OnBlueUnderCanvas

October is a month for reminiscing:

Of school days, be it class halloween parties or mid-terms. Carving pumpkins, haunted houses, group study sessions at the library. Homecoming football games, crisp leaves, that rustic cold air smell, and for all you Big Bend Elementary school alums, the “Turkey Trot”.

I turned 24 this month, not a memorable number of age by any stretch. Even so, it’s a milestone, marking a distinct yet elusive spot on the life timeline: limbo.

The convergence of October and the mid-twenties brings me into a not-there-anymore and not-there-yet suspension. I’m not a kid in school who gets to trick-or-treat nor am I a parent indulging the activities of the former.

Lacking a society designated generation costume, I’ll lean on this theory for the moment: You are what you do. In light of this tangible context, here’s what I did in October:

• worked my tail off trying to save some money for Australia
• took photos of fall leaves in Rogers Park
• had two fillings put in my mouth: one for a cavity, the second for a faulty filling
• finished the paper edit of my Abraham Project video
• cleaned out the mountains of crap from the second bedroom in the condo and painted the room yellow
• endured pain in my teeth for a week, commenced breakdown at the possibility of having to drop nearly 5K on root canals and crowns
• set up editing suite in new yellow bedroom
• traveled out to the suburbs with Kirk to go to a pumpkin farm; found the most exciting part to be not the gourds but the giraffes and wallabies in the “exotic” animal tent
• relieved of pain in teeth, relieved of potential financial ruin
• completed first video edit of interview footage for Abraham Project video; total length: 43 minutes (target length? 10 minutes! Ouch.)
• celebrated my birthday by going out with Kirk and playing darts at a Wrigleyville bar, followed by dinner at Geja’s Cafe, a fondue place
• became sick with and cured of a cold/flu (still unsure of what it was) within a 12 hour timespan
• baked a pumpkin pie, despite the cavity
• tracked down my sister on her Urban Sociology class trip to Chicago; jumped on the Green Bay Lamers coach bus to ride along with her for the leg of the tour between UIC to University of Chicago
• trimmed the AP video down to 25 minutes
• pulled the trigger (with Kirk’s cash & my emotional support) and bought the Canon 7D DSLR
• baked 3 dozen oatmeal raisin cookies
• and topping it all off – yet to be completed – a trip to Florida with my mom, visiting my grandparents

October was fairly productive, mildly celebratory, erratically emotional, schemingly adventurous and mostly enjoyable. Onward march through limbo, into November.

I should learn Spanish.

Last week I moved to Little Mexico. Or so it seems. I feel like a foreigner in my own country. Walking down the street with Kirk a few afternoons ago, we passed another 20-something guy wearing a U of I t-shirt.

I gaped, “Look, it’s a white guy.”

He laughed. I giggled. It was odd seeing another white person. Other than the briefcase-clutching 9-5ers who appear in droves near the Metra train station for their weekday downtown commute, our new neighborhood, Rogers Park, was very much Latino.

With the last name Schroeder, and a mother who spoke only German through her toddler years, as a high schooler, I studied Deutsch. I don’t know a lick of Spanish, besides maybe the numbers 1 – 10. At the restaurant where I’m a server, most of the kitchen employees habla Español. At the start of a shift, walking through the back door, I’m greeted with “¿Cómo estás?” or “¿Cómo te llamas?” and forgetting which is which, I usually reply, “Lauren good!”

Last night I mosied up to the corner food store, La Frescasita. On the prowl for taco dip ingredients, the destination was exceptionally appropriate. I needed refried beans. The entire left side of aisle 3 was a tin curtain of canned beans. I’d never seen so many beans in my life. Black beans, brown beans, green beens, beans with jalapenos, beans with chipotle, beans with green chiles, fat free beans, authentic beans, garbonzo beans, beans, beans, BEANS.

I stood there in aisle 3, for so long, that the word “bean” started to look ridiculous. After you’ve written a word, and you second-guess your spelling, and you stare at it, and the word no longer is a word, but more of an image, just a bunch of letters together, and it sounds funny in your mouth when you say it…

I needed to just pick a can.

At 9 pm, it was dark. As I left the store, I heard cheers and shouts on the busy street corner of Clark (the main drag) and Lunt (my street). Clusters of people waved Mexican flags and cars horns honked, passing through the intersection. A local shopkeeper stood in the doorway of his store, catching a glimpse of the commotion. I smiled. There was something to shout about. Some sort of Mexican holiday? I wondered. At home, I googled September 16th. Sure enough, “El Grito”, Mexican Independence Day.

I thought seeing the waving flags, so clearly not spangled with red, white and blue, would only increase my stranger-in-a-strange-land feeling. Actually, I felt enlivened. Vivacity was flowing from that street corner, and I picked it up. It was something of a humanistic bond; I wanted to go grab a flag and start yelling too.

Even if I don’t buy the “Rosetta Stone: Spanish” course, without a doubt the culture will seep its way right through the condo windows, and rub off onto me with my every jaunt down the street, making my place in Rogers Park soon feel like mi casa.