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I started thinking about writing a few of these some weeks ago, when Cleveland was named, by someone, as the nation's most miserable city. That Friday, Kendrick was off at a conference and I was heading back home during a light snow, and thinking to myself that yeah, I'm not representative or anything, but I like my life here pretty well. Of course, it's more complicated than that.
A new pizza place had gone in along my most common route home from the lab, through little Italy. I'd been eyeing them curiously for a while, so I stuck my nose in and asked if they had any food I could eat. After some negotiation, they made me their all veggie calzone, without cheese, and I hauled it back home with me, over the red brick of Murray Hill road, up the stone stairs behind the Spirk Innovation Center, and across the street to our building.
I really love those stairs. They have the look, to my eye, of 1920's stonework, and they haven't been particularly maintained. In several places the stones have buckled, and many of the flat bricked sections are pitted and broken, but they are quite passable. The height and depth of the stairs is pretty uneven - I take the goat trail in some pretty serious snow and ice, but leave the stone stairs for better weather. (However, other people make the opposite call, so it is perhaps a matter of taste.)
But they are beautiful. Beautiful then, frozen ground and a little snow in the air, beautiful in themselves, or in the almost mythical sense of ascent they invoke. Beautiful the last few weeks in sun and rain and with stretches of native lilies around them. (No, I don't know which ones. I haven't yet found the local equivalent of Pojar... they remind me a little of chocolate lillies, though the flowers are lighter and pointier.) Of course, that particular day the beauty of the stairs warred with the mouthwatering scents coming from my calzone, so I didn't tarry that much.
And oh, gods, that calzone was good. Okay, truth, I seldom go out to eat, and the local cuisine doesn't generally have a lot of overlap with my restricted diet. But it was hand made and fresh baked, and filled with several different kinds of peppers (both fresh and pickled), olives, onions, tomatoes, mushrooms... oh, so very tasty. I like little Italy a lot. As much for what it isn't as what it is. Shifu says the Seattle I-dist is "restaurant town" not "chinatown" and little Italy is also a restaurant town. It's not a high rent district, it's not all spiffy clean, I'll admit to steering clear a bit during the Christmas season because really, I can only handle so much Frank Sinatra at the best of times, and Frank Sintra singing carols... meh. There's a lot of gooey cheesey Itallian immigrant cuisine, and even some really good food that I can eat. In August there's some big Feast of the Assumption shindig, that involves a lot of people, statues of the Virgin, food, alcohol, and fireworks... I think. (I am mostly bemused.)
There are a lot of churches nearby, including some in little Italy that have pretty nifty statuary. Though what I notice the most is the bells. There are a lot of churches - and maybe other things, but I'm betting churches - that have wonderful old bells. At various times throughout the day and week they are rung. The only thing that could be better would be also having ezzins. (Real ezzins. Ideally in a couple of different mosques within hearing range of eachother, so they get all competitive with the singing.)
But that gets close to another thing I really like about Cleveland. The architecture. Oh, my word. Look, it's a poor city. And it used to be a very rich one. When I first visited I wrote that it is a fairy tale city, but much more in the sense of Grimm than Disney. The architecture is amazing. All the more so because much of it has been neglected. Beautiful brickwork crumbling away... not all of it, of course. Downtown can be very strange though - buildings of incredible grandeur, and streets weirdly empty. There aren't really enough people for the buildings. When people here talk about traffic jams, I often struggle to keep a straight face.
I live in an affluent neighborhood, by Cleveland standards. The houses here are incredible. I think I've pretty much gotten the whole owning large beautiful house on a chunk of property thing out of my system... which is a good thing because the prices are pretty incredible as well - really, you can buy a mansion for the cost of a condo in Seattle. An old creaky, lovingly maintained (but soon in need of more loving maintenance) mansion. With a carriage house, and gorgeous old oak trees scattering acorns across the lawn.
And the people are generally really nice. When I was wandering around with an injured kitty wrapped in my jacket, everyone was completely sweet, and made what suggestions they could. I have a pretty quiet life, but there are an awful lot of people I say "hi" to on a more or less daily basis, people who I run across between home and the lab, people who tend to be heading in to school while I'm doing forms, people at the stores I frequent...
That all being said, why, oh why, can I not set foot on Euclid, right next to campus (for some parts part of campus) without the street harrassment.
I do not want to hear your opinion about my looks or my body. I certainly don't want to hear what you want to do with my body. (If anyone here is inclined to tell me to relax and take it as a compliment, be warned that I will take it very poorly. Not to go into the details, but I do find it interesting that while I have generally been that I am far from at my least sexy while doing martial arts, but I *never* have to deal with this kind of crap while I'm practicing.)
It's gotten better since I cut off my hair. Loose clothing, a men's jacket, no hair... I certainly get fewer random cat calls this way. (Oh, another note - while I suspect the social reasons behind this are kind of icky, black men generally, when remarking on my appearance, do manage to come across as genuinely complementary. It's still not welcome, but it's a lot more ignorable. White men are almost uniformly creepy and threatening.) I haven't gotten a lot of people calling my a dyke - which I thought was likely, but I decided I preferred over the usual predation.
But... blech!
Some of this is that I'm from Seattle, where this sort of stuff tends to be a lot more low key. Some of this is that I'm feeling generically squicked by macro-cultural gender norms and that fricking barnyard dance. (That the majority of men who randomly hit on me in Cleveland* seem to expect that the way to go about this is to assert their dominance - usually in the face of the evidence - and then try to tell me all about them - which usually just reaffirms my first impression that they're not only blowhards but really, really boring - makes the situation here much, much worse.) I'm pretty generically not interested in dating right now, though that's outside of the scope of this piece. But even if I were, I wouldn't be interested in becoming someone's accessory, in an arrangement in which all my resources and accomplishments would become theirs to profit from and not value. I am not receptive. I am not complementary, and I'm certainly no mirror to anyone's candle.
* Quiet respectful geek boys, who don't manage to do anything as overt as "hit on" me are not counted. And generally at least a decade my junior. 8-0
A new pizza place had gone in along my most common route home from the lab, through little Italy. I'd been eyeing them curiously for a while, so I stuck my nose in and asked if they had any food I could eat. After some negotiation, they made me their all veggie calzone, without cheese, and I hauled it back home with me, over the red brick of Murray Hill road, up the stone stairs behind the Spirk Innovation Center, and across the street to our building.
I really love those stairs. They have the look, to my eye, of 1920's stonework, and they haven't been particularly maintained. In several places the stones have buckled, and many of the flat bricked sections are pitted and broken, but they are quite passable. The height and depth of the stairs is pretty uneven - I take the goat trail in some pretty serious snow and ice, but leave the stone stairs for better weather. (However, other people make the opposite call, so it is perhaps a matter of taste.)
But they are beautiful. Beautiful then, frozen ground and a little snow in the air, beautiful in themselves, or in the almost mythical sense of ascent they invoke. Beautiful the last few weeks in sun and rain and with stretches of native lilies around them. (No, I don't know which ones. I haven't yet found the local equivalent of Pojar... they remind me a little of chocolate lillies, though the flowers are lighter and pointier.) Of course, that particular day the beauty of the stairs warred with the mouthwatering scents coming from my calzone, so I didn't tarry that much.
And oh, gods, that calzone was good. Okay, truth, I seldom go out to eat, and the local cuisine doesn't generally have a lot of overlap with my restricted diet. But it was hand made and fresh baked, and filled with several different kinds of peppers (both fresh and pickled), olives, onions, tomatoes, mushrooms... oh, so very tasty. I like little Italy a lot. As much for what it isn't as what it is. Shifu says the Seattle I-dist is "restaurant town" not "chinatown" and little Italy is also a restaurant town. It's not a high rent district, it's not all spiffy clean, I'll admit to steering clear a bit during the Christmas season because really, I can only handle so much Frank Sinatra at the best of times, and Frank Sintra singing carols... meh. There's a lot of gooey cheesey Itallian immigrant cuisine, and even some really good food that I can eat. In August there's some big Feast of the Assumption shindig, that involves a lot of people, statues of the Virgin, food, alcohol, and fireworks... I think. (I am mostly bemused.)
There are a lot of churches nearby, including some in little Italy that have pretty nifty statuary. Though what I notice the most is the bells. There are a lot of churches - and maybe other things, but I'm betting churches - that have wonderful old bells. At various times throughout the day and week they are rung. The only thing that could be better would be also having ezzins. (Real ezzins. Ideally in a couple of different mosques within hearing range of eachother, so they get all competitive with the singing.)
But that gets close to another thing I really like about Cleveland. The architecture. Oh, my word. Look, it's a poor city. And it used to be a very rich one. When I first visited I wrote that it is a fairy tale city, but much more in the sense of Grimm than Disney. The architecture is amazing. All the more so because much of it has been neglected. Beautiful brickwork crumbling away... not all of it, of course. Downtown can be very strange though - buildings of incredible grandeur, and streets weirdly empty. There aren't really enough people for the buildings. When people here talk about traffic jams, I often struggle to keep a straight face.
I live in an affluent neighborhood, by Cleveland standards. The houses here are incredible. I think I've pretty much gotten the whole owning large beautiful house on a chunk of property thing out of my system... which is a good thing because the prices are pretty incredible as well - really, you can buy a mansion for the cost of a condo in Seattle. An old creaky, lovingly maintained (but soon in need of more loving maintenance) mansion. With a carriage house, and gorgeous old oak trees scattering acorns across the lawn.
And the people are generally really nice. When I was wandering around with an injured kitty wrapped in my jacket, everyone was completely sweet, and made what suggestions they could. I have a pretty quiet life, but there are an awful lot of people I say "hi" to on a more or less daily basis, people who I run across between home and the lab, people who tend to be heading in to school while I'm doing forms, people at the stores I frequent...
That all being said, why, oh why, can I not set foot on Euclid, right next to campus (for some parts part of campus) without the street harrassment.
I do not want to hear your opinion about my looks or my body. I certainly don't want to hear what you want to do with my body. (If anyone here is inclined to tell me to relax and take it as a compliment, be warned that I will take it very poorly. Not to go into the details, but I do find it interesting that while I have generally been that I am far from at my least sexy while doing martial arts, but I *never* have to deal with this kind of crap while I'm practicing.)
It's gotten better since I cut off my hair. Loose clothing, a men's jacket, no hair... I certainly get fewer random cat calls this way. (Oh, another note - while I suspect the social reasons behind this are kind of icky, black men generally, when remarking on my appearance, do manage to come across as genuinely complementary. It's still not welcome, but it's a lot more ignorable. White men are almost uniformly creepy and threatening.) I haven't gotten a lot of people calling my a dyke - which I thought was likely, but I decided I preferred over the usual predation.
But... blech!
Some of this is that I'm from Seattle, where this sort of stuff tends to be a lot more low key. Some of this is that I'm feeling generically squicked by macro-cultural gender norms and that fricking barnyard dance. (That the majority of men who randomly hit on me in Cleveland* seem to expect that the way to go about this is to assert their dominance - usually in the face of the evidence - and then try to tell me all about them - which usually just reaffirms my first impression that they're not only blowhards but really, really boring - makes the situation here much, much worse.) I'm pretty generically not interested in dating right now, though that's outside of the scope of this piece. But even if I were, I wouldn't be interested in becoming someone's accessory, in an arrangement in which all my resources and accomplishments would become theirs to profit from and not value. I am not receptive. I am not complementary, and I'm certainly no mirror to anyone's candle.
* Quiet respectful geek boys, who don't manage to do anything as overt as "hit on" me are not counted. And generally at least a decade my junior. 8-0