Five off the beaten path places you should take out of town guests visiting Chicago

After college, a good portion of my summers were spent either visiting friends in other cities (mostly St Louis) or hosting friends from out of town. When friends would visit me, I would rack my brain on trying to figure out things to do, specifically where to take these college buddies to show them Chicago. We also had the constraint of not having a lot of disposable income at the time so non-tourist traps were preferred.

Here are some places I discovered. Note: these are not the only places, nor am I saying they are the best. They are simply a few options outside of the standard Chicago Tourist circuit (i.e. Sears Tower, Buckingham Fountain, Shedd Aquarium, etc).  What are some of your own?

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An Open Letter to my Creepy Co-Worker

Cancel my vacation to work on next year’s budget six months early? Fuckacular!

Dear Creepy Co-worker,

It looks like you read one of those self-help posts in LinkedIn. The one where they tell you to get up from you seat and walk over to someone’s desk to solve the problem.  Be a Super Star and go meet the challenge of the day at the source, it probably read.

That is great. That is awesome.  That is just so  fuck-tastic.

Here’s the thing. Last week you made me go through 126 emails because you either hadn’t read this article or didn’t think it applied yet. Even without reading the post myself I had the good sense to walk over and try resolve our issue.

The first time you weren’t at your desk. The seconds time you were on the phone and waived me away even though I’m pretty sure “two tickets in the mezzanine” has little to do with work in general or our project in particular.

The third time I’d tried Instant Messaging you to see if you has a moment. You ignored my message for 5 hours and then asked, as I was about to shut down my laptop to go home, if I had a moment.

“I didn’t see your IM because I had my slide deck open all day” you typed.

So today when I sent you a simple email asking if we should use two years of data for our presentation or go back three years, you really didn’t need to come to my desk, stand two inches away from me and glance over my shoulder until I noticed you. Creepy much?  And yes, you caught me looking at Amazon. You’re just lucky you didn’t catch me uploading of a selfie of your crotch sticking in my face to Facebook you big creep.  Or to Human Resources!

From now I’d like you to simply respond to my emails in a timely fashion.  If you feel the need to come talk to me in person, send me an IM asking if I have a minute first.  I do not want to feel the hair on the back of my neck rise because you are standing there, slowly exhaling your coffee breath as you look upon my computer screen and/or the back of my head.  At the very least figure out how to announce yourself as you walk into my airspace.

regards,

the co-worker who will someday be your boss!
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What Kirsten Dunst said about traditional gender roles is nothing to get ones jammies in a bunch

A couple of months ago, the internetlands were all abuzz about what Kirsten — I’m in Baby Mode — Dunst said during an interview with Harper’s Bazaar U.K. for their May Issue. Dunst stirred up some controversy by advocating traditional gender roles of the nurturing, housebound mother and a throwback to male ‘knights in shining armour’.

I was going to write a quick post about it because clickbait but I didn’t have my act together.  My day job was busy and we had a few things going on around the house. But also we hadn’t shared our own news about being pregnant with twins yet. I knew that I couldn’t write my opinion about what a person who didn’t have kids said about raising kids while I was in this in-between state.

What Dunst said:

“I feel like the feminine has been a little undervalued,” she says. “We all have to get our own jobs and make our own money, but staying at home, nurturing, being the mother, cooking – it’s a valuable thing my mum created. And sometimes, you need your knight in shining armour. I’m sorry. You need a man to be a man and a woman to be a woman. That’s why relationships work…”source:

After a month or so of thinking it over, my opinion is pretty much the same: You don’t know what you will or won’t do until you are in those shoes.  [Rumors keep circulating that Dunst is pregnant.]  Kirsten Dunst is entitled to her opinion and that’s all this really is: an opinion of a young lady who has worked hard to make a successful career in acting but doesn’t quite have the world life experience to know what is involved in raising a child yet.

I highly doubt Ms Dunst is ever going to have to choose between working or staying at home to raise babies in the same way that millions of other women and even men have to make that decision.  Yeah she might have to turn down a roll in a movie if she wants to be a SAHM, but she can certainly afford to.  Or she can bring the kiddo and the nanny along and breastfeed between movie scene takes.  The point is for Dunst it will really be more of a choice of what she wants versus choosing between the lesser of two tough options.

“You need a man to be a man and a woman to be a woman. That’s why relationships work…”

Now this is a little more tricky. I really dislike when people try to define to me what being a man (or a woman) means and if you don’t meet their criteria you obviously have failed.

Relationships work when you play to each others strengths and mask each others weaknesses.  There are no Man Jobs or Woman Jobs, there are just  things that need to get done and the best qualified person needs to knock them out.  I’m awesome at doing laundry, my wife not so much.  That doesn’t mean if she couldn’t do the laundry if necessary.  [She would need our cat to show her where the laundry room is as it’s next to his kitty litter.]

Most of the time I don’t cook dinner.  Not because it’s a woman’s job but because my wife is much better at meal planning for the week.  She can look at the contents of our fridge and cupboards and deduce what needs to be cooked today, what can wait a day and what needs to be thrown out because it is past it’s expiration date.

Update:  I usually cite Cracked.com as a resource on this blog.  I’m excited to see a post where they essentially said the same thing I did (only much better, perhaps). 

There are people who have proven they are not data-driven thinkers who willingly adapt their beliefs upon receiving new factual information.  I don’t think Dunst is one of those people.  I think she is working from the framework of her experiences to date.  And I think once she gets into a long term committed relationship that involves offspring, she will re-think her stance on gender roles and who is responsible for what.

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Not the brightest realtor out there

Ever so often a realtor I worked with or met back when I was house hunting will reach out to me and ask if I found a house or if there is anything they can do to help.  Usually it’s an agent I met at an open house who then added me to their mailing list even though I didn’t ask them to or they offered to be my agent if the one I’m working with didn’t work out.

Today I got an email from one such agent.  He sent the following:

Greetings

Interest rates are expected to rise in 2015. If you haven’t bought a property yet, now is the time ! Please call/text me at 773-4xx-4xxx

Sincerely,
Rusty Reagan

I could ignore these but I try to be nice so I sent him the following note:

we bought a home in Nov 2012..If you happen to have a buyer for my condo, please send him our way.

And I included a hyperlink to the listing of my condo.  The very next email I get from him was:

Is your condo listed?

Not a very observant fellow but I did feel much better not letting him help me find a house.  I gave him the benefit of the doubt and replied:

yes, perhaps you didn’t notice the link  I sent, here it is again.

I already suspected how this would play out but I always love to get anecdotal proof.  He sent a reply that simply said thank you.  Which I hope means I’ll take you off my mailing list.

You’d think he would write back something like congrats on finding your home, good luck with selling your condo and if a buyer approaches me, I’ll be sure to contact your agent for a showing, both of us knowing no such thing would ever occur.   If someone were to call this guy 5 minutes after our last email and said “I’m looking for a two bedroom condo in Albany Park” I guarantee you the neurons would not fly across his brain making the connection.

The reality is realtors don’t work that way.  They rely on database searches to match clients with properties. And it’s not only too bad but extremely short sighted. Not only is there a chance that we might buy another house someday but we would definitely recommend a good realtor to our friends and relatives when they do their House-Hunting Adventures, because Good Realtors are hard to find these days. Rusty is certainly proof of that.

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Hey dude blocking my driveway: is it really that hard to be a decent World Citizen?

My next door neighbor has been having some work done to his yard this summer. It looks really good and I have no issue with anyone trying to improve their property. The thing is, at least once a week the work crew blocks my driveway. Usually they only block my driveway for 10-15 minutes. However, last Friday I was working from home and noticed his vehicle once again parked blocking my driveway even though there were dozens of other open spots on the block.

You want me to park across the street? what am I a commoner!

 

I thought perhaps there was something I wasn’t realizing about the situation. I wondered why an apparently able bodied young man couldn’t park legally 10-15 ft further in either direction.  So while taking a coffee break on my porch stoop, the driver happened to walk toward his vehicle presumably to get something. I called out, in a non-threatening neutral tone:

“any particular reason why you need to block my driveway instead of park legally?”

Not wanting to assume the worse, I hoped he would enlighten me with some point of view I had not considered. Perhaps he was only going to be there for a few minutes like before. Or maybe because he drives a truck the size of a small tank, it is necessary to have the drive way so that he can jump out of his car easier. Instead of explaining he simple said [Direct Quote]:

“you want me to move? I move.”

I replied: “if you’re only staying for a few minutes, it’s fine. Otherwise please explain why you parked there instead of all the free legal spots on the street?”

He simply ignored me, got in his car and parked across the street. I didn’t really think much about it but i was starting to feel like a schmuck since he was all sheepish about it.

 

I finished my coffee and went back to work. During a break between calls, I noticed he was still in the neighbors back yard, staining a deck. This is not a 10 minute task. Apparently his Master Plan all along was to stain the deck with his car parked blocking my drive way the whole time.

Here’s the interesting thing: The spot in front of my neighbor’s house is ALWAYS open. The reason: there is a fire hydrant. This guy knew enough not to park in front of a fire hydrant but somehow doesn’t realize that parking in front of a drive way is wrong? Come. On.

MUNICIPAL CODE OF CHICAGO

Bookmark9-64-100 Parking prohibited – Fire hydrants, firelanes and various locations.

It shall be unlawful to park any vehicle in any of the following places:

(a) Within 15 feet of a fire hydrant;

(b) In a firelane;

(c) At any place where the vehicle will block vehicular access to or use of a driveway, alley or firelane;

Rather, he knows parking in front of the hydrant sends a clear “I’m a F-ing douche bag” message to everyone who passes by while also just asking for a Parking Enforcement Agent to write an easy ticket. Parking in front of my drive way is less risky. Most people will just assume it is the owner’s car because what kind of dick would block someone’s driveway!

This isn’t the first time he’s done something to piss off the block either.  Earlier this summer, he started working on the neighbors yard before 8am, making a lot of noise.  The neighbor on the other side not so politely told him there are noise ordinances and he shouldn’t be doing that stuff before 8am.

People have suggested things from calling the cops to writing something in lipstick on his car to even rolling a wheel barrel full of bricks down my driveway. I won’t do any of that because once this escalates, it doesn’t end well for me. He knows where I live and I cannot watch my house 24/7. It’s just too bad that this guy is so lazy that he cannot do the decent thing and park legally like a decent world citizen.

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We all know a Robin Williams

By now you know that Robin Williams has committed suicide. When it first hit my Facebook feed I thought perhaps it was one of those internet hoaxes that gets sent around the world before the truth can catch up. No such luck. Apparently Williams suffered from severe depression and battled alcoholism and substance abuse over the years. I read somewhere that he fell off the wagon after 20 years being sober.

While I appreciated his talent, I was never a huge fan of Williams. I did enjoy his edgy supporting performance as disgraced psychiatrist Dr Cozy Carlisle in the 1991 thriller DEAD AGAIN starring Emma Thompson and Kenneth Branaugh. [Hat tip to Dante Bacani].

Everyone is writing about Williams and talking about depression. Here is an awesome post by fellow CN blogger Candid Candace with helpful advice pulled from the American Suicide Prevention Foundation website.  Here are a couple others:

• Why funny people kill themselves
• Creative people and depression
• Something in common with Robin Williams

The thing is we all know someone who is a Robin Williams or Chris Farley waiting to happen. That class clown wise aleck who always has something funny or sarcastic to say. Or maybe it’s someone who seems real quiet and never says anything beyond small talk.

Go find a picture of you and a dozen of your friends. Maybe it’s an old sorority photo or maybe the swim team from high school. I’ll be there is at least one person who at first glance looks like they are right smack dab in the middle of the crowd, yet they couldn’t be more alone. If you look closely, you’ll see that their smile is forced, their stance a little tense.  This person may be laughing on the outside but she is crying on the inside and definitely suffering in silence.

Depression is a complex recipe of emotions, faulty wiring and tons of other ingredients that doctors and scientists are only beginning to understand and I cannot even comprehend. I cannot speak to the cocktail of chemicals that float around your brain and cause you to interpret missing a train as being the whole world is against you. Depression is probably very internal but also can be greatly influenced by external circumstances. Forces that the person has little or no control over which only fuels the internal struggle Depression brings.

Depression is something no one seems to wants to talk about in the abstract or admit they are suffering from specifically. That is probably Depression’s secret weapon: so many people suffer in silence yet put on their “everything is awesome”  Mask in order to appear normal to the World.

For example, if you find yourself in a dead end job, have no girlfriend and live in a crappy apartment in a sketchy neighborhood, you might be a little down in the dumps. That’s perfectly normal. Yes a low paying job dictates where you can afford to live and not having an abundance of disposable income affects your dating prospects.

The mythical creature known as a healthy well-adjusted individual will realize that although they are the common denominator among these circumstances, they are not the cause.  They recognize that they have the ability to change their situation. They will find a better job or get additional education or skills to get a better paying job. Or they might simply find someone with a nice apartment in a better neighborhood who wants a roommate.

However, if your brain is also wired for depression, you might take these three unrelated items and internalize them too much. I live in a crappy apartment so no one will ever love me so why bother trying to get a better job!

Sometimes the “problem” with being depressed is that you have your shit together just enough to pass for being healthy and well adjusted 75% of the time, with the other 25% being attributed to just being a little odd.

I wouldn’t say that I ever seriously thought about taking my own life. But I will say that Dark Thoughts did cross my mind a time or two. I recall once in my early twenties we were driving to my aunt’s house in Streamwood when I thought about swerving the car into on coming traffic. Only thing stopping me was my grandmother was in the car.

I was probably a sophomore in college though I was taking some time off from school for financial reasons. We were in a financial bind. My mom was out of work and a twenty something yr old with 2 years of college under his belt didn’t have many prospects. I might even have been working part time at the only job I could get while attempting to finish my degree as quickly as possible. Yet my mom was nagging me to get a better paying job. She even read an ad about some company needing drafters. You took drafting in high school, why don’t you apply for that? Because I’m pretty sure they are looking for people with a skill-set beyond high school Drafting I, a course in which I got straight Ds.

When we got to my Aunt’s house she knew something was wrong and asked me, but I wouldn’t tell her. I couldn’t. I was embarrassed by my external circumstances and didn’t have the right tools and experiences to recognize that something wasn’t right. I shut down.

When you spend that much time and effort attempting to appear normal, you forget how to ask for help, or even accept it when it is offered.

 

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Chicago Bears: Please Skip the Preseason Games

Dear Chicago Bears,

Please do us all a favor and skip the pre-season. Seriously, the injury risks are too great to have our offense playing much, if at all, in what amount to glorified exhibition games. Just this week in training camp you lost potential #3 receiver Marquess Wilson with a broken collarbone. In Practice. Diving for a pass in the end zone on a deep route in a meaningless scrimmage play. And now you have Martellus Bennett suspended indefinitely and fined for conduct detrimental to the team.

Pre-season football is not what it use to be, if it was ever anything worth watching at all. NFL preseason games are rehearsal sessions before captive customers drinking overpriced beers. Worse, in preseason games the NFL is not even rehearsing the real plays, it’s all bland safe stuff that no one wants to watch, executed by fighting for a roster spot players, most of whom will be watching from home on opening day. I use to think that if some crazy set of circumstances made me an NFL coach, I would experiment with unusual plays, unorthodox formations and going for it on fourth and forever since it’s pre-season and it doesn’t count. Now I think that I would simply give the competition confusing film by not starting any starters and seeing what my 5th stringers could really do.

Chicago Bears running back Kevin Jones is taken off the field on a cart after an injury against the Cleveland Browns at Soldier Field September 3, 2009.

Let me walk you down memory lane. Back in 1997, your best receiver Curtis Conway broke his collarbone diving for a ball in the Bears’ exhibition victory over the Arizona Cardinals. All that got you was a 4-12 season.  More recently, in 2009 you were trying to find someone to back up Matt Forte and almost had a guy in Kevin Jones…until a meaningless pre-season game against a team you would later beat resoundingly two months later only to still miss the post-season because, 7-9!

Put the Defense out on offense, not only can they use the extra reps but it will help them get use to long drives they’ll likely face against Rogers and Tom Brady.

Lock Jay Cutler in the house with his new kid. A few more weeks of changing diapers will be good for him. Put Marshall Brandon in bubble wrap and tell Alshon Jeffery and Matt Forte to simple run out of bounds as quickly as possible.  Take a page from Tony Romo and Adrian Peterson play book. Apparently they are skipping the first game and probably the entire four series set. And who can blame them? Their respective teams usually skip the last four weeks of the regular season.

And when it is your turn on offense?  Put the Defense out on offense, not only can they use the extra reps but it will help them get use to long drives they’ll likely face against Rogers and Tom Brady.

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Respect the Run and The Test is Easy When you do the Homework

One of the tenants that many experienced veteran runners adhere to is the phrase “Respect the Run.” What this means is that any time you go out for a run, whether it is a 8-10 Long Run or a simple 3 mile recovery run, you have to respect it. Respect the distance, respect the weather and respect what’s going on with you.

Sometimes a simple 3 mile run will humble you. You might have slept in a little longer than you anticipated and by the time you donned your running shoes and got out there, the sun was high and the humidity thicker than a pizza pie. Or maybe it’s a perfect day weather-wise but you just have so much on your mind that you just aren’t able to focus on your running and the next thing you know, you stumble and fall. Hopefully you only scrap your knee because even a simple mis-step on the running path could have disastrous results.

Another lesser known tenant is “the test is easy, when you do the homework.”

what this means is that if you have a high mileage run coming up: a weekend LR of double digit miles or a race, it will be much easier to get through it if you log some mileage during the week. For instance, let’s say it’s Week 10 of marathon training and you’re using the Running Messiah Hal Hidgon Training Program, the chart calls for the following:

Tue 3 m run
Wed 7 m run
Thur 4 m run
Fri REST
Sat 15 m run

That 15 mile LR is going to be much easier — as easy as a 15 mile run can be — if you run the 14 miles you are supposed to run during the week. It’s really easy to miss a run here and there and sometimes Life Gets in the Way and you miss 2 out of 3 weekly runs. Maybe you had a busy week at work or maybe an unexpected Duracho ruined your plans for an after work run.

In my early years of training, when my body was younger and could handle it, a typical week would be sleep in and miss my Tuesday run, not do it after work because of volleyball and then miss Wednesday morning because i was still sleeping off a late night of post-volleyball drinking. So then I’d run Wed night and Thurs morning, which is okay once in

a while but not a good long term solution. You’re effectively doing a 2-a-Day, which can be a bit of a shock to an unprepared body. Sometimes I’d even run on Friday which meant not being fully rested for the Saturday LR.

Eventually I learned that if I wanted to have a good day on the path, I really had to combine these two tenants and make the time during the week to get my runs in with enough time to recover in between. It means years of going home early on Friday nights but I also think it led to some good running PRs.

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