this american blahg

The last time I came back to Chicago, the word "agoraphobia" kept running through my mind. Just look at these needlessly wide streets -- streets so wide that even with cars parked along both sides, two more cars could comfortably fit side by side in the middle of the street, and that in a purely residential area where two cars very rarely need to fit side by side in the middle of the street to begin with -- bounded by these almost comical sidewalks -- completely empty except, apparenty, for the occasional group of three and a half people who absolutely must walk abreast. It was the empty lots that really bothered me. My last apartment here overlooked half of an empty lot, and the lack of spatial definition was almost creepy. It turns out though that agoraphobia means both fear of open space and fear of crowds (among other things); clearly not a word invented by someone just coming back from Taiwan. What I have is a fear of the lack of crowds.

Aside from this general feeling that the world has come to an end and humanity has died off, which I have every time I come back to Chicago because of the lack of people on the street, I am also currently in a little bit of a communications and electronics crisis: my dsl cut out inexplicably yesterday afternoon, and the rest of my computer is having indigestion from a microsoft update I stupidly let it eat (it had icing mixed with poison that had turned a tempting green) and has spent the day lying in bed rubbing its belly. It's currently above freezing here, and I am reassimilated enough to feel like that's kind of comfortable. I'll try to find something that is happening out there and come back and report on it here, pretending that all the while this has not been an exoticising travelogue but just my little blahg about my little life. I'd appreciate it if you would join me in that pretense, at least during this transitional stage.