Someone tell me if I want to read Twilight or not

I have been hemming and hawing for ages about this. On one hand, I think vampires are stupid and I bristle at people with misspelled names like Stephenie.*

On the other hand, I have a lot of interest in figuring out how you become one of those authors who makes a lot of money.

Do I invest my precious time in this series? Someone tell me, please. I am a terrible decision-maker.

*Then again, Jim's last name is so mangled that it's basically unrecognizable as Polish. Once he went to a Greek bakery. The guy at the counter got all soppy when he saw Jim's name on the credit card, going on about, "what town were your grandparents from," etc. Then he clammed up when Jim said, "I'm Polish."

Ted, Howard, and the Coalition for Democratic Values

I am not an expert on the life and career of Ted Kennedy. I, unlike every other blogger on Planet America, don't have much to say about his death.

However, I can never pass up an opportunity to demonstrate my favorite parlor trick: relating any subject back to Howard Metzenbaum in three steps or less.

In this case, it's easy. Ted Kennedy was one of the original members of the Coalition for Democratic Values, the group Howard founded in 1990 as a liberal counterweight to the DLC, which he scorned as Republicans disguised in Democratic clothing.

If there was anything that frustrated Howard, it was the Democratic Party's steady drift to the Right -- particularly its willingness to embrace industry lobbyists with open arms. Senator Metzenbaum, whom Ted Stevens once called "a pain in the ass," was a die-hard consumer rights advocate, and he hated to see the little guy get trampled by giant corporations.

I often wonder what Senator Metzenbaum would think of the Obama administration. Would he view Obama's attempts at bipartisanship as selling out, or as a necessary compromise? And now that Senators Metzenbaum and Kennedy are both gone, what does that mean for traditional Liberalism?

Endangered Cleveland III

...and along with EC I and EC II, I think that covers all of the major University Circle institutions.

Botanical garden cutting six jobs, including leadership posts

Why do you hate Cleveland so much all of a sudden, Christine?

Interlude: lest I seem like I'm just picking on Cleveland by talking nice about Chicago, I want to clear a few things up:

1. Since I moved back from New York in 2007, my relationship with Cleveland has gotten increasingly complicated. It was easy to love Cleveland as an abstract idea from afar, from the safety of my job that I could have stayed at for as long as I wanted, or until the company got bought out. Lots of people do this -- look back fondly on the old homestead. I figured that since I had never had a problem getting a job outside of Cleveland, I would have an easy time getting a job in Cleveland, despite what everyone said about the economy. Surely, I thought, the economy would not apply to me. However, in those two years, I have been able to score exactly two temporary jobs, both of which I was overqualified for, and one of which ended a year before it was supposed to, due to funky budget issues. I am not trying to elicit a serenade by the world's smallest violin. I am just trying to tell you that my approach to Cleveland is becoming less, "yay Rust Belt" and more "shit, did I make a big mistake, and did I just compound that mistake a thousandfold by buying a house." I am demoralized and disappointed and not entirely sure what I'm supposed to do. For the record, this is the first time in my life where I've lost sight of the exit door. Where I can't feel out the next right move.

2. You are allowed to like more than one city. You are allowed to dislike things about cities that you like, just the same as you're allowed to dislike things about your spouse. Like how I can't stand Jim's habit of emptying his pockets all over the house and leaving little piles of pennies and wadded-up receipts everywhere. Or refusing to blow his nose when he clearly needs to. There are some things about Cleveland that I really, really hate. If I tell you what those are, should it counteract the whole five-year archive of my blog?

3. Pedestrian culture and public transit culture are at the core of my being, and being in Chicago I realized that I just don't feel like I'm getting enough of that here. I remember my first week living in Queens, after having taken my rustbucket to the junkyard where it belonged. I don't think I'd walked anywhere during the whole 15 months I lived in NJ because THERE WERE NO SIDEWALKS. It felt amazing -- liberating -- to be in a place where people just didn't have cars. Where people walked places not-just-for-fun and used the subway and the bus to get everywhere. I wanted to cry. I felt like I had come home.

4. One of the reasons why I wanted to come back to Cleveland is because I am from here, it made me what I am, and I have felt guilty and responsible for it. In this regard, I really wish I would've grown up someplace blatantly awful with ZERO appeal for me, like Miami County. I wish I didn't feel like there was anything of interest here to me. I wish there was nothing and nobody here that I loved.

5. Sometimes Cleveland is hard to love. Sometimes I get frustrated by the lack of inspired civic leadership, by the lack of vision. Sometimes Cleveland feels like a needy, not-so-bright relative who keeps making the same stupid mistakes over and over and who keeps coming around asking for money, like you won't remember. New York was easy to love, because there was no relationship drama -- it didn't require anything of me. As my friend B.P. Beckley says about D.C., it didn't feel like it was going to fall apart if I left.

The Megabus Experience

Moments ago, I found myself dispensing the following advice to a friend who needs a break from Cleveland: the only way to successfully live in Ohio, as a thinking, rational person, is to leave it as often as possible.

Luckily, here in Cleveland we have a reasonably sized airport where the lines aren't too long and the food isn't too gross, and which is easy to get to on the RTA. And, since 2006, we have the Megabus.

I've been waiting to take the Megabus to Chicago since we moved back here in 2007, but until my snobby little friend Mark -- the 20-year-old gay son I will never have -- got accepted at SAIC, I couldn't muster up an excuse to go.

Last week was his birthday -- he's of legal drinking age now, bless him -- so off I went.

Here's the good about Megabus:

• It's a comfortable ride. Both my outbound and return trips were fairly quiet, except for the courtship of some obnoxious twentysomethings.
• It's a double-decker bus, so if you muscle your way to the front of the line, you don't have to sit down below, i.e., by the bathroom.
  
• The driver was unobtrusive. No obnoxious banter or singalongs. No long, emotional goodbyes, either.
• It's very convenient: you can take RTA to Public Square and hop right on (providing the bus isn't late). It drops you off at Union Station, right in the middle of downtown.
  

Here's the bad:

• THERE ARE NO SIGNS IN DOWNTOWN CLEVELAND TO TELL YOU WHERE THE MEGABUS STOPS. Hopefully you looked at the website before you left home, or that you have one of those magic Internet phones. Otherwise, you're just going to have to mill around behind Tower City waiting for other people to start milling around.
• Megabus only has one destination from Cleveland: Chicago. I've heard rumors that it used to go to Pittsburgh but nobody took it, which is a shame. Pittsburgh is exactly where I would want to ride the Megabus to. Pittsburgh and Buffalo. I guess that would be like connecting nowhere to nowhere, huh.
• The big gimmick with Megabus is the $1 fare. The catch is that you have to book WAY in advance. If you book a couple of weeks in advance, like I did, your trip will cost more. It will most likely be less than flying. Whether or not to shell out for the 6-hour ride depends how valuable you think your time is, how many Miss Marples you can read in one sitting, and how much you enjoy looking at corn and donkeys, because that's all you will see on the side of the highway.

The only other notable thing about Megabus is that there were A LOT more people going to Chicago than coming back. I may have indeed seen the Brain Drain in action.

Tomorrow: "Mommy, Why Do We Live in the Suburbs?"

Vague Impressions of Chicago

Your weekly Cleveland Nostalgia Video has been preempted by my boring vacation slideshow.

I came back from Chicago with this vague feeling that I'd done something terrible, like had an affair. I mean, if someone's going to stay in the Midwest, why would they choose Cleveland over Chicago? Over the next five days I'm going to attempt to work out an answer to that question.

As I said before, my two prior experiences with Chicago were a) Doctor Who convention in 8th grade and b) driving through on my way to Montana. Jim was offered a job in Chicago right when we graduated from library school but he didn't take it because I had just started my job at Shaker. And because he had never been west of Indianapolis - I think he figured there were dragons out there. Now that one of us has actually been to that looming monster six hours to the west, perched on Lake Michigan in all of its better-than-Cleveland glory, I wonder how our lives might have turned out differently.

But in truth, it's hard to compare Cleveland and Chicago. Like Cleveland, Chicago got its first big break as a canal town. Unlike Cleveland, Chicago has been able to let go of the Glory Days of the 1830s.

Like Cleveland, Chicago is situated on a lake. Unlike Cleveland, you can actually get to it.

Like Cleveland, Chicago has a comprehensive public transit system. Unlike Cleveland, people are actually willing to use it.

Chicago and Cleveland do not look alike, not by any stretch of the imagination. Chicago is nowhere near as diced up by freeways as Cleveland. Chicago's neighborhoods flow organically into downtown. They are full of apartments and multi-family units, and not so many single family houses. Riding the train through Chicago's neighborhoods is nothing like riding RTA, it's nothing like riding NYC Transit. It's more like riding through London. The best image I could come up with in trying to describe Chicago to Jim was this: take Cleveland's downtown, make it bigger and full of people. Then take Queens and sort of mold it around this downtown area, and drop everything down next to a Great Lake.

Perhaps the most vivid contrast, however, is this one.

I left Chicago at rush hour on Friday. Hordes of people were moving with purpose. I had to do that wonderful dance where you find the hole in the crowd and weave through it. I'm really good at that.

What I'm not so good at is the dance that greeted me upon my return, at Cleveland rush hour. Actually, there IS no Cleveland rush hour. No one walks with purpose in downtown Cleveland at any time of the day. In downtown Cleveland you get stuck behind lumbering people who don't seem to have anything to do or anyplace to be. It brought to mind Ted Rall's description of Central Asia in Silk Road to Ruin: nobody's time is valuable in the Third World, least of all yours.

Tomorrow: The Megabus Experience.

Back from Chicago

Hi there. I'm back from Chicago.

I spent most of the Megabus trip home thinking about why Cleveland and Chicago are so different. (The rest of the time, I was reading Miss Marple, listening to a couple of annoying twentysomethings flirt, and peering at a bearded fellow who was reading Harry Potter and wondering if he might like to be my friend Kate's husband.)

So tune in every day next week for the official RBCA rundown on the Windy City vs. the Big Plum.

Library Night at Progressive Field!

Is tonight!

Tour the digital bookmobile!

Meet Slider - whatever he is!

Three things I like about my neighborhood

1. Sounds: church bells, crickets, lawnmowers, kids playing, dogs barking. The ice cream truck, even if it does play "La Cucaracha."

2. Gardens and sprawling front porches that make me feel like I've stumbled into La Belle Epoque.

3. It's utterly un-trendy. Thank God!

What are your three?

The 3/50 Project is simple.

The idea is that if half the employed population spent $50 a month at 3 locally owned independent business, it would generate more than $42 billion in revenue. You're supposed to pick the three local businesses you would miss most if they vanished off the face of the planet, and make a conscious effort to spend $50 there a month. That's not much -- an awful lot of people spend $150 a month on their cell phone plans.

I think mine would have to be Loganberry Books, Sullivan's Pub, and Nature's Bin. (I'd pick Papa Nick's, but it's hard to spend $50 at Papa Nick's without getting fat.)

What would you pick?

The best things going on in Cleveland that nobody knows about....

Are you doing amazing things in NEO that no one ever hears about?

Do you work for a NEO organization that's the best in the country at something, or the first to ever do ______?

If so, please drop me line, either in the comments or at christine [at] christineborne [dot] net. I'm working with the Got*City GAME! project -- Cleveland's first reality TV show -- to assemble a "Cleveland Brag Book," and we want to include you and your project. Can be anything -- biotech, academia, business, arts, culture, whatever. Let me know!

Cleveland Nostalgia Video 5

As a little kid, in my parents' first house in West Park, there were two primetime mainstays that I eagerly awaited every night. One was watching Dorothy Fuldheim on the news. The other was Cleveland's PM Magazine.

For one, how could you not love these animations:




For two, watching PM Magazine gave me a keen sense that Cleveland was a place where people were interested in entertainment and culture. And even at that young age -- though I suspected something wasn't quite right in Cleveland -- I knew that when people were interested in these things, it meant they were engaged in other ways, too. That they hadn't totally given up hope (yet).

Also take a look at the tenth anniversary show. Apart from some great shots of Michael Stanley and Jeff & Flash, there's a clip of longstanding PD rock critic Jane Scott interviewing Husker Du at the Phantasy.

Endangered Cleveland II

I missed these, so maybe you did too. Add them to my prior Endangered Cleveland list.

Cuyahoga Saves Children's/YA Librarians -- For Now
It makes me sick to think about Cuyahoga County Public Library having to lay off 41 people. If the "best library in the country" can't hack it, who can?

Cleveland Museum of Art Eliminates Jobs
Remember -- there is no Cleveland institution that's too big to fail.

Westward by Megabus

I'm going to Chicago for a couple of days next week.

This is probably the perfect time to admit that apart from layovers, I've been to Chicago twice in my life: once, in 8th grade, for a Doctor Who convention, and again passing through on my way to Montana in 2000.

What do you think I should do while I'm there? I'm particularly looking for stuff that'll put Cleveland into some kind of perspective for me.

Rust Belt Fiction

For some time now I've been thinking about compiling a to-read list of Rust Belt Fiction. Curiously, however, "Rust Belt -- Fiction" has not yet made it as an LC subject heading. (Seriously. Google "Rust Belt Fiction." It's pitiful.)

So far, here are a few titles I can think of that fit the genre:

Crooked River Burning
Les Roberts books
Knockemstiff (Wherein I read the absolute best line in modern fiction. It made me want to throw up my hands and stop trying. Not even Harry Potter did that.)
American Rust (I thought this book was a real pretentious drag*)
Good Roots (which I also have mixed feelings about)

Anyone else have any suggestions? I'm also looking for humorous books with a keen sense of place, a la Carl Hiaasen.

Oh, and for our purposes, here's a picture of the where the Rust Belt is, looking like a bloody smear across the Upper Midwest:




*with apologies to the author, assuming he's got a Google Alert out for his book. The New York Times liked it, so you don't need me anyway.

Julie and Julia

I went to see Julie & Julia last night. The show was sold out -- the first time I've ever experienced this at the Cedar Lee. The recession must be driving more people to the $5 Monday shows...although like a true grump I'm sure it's more about recession chic than actual scrimping, among the Cedar Lee crowd.

Anyway, there are four things I am taking away from this movie:

1. Find some kind of blogging gimmick, preferably one involving an ungainly, beloved American icon, and you will get famous.

2. If you find out that Julia Child hates you, it's supposed to be OK. Supposedly, you've still got your pride, and you can keep on loving her cookbooks. Uh, no. If I were Julie Powell and I found out Julia Child hated me, I would have set all of her cookbooks on fire, set myself on fire, and jumped off the Triboro Bridge. It would be like if I found out that Howard Metzenbaum hated me. THAT would be utterly devastating. If Howard disapproved of my parlor trick where I relate any subject back to him -- for example, English sheepdogs or tuna salad -- or if he disapproved of the mixed drinks I created in his honor. (The Metzen-bomb and the Bloody Shirley.) Luckily for me, Howard has gone to the great Senate floor in the sky. But I'm making a mental note not to piss off any of the following people: J.K. Rowling, Philip Pullman, Neil Gaiman, Rick Steves, Big Chuck and Lil John.

3. When they make a movie out of my life, I will make sure they don't cast anyone cute to play me. I've got to be kind of a visual disaster. No skinny jeans, no hip fitted t-shirts with sweetheart necklines, and no haircuts within the last 6-8 months. Casting suggestions include Ugly Betty (i.e., America Ferrera would have to come to the audition dressed as Ugly Betty, and then from there we'd take it into uncharted waters), Danny DeVito in drag, Paul Giamatti in drag, or the corpse of Bea Arthur. I would, however, settle for Tina Fey, but she'd have to gain about 60 pounds.

4. Whether or not you like Julie Powell, whether or not you think her Julie/Julia project was just a shameless attention-grab, whether or not you think she's actually a pretty boring, not-very-compelling writer....these things don't matter, because ultimately they led to OMG MERYL STREEP PLAYING JULIA CHILD.

Cleveland Nostalgia Video 4

Nerd alert: in my senior year of high school I joined a very exclusive club: Northeast Ohio Teenagers Who Looked Ridiculous on Academic Challenge.

In the 14 years since then, I have never actually watched the tape. But I must have looked ridiculous because I was wearing oversized John Lennon glasses, a shapeless grey wool cardigan to which I was attached like Linus and his stupid blanket, and (best of all) a polyester hippie wedding dress that I'd bought at the Renaissance Parlor on Coventry. (I'd originally bought this dress for my senior pictures.)

Eerily, this speechless Mogadore kid is sitting exactly where I'd sat. I'm sure whatever I said about myself was equally compelling:



Anyone else want to share their Academic Challenge memories?

Very Honest Interview Questions

Remember my Very Honest Resume? Here are a few Very Honest Interview Questions.

Describe your experience working deadlines.

Well, honestly, the tighter the deadline the better. Long deadlines provide me with greater opportunity to hem and haw, to talk myself out of whatever writing project I am working on, or to freak out about whether the thing I've written is perfect rather than simply excellent. Yep. Give me 24 hours over 4 weeks any day. I know it's totally cliche to use the P-word -- "perfectionist" -- but that is the sickness I'm afflicted with. So please give me tight deadlines to work with because I don't have a prescription drug rider on my health insurance plan and I'd rather just work under the influence of endorphins (which are free) rather than some kind of OCD medication (which isn't).

Do you have any experience interviewing people?

No, unless you count the phone interview I did with my grammy for an oral history project in 7th grade. (She hung up on me.) But I imagine that my interviewing style would be a delightful cross between Dorothy Fuldheim and Ali G.

How would your last boss describe you?

My last boss just told me yesterday that something I wrote on her Facebook wall made her laugh so hard she wet her pants. So, she would probably tell you I shouldn't be trusted around the incontinent.

What if?

This morning I had breakfast with an old friend, and then I had lunch with George Nemeth, who I've "known" for about five years but never actually met in the flesh until today. They're very different people, but it's funny...they both told me the same things.

So somewhere between West 25th and West 117th, a voice spoke to me. It wasn't quite the same voice as the one that said, "I sure do hate my life" on the night my New Jersey life fell apart. It wasn't quite the same one that woke me in the middle of the night to tell me not to take the job at the Queens Library, and take the one at Facts on File instead. But it was similar. It said:

"What if you stopped looking for a 'real job' and became a writer?"

Well, what if?

Unemployment: Month One

I've now been unemployed for a month. I've stuck to most of my ground rules, but here's where I am at:

1. Surprisingly, what I really don't want right now is to be on a rigid schedule. I thought that would help, but it doesn't. I'm liking the idea of being free to do as I please - that if I see a $200 R/T ticket to London that's only good for 24 hours, I can be watching Bob the Builder with my nephew by tomorrow afternoon. I also like having time to read voraciously and watch all the stuff on my Netflix queue that everyone else forgot about years ago, like The Sopranos and Freaks and Geeks.

2. Speaking of $200, that is the amount I get weekly in unemployment benefits.

3. I have applied for about 15 jobs, with little more than a nibble. That nibble was, "We like your resume very much and think you'd be great in a better job market, but we have several other candidates with experience doing exactly what the job description entails." While I understand (and appreciate the honesty and tact), it's still rough to hear "you don't have enough experience" when I have eight years of experience and a master's degree.

4. I'm very nervous about having to dip into savings. If we were living in an apartment, I wouldn't be nervous about that, because I don't buy stuff I don't need and I only eat one meal a day. It's just that I got the ax a month after we moved into our house, and I'm pretty sure that fixing up the first floor alone would wipe out about a third of the unemployment benefits I'm eligible to receive.

5. I know I am not trying as hard as I could to look for jobs. Although Michelle Malkin might call me a drain on the system, I'm really using this time as an opportunity to pay more attention to the world. I have time to read the news, to read all the email newsletters that arrive in my inbox, to write letters to elected officials. To follow Ralph Nader's "professional citizen" directive. Because I feel like America needs the civic equivalent of the little old lady peering at the neighbors' houses through the blinds. (Which, in fact, I'm also able to do now.)

6. I drink gin in the afternoon sometimes because it makes home improvement projects seem more fun.

Cleveland Nostalgia Video 3

Fun fact: I only recently realized that Hickory Hideout was a local TV show. I never really watched it -- they talked about feelings too much and I just wasn't into that -- but I'm sure lots of other people my age did.

So this one's for you. Sorry, but this was the best HH video I could find: