A Day in Rock City: Parade

There are certain moments in my life that have caused me to reevaluate some part of my concept of who I am. I start to wonder who this person is who made the decisions that put me in this situation. I had such a moment when I tried to sneak out of my Turkish dorm room and found myself hanging from a windowsill over a 12-foot drop onto concrete; another just before jumping out of a plane with a parachute strapped to my back.

Both of those incidents of minor physical peril pale in comparison to what I was doing at a little before 11:00 on Saturday morning, though: namely, rollerblading alone past small-town Midwesterners who'd gathered outside to see a parade. In addition to the rollerblades, I was wearing white fishnets, a short, yellow, sequined skirt and skimpy top to match, long black gloves, huge sunglasses, a wig, and a cardboard car.

The first decision that led me down the road to this moment of public weirdness was coming to A Day in Rock City, a festival put on each year to celebrate the founding of this village of 300 near the Illinois/Wisconsin border. Each year friends of Nell, a friend from my Ithaca days who's from Rock City, converge for the occasion, and this year I thought I'd see what the fuss was about.

Nell and another Rock City Day veteran picked me up in Rockford on Thursday in the midst of a shopping trip. As we drove between craft and thrift stores hunting for costumes and float decorations, Nell explained that the theme of this year's float would be Gas Guzzlers for Global Warming, and she ran down the available roles: the Arab oil sheik, George Bush, gas station workers, the oil company worker, the Texas oil tycoon and his wife, ghoulish dying people. The role of a polar bear drowning in a wading pool was already taken. "And if you have any interest in rollerskating, you can be a car," she said. The cars would skate in front of the float in a traffic jam; each would have a designated color and a costume purchased by Nell in Thailand.

This didn't seem like the best option, given that I hadn't roller skated in years, and had no roller skates. But when I found a box full of $2 roller blades to choose from at Goodwill, I became more receptive to the idea. I bought a pair and practiced skating around the bank parking lot that night, but I grew worried when I saw the costumes, which I thought would look fine on a six-year-old at a dance recital, but not so great on me.

As far as I could tell, nothing got done on the float on Friday, including my own goal of finding someone else to be the yellow car. Work seemed to begin in the middle of the night; when I woke up in the morning, Nell was already hard at work on the seemingly impossible job of getting the float ready for the parade's 10:30 commencement. I went to work on my car with the over-worked hot glue gun, quickly resigning myself to driving the most pathetic car of the group. That was the point of no return: having built the car, I had to drive it.

We were late to the parade, and being accomplished skaters, the other cars reached the starting point blocks ahead of me. Which was how I came to be all alone on my $2 blades, behind the other cars but ahead of the float (ably pulled by G.R. as the Arab sheik on a three-wheeler), on a later stretch of the parade route where the spectators were already gathered.

We had a great time, though. If you don't believe me, believe G.R.'s Picasa album.

Editrix

A big congratulations to M.M., who informs me he's been accepted to the University of Maryland's M.B.A. program. He was nice enough to give me some credit for editing his essays (but do admissions people really read these things? I have my doubts). It's great to know his work paid off, including my making him re-write two of his three essays. I find editing other peoples' stuff to be oddly fun, but sometimes I think I get a little carried away...

I've been busy this past month, and also uninspired, blog-wise. Let's have a moment of silence for some of the topics I thought about writing about, but just never got around to:

• How hard (and unpleasant) it is to adjust to a style of tae kwon do where you can hit people in the face, when you're used to a style where you can't
• How lightening struck so close to my building on Friday night that it set off the fire alarm, which turns out to emit an adorably quaint clanging sound
• How G.R. and I threw a surprisingly kick-ass dinner party on Saturday

Also, congratulations to TOWWAS, who finally has Internet access in her lovely and conveniently-situated IKEA-furnished new apartment, and thus can go back to blogging far, far more regularly than I. (Now there's a sentence in need of editing.)

Tourists

One nice thing about living in DC is that it's easy to impress out-of-town visitors.

A few weekends ago NSCV came down for a festival involving Flogging Molly, a pseudo-Irish band we both like. M.M. came out with us, and I introduced them both to Turkish food one night and Ethiopian the next, both at restaurants within walking distance of my place.

This past weekend G.R. made his first trip to our nation's capital from his new home base in Delaware. G.R. is naturally enthusiastic, and actually pays attention to things like the Supreme Court, so he was like a kid on a sugar high. If kids on sugar highs kept dropping the F-bomb and talking about evolution.

So what could have been a somewhat brutal post-St.-Patrick's-Day slog around the mall actually turned out to be quite fun, with stops at the Botanic Gardens, the Canadian embassy, and the Museum of Natural History. I may have even learned some things about evolution.

Canadians

Today G.R. made a disparaging comment about how I hadn't blogged lately, which was nervy of him considering we're lucky to hear from him once a week. Rather than point this out I just said my life's been too boring to blog about lately. But that was before I arrived home to find a package from G.R.'s homeland, containing this awesome t-shirt. It's exciting if you're lazy, and you were a chemistry major, and especially if you only ordered it last week and selected the cheap shipping.

I don't want to sound prejudiced here, but is anyone else a little unsure of how to classify Canadians? They're a strange hybrid of foreigner and not-foreigner, fitting in well here apart from their superior enunciation and flappy heads. You can't teach them new words like "faucet." But once in awhile they say something that reminds you they do in fact hale from a different culture.

For example, today I had a drink after work with a Canadian friend who's lived in the U.S. for six months or so. We were talking about Al Jazeera; a friend of hers just moved here from Toronto to work for the new English version. Apparently all the non-anchor personel at the English Al Jazeera are British or Canadian because Americans don't want Al Jazeera on their resumes. There was an article in the Washington Post today that this friend thought was strangely biased against Al Jazeera, too, which led her to ask me, "Why are Americans so freaked out about Al Jazeera?"

To me Americans' automatic Al Jazeera-disliking reflex is such an obvious fact of life that I probably would never have questioned it. It would be like asking why cats hate vacuum cleaners (although a friend of mine thinks cats' ancestors were terrorized by a prehistoric feline-sucking Hoover, ingraining that aversion in their genes, so maybe that's a bad example). I could have said that post-September 11 Americans fear and despise all phrases that begin with "al," but I went with the less rascist explanation and said that the only time we ever hear about Al Jazeera is when Osama bin Laden releases a video, so of course we think they're the network of terrorists.

Here's my plan for salvaging America (and its reputation): Those of my readers who are not stealing cable should email their providers and ask them to carry Al Jazeera. We'll kill two birds with one stone: America will get more news of foreign lands, and we'll show the world we're not afraid of all things "al."