ow do drop ceiling lights get dusty? You’d think dust would just fall and be done with it.  Not float up. I mean, dust is mostly dead skin. So. Weird. Maybe it’s from the little people living within the walls and ceiling. Making a mess.

I was just thinking about that because GVMC’s ceiling grates are really clean, and the office I cleaned last night had identical grates except for a lot of dust.

Does anyone know of a good book written by a female that does what Judd Apatow (Knocked up, 40-year-old Virgin mastermind) did for the male gender in film? I mean, he made a funny and realistic genre that is about men but appeals to everyone (except those who don’t like nudity and bad language). Bromantic Comedies. The women in them are usually smarter than the guys, and funny, too. And not cardboard. I appreciate it. So many women enjoy these movies that maybe we don’t need females writing stuff this good?  But yes we do. Think about how New Moon broke records. We all know it is a terrible movie based on a terrible book. Yet it drew a largely female huge huge audience. Way to represent, Stephenie Meyer. We’re smarter than this! Please! I beg of you!

What would a female version of I Love You Man look like? Is it even possible? Women hold grudges. Their sisterly love for each other is fragile and often dissipated by incoming boyfriends. They’re not up front or honest with each other, and they have to constantly be sensitive to each other’s hyper-sensitive emotions. (Disclaimer: this has all been my experience. I’d like to hear about yours if it differs.) A woman can’t tell her friend her sweater’s ugly or her favorite movie sucks, even in a joking way. There’s no joking way to do that in the female world. It is always mean. There are always ulterior motives.  There is always competition.

That’s why chick flicks always have the safely neutral sidekick chick friend who is not important to the script at all. The point of a chick flick is to match up the main girl with a guy she didn’t know she loved. Writers of these screenplays pat themselves on the back for making these women career-oriented and strong, thinking they’re encouraging a feeling of empowerment. It’s not doing it for me. And neither is the “but it’s cuuuute” argument for these movies that I hear from a lot of women. It doesn’t work because the main character isn’t interesting or real. She’s just pretty.

Maybe the problem isn’t the way people are writing our media (isn’t it usually guys who write chick flicks?), but the way we’re writing our own lives. It’s hard to know how to overcome a society that is more patriarchal than everyone realizes. How do we surrender this competitive control in order to have comradeship with fellow females? We barely feel any control in general.

I wish I could edit my past–how I’ve treated girl friends and how I’ve approached new friendships.  I hope we can figure out a better way to present and represent ourselves in a successful way.

finished the audio book, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union last night. It’s by Michael Chabon and it’s about a crime that happens in a made-up community of Jewish people in Alaska who originated there because of WWII and the American Government giving them a safe haven. It’s a crime novel but in the third person and it was hard to follow as I was listening to it at work and loud interruptions are a given. But Chabon is so good at details and tying themes together that I enjoyed every minute of it.

His themes of salvation, evil, and faith would be tired if not from a Jewish perspective. With his created community, he is able to make the Jewish faith real to me in a fresh way, especially since I don’t know any practicing Jews as I live in West Michigan. It really is a beautiful and complicated and heartbreaking religion.

After the book, there was an interview with Chabon who talked about the process of writing the book. He wrote it in first person as his first draft, which is typical for crime novels, but then realized it’d be better in third person. He talked about Raymond Chandler and how he rereads his books all the time, and how that was the first author that really grabbed him.

It made me think of what authors have really grabbed me, that make me happy to own their books. John Steinbeck pretty much changed my life. I read Grapes of Wrath in high school and East of Eden and recently, The Pearl. I’m afraid if I reread The Grapes of Wrath I’ll hate Steinbeck. I change a lot year by year. A lot. Was it just the dustbowl vernacular I loved? Am I over that? I should just try.

Flannery O’Connor has had almost the identical effect, but in college. I should reread The Violent Bear It Away. She was a better short story writer. I should take after her and read up on philosophy and theology. What a brainy.

Anyway, listening to books has improved my writing. To hear how a book sounds really helps and because it’s read to me, I can remark about devices the author is using and the structure of the novel. It helps that Chabon is so careful.

Next on my list is Candide, which I downloaded in audio form from the library. They need to get all audio books to do this, because right now the selection is tiny and it’s so much easier to download a book then to get the CDs, burn them on your computer, and sync them to your iPod. My poor laptop can’t take all that work. My past experience with Candide was awful. It was taught to me poorly in a rushed college class and I read it before I learned how to read comprehensively. So this will be good. I already listened to the first few chapters. This will hit the spot. It’s what I need right now.

I’m having my doubts. Our system of government is run by majority. But I have been proven time and again that majority movements are erroneous and not intelligent (the classic argument that Jesus was crucified by majority vote). And it implies that the minority thought pool does not deserve what it wants simply because less people want it.

Democracy would work if people were basically good. But people are basically selfish and greedy and that will never change. Please debate me.

EDIT:

After some WIKIPEDIA research, first: I need to read Plato. Second: I really think the “Popular Rule as a Facade” idea has some weight to it. Do we have as much control as we think? Even if the government let us do what we want under the checks and balances of our system, the media and movements of common thought are dictating us as we let them. My ignorance and apathy are a danger unto myself!

Third: Why shouldn’t we be inventing completely new systems for ourselves? Our founding fathers did. I want to start over.

y first graduate school application was due today. With my night job of cleaning and my internship and Catholic initiation stuff I have been sort of busy, but that’s no excuse for not posting as often.

I kind of lost sight of what my blog means to me. I had seven blogs at one point this summer, and they were all separated and stood for different things. I was treating the internet like my numerous notebooks that I have. One is for poems, one is for songs, one is for journaling, one is for lists, one is for phone numbers. Walt Whitman wrote his first Leaves of Grass poem in the same notebook he was keeping for names and notes of his general life. Why separate all of these elements? Why was I hiding parts of myself from this blog? It was all urban planning all the time and that’s not what I focus on all the time. Because if I did, I would either be smashing cars with a baseball bat or bashing my own head in. It’s a frustrating subject. It’s stuck with me forever, it is what I’m made to do, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t frustrate me. So I imported my Pretty Darn Pretty blog into this one.

And I started to doubt the whole “little life” thing. I was worried that it was a reaction to depression, that if I were a happier person I would be more courageous and willing to live bigger and dream bigger. But I’m going to graduate school for the thing I most want to do. I don’t think I’m holding back for anything. Small and large are relative concepts, I guess. The biggest problems of the world are massively generalized. Hunger. Can you think of a bigger beast? We can wrack our brains and beat ourselves out of guilt,  just ignore it, or give food to the hungry people in our neighborhood. People have got to stop resorting to the “starving people in Africa” thing to make themselves grateful. It’s unfair to everyone.

Once we admit that we are small, our lives are small, are abilities are tiny, once we accept our ordinary-ness, we can do a lot. I find that once I break my weeks, days, hours up into moments and live in them, I am enjoying myself more.

A specific way I’ve been doing that is small art projects. I love creating things. I’m writing a novel right now, bit by bit, but in my time gaps between work and sleep and internship, I like make things that are beautiful to me. I’m really surprised at how happy it’s made me.

Joseph Gordon Levitt’s site, Hitrecord.org, is giving him a lot of joy. It’s apparent in his face every time he talks about it. He’s not trying to make loads of money or save the entire world, but his project has gone pretty far (Hitrecord is going to Sundance next year) and it’s genuine.

Adam Lambert is trying to be too big. He’s using controversy as a device to get fame and nothing about his AMA performance seemed genuine. I don’t think very many people respect him. He’s trying to make a big splash by being true to himself, but that’s the wrong formula completely.

The difference between making a big impact by living your true life, making your life small out of fear, and trying to make yourself bigger than you are, is in the core of you, in the daily choice to do what’s right.

I gotta make dinner now. BYE.

omeone made a summary page with really big pictures of dilapidated buildings in our beloved and messed-up downtown, buildings that have big plans looming over them.

I’ve been reading complaints about so much money going into brownfield redevelopment, into revitalizing the downtown, when it can barely afford to support its infrastructure. Well. Most of our tax dollars go right back to the inefficient infrastructure of sprawling communities, which are heavily, heavily subsidized. So go for a drive and think about that one.

I will never have to travel anywhere ever again. I’m going to project Streetview of Hawaii, Italy, Seattle, etc. onto my wall and order souvenirs online. Just kidding. But I like exploring Hawaii because I will never go there and no one ever talks about how it’s built.

I have been thinking a lot about regional government and getting things done for our local areas – well – locally, instead of going through federal and state programs. Meeting LVEJO in Chicago really inspired me – they were so active in getting their neighborhood clean and beautiful and what they did really worked. It’s different in Chicago…they have Aldermans. Aldermen? I don’t know.

Anyway, I got to thinking about my neighborhood, Alger Heights, and how the planters on Eastern and Alger are mostly empty. That little strip has roughly 20 businesses operating along the 400 foot stretch, but its streetscape is nothing to look at.

Then it dawned on me. With some simple Googling, I found the Alger Heights Neighborhood Association. They have community meetings on the second Tuesday of every month at 7:00 pm. Duh. Why didn’t this hit me before? I should totally be participating in this. I’ve been preaching local action for six months and I have yet to attend a neighborhood meeting, which my mom has probably told me about, too.

It takes me awhile to catch on to things.

I love this line from The Boulevard Book:

“We became aware that the boulevard epitomizes a completely different paradigm for urban street design–one that embraces complexity and coexistence of movement over simplicity and separation, and one that insists that access to abutting uses is as central to the functionality of city streets as swift through movement.”

That’s why I’m learning how to draw and diving into design and trying to do this the right way. I sometimes give up on things because they’re too hard. But it’s usually the most complex of tasks, the things we work hardest on that make us happiest. It’s correlation, not causation, because who would work so hard on something they didn’t love?

It’s easy to drive down 28th Street or US-131. It’s also easy to speed and get into an accident. It’s also easy to ignore the landscape, the backdrop to your everyday existence, the people in that landscape who are your neighbors. It’s probably easier to plan areas for cars because there’s no resistance against that anymore. But that doesn’t mean it’s right.

I bet my science degree friends would agree that everything about the created world is incredibly complex, that the more we study it the more mysteries we find. A city is equally complex. We study how it works but there are still many mysteries. It has a life of its own, and it’s not under our control. Creating banal, boring places for cars with ugly stores and endless parking lots simplifies and paves over the life of our cities. We lament when a shopping mall gets built over a thriving marsh, but we’re part of that natural system we say we’ve escaped from. We’ve destroyed habitat: our own habitat.

I am staying because blighted neighborhood is not a death-sentence label. 20 years can change any place. We have full control of our urban environments. All we have to do is organize.

Grand Rapids is a beautiful city.

I’ll be paying close attention to Robert Israel’s plans for Bridge Street in the coming years.  The problem I stated in my last post about being able to do anything with enough money can also be a solution.

he most confusing thing about planning is that you can’t plan for anything. No one knows the future. Urban planning is more like the laying down of dreams into reality, not planning how future populations will live.

Because how would you do that? How do you plan where people will want to live in 50 years? Do you create places where they’ll want to live, or do you let them choose from the blank slate and then build for/around that?

Do we follow the natural pattern of what people will do or do we create a pattern for people to follow?

I don’t think suburbs were a natural occurrence. Maybe in our minds, we wanted to get away from the troubling inner city and have yards for our kids, but a lot of work went into creating these suburbs and selling them to families. Are we doing the same with Transit-oriented town centers? Is it a bad thing?

You can’t tell someone where to live. But you can lure them into it. Planners and developers and realtors are so dependent on the general public, on what people want out of life. It’s a real temptation for planners, developers, realtors to tell people what they want out of life and then give it to them. But what business doesn’t do this? TV ads tell us every day what we want. They are just creating attractive merchandise, or providing services people need. Is there any shame in creating attractive neighborhoods and convincing people they need to walk more?

I think most people don’t even think about the width of their streets or their commute to work. Or building frontages. It’s undercurrent, because they do notice how safe their kids are, and people will move to a place that feels safer. Or emptier. Or busier. But they can’t stop what other people will want (to live next door, to play their music loud). The question of freedom and rights gets really confusing here. The answer has been private property. If you have enough money, you can buy the amount of land you want. But not any location you want, because of zoning.

We’re a free market and we’re very market-driven, but we make bad decisions. A lot. That’s why we have laws.

How should planning be done in the future? How does it become democratic and not market-driven? Anyone read any good books about this?