Spooked; or, two good omens

Today was the designated day to go to the dentist and get my teeth cleaned before my foray into European, non-fluorinated waters (I don't think they put fluoride in their water - do they?). The dentist is a 30-minute ride on the El away, so I walked over to the Blue Line at 10 this morning and hopped on. The car was nearly empty - there were only three other people in it. As I was looking around the car, I saw a black purse sitting on one of the seats, clearly belonging to none of the current riders.

Instantly, the mental alarms started to go off. I don't know how the age of terrorism works in other metropolitan areas - I suspect it's much the same - but here in Chicago, users of public transit are bombarded with messages urging us to report suspicious persons and unattended packages the proper authorities. During the 90-second ride to the next stop, I contemplated the purse.

Surely it's harmless, one voice said. Someone probably just left it behind in the rush to get off the train. It's nothing.

Please! said another. Does a woman easily forget the purse that holds the necessary items of her daily life?

So I went back and forth for a while in my head. Finally, I remembered something my sister had said when she saw an unattended backpack on the train: "I thought I would feel stupid raising the alarm over someone's lost backpack, but I would feel even more stupid dying." So I got off at the next stop and let one of the guards on the platform know. He continued eating his banana, but said that he'd inform the train's engineer.

And there haven't been any reports of anything dreadful on the train, so far as I've heard, so I hope that the owner of the mysterious black purse will be reunited with it.

As for the second part of the title: at the dentist, it turned out that a filling I got back when I was 8 needed to be replaced, so I went back to the dentist tonight and had it done.

Good omen number one: As the dentist bent over my mouth with the drill, I saw, written on the drill: Made in Germany.

Good omen number two: When the replacing was done, I went out in the lobby to pay. As I waited, "Don't Stop Believing" came on the radio. I don't have to tell anyone why that's important :).

A Bridget Jones moment; or, why the prospect of motherhood sort of freaks me out

A few hours ago, I took the elevator back up to my mother's condo. In the elevator with me were a mother and her daughter, a toddler, neither of whom I knew or had seen before. The mother was apparently somewhat upset; the little girl had urinated on someone's floor and they were going upstairs to change her clothes. The mother had started a bit of a monologue in the lobby, in the sort of loud, clearly enunciated voice people use with children, and continued it on the elevator:

"Mommy needs you to know that peeing on floors is not okay. You can't wear big girl underpants if you can't let someone know when you need to go to the bathroom. People don't like it when you pee on the floor. This is important, okay? Big girls use the toilet."

I was getting out before them, and as the doors opened on my floor, I heard the mother say, "Don't touch Mommy's hand; you just wiped your nose with your hand. It has snot on it."

Does the fact that this conversation strikes me as odd mean I'm mean-spirited? I don't dislike children in general. I'm not particularly good with them, but I'm not opposed to having children on principle. I don't see the sense in expecting babies not to cry in public, for example, or for little kids to be perfectly behaved all the time.

No, it was the mother's behavior that sort of spooked me. I'm guessing that her pre-child life did not include discussing various bodily fluids in public places and in front of complete strangers. The whole situation was just a reminder of how much people change. I've known rather polite and shy people who get into their first serious romantic relationship and suddenly think it's okay to make out in extremely public places and to put an damper on larger social outings by focusing all their attention on their significant other and turning their other friends present into uncomfortable spectators. And apparently becoming a mother can produce the same sort of effect.

Then again, there are all sorts of mothers. My memory doesn't go back that far, but I'm pretty sure my mother would have waited until we were back home to scold me on a subject like that.

Reader, I disagree.

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Damn. I was really hoping for Elizabeth Bennet. I've always like P&P much better than Jane Eyre.

Anyway, would Jane have dropped her new glasses several times since picking them up on Monday? Somehow I doubt it. She would probably have been responsible and kept them on a chain around her neck.

Shameless plug

Today was my last day at my summer job. I'm not actually leaving for Germany until next Friday, but I figure I need the next week to pack, run some last minute errands, and maybe watch a little Star Trek, which is inexplicably only on during the day.

I've worked at this same place for parts of the last three summers, so I'm pretty used to leaving it by now. It's called Illinois Citizens for Better Care, and it's an advocacy group for residents of Illinois nursing homes. Working there these past years has taught me a lot about elder abuse and neglect, a subject I'd known nothing about before I started there. My supervisor is the staff attorney, and she would tell me stories about nursing home residents being illegally sedated, cursed at by staff, or otherwise treated badly. She tries to work with the Department of Public Health and the ombudsmen to help resolve complaints, and also advocates for greater family and community involvement in homes.

Because it's a non-profit, it's not a particularly rich organization. ICBC is just now getting its website off the ground, after about three years of trying to coordinate various short-term student workers and volunteers with experience in HTML to get various materials up on the web. Recently, people have been calling the office and complaining that searching for "Illinois Citizens for Better Care" on Google doesn't get people to the website. When we contacted Google, they said that the way to get the website into their search results is to have other people link to it on their websites. Maybe that's a "duh" rule for more internet-savvy people, but nobody in the office had any idea.

So, even though this will probably be my last summer at ICBC, I still want to do my part. The website is at www.illinoiscares.org. Remember that it's a work in progress, but a good cause nevertheless.

The new specs

Yesterday, I picked up my new glasses. I decided to make a switch from the frames I've had for a few years now and go with frames that are a little smaller and more rectangular - not quite the Glasses of Justice worn by the one-time ADA on Law and Order: SVU, but along those lines. I'm hoping they make me look a little more sophisticated and adult, but they may just make me look bug-eyed.

Whenever I get new glasses, I always think I look tremendously different. Usually, though, nobody else notices. We'll have to see how the new (bug-eyed?) frames work out.

Oh, right

Last night, I was reading through the orientation handbook that the Fulbright people publish - full of handy little advice and reminders to pack your alarm clock, get your tax situation together, and to look for worn spots in your mosquito netting (there's an entire section called "Hints for Life in the Tropics" for the more adventurous types going to Africa. I really hope malaria won't be a problem where I'm going).

Anyway, in the middle of the section on financial issues to consider, the writers note that it may sound a little extreme, but people traveling abroad should make sure their wills are up to date before they leave. I paused for a few seconds on this sentence after reading it, wondering what the other grantees my age would think when asked to consider the possibility of imminent death (assuming that anyone else is bothering to read the handbook, especially the financial part). Then I thought, well, dangerous times we live in, it's an understandable piece of advice, and moved on.

And there, in this morning's headlines, was a reminder that the world is much more dangerous than any of us would like. I am most definitely unnerved by the news of the plot to blow up several planes with liquid explosives, not least because I'm making a connection through Heathrow on my way to orientation in a few weeks. At the same time, I think it's a good thing that I'm afraid because British anti-terrorism officials caught the plotters (or most of them, at any rate) and not because they didn't. That surely means that some protective mechanism (in Britain, at least) is working at least some of the time. And I can certainly rearrange my baggage so that I can check everything in London and only carry my ticket, passport, and some money, as I imagine they'll still be requiring in a few weeks.

Besides, what's the alternative? The main article in the Times this morning ended with a quote from someone (whose name I have, in a most unscholarly way, forgotten) who wondered why people don't just stay home. I can see where he's coming from, but I still don't think seclusion is the best option. I don't intend to thump my chest here and declare that if we hide behind our own four walls, the terrorists win! but that's a little like what I mean. When you balance the excitement and all the great things about travel against the relatively small possibility of being the victim of a terrorist attack, it doesn't make sense to stay home. Anyway, home for me is downtown Chicago, where I'm nearly run down by idiotic, careless drivers every other day. Heck, I could be walking under a skyscraper and have something fall on my head. People die in unforseeable ways all the time. You have to be careful, to a reasonable extent, and then you have to stop obsessing about it.

That said, maybe I'll go make sure my affairs are in order.

This blog: an apology

On September 1, I'll be heading to Germany to become a teaching assistant of English. I'll spend approximately ten months in Berlin attempting to inspire young German minds, aged somewhere between 12 and 18, with diligence and enthusiasm for the English language. In my off hours, I'll be trying to find a place to live, communicate in German full-time, and maintain a seven-year stint of vegetarianism in the land of schnitzel.

"Yes, Katie," an asute interlocutor might say here, "but none of those things involves keeping a blog. Therefore, whence the blog?"

Hence the blog: I spent my junior year abroad - fall in Athens, spring in Rome. Every week or two, I would send out an e-mail to my friends, telling them where I had traveled, what I had seen, and what I had eaten since I last wrote. These were often rather long e-mails, sometimes stretching to three single-spaced paragraphs in Word. Essentially, they were journal entries, intended both for the enjoyment of my readers (or at least to allow them to procrastinate for a few minutes while checking their e-mail) and for my own memory. Writing those e-mails allowed me to sort through the experiences I had overseas and reflect on them. I've generally been too lazy to keep a journal for myself alone, and the knowledge that I'd promised people these e-mails kept me from succumbing to that laziness. And now, when I reread them more than a year later, they remind me of what a fantastic time I had and trigger all sorts of warm, fuzzy feelings.

I didn't want to assume the same system for this year, though. For one thing, most of the people on my original e-mail list are no longer undergraduates. They are real adults, hardworking folks in the economy, and I don't want to be responsible for lowering their productivity by sending rambling e-mails their way. Ditto for the people I know who are going on to more education and will have better things to do with their time.

Also, a blog will allow me to use italics, something the school e-mail account was never cooperative about. Sometimes, you just want to emphasize things, you know?

Mainly, though, I just wanted to try a different venue - a place where I could publish the occasional deep thought on American identity and life abroad in the Bush era, as well as (more likely) observations on quirky German habits and classroom anecdotes. If you've read this far, thanks, and I'll try to make it interesting.

Testing . . .

Test post. Nobody move.