A Dumb Twentysomething Expat in Chicago

last but not the least

2003-12-11T05:11:00.000-05:00

i hereby announce that this site is deserted by its master from now on. for no reason.

I am a nut...

2003-11-18T01:31:00.000-05:00

Gonna drive myself mad this week. Stats exam tommorow, collecting and setting off grading the papers of my 60 or so students, planning meeting of the ethnography conference at Loyola, group meeting with Julie and Juan prior to that, Lousiana team group meeting, Saturday shopping and community outreach project on Sunday...besides the routine lectures and discussion sections.

What else you are not gonna do this week, Karen? Maybe eating and sleeping...

Ms/Mrs Dalloway

2003-11-16T23:16:00.000-05:00

Ola, Maggie and Danny held a Christian cook-in party at Ola's place last night . It was over one month ago (on my first volunteer day) that the four of us came up with the idea of throwing up an ethnic food party. Danny and Maggie are sisters from a Romanian family. (I thought they might be the only two kids in their family. However, I saw two more sisters in the party and it turned out that they have 6 girls and 2 boys in their family. My goodness!!)

My task at first was but bring one or two dishes I make on my own to the party. I felt flattered about that and set about shopping the grocery days ago. I was even more happier that I bumped into Ola and Danny at CCC Friday afternoon. (Well, I was really blessed that afternoon. I ran across one of my students I was seeking for ages, who has yet to hand in his first paper. I even finally dug up where the office of ASB is, as every buidling in UIC is practically a maze!) However, the Dalloways rang me up Saturday noon and it hit on me that my job was not just cooking, but also drafting GUYS into this party!!! There kicked off my lobbying career. Generally, Chinese guys hold a common sense that all parties thrown up by Americans, esp. by American undergraduates, are wild and sexually related. (No offense, Dalloways.) Moreover, my Chinese-guy-101 tells me that the majority of Chinese guys don't have Caucusian fetish in practical terms and may not feel like an American party, esp when they are not pretty articulate in the language. Fortunately, I have several guys sharing the same unit and another guy who hangs around with the guys upstairs day in and day out. The persuation was not extremely hard, though. I just emphasized that you could not expect anything wild and out of the ordinary from a party held by some of the most pious Chirstians I have ever met.

In the end, I enlisted 3 GUYS and two more girls into the party. Impressive accomplishment, wasn't it? The Dalloways were fairly happy about my achievement yet Ola was rather nervous when she came over picking us up. It was the first time she held this sort of party. I myself was stressed out all the afternoon, checking out if I could bring over more guys and hence making numerous calls to the Dalloways. The party was going fine, though. Basically grazing food and most of the time was dedicated to games, which was moderated by Maggie's little sister, Joanna. The Romanian food made by Danny and Maggie was impressive in terms of both taste and quantity. Ola's fish got lots of compliments and in turn Ola complimented the chicken with pepper I made on my own. When I was starting off cooking by myself this August, I doubted if the food was edible at all. Now apparently my dishes can pass for treats to people. Way to go, Karen!

Every woman may be a Ms/Mrs Dalloway once or more in her life. Victoria and I were treated homemade Italian dinner by Jo-Jo, Mike's mum, three weeks ago. (Mike and Lauren are the host family of us. I will share more details about them later.) Jo-Jo was even checking out recipes:) My mum presented a big feast to our extended family before I left for Chicago, in celebration of my getting into U.S. grad school. Ola, Maggie and Danny got over their party eventually. When would my party be? And whom that party would be for? I would be seeking out some pretty 'daisy' to put on the table...

p.s. If you have little idea who I am getting at by Mrs Dalloway, please just go watch the movie 'The Hour'. I truly lack sophisitication, but I cannot think of a better methaphor than Mrs. Dalloway in this posting.

2003-11-08T13:15:00.000-05:00

I am having a hard time beating my procrastination habit. It takes me way longer to finish up a regular assignment, at the cost of numerous sleepless nights. And it takes me even more time to get back to these due emails I should have written back to my friends. This blog is no exception...

I am settling down in this city...physically, after I enlisted three guys to fecth the study desk to my room from Colleen's apartment. I made myself a decent workstation,though all but one piece of furniture in my room is freebie. When I am in a good mood, the room will be extremely neat and tidy. However when I am tied up with assignments(as right now), it'll be carpeted with all my books and handouts.

I did not rob a bank nor fall victim to Chinese mafia's usury. We got our due payrolls...and I am still toiling on my awful TA work. Most importantly, I got over my assigned actual lecture this Wednesday. Yeah, it's a real lecture, to an audience of 300 or so undergraduates. Needless to say, I did not sleep the preceding night, in order to get ready my 20 plus page lecture notes.

No one is out there to tell you how to lead a discussion. Still there is no one you can reach out to ask how I--a nerd coming all the way from China just two weeks ago--can lead discussion sessions for American undergraduates in ENGLISH. You have to get over your TA survival 101 class ALONE. It is more a matter of accountability than pedagogy. I kinda enjoy this sense of accountability and make sure that I am fulfilling it, though I cannot find a single bit of pedagogy sparkle in whatever I speak in the discussion. I am relatively articulate in my own classes and on any other occasions, yet I will be staggering when I speak to my classes.

I am a straight person, at least right now. But I find it easier for me to bump into and appreciate wonderful girls than their counterparts of the other sex. I met Cara--a rape crisis counselor--in a documentary video show organized by a Feminist society here. She was dressed up much like a tomboy, but she is definitely the most amazing girl I have met here so far. I said to myself, 'If I had a little bit of her guts of switching identity while speaking, I would be adored by all the kids in my classes.' I met another bunch of ladies in a 'rap session' of breast cancer survivors last Saturday. The discussion and the laides there were so impressive. This support group, which are mostly Afro-American ladies, has been running since 1997, as a chapter of Y-me National Breast Cancer Organization. They get together regularly, sharing with each other everything, ranging from sense of depressions, clinical advice to financial information. They are not victimizing themselves but are extremely positive. Candidly, I used to have an unrealistic and even biased image of these black people on the street. They may be fun but I thought they had difficulty in speaking out their ideas in well-formed sentences. This is not true,though...

I did not make it to NBA game featuring Yao Ming, nor did I go to see the Baseball, which was supposedly an indispensable step for Americanization. I may be missing out some enjoyment, but for me it is more like an exploration day to day...

2003-10-10T14:33:00.000-05:00

I have turned down all the study dinner, host family Italian meal and Lakefront departmental picnic offers for the weekends. After finishing up all the grading for the soc100 undergraduates (at the cost of two sleepless nights), it's time for me to set down to my own classes. Gonna have stats exam next Tuesday. Disoriented and messed up with all the assignments. Jiaming, my compatriot TA for 401, has been extra nice to me and may think that I am a 'special child' for maths and need time for transition:)

I am only too anxious to wait for the end of my 'no money-no honey' day. Already done with the Payroll Office stuff. So supposedly I am going to get my paycheck next week, if nothing unexpected occurs. Well, there are already lots of things to allocate my first sum of income in the States. My IBM laptop which is now 'backordered', a decent DC and the October rent. The first two entries are what I need as well as what I want. For the last entry, I wish I could be waived,haha:D

Got still more stuff on my schedule for the next months. Serving on a steering committee on an ethnography conference(which I think is one of my expertises) and preparing myself for my ASB winter trip.

Theme Days

2003-10-08T17:21:00.000-05:00

I have had a couple of Theme Days for the past few weeks. For instance, we had a 'screaming and sore throat day' when we were running numerous rides of roller-‘n-coaster at Six Flags Great America. What is more impressive is our Marine Day. One of our friends here took us to go boating in Chicago River and Lake Michigan on a sunny Sunday! To be more exact, before we could sail into the Lake, we had to unload our boat into the River and went all the way along the River and went through a lock. It is believed that this is the way those wanna-be people in between 'haves' and 'have-nots' entertain themselves. If you were on upper top of the pyramid, you would have a parking lot for your boat/cruiser in the Lake, which costs far more than that for a car per year. Besides all these hassles, boating was really fun. As a climax of that Marine Day, we grabbed some food at our favorite dim sum bar and rushed for Jonny Depp’s Pirates in the Caribbean. In fact, I am kinda impressed by myself for all these adventures. I used to and do have a phobia for almost everything, like height, downwards escalators, water, etc. I was scared to death while running all those rides at Six Flags but I pulled through it ALIVE. I cannot swim yet I did enjoy sitting at the forefront of the boat while we were sailing against the wind. Nevertheless, I am still trying to keep myself away from these downward escalators so long as there are upright lifts available. I wonder if this phobia issue can be considered sick. I will stick with it!

Oct 4th Saturday was my first volunteer day in the States. I went to Lawndale Day Care Center (largely for Afro-American kids) with some other ASB (Alternative Spring Break) members. Neat deejay, good food and tough work! We were building a playground for the kids in Lawndale within a single day. Totally unlike what I have been doing academically and professionally, the work there is primarily physical. Shoveling and transporting sands as well as leveling the ground. People engaged with the project all agreed that it was much like working out, exercising your muscles. My roomies dropped their jaws when I told them that I was going up there helping build a playground. ‘Are you sure that you will not mess up the whole things… You are so skinny.’ Well, one of my incentives was that I only wanted to get to know more Americans, which appears to be the easiest possible thing while you are living in USA. The truth is this is not a snap up to this moment. A more important incentive may be that I want to prepare myself for a career in public service. Naturally there is no better way than getting a sense of the spirit of volunteerism first hand.

This is how my mundane life goes on. Tuesday night has always been my nightmare. For last night in particular, I was staying up until well over 5 o’clock, jogging down all my critique and comments for my two classes’ soc100 papers. Woke up at 7:00 and rushed to the Maze (Behavioral Sciences Building) at 8:00 and pulled through two disc sections and one lecture with a cup of chocolate. What a life!

Of course, there are much more things I want to talk about in this blog later on. The recurring debates between me and our theory professor, those guys' on-the-table talk on sexuality and my special-child orientation for stats401:D

2003-09-25T21:32:00.000-05:00

I become broke today. Though my banking balance shows that I still have more than 1400$ in the checking account, I am pretty sure that all the money in this checking account will be gone by next Friday at latest. By that time, I will only have $71 left over in my banking account. We are supposed to pay the University of Illinois at Chicago a total of $769 this semester. Our payroll for the first month was due last week but we were unable to get it. That's apparently because we are not yet done with NESSIE system. I hate to spell this abbreviation. For me, it only represents one word: bureaucracy.

Another money issue is the rent for our apartment. That'd be a way too long story, if I traced it back to the very beginning. It's partly set now, so I will not bother to recall it. I hate to complain, but I have been complaining too much these days.

Well, this is the very first post of this blog. In fact, I registered for this blogger site back in Beijing a couple of months ago but I failed to post anything here. Oops, the word "back" occurs too frequently in my speech and writing all these days. Back home, back in China...And of course, this word is always associated with comparisons. What we have back in China...and what we don't have back in Chna.

Blogging and picking up photography are actually two of my utmost important goals in the following years. I used to believe I have been living a mixed life, a blend of within China and beyond China. Then, I eventually arrived in the States one month ago and I think I am presently living two separate lives, English speaking life paralelled with Chinese-speaking life. Up to this moment, I have no idea wheather or when these two tracks can meet. I kinda hope blogging will help me a little bit in linking these two tracks, because writing may be a good outlet and linkage for that purpose. Visual images, I hope, may also capture some episodes of your life...