(no subject)

[cblj_backup]

Apparently nobody clued Mother Nature into the fact that "The Windy City" IS A METAPHOR. I almost blew over today.

But I got out and had an ADVENTUR nonetheless.

There's an area in Chicago's northwest side, known as River West, that appears to be mostly shoe and furniture stores and Chinese food restaurants, but the list of stuff to see there has been mounting, so I caught the bus to the Blue Line and braved the Blue Line Assholes (I swear nobody on that line knows how to ride a damn train) to go to the Chicago stop. At the Chicago Blue Line stop is the Windy City Cafe, which I was told serves a really good breakfast. It's decent, but not anything special; I had the maple-cinnamon waffle (slightly overdone) and some sausages (perfectly done) and it was certainly busy. A lot of folks were there to have breakfast before attending the eleven-thirty service at St. John Cantius, I think.

St. John Cantius, a Catholic church about a block away, supposedly has an amazing collection of religious art, but for a church-cum-museum it's pretty unwelcoming. The website has zero information about how to actually SEE the art, and when I went to look at the church to see if maybe there was some quiet side-entrance I could slip into, I found most of the doors locked and the big main entry doors shut (it's windy, I get it) and the people going into them looking quite askance at my jeans and leather jacket. I decided not to go in, a combination of shyness and "Well, okay, it IS Sunday, I don't want to disrupt worship".

Sidebar: I've never understood dressing up to go to church. If God won't talk to me unless I'm wearing a tie, we aren't going to get on at all.

Anyway, I wandered off from the church and stumbled over the Gonnella Baking Company, which makes really delicious baked goods, but they were closed. So I got back on the train and went north a stop to Division.

I was headed for The Boring Store, a branch of the 826 organisation, but I got totally sidetracked by this awesome thrift shop full of furniture because it had a display case of owls in the window. Owls are very in this year for decor (don't look at me, I just report the news) and I knew Mum would squeak if I sent her a photo, so I went in and had a look and ended up buying a set of three little brass owls to keep my soapstone owl Quiz company. I'm going to name them Saul, Orrie, and Fred, after the freelance ops in the Nero Wolfe books.

The Boring Store, when I finally got there, was MADE OF AWESOME. It's part of 826 Chicago, which is a not-for-profit afterschool creative writing program for kids. You may have seen the Time Travel Mart, which went viral a year or two ago -- same people. The Boring Store is a "spy store" that sells all kinds of fun stuff, including fake moustaches, books and postcards, tchochkes, and school supplies (ROBOT ERASERS). If you're in Chicago, I highly suggest it as a fun shopping experience that supports a good cause.

I went back down Milwaukee to Lovely Bakeshop, where I had a groupon for a dozen mini-cupcakes. They're very nice people; the cafe is hip in that "none of our furniture matches" kind of way. I don't think I'd go there specifically to go there, especially since I'm not that into coffee shops, but if I lived in the area it'd probably be somewhere I'd hang out a lot.

And now I am home, with three owls, a dozen mini-cupcakes, and windburn. Seriously, why so much wind?

Comments

[thefannishwaldo.livejournal.com]

I've never understood dressing up to go to church. If God won't talk to me unless I'm wearing a tie, we aren't going to get on at all.

You'd like 2U. I went in jeans and a sweater today and I was among the 'more dressed up'. Some folks show up in the kind of clothes I'd work out in... if I were inclined to work out. And it's all perfectly fine. Some people dress up, but that's because they feel like dressing up, not because OMG YOU MUST LOOK ALL FANCY OR ELSE. :)

I mean, I think you'd like it for other reasons - we call it 'church for people who like to think not just believe' - but also because you could probably show up in your pajamas without getting much more than a "that's an interesting choice" look.

[copperbadge.livejournal.com]

Is that the church that runs the funny subway ads? "We like Bears fans. We like Packers fans. (But sometimes it's very hard.)"

[minkrose]

Wait, 2U? Are we talking about Unitarian Universalism or something else?


My husband & I were both raised UU, but we don't really attend anywhere at the moment. It is the easiest religion to bring your own beliefs to.

[minkrose]

Also, on dressing up: I think it's mostly to show off to other people, not for God. I think other people are way more judgmental, too. At least, that seems to be why my extended family gets dressed up for things (and why I couldn't wear what I wanted to a funeral!).

[bkwyrm.livejournal.com]

Pity you didn't get into St. John Cantius - it's an Opus Dei church that still uses the Tridentine Mass. Interesting in a sort of "What the hell is WRONG with these people??!" sort of way.

[luciab.livejournal.com]

"Windy City" has NEVER felt like a metaphor to me. It's nearly blown me over every time I've been there. And since I've often been there in the winter, it's nearly frozen my patootie off as well.

[copperbadge.livejournal.com]

There's a great monologue, I think by Gil Scott Heron, where he talks about how on the south side they call the wind "The Hawk" and if you let the Hawk in because you didn't close the door behind you, you're gonna get cursed out something fierce...

[tzikeh.livejournal.com]

Sidebar: I've never understood dressing up to go to church. If God won't talk to me unless I'm wearing a tie, we aren't going to get on at all.

Oh please oh please oh please let me take this to metaquotes.

[copperbadge.livejournal.com]

Sure, if you want :)

[madripoor-rose.livejournal.com]

Oh, owls are in, that explains a few things about some of the catalogs I've been getting lately.

You found the Boring Store! Glad to hear it was a cool experience.

[strangesequitur]

We're actually about two and a half years into the teal owl (brown background mandatory) home décor phenomenon of perplexing what-the-fuckery, the horrific and massive scope of which can only be truly appreciated by longtime craft store employees.

Cute enough alone or in pairs, but group hundreds of them together in a dedicated shop aisle, with all of their little owl-eyes following you everywhere you go...

[copperbadge.livejournal.com]

LOL, okay teal owl, so much no. :D Apparently it's also a hipster thing! Who knew...

[sophie-spence.livejournal.com]

A friend of mine has had this verse up on her refrigerator for ten years:

1 My brethren, show no partiality as you hold the faith of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Lord of glory. 2 For if a man with gold rings and in fine clothing comes into your assembly, and a poor man in shabby clothing also comes in, 3 and you pay attention to the one who wears the fine clothing and say, "Have a seat here, please," while you say to the poor man, "Stand there," or, "Sit at my feet," 4 have you not made distinctions among yourselves, and become judges with evil thoughts? 5 Listen, my beloved brethren. Has not God chosen those who are poor in the world to be rich in faith and heirs of the kingdom which he has promised to those who love him? 6 But you have dishonored the poor man. Is it not the rich who oppress you, is it not they who drag you into court? 7 Is it not they who blaspheme that honorable name which was invoked over you? 8 If you really fulfil the royal law, according to the scripture, "You shall love your neighbor as yourself," you do well. 9 But if you show partiality, you commit sin, and are convicted by the law as transgressors. 10 For whoever keeps the whole law but fails in one point has become guilty of all of it. 11 For he who said, "Do not commit adultery," said also, "Do not kill." If you do not commit adultery but do kill, you have become a transgressor of the law. 12 So speak and so act as those who are to be judged under the law of liberty. 13 For judgment is without mercy to one who has shown no mercy; yet mercy triumphs over judgment. (James 2:1-13, RSV)

She keeps it there because a) she attends a church with a very casual dress code, b) her mother attends a church with a very traditional dress code (all the women wear stockings and some wear hats), and c) the sight of it annoys her mother intensely. Her mother still purses her lips whenever she catches sight of it, but refuses to comment because a) it's a Bible verse, b) she's clever enough to see the pitfalls, and c) she doesn't want to "give her daughter the satisfaction".

Christian one-upsmanship, and I can't decide who's winning.

[jaydeyn-sitari.livejournal.com]

Wish I had known that verse when I was attending Catholic school in my younger years. Would've made a lot of things much easier to argue!

:)
Jaydeyn

[twirlynoodle.livejournal.com]

I have had it explained to me that the owl is apparently a hipster emblem. Has it now gone mainstream? (Who really cares?*)

The way I understand the dressing up thing, like many other peripheral religious rituals it's supposed to be more for you than for God – if God can see you struggle to eat tacos and fall down in the shower, merely dressing up for church isn't going to impress him much. It's about making church special in your mind, and putting you in a certain mindset; if it's something you 'have' to take care with, it gains more significance than, say, a trip to the grocery store or the gym. Of course human nature being what it is, that sort of thing really quickly turns into collective one-upmanship. I think there might be something in one of the Epistles warning against dolling oneself up for church, but St Paul is so fond of telling people what to do it all kind of turns into a blur and I might be wrong...

Anyway, that's just my understanding of it; I am by no means any sort of theological authority.

[keestone.livejournal.com]

Oh no! I've been collecting owls for several years, and now it's a thing! But I was doing it . . . um yeah. (Like embroidered jeans, I don't really mind if a thing I love becomes popular again but I don't really dig the quality of most of the stuff that became available to buy because my preferences got trendy for a bit.) But really, a hipster emblem? How and why?

[i-amsherlocked.livejournal.com]

OMG, The Boring Store is awesome!!! Thank you for the link!

and dressing up for church sucks. God(s/ess) don't really care what we look like, LOL!

[madripoor-rose.livejournal.com]

http://826national.org/stores/

You might want to check out the other storefronts, like Ann Arbor's Liberty Street Robot Repair and Supply or Boston's Bigfoot Research Society.

church

[(Anonymous)]

The people going into them looking quite askance at my jeans and leather jacket. I decided not to go in, a combination of shyness and "Well, okay, it IS Sunday, I don't want to disrupt worship".

Something I've found useful, and very difficult, is to distinguish between what other people actually communicate to me and what I project onto them. I would respectfully suggest that your thoughts in this case were your own.

The folks glancing at you may have been thinking harmless churchy thoughts like, "Who's that? Is he new? How can we welcome him? Should I say something? Maybe not, I'll scare him off. OMG OMG OMG, is a young person interested in joining us? Maybe he'll join the finance committee!! Maybe he'll join the choir! Maybe not. I'll stop looking at him, I might scare him off. Wait, I'll look at him and smile. No, he looks shy, I'll pretend I don't notice him. OMG I don't know what to do!"

Re: church

[copperbadge.livejournal.com]

I'm not the best ever at distinguishing that, but some of their looks were pretty difficult to misinterpret :D It's fine; it's not like I wasn't showing up at a church in jeans, after all.

[kallaneboi.livejournal.com]

Sidebar: I've never understood dressing up to go to church. If God won't talk to me unless I'm wearing a tie, we aren't going to get on at all.

I had a years long (literally) argument with my mom about dressing up for church. I think it took me six months at around 13 to convince her to let me wear dress pants. DRESS PANTS. NOT JEANS. DRESS PANTS. I finally told her, "Look, if I'm uncomfortable, and all dresses are uncomfortable, I'm not paying attention to the sermon. If I'm comfortable, I'm probably going to listen better."

It took me another few years to get her to let me wear jeans. (She still doesn't approve, but I am 23 and ignore her glare when I'm home for church on Sundays.)

[xntrick.livejournal.com]

The whole "dressing up for church" thing...

I think the church were I work would fail if we had to dress up. I wear jeans. But also, I think now the majority of people who attend are homeless and need help. (Today, I was accosted by two schizophrenic individuals who had apparently been off their meds.)

Needless to say, the homeless don't wear designer clothing.

[metallumai.livejournal.com]

Church has metaphors; Mother Nature doesn't. :D

[slice254.livejournal.com]

My church as everything from people who still come in suits (and the occasional hat on a woman) to kids in shorts and t-shirts. Some of the old folks have issues with the latter, but they are learning to deal.

Some churches have a really hard time dealing with people who "don't belong." They've closed themselves off from the world, and when there is a new face, they get suspicious. On one level, it surprises me from a Catholic church, because in my experience, it's a lot easier to be anonymous in a Catholic church. On another level, given my experience with the Catholic church (born and raised and pretty devout up until about 5 years ago when I decided that staying in a church I didn't agree with on many issues of morality and theology was hypocritical), it doesn't surprise me at all.

[arsenicjade.livejournal.com]

Seriously, we're gonna have a friendship divorce over cupcakes.

[copperbadge.livejournal.com]

These aren't worth it, trust me :D They're edible, but in taste and texture they resemble supermarket cupcakes.

[(Anonymous)]

A choirmaster I once sang under used to tell the story about how once he was running late to get to a Friday afternoon service at a big, fancy, very traditional Episcopalian church. He got there just in time to process in behind the acolytes. He was in vestments, so the fact that he was wearing holy (snerk) jeans and a grubby tee-shirt didn't really matter, but apparently all of the little old ladies were quite scandalized at his pink high-tops.

[tardis-stowaway.livejournal.com]

YAY ADVENTUR.

My parents' requirement that I wear a dress to church was a HUGE point of contention when I was a small child. Between the annoying dress code and my very early awareness that the Bible had a serious shortage of women doing important things, church and its God seemed unfriendly to me for a lot of years.

These days I do dress up a bit for church willingly from some combination of training, wanting to set aside worship time as special, and looking for an excuse to wear my nice clothes that I can't wear to my messy job. Having moved from a protestant church in the south to a Quaker meeting in California, I usually find myself more dressed up than half of the old ladies. (I think I actually wear a bit too much jewelry for the Quaker sensibility, but this is another example of how God can just take me as I am.)

[strange-selkie.livejournal.com]

I used to love the Gonnella trucks for a very specific reason: they made a layer of snowpack I could walk on/in when it was just me and the bakery/milk trucks out on the road at ASS DARK IN THE MORNING.

Also because the name means "Petticoat," and yeah, it's probably a family name, but Petticoat Bakery sounds so homey-like.

And their stuff is tasty.

(review, Sam. review.)

[copperbadge.livejournal.com]

Their bread is delicious! They seem like a nice unassuming little company.

(I know, I know, believe me...omg I need an ereader clearly :D)

[brewsternorth.livejournal.com]

I missed Chicago in winter the one time I was there, but knowing the terrain and what happens in equivalent bits of NY I'm not surprised the gusts were blow-you-over awful. *shivers*

I have no particular opinion about people who dress up for church - but I certainly don't think it should be obligatory, and even less so if you're going to be concealing said costume under five and more yards of poly-cotton choir robes. I'm often wearing jeans and a goofy T-shirt or plain sweater, and *you can't tell*.

I'm going to have to drop in on the Superhero Supply Store (the 826 in New York) just for the lulz/awesome. I already follow both the local and national 826 on Twitter and they're clearly doing good stuff.

I shall have to check out that bakeshop if ever back in the Middle Coast - that sounds like a fun and chilled-out place.

[black-rider.livejournal.com]

From an outsider's perspective, church is a social affair, and dress is just another form of one-upsmanship.

[keestone.livejournal.com]

That was pretty much my insider's perspective too. (And as sophie_spence and others pointed out, it was pretty much warned against for that reason (James 2:1-13).) And that kind of thing is a big reason that my first sentence is in the past tense. :-/

[happi-feet.livejournal.com]

I don't dress up for church. I wear flip-flops and jeans, and usually my shirts don't have holes. The pastor's wife starts out her prayers with, "Hey, God..."

I go to a pretty awesome church. No one stuck up here.