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2004-06-17 - 11:28 a.m.

I'm back from Chicago, and damn if Seattle is not welcoming me back with the most beautiful day ever. The sun is shining in a way that you feel sure will give your hair attractive highlights while leaving your skin completely cancer-free.

Unfortunately, my plan for the day involves a couple of hours of work here at UW followed by a four-hour (!) orientation at the Youth Services Center, where my background will be checked and it will be explained to me that I should not try to take any of the delinquents home as a pet.

But anyway, about Chicago! It's nice! Really, it is. (Note: More than one person has pointed out to me that I was a complete chucklehead for thinking that "Chi-town" was pronounced "Chai-town" instead of "Shy-town," as �Chicago� is not pronounced �Chai-cago.� I would like to point out, however, that it is also not pronounced �Shy-cago.� So shut yer cakehole.) Visiting a real City made me realize a couple of things about Seattle, such as 1.) It�s a tiny hamlet. We think we�re hot stuff, culturally, but that�s really just in comparison to Idaho and Montana. Don't get me wrong, we have a lot of good stuff for the size and all. But it's not a City. 2.) The architecture in Seattle kind of sucks. The deadline for building a nice-looking city was about 1950; after that you are stuck with hundreds of brick-and-concrete boxes, like the one I live in. The only other option is to build an interesting-looking City of the Future, a la Vancouver. 3.) Seattle is clean.

Chicago has some trash on the streets. And by �some trash,� I don�t mean �a few cigarette butts.� More like �entire piles of garbage dumped onto the curb for no apparent reason.� I must have seen six people throw cans, empty bags, wrappers, and a whole slew of other stuff right down onto the street, which is something that just doesn�t happen here. Every time it happened, I would gasp like a grandmother. "My heavens, did you see that? He just threw that wrapper on the ground! There's a garbage can right there."

I was told, however, that littering was not the source of the problem. The real culprit, it seems, is the wind in the Windy City, which blows the trash (which has been carefully deposited by Chicago's citizens into its many conveniently located garbage cans) right out of the cans and onto the curb where it awaits the eventual effects of radioactive decay, since nobody seems very interested in picking it back up again. Now, this whole wind theory may be true, but if so I would like to introduce Chicago to a new invention that the rest of the world has been enjoying for some time now, known as the �lid.� It is handy for keeping stuff inside other stuff! Just something you might want to look into.

Having said that, though, it�s a great city. So great, in fact, that the whole time I was there I kept hearing Sinatra in my head singing �My Kind of Town� at full Sinatra-blast. I was constantly fighting the urge to yell lines like, �My kind of people too! People who! Believe! In! You!!� For the most part I was successful in restraining myself but it did happen once or twice.

I was wrong about one thing�the body slices were at the Museum of Science and Industry, not at the Museum of Surgical Science. We went to both. Surgical Science was sort of appropriately interesting-yet-creepy and low-budget. Science and Industry was okay�there were a lot of screaming kids, as you might imagine, and unfortunately some of the body slices were not on display, as they were apparently in the process of being moved to another location. The ones displayed were satisfyingly gross though. They still had hair on them. I was hoping to find some body-slice related souvenirs in the gift shop, but the shop was called something like �Discovery Now!!� and it was disappointingly filled with educational videos and freeze-dried ice cream.

Probably the weirdest thing that happened to me, though, was the cab ride home from the airport. My flight didn�t get in until nearly 1 a.m. (3 a.m. Chicago time, let�s remember), and so I hailed a cab and slumped into it, exhausted. The cabbie was very chatty, despite the lateness of the hour and my fervent wish that he would shut the hell up. Within ten minutes I knew that he was from India (Pujab, where his family had farmed until they immigrated here about eight years ago), that he was about my age, that he was just finishing up an auto mechanics course, and that on weekends he enjoyed lying on the couch and watching television, which I admitted I also liked to do at times.

He got very excited about how much we had in common and asked it I wanted to be friends. �You seem like nice person! We see movie. Okay?�

I have his number. If you�re interested, let me know.

p.s. Thanks for all the great Chicago-related suggestions! I actually followed through on almost every single one.

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