all fairness sometimes art history bothers to stop staring at its own navel long enough to see what is going on in the current world, but usually the only thing it comes up with is some painfully self-conscious exercise in narcissism. Although I must say that Bruno aka Sacha Baron Cohen is one THE best performance art pieces since ever and definitely better than any piece that is deliberate performance art. See Matthew Barney (partner of Bjork), Chris Burden, etc., for examples.

My new discipline, urban planning, looks, or should look both to the past and to the future. If anything it really needs to be a student of the past to see what has worked and what definitely did not work to avoid literally expensive mistakes. But at the same time it is concerned about the present and working for the future, for a better future.

Again, unlike art, planning fails when it caters to elitism- hello Lewis Mumford! Catering only to a specific demographic only brings about downfall. Yet one more thing to get me psyched about planning!

How Far Is Too Far?

I am getting a new apartment in Los Angeles this weekend, actually, hopefully, ideally, renting a room in a house that rents out all of the rooms to individual tenants- and USC grad students only if everything goes according to plan.

But the age-old question of location, location, location had me thinking- how far is too far? Points A and B being your place of residence and your consistent destination- work, school, your kid's school, your place of worship, your favorite protesting spot, whatever.

For some of you who know me, I have lived in 11, soon to be 12 places in 26 years. And for the most part my family and I have selected our dwellings within reasonable proximity to our locations that we would frequent often i.e. work, school, and church. When I say reasonable proximity I mean about 15-20 minutes. We never lived in any big, big cities, so traveling times were pretty consistent, with weather being the only variable- black ice? add at least 5 minutes for safety.

It threw us for a loop when we moved to Connecticut and people lived in different towns, but knew each other as if they were in the same zip code. Like I said, we lived in small towns and yes people from Wausau knew people from Merrill, but they went to different churches, their kids to different schools, etc., To live in Avon, but to go to church in Canton was very strange to us. The Connecticut way of life still remains very strange to me. I'm surprised no one has spontaneously combusted yet.

When I moved to Chicago on my own it took me a good hour to get to work via public transportation- bus + the Red line, not counting delays due to linework, which was a constant in the summer of 2006.

Sometimes I took my car, but during the holidays working retail in Lincoln Park made it impossible to find a spot for my car, so I relied on the ease of the public transportation. And when my car was damaged beyond repair my prior experience using public transportation made the journey less of a hassle and more of just a part of my going-to-work routine.

When I moved to the suburb of Naperville I chose an apartment whose location was only ten minutes driving time away, but unfortunately was not located on a road that was safe enough to get to on foot.

Now it takes me about half an hour (on foot) to get to my current job. Some people are horrified when I tell them how long it takes and more than three people have offered to pick me up on their way to work. But my walk not only gives me exercise, it also gives me a chance to wake up and really immerse myself in my surroundings.

But my latest relocation had me thinking. The champions of New Urbanism argue that our auto-dependent society has allowed people to live farther from their jobs- not necessarily a bad thing at the end of the day- but not great for the environment either when you consider how many emissions and pollutions one can accrue over simply a five-day work week when mass transit is possible.

Note I didn't say plausible as many people in the suburbs can attest to- I don't even want to know how few suburbs even have a bus line running through or within reasonable walking distance of the major sub-divisions.

Unlike say, Chicago (how I love their transportation department!) where one is hard pressed to find a major neighborhood that is not near some form of public transportation. And New York? Fugghedaboudit! In one ill-planned trip I managed to get from Wall Street to the West Side to midtown with the help of the NY subway system and my own dogged determination.

We have family friends who live up in the Bay Area and the father commutes two hours-each way! each day to get to his job. This is beyond crazy to me. Yes, I understand the need to have your kids be in "good schools," "safe neighborhoods," etc., But Dad has to schlep two hours each way each day? Oi. . . This is not uncommon for people in the Bay Area- my housemate's dad, when he (my housemate) was growing up- would ride his motorcycle- come rain or shine between the lanes of stalled cars (think the opening scene from Office Space)- two hours to get to his job.

I have no doubt that this is true for families across the country, especially in bigger, non-mass-transit oriented cities, especially in the South like Atlanta and Charlotte. But I think that it is a time for a revolution.

Hopefully as part of the "green" movement more funding will be devoted to mass transit, and innovative forms of it- light rail, anyone? And two hour one-way commutes will become a thing of the past. Here's hoping.

Stop the Cow Farts! with Garlic?

Forgive the crudity, but for those of you who don't know part of our greenhouse gas problem stems from bovine flatulence. Yep, cow farts contain methane, which is contributing to our steadily rising temperature.

I like Alan Richman's solution "the way I see it is to eat more meat" -from his work Fork It Over

However, in the newest issue of Scientific American 3.0 (Volume 19, Number 2) some entrepreneuring Welsh people have come up with a solution- garlic. Neem Biotech in Cardiff, Wales is making a product called "Mootral" (moo + neutral), which contains an extract in garlic called "allicin." When cows (and sheep) are given this product the bacteriat that produces the methane is inhibited. How much? Two small trials have been conducted showng a reduction by 15% More research hopes to be able to increase the reduction success rate.

I still plan to do my part by dining at steakhouses everywhere, but it's nice to now that science is making strides that don't involve my cholesterol.

More Views From the Road

This afternoon my dog Dante and I went to the vet and acquired some antibiotics for a condition of his. I read the label and realized that one of his meds need to be taken with food. And what kind of delicacy does Mr. Dante favor? Peanut butter! What we were out of? Peanut butter! This necessitated a trip to the "local" grocery store, which may not be around the corner, as Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk and Andres Duany hope in all cities with an implementation of a new urbanist design scheme, but it was within (relative) walking distance.

Walking back from the store I came to an intersection where two perhaps eleven (-?) year old boys were waiting for the light to change.

I could tell that they had just returned from an afternoon excursion to Roller Town, the local skating rink and arcade, where I spent many a middle school afternoon, as they both clutched small treasures.

We were apparently heading in the same direction, so I had a chance to observe them from a discrete distance.

They were about the same size and height, but appearance-wise they embodied the polar extremes of that caterpillar-like stage of a young man's life when he is no longer truly a child, but he is not quite a teenager. One had long, tousled blonde hair and the other was dark haired, which was cut in something a quarter of an inch from a buzz cut.

Both were wearing those ill-fitting, but totally age-appropriate clothes for their age- you know what I mean- those slightly over-sized t-shirts and average fitting pants. Pants not nearly as baggy as those favored by gangsta rappers and their suburban fans that were sported a decade (yikes) ago nor the gonad-crushing skintight almost leggings i.e. "skinny jeans" that the teenagers of today are sporting. Yes, I am old when I cast a critical eye on the fashions and trends of today with a jaundiced eye. Yet somehow I still can't comprehend how pants that double as a tourniquet to the lower extremities are "cool," but this clearly my age talking.

I remember when my brother favored t-shirts that looked like he'd raided my dad's closet and shorts that looked more like baggy pants cut to calf-length. Then he suddenly discovered American Eagle and Hot Topic and started sporting more body-conscious outfits. The sudden enlightening of the concept of girls and the desire for proximity to them was also a contributing factor to this revolution of the wardrobe. I am not immune to fashion faux pases. In fact, I think everything up to yesterday has been a mistake I'd prefer to forget and not to captured for posterity on film.

To remain unobtrusive I kept my earbuds in and my ipod on to Chester French's "Love the Future" album. Therefore, I'm not exactly sure what they were talking about, but I know that one was quite elated by his prize, a sort of plastic stick with a grabbing mechanism on the end, which he took great delight in using to hit his friend with, when said friend was not looking.

There are several intersections from the point where we first came upon one another to my final destination and rather than wait for the light to change they sprinted across the street after judging oncoming traffic to be at a safe enough distance. They also lept to swat at low hanging tree branches and broke into a sort of inspired sprint several times too, oblivious to how odd this may look.

It is moments like these that I savor, moments that remind me of my own (what feels like distant) past and what it really means to be young and alive. There is much that lies ahead of these two boys, but for these embodiments of the future, the present is all that matters. And honestly, it is all that should matter to us too.

I would have missed out on this quiet observation if I had been driving. If anything, I probably would have regarded the boys as a minor irritation- two more additional factors that I would have to calculate in my defensive driving formula. Would one of them suddenly run into the road, would one of them suddenly trip and fall into my path, etc.,? Instead of what they are, two boys enjoying a warm spring day, free of their parents' watchful eye, and exploring the world on their own terms, something every child deserves.

As graduation draws near for schools near and far I also become quite philosophical about life, especially my own, and the direction that it is taking, should be taking, or veered off course. It is an annual thing, though when it started exactly I am not sure.

So, some future postings may be waxing philosophic about what it means to inhabit this mortal coil. But I am also compiling some thoughts about new urbanism, sustainability, and reviews of the excellent spring 2009 issue of Good magazine (http://www.good.is/) and Scientific American 3.0

Wishing you a safe and satisfying summer.