setting in the (mid)west

this livejournal will be on hiatus for the summer. i will likely take it back up when i return to the midwest for a final semester. until then, please direct your voyeuristic eyes to:

http://risingintheeast.blogspot.com

see you there.

i don't have internet at home anymore. thus, the lack of posts despite the lack of responsibility (usually as school winds down, livejournal posts wind up). anyway, i'll do this backwards.

i'm currently enjoying:


high fidelity by nick hornby.

it's about a record store clerk and his tribulations with love. i'm borrowing it from quentin and hope to finish it tonight or tomorrow night. it's at once charming and sad and funny and clever and believable and enticing and great. needless to say, i'm really enjoying it. i'm about halfway through it and can't wait to finish it, even though i've seen the movie (which is also great). i have a feeling i'm going to want to buy both the book and the dvd very soon.

now for an update:

• i'm going to be an uncle! my sister is 9 weeks pregnant with her first child, and my niece- or nephew-to-be. i'm so happy for her and chad, her husband. the baby is due dec. 14, which is one day after my 22nd birthday, and two days before my first college graduation. i think somebody's already trying to steal my thunder. regardless, i'm excited!


• i've been working 6 days a week: 3 days at recycled sounds, 3 days at sunny bright landscaping services. i need to pick up the hours to save money to eat for the summer (a 40-hour per week internship for 2 months isn't very conducive to putting food on the table, or at least in the microfridge). i also landed a job for the 2 weeks between my return home to rhode island and the beginning of my internship. i'll be cleaning up baseball fields again with the lincoln parks and rec maintenance crew. man, i love that job.


• speaking of coming home, the trip begins friday. al dony will arrive in omaha thursday morning at 930a. i will pick him up, we will run errands and fill my car with stuff. we will hang out that night. we will leave the next morning for chicago, then saturday for cleveland (we have tickets to the pirates at cleveland saturday night!), then 12 hours on to providence/lincoln on sunday. the open road never looked so good.


• as for my internship, here's what I know: i will be living at boston university in this building:
  
  i will work 40 hours/week. I will have night class on tuesdays and thursdays from 7p-9p. i will move in on june 2 or 3 (probably 3). i will being work on tuesday, june 6.
  
  what i don't know: where i'm working, and who i'm living with. ugh. seriously, it's agony. i really, really want to know where i'm working. i still have my fingers crossed for the carr center for human rights policy at harvard. you should cross your fingers, too. failing that, at least physicians for human rights or amnesty international's boston office. seriously. i hope i hope.


• moseman already moved in for the summer, matt should move in soon. this means i have to pay little for the summer away from my house in lincoln. this is a very good thing.

there's this week's blurb. i'm shifting to a new blog for the summer. it's just about finished with the design, i'm just finalizing the url (hopefully). it will be posted here when it's finished / when i return home.

hasta.

before:



after:



or, more specifically, before:



after:

here is your hummus cat.



*edit: they're friends.

amnesty international has released a report about the use of the death penalty internationally in 2005. click the image to go to the site. each individual image on that site has rollover information about the number of executions and death sentences in that country last year. the image is great and the information is thorough, as usual.

this art is part of amnesty's "createCHANGE!" project. you can see more here.

and in response to john's response, details about SLAMcakes for peace are forthcoming.

this happened last night. it was AWESOME.

32 years ago today:










in honorarium, the braves were crushed by san francisco today, 12-6.

oh well. also, happy birthday mom :)

i was up really, really late last night (er... this morning) making a poster for my independent research project. i was among maybe 100 students presenting their research visually.



for a larger .pdf image, click here.

i'd like to get to bed at a reasonable hour tonight.

that being said, in honor of opening day, i'd like to post photos of my trip to turner field in atlanta. it was the beginning of that horrible day, one that started off pretty rough (waking up at 6:30a, leaving krys at the airport [never easy]), made a very positive spike with the stadium visit, and took a decidedly horrible turn when i blew out a tire (see previous post).

anyway, this post needs little setup. i had left the airport feeling pretty down, lonely with about 700 miles of road ahead of me. it was early; i planned on making it to mizzou by, say, 8p with plenty of time to get some food and hang out with lindsay and her roommates and friends. passing a sign for the stadium, i figured i'd take some shots. i could be a little late to columbia. so i exited.

well, after a couple of pictures (...alright, maybe 20 pictures) i tried to get inside. not easy on a saturday at 9am. a woman told me there were guided tours beginning at 10a, but other than that i couldn't see the stadium other than the outside area.

after a half an hour of reading a newspaper in my car, i paid the $10 and stepped into what some have called baseball's newest theme park.

here's some proof.


this is a shot from the parking lot where atlanta/fulton county stadium used to stand. that ball is hank aaron's 715th home run ball. they love that ball down there in atlanta.


this is a statue of ty cobb that stands in front of the stadium. there are other statues of former players (warren spahn, phil niekro, and hank aaron's 715th home run swing, plus a bust of aaron, coming up soon), but this picture came out the best. maybe a more realistic statue would have had cobb spiking the fielder in the face.


this is me next to a bust of hank aaron, the greatest home run hitter of all time (and, as far as i know, he wasn't using steroids). i'm on the left.


here is turner field, being fixed up for opening day (then only a few weeks away), as seen from the coca-cola sky field pavillion. it's denoted by a bunch of coke-bottle cannons and a giant bottle made out of recycled cans and baseball equipment.


this is said coke bottle. pretty sweet.


here's some more detail about the bottle. from here you can see the gloves, jerseys, bases, and thousands of baseballs that comprise the gigantic bottle. impressive.


when i was in the press box, i tried to get a little artsy. this is not exactly a perfect shot, but i like it.


i made it to the velvet rope that cordons off the locker room. we couldn't go in, but we could take pictures. i saw andruw jones' locker and i immediately became 12 years old.


here i'm sitting in the braves' home dugout. it's as if i finally found my way home.


an umpire's view of the third base line of turner field. beautiful.


this is a seat in center field. all stadium seats bear the logo and the ballplayer. suffice it to say, they built this place right down to the last detail.


turner field from behind the wall in center. quite the landscape.


in the "museum" section of the stadium, where the tour ended, sits lots of great old memorabilia. this is the ball that home run hero hank aaron sent over the wall for the 715th time in his career, and the bat with which he hit it.


and here's a (blurry) shot of the 1995 world series trophy, also proudly displayed in the museum.


this was on a bathroom stall somewhere inside the stadium. this is why i love baseball.


on my way out there was a table with a bit of braves merchandise next to a ticket window. the official clubhouse was closed, since it was saturday and pre-season, but i was still able to pick one of these up:


it's got tim hudson's name and number on the back.

the tour ticket may have been the best ten bucks i've ever spent.

this is going to be chronologically out of order. my trip back was such a rollercoaster - with so many long stories - that it would be too much for me to publish in one post, and too much for you to read in one sitting.

so i'm breaking it up into three parts that do not follow a timeline. as i've written two consecutive image-intensive posts, this one will contain no photos, but maybe the most interesting story of the entire trip. elitist northerners beware.

a week ago this minute, i was driving on an interstate highway somewhere in the middle of kentucky. i had planned to be deep into missouri by then - maybe even almost finished with a long day of driving. by the trip's standards, though, i'd just begun. i had about 6 1/2 hours of open road in front of me.

certainly i hadn't planned for this.

and i hadn't. i was about 4 1/2 hours behind an updated schedule. the morning started with a 6:30a alarm (after getting to bed around 1:30a)and a half-hour drive to the airport. after dropping krys off with a tearful goodbye, i planned to make a bee-line for mizzou and arrive somewhere around 8:30 or 9pm to treat my good friends lindsay and her roommate natalie to dinner, as i owed them each a meal.

i turned off the highway in a moment of inner-child-inspired anonymity and decided to photograph turner field, home of my favorite atlanta braves. the next post will chronicle my trip to and through the stadium.

i justified this trip with some convincing rationale: 1) when would i be in atlanta again? with free time? and a camera?; and 2) my friends are party animals (er... so to speak, no offense intended linds) and it's a saturday. there's no harm in rolling into a college town at 11pm. there will be plenty to do.

so after the stadium trip, around 11:30am in atlanta (10:30a in columbia, mo, my destination), i hit the road, a new t-shirt in my back seat, 60 new pictures on my (roommate's) camera, unforgettable images in my mind, and wearing a smile spanning my entire face. i felt amazing.

about 50 miles down the road, my car started wobbling. wobbling is unsettling at 80mph, to say the least. i slowed a bit and hoped it was just too fast for the car. it wasn't. the wobbling persisted, even got worse. i blinkered over to the right lane, slowing now to about 45-50mph. wobble, wobble. cue the hazard lights as the 18-wheeler behind me passes on the left. i pulled off into the breakdown lane and shut the car off. upon inspection, it was the confirmation of what i'd feared.

a flat tire.

in rural northern georgia.

alone.

luckily, i'm a member of trusty aaa. surely they'd rescue me quickly and i'd be on the road in no time. i called them up, found the nearest mile marker (maybe 1/4 mile up the road) and declared my location to the operator. she assured me she'd get someone to the scene as soon as she could. i called lindsay. broken down, i said, no big deal, but i'd be later than i thought. i'd call when i got back on the road. this was about 12:30p.

what's there to do when you're waiting for a tow truck? i sat on the green grass next to my car and read my complimentary copy of "chop talk," the braves' monthly magazine that my tour guide had given me. after finishing as much as i could of the sub-par writing and hoaky stories (marcus giles may be a hell of a second baseman, but he's no writer), i moved on to a book on accountability for atrocities in international human rights law (i know... but we can't all have the exciting life that i live). all the while i was either looking over my shoulder or standing up, hoping to see a tow truck turn that familiar bend around i-75 north. alas, no luck, and back to the book.

while i was waiting, two different people pulled over to help. one man, in a semi that had more wheels than it's poor driver had teeth, stopped and asked if everything was alright. i assured him aaa was on the way - i had called about a half an hour before - and thanked him. another guy, this one more my age, pulled over and offered me a hand. i thanked him and told him everything would probably be alright, that i'd called aaa. that was about an hour after the first driver had stopped.

about two hours after i had spoken with my friendly aaa representative, and after two calls from the local garage that was apparently closed, it being a saturday and all, my tow guy arrived. a round-faced, red-headed georgian, he asked me what i wanted to do. he told me his shop didn't have my size of tires (itty-bitty 13-inch tires on a '92 honda civic), but suggested i go up to wal-mart up the street. my aaa towing only covered me for 5 miles, and wal-mart was at least 7. i asked him to put my donut on the car and i'd drive the 7mi myself. he was quick (it's very annoying to wait 2 hours for something that takes 10 minutes) and wished me well.

i drove into town toward where the man had told me wal-mart would be. i passed a goodyear tire and decided to turn around, to ask them if they could help. surely goodyear tire would have my size tire. turns out they didn't ("but," one of the employees told me, "we could have it for you by monday"). i turned tail and headed back toward the hated wal-mart.

i pulled into the back parking lot, right next to the tire and lube center, and walked into the garage. a young girl spoke with me, very smiley, and sent me inside. there i spoke with someone who i would come to know rather well over the next 2 hours, at least i'd feel familiar around her. she was a very nice middle-aged woman who handled my inquiry. as she determined that they did, in fact, have the sized tires that i needed, she also suggested that there was a 2-hour wait.

it was already 2:30.

i told her i couldn't wait that long, that i needed to be in missouri that night. she spoke to her boss and assured me that they would get to it as quickly as they could.

so i had nothing to do for a while. i wandered around wal-mart. i talked to quentin on the phone a bit (he was already leaving columbia on the 5-hour trip back to lincoln so he would be the coming snow. more on that in future posts). in my time waiting in the wal-mart in calhoun, ga., i:

• perused car cleaning/maintenance products


• watched two different motivational speakers tell me what was wrong with my life, and how to fix it (only one of them mentioned a deity explicitly)


• observed a conversation between a man and a woman in the waiting room. i still don't think the man uttered even one comprehensible word, but the woman seemed to understand him fine. i'm glad he didn't look toward me while he was grunting, because i would have returned his probably friendly gesture with a blank stare.


• had one of the mechanics tell me, "ah lahke yer hay-yer," [translation: "i find the style you wear your hair to be intriguing."] and go on to tell me that he has a hat with dreads in it (a "reefer hat," as he referred to it), that a friend of his had given it to him, and that when he saw my hair, he thought immediately of that hat. i don't even remember my response.


• tried to shut out the surrounding conversations and television noise and read about international human rights law. to little avail.

finally, around 4pm, my car made its way to the lifts and the tires were changed (another frustrating 90-minute wait for a 10-minute job). one tire was rotated to the back, as it was fine, but one of my back tires was wearing pretty thin, the mechanic told me. whatever you need to do, i said, and thought about how glorious it would be to get back on the road. soon, i thought, soon.

a half an hour later i had paid my bill and cut out of there. i hit the open road as if nothing had happened - foolishly driving just as fast as i had originally - but it didn't cost me. i drove the requisite 10 hours into mizzou, the last 2 hours of which i was so tired that i felt either drunk or at least heavily drugged, and i wondered if i could be ticketed. i called lindsay from her backyard at 2:39am and she let me in. i was asleep by 3 and didn't wake up until 12:30p on sunday.

i'd like to say that my biggest regret was that i didn't have time to stop in chattanooga to see the historic choo-choo. not true. while i guess it's not really a regret of mine that i got a flat in georgia (hey, at least it wasn't an engine problem or a valve or something), it's something of a nightmare come true.

some final words to the state of georgia: you're lucky the braves decided to move to atlanta back in 1966, there would be no reason for me to like you. at all.*




*exceptions are cyndi, melanie, morgan and, of course, charlie.