Summer in the City

Whew! So much has happened over the last couple of days, I positively don't know where to begin! First off, yes, I am psyched that the White Sox traded for Ken Griffey, Jr. Do I think that he's going to make them a better team? Not really. Do I think that he's going to end up hurting their chances of making the playoffs? Probably. But do I think that he's going to raise attendance (and, hence, revenue) at U.S. Cellular Field? Absolutely. Plus, the guy is a living legend. I mean, I was 5 years old when he started playing for the Seattle Mariners. And I have very fond memories of him being the only baseball player that I knew at that time.

In other news, R.A. and I have been doing our best to take advantage of the city in the summertime. There has been a glut of music festivals recently; Lollapalooza is going on this weekend downtown, and a friend of R.A.'s drove all the way from New Hampshire to sleep on our broken futon and to see Radiohead and Wilco. We're not going to be partaking in those festivities (we're trying to stay on budget this month), but we are planning on going up north to Roscoe Village to check out our new neighborhood and attend a little music festival there that is exclusively oldies and classic rock cover bands. I suspect that those genres kind of reflect the sensibilities of Roscoe Village in general; there are lots of young couples living there, with their dogs/ small children, and there are a lot of sushi bars and vaguely European sounding restaurants. Plus, in the Fall they have a Harvest Fest. What it is that they're "harvesting" in this neighborhood, I'm still not sure. (There could be a dark side to this neighborhood that I'm not aware of.) But I bet that there will be lots of gourds and apple cider for sale and several face-painting booths.

By contrast, last weekend we hung out in Wicker Park and took in the sights and sounds of the local hipster/ bohemian crowd. It was kind of surreal being amongst my own demographic for a change, meaning that we were surrounded by mostly young, middle-class white kids. It felt a little weird being marketed to so directly. It seemed like every vendor, from the micro-brewery to the novelty t-shirt maker to the indie music booth was specifically fashioned to my tastes. I was pretty proud of myself for resisting, though. Sometimes poverty begets its own virtues. All in all, though, I think that I'm glad that we're not going to be living in Wicker Park or the Ukrainian Village or any of those hipper neighborhoods. It's fun and novel to go visit them, for sure, but I think that it could get pretty tedious pretty quickly if we had to deal with gangs of drunken indie-rockers or gaggles of teeny-boppers outside of our front porch on a regular basis.

To complete the triumvirate of social groups, last night I went to a party that my friend John described as, "fratastic." It was held in an apartment in Bucktown that had an absolutely stunning view of the Chicago skyline from the northwest. I didn't know any one at this party, so I figured that I would just sit and quietly drink their keg beer while I enjoyed the view until it was time to go home. However, at some point I must have gotten either bored or drunk enough to start a conversation with a local law school student who was also a practicing Catholic. One thing led to another, and before long we got into a heated debate about the validity of the doctrine of transubstantiation. (It's insane! Bread isn't Jesus! Jesus isn't bread!) It was at this point that John called me a cab, even over my protests and incessant criticisms of the theology of the Trinity and of the concept of divine sacrifice. (For some reason, this seems to happen to me at parties quite often.)