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I'm confused.

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View from the hancock tower

Nostalgia

Most often, I view memorabilia as dangerous. While sometimes it's okay to let your mind wander in reverse, an eternal pessimist doesn't always find it a smooth ride. A legal pad from a previous job you miss desperately, a cute note from a spurned lover buried in a wallet. These sorts of things simply open old wounds and I honestly hate them. With my extremely biological view of society, I believe our minds were meant to retain important survival skills and forget those events which will serve us little in the future.

Anniversaries are odd in that, being calendar-powered constructs, they are unavoidable. You can easily forget that it has been exactly one year since you made a move to Chicago on the anniversary DAY, however a stunning realization a few days later can feel like a flesh-eating virus on the brain. What am I doing here? Why do I feel five years older when it's only been one? Have I even fully made the transition back to living in the city? It's all very complicated

I Can Taste It

Eerie - this would have been a great post for Halloween. I've been lucky (lucky?) to have little experience with death and dying, so this is fascinating.

Festival of Maps

Despite being the hobby/obsession of one very wealthy group of people* who financed and seemingly pushed his interest on an already over-extended group of cultural institutions, I can't help but plug the Festival of Maps, which premiered in Chicago at the beginning of November. They have impressive collateral, ads, and an interesting website. Full disclosure: the MCA is a participant, but I see plenty of other venues throughout the city that look to have incredibly interesting seminars, exhibitions, and events on cartography...all while facing the digital age of Google Maps and GPS.

*It's well-known that one of the board members employees a full time curator for his private collection of maps.

Another Example of Machinary Addiction

(And it sounds so much better if you say it "mash-in-air-ee"...)

Old habits are hard to break, apparently even for phone systems: Over the weekend our work telephones fell back, according to the old Daylight Saving Time rules (officially no 's' on Saving, kids).

This led to a hilarious level of internal stress within the museum since everyone was not noticing new messages until over an "hour" later. Hilarious! In all of two days, an unsentient machine made 100 people feel a bit insane. To the dystopic, I argue that we handed over control of our fears/emotions/bodies years ago...

Alas, ghosts in the machine just in time for Halloween.

Why I Love Google, Part XVII

I am a total Googlephile. They just put up street views of Chicago as part of their mapping service.