Non-midwesterners may or may not have heard that last week the region experienced a 5.2 magnitude tremblor. The next day everybody shared their experiences…here’s mine (from what I remember):

4:40 am : Wake up. Not sure why. Get up to use the bathroom and drink a glass of water.
4:41 am : Walk back to room and notice cat trying to cover something up.
4:42 am : Upon closer inspection notice that the cat is trying to cover freshly eaten food pellets. Clean up food pellets and wonder why the cat threw up just after eating.
4:43 am : Fall back asleep.
9:15 am : Realize at work that there was an earthquake around 4:36 am. Proceed to tell people that I didn’t feel anything, but my cat apparently did.
10:15 am : Receive Instant message that says: “Did you feel that? Aftershock!”
10:16 am : Nope.
4:45 pm : Arrive home and inspect apartment for crooked pictures or any signs of movement.
4:47 pm : Wonder to self if the tremblor affected anything in the apartment…or if my apartment is always slightly disheveled.

It’s probably always slightly disheveled.

(the end)

During the (almost) six years I’ve lived in the city, I’ve had numerous conversations with people about baseball allegiances. First and foremost I live and die by the Brewers, but I’ve been here long enough to pick a local favorite. Lucky for us, Major League Baseball placed two teams in the metropolis. One can learn a lot about society by observing both fan bases.

As soon as I moved here I knew it was apparent that there’s a discrepancy in perception between the two teams. The Cubs play on the north side and play baseball in this so-called Baseball Eden called Wrigley Field where you’ll always have a good time because there’s beer, baseball and hot (read: blonde) chicks. The masses pay top dollar to watch a bad baseball team while taking breaks to pee their $6 beers back into trofts. The Sox play on the southside where things are supposedly a little tough and as a former co-worker advised before I attended a game in 2002: “bring a gun.” Well, it’s 2008 and after attending many games at “The Cell,” I’m still here. After the Sox won the series in 2005, I heard my boss make a crack that the victory parade would be well attended because “Sox fans don’t have jobs.” Uh yeah…perception. Where was I?

Oh yeah, I was talking to my eldest brother and he was also duped to think you attend a Sox game if you want to get shot. I told him my experience was vastly more enjoyable on the Southside because you have more room to watch, fans are civil to each other, the bathrooms are clean, and nobody hurls racial insults as opposed to one particular game where I sat in the Wrigley Field Bleachers. It was during the season Hee Sop Choi was touted and eventually run out of town. I expected some race-related ribbing, but they took it an insulting degree by saying things like: “you don’t know the meaning of Home Run” and “hit me a big Dong” when he didn’t excel. After the game (or perhaps it was later in the season) I was walking down the street when a group of people spotted me across the street and started chanting “Hee Sop Choi!” I mean…okay, so I kind of look like a Korean, but that doesn’t mean that’s the only reason I attended that game or follow the team.

When I watched the Cubs home opener on TV and saw a group of fans in the right field bleachers wearing stereotypical Japanese headbands to welcome their famous free agent Kosuke Fukudome, I thought to myself: “oh boy, here we go again.” It turns out that profiteers (not official cubs merchandisers) took it to a whole new level by introducing the Fukudome shirt:

I consider it very insulting but I’m not the least bit surprised that a) the shirt was made and b) the shirt is a top seller. When the Sox fielded Tadahito Iguchi to at second, you’d never see anything like that and his nationality was never brought up…but I digress. There seems to be a bully mentality among a segment of the fanbase that believes it’s okay to use race as a means to mock. I feel that these Cubs fans represent a chunk of the US population who still feel that it’s okay to be ignorant (”in good fun only”) as long as they can drink their beers, watch baseball, and feel better about themselves.

Locally, this just makes it easier for me to be a Sox fan. But on a grand scale, this episode shows that there’s quite a bit of work to be done when it comes to race, perception, and knowing where to draw the line…

Me: “Sorry Mom, I don’t think a simple letter will do. You’ll have to fill out this complicated form so your brother can visit the country and not be seen as a drain on American resources.

Mom: “No…it’s not the president…it’s YOUR muslims!”

Dear Islam: I’m sorry a shade over half the country feels that way about your religion. I’ll do what I can to curtail the ignorance.

Your Pal,
Leftoverchinese

You obviously need to know this about me. I have a cellular telephone. I have a land line at my apartment.

The cellular telephone is to be used for communication purposes wherever I may be at that particular moment. The land line was originally installed as a way to direct telemarketing calls to my answering machine, create an easy way for family to get a hold of me and leave messages, and a portal to 9-1-1 just in case. If you call Ma Bell and insist on picking your features ala-carte, you can get bare-bones telephone service with caller ID for less than $20 a month. Local calls within a five mile radius cost only $0.03 cents a call. However, after a few years of having almost-impossible telephone conversations in my apartment on the cellular phone (standing on the couch by the window is not a comfortable speaking position), I thought long and hard about whether to expand my land line’s calling power beyond that radius.

Ma Bell offers long distance packages at reasonable prices depending on your use. I was deciding between paying; (a) $2/month to call around the country at $0.12 per minute and; (b) $10/month for 120 minutes of call time. The break even point there is about 67 minutes. That means option B makes more sense as long as you make 68 minutes worth of telephone calls. I do like getting more bang for my buck. So I now have 2 hours a month in which to make calls from my apartment…we’ll see if I make this venture worth it.

As close friends probably know by now, I’m not one to spend much time on the telephone machine (thanks in part to two medium-distance relationships in my life). Why call and just talk when you can make plans and catch up then? I (still) abhor public telephone conversations, so the cellular telephone is used mostly as a locater and planning device (I have about 70 hours of constant rollover on my cellphone) with calls never lasting more than a few minutes.

The irony here is that between the ages of eleven and eighteen, jockeying for telephone position at the house was a constant battle. A second line was never an option. Now I sit with two telephone lines that I barely use…but that might change. I have years of catching up to do with friends in different places. Are you on that list? Stay tuned.