Circuses

Yesterday was our third walking tour of Philadelphia. I was with the TA's this time, which I might've preferred as it seems our tour covered more interesting things in more depth. I now know a slew of fun facts about practically every part of Philly proper so...y'all gotsta come see me. My favorite part was definitely the Wanamaker building (currently Macy's). The building was designed by Daniel Burnham (the guy who planned all of Chicago). The pipe organ is the biggest in the world. The coolest thing is that the building was designed to be Wanamaker's department store. It kind of shows how important downtown, department stores were for cities at the time. It's cool that a private company would put so much funding into creating a beautiful space primarily for public use. The picture obviously doesn't do it justice. I guess during Christmas they still deck out the whole thing and it's a center of activity.

The day concluded at Reading Terminal, which is also amazing. It's an indoor market with tons of booths where you can find almost any kind of food or delicious treat. I bought all my produce there because it's really cheap inexpensive. Some people went to play mini-golf afterward but Christy and I went home b/c Duncan, a guy around the corner, was having a yard sale. It was not just any yard sale. To create ambiance for example, a circus record was playing in the background the entire time. Duncan has rented an Airstream trailer to travel cross country and is selling all of his stuff. A self-admitted pack rat, he had the craziest and most random crap I've ever seen.

Things weren't priced individually; instead you had to make a pile of stuff and make an offer, and he'd accept based on "how many beers I've had, and how many beers you've had." (Beer, Mike's hard lemonade, and Wood Chuck pear cider were provided.) Lots of items were "free with purchase", as in, if you take something you like, you've gotta take something you don't like. Christy and I wanted "Therapy" so we had to take "Careers for girls", and "The Bionic Woman" and "The Six Million Dollar Man" have to go together because they're married. We also made off with a toaster, a really nice floor lamp, kitchen knives, a box of linens with a CD player and speakers in it, mixing bowls...perhaps more, I forget, all for $20. Now our kitchen is officially on its way to being decked out.

Duncan and his friends may have started a theme for the day. I definitely ended up at a gay bar last night which was really really fun because it was just as I had always pictured: Whitney Houston / Britney Spears remixes, pretty boys dancing, disco ball, etc. It was rather fantastic. Unexpected point of interest: a lot of gay guys go into urban planning. At Duncan's place, two of his friends were planners. One of the guys we were out with last night, who no one thought was gay, ended up going home with someone from the club, or so we think. The single girls in the program are lamenting that the list of available straight guys is slowly losing members to the list of straight taken guys and newly discovered gay guys. Alas. At the risk of sounding totally naive, people going home together at the end of the night with people they just met, and people from the program hooking up randomly is all unsettling to me. I know it happens all the time, but I don't have to think it's healthy. My generation does not have clear social norms to guide people's dating practices. It seems like none of us know how to properly relate to people we're interested in and I've seen too many friends get emotionally effed up because of it. This frustrates me.

As fun as the day was...I'm kind of getting sick of the party scene. I'm looking forward to getting settled in and having friends that I can have normal conversations with, rather than only making small talk at bars and then loud drunk talk after bars at the end of the night. I'm wondering if this group of people is just like this, or if grad school is just like this, or if the real world is just like this? Natalie always told me that my friends at Calvin had intellectual orgies. Perhaps that was true and I took it for granted. I don't really miss the pretentiousness of those conversations, but I do miss talking about something real. I'm sure things will get settled in soon and once classes start this may all be a different story. I mean, we're all in city planning for a reason - and it's definitely not money. I'm sure we're standing on some common ideological ground. And as I hear this program's about to kick my ass, I'm thinking there won't be much time left for partying at the end of the day... well at the end of every day at least.