To Engineer

I'm in a philosophical mood. Maybe it's my recent brush with my own mortality. Or maybe it's that I'm reaching the end of a project at work. Sometimes it's good to just take a step back and ask questions that have no answers...

We, in this society, are always looking for the new and improved. The march of progress. Some take it for granted that the march is inevitable, propelled by human ingenuity, and always leading in the same direction.

Somewhere, long ago, a Neolithic schmatte macher first put needle to thread. It was not inevitable. It was a clever solution to a problem -- a new way of doing things that was deemed superior to the way things had been done before. Because of it, today I wear pants.

We engineers are trained to create or use technology to solve problems. Each of us works in our own problem domain, improving upon that tiny, narrow piece of our world. Where are we going? The accelerating march of progress, proceeding blindly into the future, is not without risk.

What if that progress carries with it externalities, where others must bear a cost for what we design to be optimal for ourselves? What if the negative externalities are cumulative and persistent, but the benefits are ephemeral? How do we know that the sum total of all our efforts will not lead us -- all of us -- to our ruin?

Venting

When I see my flute case, containing my flute, lying idle; when I look at the music stand, with its pages of music and their black dots begging to be realized into sound... And when I consider that I'm not supposed to pick the flute up until my lung heals, it is so frustrating! I can't wait until this whole thing is behind me!

Food to make you feel better

When word got out about my little ailment, family members rushed over to my place with gifts of food. Who am I to argue?

On Friday evening, my sister and brother-in-law came bearing fried shrimp and three bean salad from The Fish Keg. Yesterday, it was my parents with barbecued chicken from Hecky's in Evanston. Today, my parents took me out to Tommy Nevin's Pub for some fish and chips.

The importance of breathing

The importance of breathing cannot be overstated. If you are not breathing right now, I highly recommend you do something about it immediately. In other words, don't be like me and wait a week.

Last Saturday it struck like a bolt out of the blue -- a sharp pain behind the left shoulder blade that got worse when I tried to draw in air. It did cross my mind that it might be something serious, but, despite the pain, I didn't feel short of breath or weak, I wasn't turning blue, I wasn't light-headed... Mostly, I felt fine. Probably just a strained muscle.

But it only got a little bit better over the course of the week, and it worried me that I couldn't remember doing anything that might have caused the pain. So yesterday, I saw the doctor. And he told me to go to the hospital right away. I got a CT scan of the chest and waited at the hospital for the results to come back. The scan revealed a pneumothorax, commonly known as a collapsed lung. It's the kind of diagnosis that makes you think: I'm lucky I'm still here. Fortunately, I still had one good lung left; redundancy in design can be a beautiful thing.

Here are some things I did on my one good lung: I sat in an unheated sanctuary for a couple of hours. I painted over racist graffiti. I carried a heavy load of groceries one block and then up three flights of stairs. I put in four full days at the office. Some of these things might be worthy of a man's last breath, but I, for one, would rather go on breathing.

Agudas Achim

Yesterday I attended a rally in support of Agudas Achim North Shore Congregation, which, as I wrote in my previous entry, had been vandalized about a week ago. All who attended were given the opportunity to brush a bit of white paint over the graffiti, though given the extreme cold, it was largely a symbolic act.

According to news reports, nearly 200 assembled there, a large enough group that it was necessary to gather in the unheated sanctuary. The goyim kept their heads covered just to keep their ears warm. We all shivered, and our toes grew numb as we listened to the words of the neighborhood's religious and community leaders. One speaker, Rev. Richard Simon of St. Thomas of Canterbury Catholic Church, actually put together a few complete sentences of Yiddish. A Yiddish-speaking Catholic priest -- now I've seen it all!

This was my first time inside the Agudas Achim building, an impressive structure built for a much larger and more prosperous Jewish community than now exists in the neighborhood. Looking around the ruin of the sanctuary, I could imagine what it must have been like when it was new. But now the roof leaks, ceiling tiles are falling off, plastered walls are deteriorating, and windows are boarded up. The only parts that have not suffered from neglect are the bimah and the ark, which contrasted with their surroundings, are radiantly beautiful. Above the ark were the Hebrew words: Daw lifnei mi ata omed -- Know before whom you stand.

It is unfortunate that a building such as this should lose its congregation and fall into such disrepair. The rabbi of the congregation, Rabbi Lefkowitz, has been working to keep the synagogue going, but it must be an uphill battle. The work that needs to be done looks so overwhelming. From their website:

Structurally sound, this more than three quarters of a century old building needs a great deal of repair to make it fully functional. Its functionality is essential to respond to the needs of a large population numbering in the thousands, living at or slightly above the poverty level, who desperately need a center to meet their religious, cultural, social and medical needs. Unlike other majestic buildings of the past, Agudas Achim North Shore Congregation is once again a functioning Synagogue. Its congregants, mostly seniors from the former Soviet Union, require a full array of support activities.

As Rev. Simon said, "It is a shame what was sprayed on the bricks of this building. But it would be a tragedy for the bricks not to be there at all."

Outrage

From the movie The Blues Brothers:

Elwood: Illinois Nazis.
Jake: I hate Illinois Nazis.

I found out last night that a synagogue in my neighborhood had been vandalized early on Monday. Swastikas and other anti-Semitic graffiti were spray-painted all over the outside of the building. This happened a mere three blocks from where I live.

Here are a couple paragraphs from the Chicago Tribune's account, in Tuesday's paper:

[T]he rabbi's son came to the temple ... Monday morning [and] found swastikas and several anti-Semitic writings -- among them "Mein Kampf," "Kill the Jews" and "White Power" -- spray-painted on the outside windows.

"Frankly, I was shocked," [Rabbi] Lefkowitz said, "because this is a blight on the neighborhood of Uptown. Everyone has been working together in this neighborhood. This is a bizarre situation."

Martin Luther King Jr., reflecting on the time he spent living in Chicago, once said of the experience, "I have never in my life seen such hate." I'd like to think that my neighborhood is an exception -- a place where people of diverse backgrounds live together in relative harmony, even in a city that remains one of the most racially and ethnically segregated in the country.

The synagogue is a block north of an enclave of Vietnamese restaurants and shops. There is enough of a Mexican population to support tacquerias a few blocks away on Broadway. A half mile to the west, in Andersonville, we have the Middle Eastern Bakery and Wikstrom's Swedish Delicatessen. But amid this diversity, we are sent a message: the Jews are not welcome.

I would like to respond to that message. To the vandals: So long as you cannot live in peace with my neighbors, you are not welcome.

Not so happy news

I've written before about my band. The past several weeks, the woman who sits next to me, and with whom I would normally share a music stand, has been absent from rehearsal. On Thursday I found out she has cancer. I invite you to make use of the button below:

(The button doesn't really do anything.)

A mysterious fortune

This week I went to a Chinese restaurant. I got the following fortune:



For someone I know, this will happen in nine days, give or take a few. This mysterious person requires a Pack and Play. Very mysterious...

Brown's Chicken opening

A Brown's Chicken sign just went up where the Burger-King-slash-Burger-Delights-slash-Chicken-Delights used to be (near 5130 N. Broadway)... Thus keeping the level of saturated fat in the neighborhood at an equilibrium.

Berwyn stop greasy spoon closed

Maybe this happened a while ago when I wasn't paying attention. But when I got back from Minneapolis last week, I walked past the Berwyn Red Line stop, and the gyros/burger greasy-spoon type restaurant adjacent to the CTA station was gone. Not that I'll miss it. Once I poked my head in there to check it out, but the overpowering smell of french fry oil took my appetite away.

Last November, AJ's Grill opened up near the corner of Berwyn and Broadway, and I've noticed it attracts a lot of CTA employees. I think AJ's probably drew customers away from the other restaurant and drove it out of business.

Neighborhood bookstore closing

I can't believe Left of Center Bookstore is going out of business! Left of Center will be closing at the end of the month; until then, everything is marked down at least 40%. Soon I'll be shopping for my Marx and Chomsky at the big, corporate Borders bookstore. The irony...

Metropolis Coffee is next door to Left of Center. They've got the best lattes in the neighborhood, but without the bookstore, I'll have less reason to go there.

Super Bowl Extra Large

"You're a vicious!"

"Why a Seahawk?"

I haven't had a chance to update the blog since the Super Bowl. I was rooting for the Steelers, so I was pleased with the outcome. My brother-in-law, who grew up in western PA, is a Steelers fan, and he was there at the game.

The Stones turned out to be a good act for the halftime show. It occurred to me that "Start Me Up" would make a good song for a prune commercial. The way Mick hops around on stage like that, at his age... Must be prunes.

Bulbs

Bulbs... Last year it was the squirrels that did them in. This year, it might be the unusual weather, although nothing has died yet.

I took a look around the yard today, checking for evidence of squirrels digging. I was surprised to find that a good number of bulbs have already sprouted, including some crocuses (Croci? What's the correct plural form?) that I thought had been destroyed by the squirrels last year. This is four weeks too soon, following an unusually warm and rainy January. Now that their leaves are poking above ground, they're vulnerable to a good cold snap. And, of course... squirrels.

Back from Minneapolis

[Reposted 05 FEB 2006: What happened??? Somehow this entry disappeared...]

I spent a few days this past week at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis -- my first time there. Nice place, but why couldn't the company have sent me to Hawaii in January?

Back when I was in college, the University of Minnesota was famous among computer geeks as the place where the Gopher Internet protocol was developed. That was back in the good old days, when the Internet was largely text-based. Soon, however, Gopher was supplanted by HTTP, which is the protocol you used to download this page to your computer. By the late '90s, there were hardly any Gopher servers left.