carrieoakey12's Xanga

Last Friday

Sat, 19 May 2007 03:38:20 GMT

This is my last Friday night in my first big city apartment. I'm moving to another building, closer to the lake. Higher up. Fewer trees in view. More sky. Sketchier building. Lower rent. I'm looking into these apartments across the alley and the courtyard for the last time. Lives lived in such close proximity and at such a distance. More than their human inhabitants, it is the colors of the walls in these apartments -- white-white -- textbook blue -- mossy green; it is the artwork hanging there -- an oversized black and white canvas screened with a picture of Billie Holiday -- a large wooden spoon on a kitchen wall -- visible through windows; it is the color of the light coming through the blinds -- the Billie Holiday apartment has recently switched entirely to the cool blue-white of eco-friendly bulbs -- a lady across the courtyard who has lived here for twenty years gives off a thin dingy yellow -- the rotating college boys in the basement bright overhead light at all hours; it is with these which I have become intimately acquainted. I will miss these.

Friday, May 11, 2007

Fri, 11 May 2007 17:11:52 GMT

The secret of the creative life is often to feel at ease with your own embarrassment. We are paid to take risks, to look silly. Some people, like racing car drivers are paid to take risks in a more concrete way. We are paid to take risks in an emotional way.
Paul Schrader, interviewed by Terry Gross, Fresh Air
A risk I took --
Click here to listen to my entry into the Public Radio Talent Quest
And another risk, a link there pointing back to this blog. I started this blog to fill a requirement for a class in library school. My username "carrieoakey12" was actually made up by a couple of middle school girls that worked as assistants for my instructor at the public library where he works his regular gig. He set up these blogs for us before the class started and we were required to fill them in with something -- a topic of interest. I had just moved to Chicago from Athens, Georgia and the transition from bite-size community to choking hazard city was anything but smooth. I wanted to document my experiences and make notes on differences. I also wanted to talk myself into falling in love with the city the way I thought every thinking person should. The class only required that we make a few entries. I thought no one cares what I think about these things anyway -- the internet is stuffed with opinions -- and I met my quota of entries. It turned out to be precisely the fact that no one does care that spurred me to continue to add entries. For me, this blog is like leaving notes in the hollow of a tree for no one in particular. Notes about how I continue to flounder, trying to regain my sense of place. Trying to figure out what matters to me and why.
Between posting my voice for a contest and posting a link to this blog, I think this journal is more embarrassing, more risky. My emotional voice is right out in the open here, but it is just my physical voice over there. I don't know, it might be a toss up. Either way, who cares, right?

Friday, May 04, 2007

Fri, 04 May 2007 22:25:12 GMT

This was a banner to promote the Save Net Radio campaign.

Monday, April 30, 2007

Mon, 30 Apr 2007 07:20:55 GMT

MAUDE :

I should like to change into a sunflower most of all. They are so tall and simple.

And you, Harold, what flower would you like to be?

Harold and Maude look out

at field of daisies.

HAROLD: I don't know.

Just one of those.

(Gestures.)

MAUDE: Why do you say that?

HAROLD: (Softly) Because they are all the same.

MAUDE: Oooh, but they are not. Look.

They bend down to see some up close.

MAUDE:

(continues) See - some are smaller, some are fatter, some grow to the left, some to the right, some even have some petals missing - all kinds of observable differences, and we haven't even touched the bio- chemical. . . At first you think they all look alike, but after you get to know them you see there is not a repeat in the bunch. Each person is different, never existed before and never to exist again. Just like this daisy - (she picks it ) an individual.

HAROLD:

Well, we may be individuals all right but - (he looks out at the field) we have to grow up together.

They stand up. Maude looks up, moved by what Harold has said. She speaks softly. Tears are in her eyes.

MAUDE:

Yes, that's very true. Still I believe much of the world's sorrow comes from people who know they are this...

(she holds a single daisy)

. . . yet let themselves be treated

(she looks out at the field)

as that.

The reckoning of life and death in America

Wed, 25 Apr 2007 20:44:01 GMT

When I first moved to Chicago I thought a great deal about the scale of community and how it impacts the quality of our lives. The large scale living that affords people the anonymity to live lives of their own choosing without the scrutiny of the neighbors also means that there are no neighbors. When nobody knows “your business,” nobody knows you. For most people here that tradeoff is acceptable, even desirable. Everyone can remain at the comfortable distance of “otherness.” No one comes too close. Nothing is too intimate, not sex, not death.

I remember the first time I was delayed on the red line because someone had fallen onto the tracks. Everyone around me was angry and impatient, concerned only that they were being held up in the course of their day. They were inconvenienced. No one seemed to consider that if nothing else, a delay caused by a stranger’s death might be an occasion for reflection, “if this were my time . . .”

No. There was no moment of silence, no heads were bowed. Instead people were pacing back and forth, bitching to one another or complaining loudly into their cell phones about the CTA – Can’t Take it Anywhere.

I was sick to my stomach. The last thing I was thinking about was getting on with my business. I couldn’t stop thinking about the woman whose life had just ended. Right then. She was going someplace, just like I was. Only now she wasn’t. Screeching brakes. Sparks. Snap your fingers. Gone. Just like that.

I guess somewhere in mind I knew people died on the tracks but now that I was experiencing it first hand I couldn’t quite believe the cold prickly math this system was based on. Thousands of people getting transported to where they are going are greater than or equal to the one that doesn’t make it. It is a question of scale. Sorry for your loss . . .

Who was she? Where was she going? Was she someone’s mother? Daughter? Wife? Sister? Sweetheart? What did she dream about when she was a girl? Did she dream? Was someone expecting her? If there was no one who would the authorities tell? Who would tell her story? Would the CTA workers pick up the contents of her purse, now scattered across the tracks and put them back inside it or will they let the wind take it all away?

The thought, as voiced by some of the other passengers on the train, that it might have been suicide, that she may have actually intended this death, did not make me feel any better. Especially since, if that were the case, the people on the train seemed to place no higher value on her life than she did. All they cared about was that in her death she had become an obstacle. No wonder she didn’t want to live any more.

I looked in the paper and on the news for the next few days hoping to learn something about this woman. She either lived or worked somewhere close by me. She was only two stops away. To my old way of thinking, she was my neighbor. I desperately needed this information – to somehow connect myself to her – I could not bear the fact that she would be as anonymous to me as she was to all of those other people on the train that day. That she was just a statistic in a poor accounting. But no details on the incident were reported; just that there had been a delay on the red line.

I am confused by the inexact measure of the value of a life in America. That day in Chicago the value of a single human life seemed very little. Is that due to scale? What is one less when there are so many. In a smaller place, like the Virgina Tech community one senses that even one death is keenly lamented, and 32 deaths at once are unthinkable. And even though the campus is far from here, and I don't know any of the victims, I am also deeply pained by the lives lost there.

Over the course of the week of media coverage I got to know each one of the victims. I learned their names and faces. I felt sharp pangs for their families and friends, as well as for the shooter and his family. Set apart from the rest in this tragedy as “the other.” His life seemed no less “lost” than those of his victims. The complexity of the emotion his parents and his sister must be feeling seems impossible to bear. All of it, all of them, so painful, so impossible to bear. Bush stated that they were simply “At the wrong place at the wrong time.” Or were they in the right place at the wrong time? In a place where their lives were properly valued?

When a nameless woman falls beneath the train isn't she also “At the wrong place at the wrong time?” Why don’t we count and name the victims of these types of misfortunes? Why don't I know the answers to all my questions about her on that day? Is it because there is no “other” to pin that on? Are those deaths just a little too familiar? Too intimate? Too necessary to our way of life? Calculated rather than an uncalculated losses? Acceptable risks. Whose arithmetic?

62417 civilian deaths in Iraq. "Calculated" as "the cost of war." All of them, “At the wrong place at the wrong time.” Yet, I can’t conjure up the face or name of a single victim to help me connect with that tragedy. Is that a coincidence? Is that a question of scale?

Bite-size: crime

Mon, 16 Apr 2007 15:30:39 GMT

Guitars, chicken pot pie taken from house

"A Sunset Drive man reported that someone stole three guitars and a chicken pot pie from his home Friday night, according to a police report.

The man told Athens-Clarke police that he leaves the back door unlocked because he lost his key. The victim also said he suspects a friend with a drug problem - who came come over while he was away to borrow DVDs - might be responsible for the burglary.

The guitars are worth an estimated $720, according to the police report, which didn't put a value on the pot pie."

Published in the Athens Banner-Herald on 04-16-07

i'm me, me be, goddamn i am, i can sing and hear me, know me

Tue, 10 Apr 2007 03:23:16 GMT

Most nights at 10:50 a guy comes down Albion yell-singing at the top of his lungs. You can set your clock by him, or at least you could. There are other street singers, rappers, and various rabble rousers, but they appear much more randomly and, therefore, hold less intrigue for me. Last night the 10:50-yell-singer was yell-singing Weezer's, "Undone." Perfect for his insistence on being heard. His insistence on being. But tonight all is quiet. Too quiet. Where is my wandering boy tonight?

rural: best places to live

Tue, 27 Mar 2007 03:16:00 GMT

Progressive Farmer's
Best places to live in North America 2007

No. 1: Barren County, Kentucky

No. 2: Warren County, Pennsylvania

No. 3: Randolph, Illinois

No. 4: Gillespie, Texas

No. 5: Union County,South Dakota

No. 6: St. Lawrence, New York

No. 7: Sac County, Iowa

No. 8: Garfield, Oklahoma

No. 9: Amador County, California

No. 10: Polk County, North Carolina

Why are these places so great to live? Cheap rent and even the remotest possibility of one day being able to afford to buy my own place are always good arguments for me. Who needs culture when you have books, recorded music, netflix and the internet? You can even buy soymilk and tofu pups pretty much everywhere these days. The article also promotes some of its own ideas, but if you actually live in one of these places perhaps you would be so kind as to elaborate?

rural: springtime

Thu, 15 Mar 2007 04:24:29 GMT

Life of a Farm Blog. Some of my family's farmland is in Southern Indiana, not too far from the Kentucky border where this guy keeps his 3 kids, red tractor and 130 acres. I've got some old pictures of my grandpa dwarfed by his Southern Indiana tobacco plants. Probably some pictures of me dwarfed by Nebraska corn too. Maybe it's just cabin fever but I think I'd take detassling or walking beans over sitting in front of the computer any day.

urban: springtime

Mon, 12 Mar 2007 21:26:33 GMT

Time for the shopping cart guys to return from wherever it is they went and stake their claims on their territories in the alleys. There will be a brawl out there one night soon. Time for the back stairwell to begin smelling like rotting garbage again. Not that there's any more garbage than before. It's the temperature of the garbage. Heat is a catalyst for bacterial growth in a bag of garbage. Warmer garbage=smellier garbage, faster.Time for the sirens to sound with more urgency and frequency. Not sure if that's because they are just more noticeable with the windows open. Time for broken car window glass on the curbs. New glass every morning. Time for that guy in the car who drives really slow behind women out running to reappear. As if that isn't creepy enough, eventually he pulls up alongside, opens his driver's side door and exposes himself. Time to think twice about going running. Without running and the easy sleep it ensures, time to be kept awake at night by the restless breeze coming in the window. The promises it makes of a springtime so much sweeter somwhere else.