the ugly duckling

the ugly duckling
Originally uploaded by crgreene

I really should have posted the shot I took with a duck in it, to give size perspective on the swan here. He's huge compared to the other birds.

I love the story of the Ugly Duckling - who hasn't identified with it? It's such a good lesson to remember that if you don't fit in, you might be measuring yourself with the wrong stick. Forget about all those other ducks - what are you supposed to be?

Though I hated the episode it came from, this phrase stayed with me:

'He walks among us, but he is not one of us.'

Maybe the swan felt that way too. Being a leader, taking a stand, setting off for parts unknown: sometimes exciting, but mostly lonely. Being (or thinking) different is often much riskier & more difficult, but it can be more rewarding (see, Apple advertising campaign 1997). I'm hoping this swan photo helps me keep this all in mind.

street art, new york

street art, new york
Originally uploaded by crgreene

Monday morning needed some inspiration / aspiration.

the moment of flight

the moment of flight
Originally uploaded by crgreene

yes, i know, it's been a while. i didn't have internet at home for 37 days.

my sister came to visit this weekend and we took a lot of photos ... including this one from the Lincoln Park Zoo.

more regular postings anon.

Kittens & schnitzel

Not together, certainly.

Favorite things, in case you haven't guessed, is what I'm getting at here. Since I appear to be doing just crap at posting without some kind of reason, and because posting every day for some set reason kind of wears me out, and because after not posting in a while and having nothing pressing to say makes it hard to ever post, this seemed reasonable enough.

Right now, I can't get enough arugula, fresh basil and pine nuts. Sometimes together, as in the farfalle with a little olive oil, salt & pepper, sun-dried tomatoes, portabella mushrooms, onions, olives, roughly chopped basil, pine nuts, just a dash of cream, and the arugula tossed in at the last minute, throw on a lid, let it steam a little, serve with some more fresh basil and feta cheese. Delicious. Or, the best lunch I had this week, arugula with warm bacon vinaigrette, toss on a little feta and some pine nuts. Apparently I'm in a bit of a rut, but it's a tasty one.

Sort of along the lines of spring cleaning, I've been getting rid of things - cleaning out closets, recycling massive amounts of paper from my desk, sorting out the chaff in my music library. I thought I'd pick out a couple long-time fave albums or artists and mention them here. Right now my choices are largely driven by alphabetical order.

• Fiona Apple. Yes, she's a kook. I saw her live in college, opening for Counting Crows (yes, it was a great show, and thanks to good old Union Board I had sweet seats too); wearing angel wings, doing the Lloyd Dobler nervous patter thing although it wasn't quite as charming as he (John Cusack isn't anymore, either, but that's another matter - his recent spate of roles is pretty grim)... but what a voice. And the lyrics. I am a lyrics person... dude, I was an English major! I am quite possibly verbally oriented to a fault. Girl can write some good ones, and then deliver them with the torchiest voice and the piano ... it's the Diane Court effect, if I may be permitted to refer to Say Anything twice in one paragraph. I prefer Tidal and When the Pawn ... -- Extraordinary Machine didn't really do it for me. Too much whimsy, perhaps? Two favorite tracks, just to not list the entire albums:
• Pale September. 'I wore the time like a dress that year' [nice image] '... All my armor falling down in a pile at my feet, and my winter giving way to warm as I'm singing him to sleep' I blush to admit, but in high school I wrote a poem which also employed a waterlily metaphor (which features prominently in the song, in case you haven't listened to it). Maybe that's why I like this song?
• So as not to choose any of the more bitter, angry songs (tho there are some gems) off When the Pawn, how about Paper Bag, or actually The Way Things Are - I love the relentless forward motion of the latter.
  

• Aimee Mann, Bachelor No 2 (or, The Last Remains of the Dodo) I have Lost in Space, and it's good, but I like Bachelor better. Last week a colleague/friend and I had a little road trip downstate (the palatial Chateau) to present at a conference and this is one of the albums we were able to rustle up in my car (don't have so much on the physical media anymore, and no iPod right now... very limiting). Just a delight, from the first to the last song. I particularly enjoy Red Vines, and Deathly.

Well, lookee there, apparently it was Jon Brion night and I didn't even know it.

Quagmire

It's not just a great Scrabble word anymore ...

According to the Oxford dictionary (the version on my Mac anyway), a quagmire is:

1) a soft, boggy area of land that gives way underfoot;
2) an awkward, complex or hazardous situation.

These both sound an awful lot like committee work to me. :)

Search and ye shall find...

I'm taking a page from thefiftyfootblogger and sharing with you some recent searches that led folks to my blog ...

• tig coili (2, one from Galway, one from Dublin ... not surprising; if it was my bartender buddy Jason, please holla back, I'd like to know how your trip to America went)

• +"enneagram number" +"theme song" (what an idea. I only mentioned enneagram once, I think, in a quiz)

• bump to bump motivation (No idea. Really - maybe it made more sense in South Africa)
  

• city wise high tide timing (from India)

• cute baggages
  
  
• gloriana frangipana (words from the IU fight song)
  
  
• irons that turn off
  
  
• james mcevoy shirtless
  

What an amalgam. If James McAvoy ever shows up shirtless, with an auto shut-off iron, at the Tig Coili, humming his enneagram theme-song, I hope I hear about it. I'm sorry I wasn't able to work in the bumping.

99 bottles of beer on the wall

Sort of like (not) going to the gym, I have been feeling like so much time has passed since my last post here that I'm frozen and need something of Great Moment to report. The gym parallel to this, to expand- it's been a while, and I feel I need a plan or resolution, or a Fresh New Start, when really what I need to do is take my ass over there and just put it on the treadmill, even once. One time would be a great start. Does this happen to anyone else, the feeling that you need to have some commitment, some great commitment, to start or re-start something, that if you can't do X [some amount currently impossible] then why even start... Voltaire said, The perfect is the enemy of the good. I'm not sure what he was referring to, specifically, when that was written/uttered (confession: never read a word of Voltaire. Well, except for that quote), but I have to agree, at least in my personal experience.

I have in more than one situation spent so much time building up what I should do that in the end, I did nothing, because I knew that - at that moment - I couldn't reach the lofty, forbidding height of my imagination. That can't be the right thing. Marathoners don't go from zero to 26 miles in a day - somewhere, sometime, they had to start with a mile. Now, most of the marathoners I know left their single mile days in the distant, dusty past... but still. The principle remains.

Blogging, at least for me, is not a ivory tower of the soul to summit; I'd like to be effortlessly pithy, or frankly, to even be pithy with some effort on this channel, but right now my effort is mostly reserved for other intellectual tasks, like my job, and my degree, and my in-person encounters. In lieu of pith, I'd settle for witty. Witty and pithy - that, my friend, is my holy grail of the brain. In my most flattering daydreams, I am witty, pithy, have a great singing voice, and am impossibly fresh-looking.

But, asides aside, I guess it's been sort of a busy month. School, work, etc ... a week's blessed escape to the Dominican Republic (maybe I'll post on that eventually)... and a crap load of snow, for Chicago anyway. I read that as of last week we are 171% over our usual snowfall for the year, at something near 40 inches. Poor Madison Wisconsin is well over 200% up from last year, at a staggering 70-some-odd inches. I'm tired of shoveling; I think accumulation on that scale would merit a snow blower for sure.



Today I went out to Geneva, to the DuPage Library System, and did a workshop. Google Maps says it's just on 45 miles each way; we've had lots of "weather" predicted, so I took the train, and I'm glad I did. The train was late, both ways, but still better than sitting on a highway somewhere. The only downside to walking to work is that it really cuts in on your reading time - when I get home I usually feel like there is something else that I ought to be doing.

Finally saw Juno on Sunday - sadly, I think it's another victim of the over-hype for me. I'm not saying I didn't like it (I did), or find it funny (it was), but I did feel just a bit let down. Had the same reaction to Sideways (only more-so; I liked Juno better than that) -- that, 'Really? This is it?' feeling.

Oh, and if you were wondering about the title, this is my 99th post.