Yesterday, I blogged what I expected to be my last words on living in Marina City. I didn’t expect to be called home from the office today by our management company to attend what is our third apartment flood in 12 months. Silly me. After seven years of blogging about state-of-repair disasters in both towers–including numerous fires, floods, drunken attempted apartment invasions, and at least one interstate prostitution ring abetted by former board member and local dentist Gary Kimmel, I really should have known better.

If you think I’m kidding, please (oh, please) browse through my Marina City archives–from beginning (in June 2005) to end (this month)–or read this recent coverage of the Gary Kimmel scandal from Chicagoist. Sadly, it doesn’t get any better. At least not in these corncobs. If you look at an apartment here, either to rent or to buy, ask the person showing it about these issues. If they–or anyone else–tell you things like this don’t happen here, they aren’t telling you the truth. Do your you diligence. One word: Google.

Today’s events just bolstered my sense of relief about finally leaving this place. But as with everything, there’s always a blessing if you look for it. As I wait for the residual dripping from our newly damaged window-wall ceiling down directly into our electric baseboard heaters to putter out, one comforting thought keeps coming to mind.

At least we don’t have carpeting.

(Can’t see this video in your news feed? Watch it here.)

In the photo above you can see our current Marina City balconies. They’re no different than most other balconies here, so there’s no need to point them out. As you can see, there’s an eternal consistency to life here at the corncobs. Some of that consistency I’ll miss, and some I’ll be glad to leave behind. Ryan and I have signed a lease on an apartment in Edgewater Beach for March 1st. We signed the lease a couple of weeks ago. It just took me a while to realize that this is the end of an era in my life.

We’re moving because we realized that our lives are centered elsewhere–primarily on the far north side and the northern suburbs of Chicago. North is where our synagogue and most of our synagogue friends are. North is where the heart of the Chicago area’s Jewish community lies. North is where most of the restaurants and stores are located that we like to frequent. After a year living in Marina City and more than a year of living Jewishly, it just turned out that Milan Kundera was right. In our case, life really is elsewhere.

I’m looking forward to the move. For years I’ve blogged about the consistent agony and ecstasy of life in the Marina City corncobs, and all of it still applies. You always know your neighbors. Via foot, ‘L’, bus, or expressway, you can easily get anywhere from here. The architectural and cultural wonders of the Chicago Loop are your front yard. And the 61st-floor roofdecks are sublime.

However, an eternally combative condo board, nonstop punishing noise from every-fifteen-minute emergency sirens and late-evening Chicago Riverwalk cafe music, fraternity-level antics from numerous college-age residents, a noticeable lack of neighborhood amenities, and the persistent feeling that once you step outside your lobby, the block belongs to hipsters lined up to get into the House of Blues and drunks stumbling home from Dick’s Last Resort, bring any sense of soul soaring right back down to earth.

So I suppose, at long last, these are my final words on Marina City. I was thrilled to move into Marina City in 2005, but in the end, I agree with my last last statement about living here. It’s cheap and well located, but it’s not worth the quality-of-life trade-off you have to make to be able to live here and keep your sanity. Unlike last time, though, this time I’m leaving on my own terms. I won’t be back.

We’re off to an apartment twice the size of our current one for only slightly more rent, in a Sheridan Road high-rise with a spectacular city and lake view. It’s near two of our favorite supermarkets, the Red Line is two blocks away, and an express bus is outside our front door. But what really matters to me is that we’ll be living on the same block as our synagogue. For at least one Reform Jew, gaining the ability to walk to synagogue on Shabbat–and in five minutes, too!–really will be a dream come true.

But far north side living is a far cry from a lot of my life that came before. Growing up in New York, it was my life’s goal to live as close to Manhattan as possible. Eight years living in Park Slope, Brooklyn, satisfied that urge. A graduate degree in urban planning sealed my then-permanent anti-suburban sneer.

During the past nine years in Chicago, it’s been much the same thing. First I tried to live as close to downtown as I could get. Then I moved into it, and for seven years downtown is where I’ve remained. A boyfriend moved to New York, but I stayed. I moved out of Marina City once already, but I still stayed downtown.

But life goes on, and while doing so it changes us, little by little, until it changes us a lot. For many years, I haven’t been an urban planner. Over time, I’ve realized how much more I like Chicago’s outer neighborhoods–and suburbs, too–than I ever liked their New York counterparts. And in converting to Judaism and joining a synagogue, I did something I never dared do back in my hometown. I put down roots. Those roots just happen to be planted in soil that isn’t in the 42nd Ward.

And so. I guess this is the point where Mike Doyle, the post-college, agnostic, pessimistic, inner-city, out-of-place Gothamite is finally let go of by Michael Doyle, the forty-something, religious, optimistic, city-as-neighborhood, where-he-belongs Chicagoan. Who I’ve been for a lot longer than I’ve let myself realize.

I guess I’ll never be an urban planner again. Or a New Yorker. Or maybe even someone with a 15-minute walk to work. I’ll never brag about living in a Goldberg building again, or meditate on my life from the panoramic roofdeck of one. There are a lot of “I’ll never agains” when you reach past forty, I’ve come to see now.

On the other hand, I’ll never again wonder where and how I’m supposed to fit in on this planet. I’ll never again feel lonely in a room alone. I’ll never again face a challenge, yell “Why?” in my head, and fear there’s no Eternal being out there to hear me cry out. I’ll never again hate the suburbs like I used to. I’ll never again fear outer neighborhoods like I used to.

And you know what else? I’ll never again fear moving on like I used to, either.

When I moved on from my formerly beloved high-rise home, Marina City, last May, I never planned to be back. At the time, drowning in the watery surge of the tsunami of the Great Recession, I decided greener, more northern, and, er, cheaper pastures would be in my future. Lincoln Square seemed more bucolic. Edgewater was a lot closer to my temple. And after five years living in Chicago’s (in)famous, twin corncobs (regarding the ‘in’ part, just read through my Marina City archives), I needed a break from living in the dead-center heart of the middle of urban America.

Three months later, living with roommates at the foot of Milwaukee Avenue, tantalizingly close to downtown but not really in it anymore, I started to reconsider my decision. But I was still too poor to do anything about it, and too humble after my emotional and spiritual leaves (after forty years finally) turned over midyear to do anything about it. And spending time in Edgewater, I really started to fall for the neighborhood vibe of the place. In many ways, it reminded me of the local-neighborhoodiness I gave up when I left Brooklyn in the early 2000s.

By year’s end, I started a volunteer position managing the web presence of a major local nonprofit that very quickly turned into something more. (I’m not at liberty to flesh out further details yet, but suffice it to say, I can let my Link card expire now.) But I had spent a lot of time loving on the vibe of Chicago’s northern neighborhoods–and a lot of time doting on the noise, scandal, and troublesome condo board at Marina City. So downtown still wasn’t in the picture.

I had forgotten about the community spirit of the corncobs’ longtime-resident couch ladies, the comfort of knowing so many of your neighbors (don’t ask why, but Marina City in all its 60-story glory seems to promote neighborliness), the security of being on a first-name basis with building staff, and the sheer convenience of having five supermarkets and the entire Windy City transit system within a short walk from your front door.

I was reminded of all these things when Ryan, whom I love and–for once–whom you haven’t heard all about, suggested we have a living-room picnic a few weekends ago. We visited my old Trader Joe’s, on Ontario Street in River North, just up the street from Marina City. He almost had a heart attack from the crowded, Saturday evening bumper-shopping-cart action. But I started to remember how much I missed it, and Yankee Hotel Foxtrot along with it. (Oddly enough, Jeff Tweedy, lead singer of Wilco whose so-named album featured the towers on its cover art, is a member of my temple.)

Gainfully employed, I had already started planning my move to Edgewater. At the same time, Ryan wanted to move closer to his Berwyn job than his current Aurora home. We decided to look for an apartment together and move in (now there’s a buried lede for you), and mused that maybe we should look downtown. But we really figured we were going to move in together in Edgewater.

Until Trader Joe’s.

So in February, for the first time ever, I’ll live with my boyfriend. And we’ll be living in Marina City’s West Tower. So remember all that yapping I did in 2007 about yearning to move home? Well, I’m finally doing it. Just not to New York. But back to where, in the end, I guess I really belong. Downtown Chicago.

Also…yahoo.

Though I rarely accept products for review on my blog, a recession has a way of making an offer of free food hard to say no to. A month ago, the PR firm supporting Dominick’s Just For U coupon-card campaign offered me $200 in gift certificates to try out the service. The nearest Dominick’s supermarket is a small hike from where I currently live in the Fulton River District, but, hey, $200 is what it is.

I accepted and was asked to share some of the gift cards around and to write a post within a week or two of receiving them. The PR firm asked me to do that sharing with my readers, but I chose to shift some of that free gift-card bounty on to the homeless, instead. I also let the PR firm know that a week was too short a time to ask anyone to offer an opinion on a lifestyle product. To really know how you feel about them, you have to live with them first, no?

So I lived with Just for U for a month. And as it turns out, a month is enough. Just For U works by linking your existing Dominick’s Fresh Values customer card to the web. Once linked, you sign onto the Just For U website and, in a page from Peapod, browse through online aisles of food, clicking on “special” coupon deals on products you’re interested in buying in the store. When you’re done, you print out or email yourself  copy of your deals list, then go shopping with it.

I’m a single man living in urban America. Admittedly I’m a home cook and strive to meal-plan. But, in general, do I have the time or the patience to sit down, sign-on, search for coupon deals, and then run to the supermarket that, in all likelihood, I’m actually headed towards in the early evening, running late from a client meeting/interview/argument at the post office?

Not really, no.

That extra, time-consuming step pretty much made Just For U more of a pain than a pleasure for me to use. It just didn’t feel convenient. Worse, once you get to the Just For U website, it’s needlessly clunky and not at all intuitive to find your way around. Using it reminded me a lot of navigating 1990s websites on Netscape: unclear navigation; inconsistent fonts; a relative lack of feedback for important mouse clicks; and an overall feeling that the importance of usability trials had not yet been discovered by the Columbuses of the web design world.

Unfortunately, you can’t escape that tepid website experience–or the need to waste time and paper by printing out a deals list–by using a JustForU mobile app to do your deal shopping from the convenience of your smart phone once you’re firmly inside an actual Dominick’s. No mobile app exists, and the Just For U FAQ page makes it clear that one isn’t forthcoming, either. Yes, I k,now I can email myself a deals list, but if you’re asking me to shop with my smart phone in my hand, it’s incumbent upon you to make that experience as easy and useful as possible.

I really wanted to like Just For U. The gift cards were put to good use, and I can see how it might work for a mom or dad sitting down to plan a biweekly grocery expedition for their family. Then again, I don’t know any busy moms or dads who have enough time or patience on a Saturday or Sunday with kids to actually do that. Instead, I was just left with the feeling that Dominick’s Just For U campaign didn’t receive nearly enough thoughtful strategy up front or thoughtful design in its architecture and features as it should have to make it actually, well, worth using. I hate to say that, because without Dominick’s, I wouldn’t be able to find my favorite highly non-pork chicken Andouille sausage.

But if I had to use the JustForU website every time I set out to buy that sausage, I might just go to Jewel, eat the pork, and talk it out with God on Friday night, instead.

___

UPDATE (11/10/10): According to the Dominick’s PR firm, parent company Safeway is in the process of creating an iPhone app. So, potentially more to come…

The result of Mayor Daley’s last attempt to link fast trains to Chicago airports? One fewer Loop ‘L’ station.

Another year another dangerous Daley fast-airport-train plan? This week, the Chicago Tribune reported outgoing Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley thinks Chicago should build a high-speed magnetic levitation (maglev) train between the Loop and O’Hare Airport. Why? Because he rode Shanghai’s airport maglev train on a recent trip to China and liked it.

Whoosh!

While I’d certainly love to take a 268 mile-per-hour trip from Terminal One to State and Madison, I think it’s important for Windy Citizens to remember Daley’s mixed track record of coming home from the hinterland (read: the rest of the world) with one idea or another he’s just revving to unroll in Chicago. Our bus-stop shelters, bike lanes, and municipal green roofs were all inspired by the experience of other cities. All wonderful ideas, to be sure, but they haven’t been unmitigated successes. The bus-stop shelters don’t adequately protect from the elements. Many bike lanes have been tacked onto major thoroughfares where they just don’t fit (see especially: Milwaukee Avenue.) City Hall’s green roof isn’t publicly accessible.

Most importantly though…how about the spectacular and very recent failure of Daley’s last attempt to adopt a fast-train airport plan? Last year I summed up that debacle in a link-laden post here on Carless. The basics:

• In 2005 the mayor decreed an underground superstation for trains to O’Hare and Midway airports be built during the (re-)construction of the Loop’s Block 37, to run European-style fast-train service (see: #themayorwentonvacation);
• The project required the temporary closure of downtown’s busy Washington/State Red Line ‘L’ station and of the equally busy customer transfer tunnel between the Red and Blue line Washington stations;
• Unanticipated engineering difficulties and Block 37 construction delays ballooned the cost of the project to more than $300 million–including a $100 million overrun in June 2008, alone;
• The project was shelved, incomplete, when the city ran out of money due to the overruns–without a backup plan to restore Washington/State or the transfer tunnel;
• In winter 2009, the CTA quietly demapped Washington/State from the ‘L’ system;
• The Washington/State ‘L’ station and transfer tunnel remain closed–because the CTA cannot afford to recommission them thanks to the damage done to physical infrastructure by the failed superstation project.

So after spending $300 million, instead of getting fast-train service to O’Hare, Chicago actually ended up with less access to rail service than before the airport superstation project. And that was that. No mea culpa from the mayor’s office. No plan to return Washington/State to service by the CTA. Just a quiet cover-up of a massive mayoral blunder that cost Chicago much more than it should have.

These are the kind of clandestine, face-saving politics that will hopefully end with Daley’s successor. The idea that a mess like this doesn’t get discussed publicly because a city is afraid of angering its mayor is frightening to non-Illinois sensibilities (like mine), and damaging both to the public’s trust in government and its belief that government might actually work to protect the best interests of the public (as it is supposed to) instead of the best interests of politicians.

Given all of that, the idea that any newspaper in town–or any Chicagoan, for that matter–should take Daley seriously on another, grander, surely far more expensive airport fast-train plan is patently ludicrous. Yet, amazingly, the Trib’s recent maglev article doesn’t include a single word about the the failed Block 37 superstation project. (Follow the link at the top of this post and see for yourself.) Sidebars don’t count–they’re easily ignored. This should be a central part of the debate. Not addressing the Block 37 superstation in the main article is not an editorial decision I can fathom.

Chicagoans writing about this week’s airport-train debate shouldn’t be asking, “Gee, is this a good idea?” They should be asking, “Richie, where’s our last $300 million?”

Not to mention our ‘L’ station.

They say the best way to learn Jewish is to do Jewish, and I’ve been learning just that in an expected place lately: the supermarket aisle. It’s a lesson that’s come much earlier than I ever expected. It takes a year or more to join the Jewish people, and I’m only standing at the very beginning of my conversion journey to Reform Judaism. Local Jewish friends have invited me to their synagogue, I’ve met the rabbi, and I’ve begun participating in community events.

It’s the tip of an iceberg I had heretofore only read about. And boy, have I been doing a lot of reading. I’ve been persistently haunting the Judaica section at downtown’s Harold Washington Library Center for several weeks now, prompting fellow blogger Leah Jones to point out to me, and rightly so, that I have a lifetime to learn about Judaism and I shouldn’t feel a need to learn everything all at once. Not ever having met me in person, funny how she pegged exactly what I wished I could do.

After all the holidays, and rituals, and philosophy of Judaism that I’ve been devouring, I know how well I seem to fit the faith and it seems to fit me. Uncannily so. But I didn’t quite know how to answer the question “Why?” until another new-media Jewish acquaintance made a sweet and surprising request:

“I want to hear more about how HaShem tapped you on the shoulder sometime if you’re willing.”

That’s the answer, I realized. In a nutshell, that’s what it felt like: like a tap on the shoulder. Not a tug on my arm. Not a billboard in front of me. Not a shout in my ear. Just a whisper, and I turned my head to make it out, and realized I had never looked in that direction before.

On Saturday evening, I got the chance to hang out with a group of young professionals exploring their own relationship to worship and to HaShem. (“The Name,” the polite term for God in everyday conversation…I haven’t quite worked my way up to inserting a “_” in the English word. If you read on, though, you’ll know I may get there.) We met with the rabbi in the synagogue’s temporary outdoor Sukkah to celebrate the harvest festival of Sukkot, and to do the Havdalah ceremony which marks the end of Shabbat, the Jewish sabbath. I was lost through the Havdalah ceremony but did my best to try and follow along. But when I was invited to hold the holiday’s ritual lulav (bound branches) and etrog (citron fruit) and do the Netilat Lulav blessing, I surprised myself by not stumbling on the words.

I knew studying Hebrew for a failed Israeli teenage crush would come in handy someday.

But I also know I’m an abject noob. So finding myself standing frozen for five minutes in front of a shelf of deviled ham in an aisle at Jewel recently came as a shock. In my mountains of reading I’ve learned about kashrut, the Jewish dietary laws about keeping kosher, which very roughly gloss into: eating only animals with cloven hooves that chew their cud; eating only fish with fins and scales; and not mixing dairy and meat in the same meal, or even the same time frame. Traditional Jews are more apt to follow kashrut, or at least to follow it strictly, than are Reform Jews. Reform Judaism leaves questions of observance to the individual. I knew I had to understand kashrut. But I know I’ll never be the kind of Jew who keeps a separate set of kitchenware for milk versus meat products.

And yet…the act of putting a can of deviled ham or a package of bacon in my shopping cart, or a container of chicken stock for the quinoa that will accompany my cheese-covered soy burgers, has kept me at Jewel for far longer than ever before. Pondering. Rationalizing. Putting things into my shopping cart, rolling away, and then rolling back to return items to shelves. I really doubt strict kashrut observance is in my future. But considering how important this journey feels to me, the hypocrisy I feel every time I try to put trayf (a non-kosher item) in my cart, or think about planning a meal that would violate kashrut is astounding.

I never expected to feel this way, but I do. I can’t ethically reject kashrut without knowing what it is. And I can’t really know what it is without doing it. So now the supermarket is a minefield, if a temporary one, and I’ve unexpectedly come to understand the meaning of learning Jewish by doing Jewish.

It’s kind of like the email I sent to the rabbi asking for a formal meeting about conversion and to discuss a plan of study. I didn’t think it would be so hard to write. Friends suggested I say I was interested in converting, wanted to learn more, needed advice. All of that is true and he already knows all of that anyway. What I was afraid to say was how I really feel, which was driven home to me by how thoughtful a grocery shopper I seem to have become. That I feel like I’ve been tapped on the shoulder by HaShem and found a place and a people I never knew would feel like home. And that I don’t feel worthy enough to feel those things but I do. And I need to know where/how to begin.

But much like that can of deviled ham seemed to hop its way back onto the shelf at Jewel, those very words seemed to type themselves out in my email, shortly before the Send button pressed itself.

A couple of weeks ago, a reporter in the social-mediaverse asked me if I knew of any local eateries represented on Twitter who took customer comments seriously when they arrived via tweet. I had to think hard about that one. I see lots of local businesses tweet out specials, but the only one that I personally engage with–and on a consistent basis, too–is @BaoMouth. That’s the talking steamed pork bun character who tweets for Wow Bao, LEYE’s small but popular local chain of Asian bun storefront eateries. I shouted them out to the reporter on Twitter, sure the Mouth would prove me right and shout right back.

After a couple of hours of crickets, a contrite BaoMouth shouted back, which probably didn’t help my case with the reporter, but I’ve seen Wow Bao’s Twitter account at-reply thoughtfully more than enough times to know the delay was an aberration. The Mouth didn’t really need to be all that contrite anyway. I’m a big fan. I used to practically live on their Thai Curry Chicken bao and rice bowls when I lived at Marina City, across the river from the State/Lake location.

So they knew I’d be an easy mark when the Mouth and RedEye “Social Mediaologist” @ScottKleinberg asked me to ask you to consider making a fool of yourself for their co-sponsored WOW in Bao Contest. Details are after the contest link (or here), but the idea is Wow Bao and Red Eye want to know what you would do to “put the WOW in Wow Bao.” You know, like “What would you do for a Klondike bar?” only meatier. You can tell them by leaving a comment through Friday (9/24) under the contest announcement linked above. The Grand Prize is a party at Wow Bao for the winner and 50 grateful friends.

Food flew the same week the Mouth and Kleinberg asked me to show their contest some love. Someone who showed me some love recently, OutsideIn’s Esther Ildikó Brown (@estheribrown), told me about their foodie blog. Brown interviewed me for a September 1st blog post on OutsideIn that let me start to make amends with my blogging community (with my heartfelt self-pointed advice, “don’t be a dick” when you blog.)

Brown, herself, is blogging her way through her family heritage at Y’all Hungary?. The North Carolina-born daughter of a Southern father and Hungarian mother (she calls herself the “Budapest Belle”), Brown says on her new blog she intends to “cook my way through my family tree, from gulyás to grits.” Good luck, Esther. When you get to the gulyás, send samples.