Changing your view

The call came out for tips and tricks, so here are two tips that helped me get through chemo and after:
ONE.
When I was in chemo I mostly spent time in one or two neighborhood cafes--writing my blog, reading, working. A nice way to get a cheap vacation, though, is to go to a different part of town and hang out, either in a coffee house you haven't been to, or, if the weather's nice and you feel like it, on the streets and sidewalks.
I think people like going to new cafes and restaurants partly just to feast their eyes. Oh, of course, there's our obsessive focus on the minutiae of food and on finding the top 10 [fill in the blank]s, a trend that was spawned, supposedly by the start and rise of city magazines, and that helps us forget the polis, and the great world around us, but there is something in us that loves a new place. If we had all reached enlightenment maybe we wouldn't need this stimulation; home or our monk's cell would be enough, but until then, it's nice to get out every once in a while. A change of scenery can liven you up. It does something to the brain. Don't ask me what. Today we went to the National Museum of Mexican Art to see two exhibits. One was small and unfortunately partly amateurish, about the kidnapping, torture and murder of more than 500 women in Ciudad Jaurez. Both of us liked this piece, Broken Dreams by Rocío Caballero, very much:

The other exhibit was so so well-done and interesting, on Mexican and American muralists, and how they influenced each other. There were even three pieces by Jackson Pollock, including the painting above. Afterwards L and I walked around and went to a restaurant where we split a burrito. It felt like we were in a different country, or at least in the Mission in San Francisco. It's still hard for me to explain to people why I can write more when I go to Ragdale or another artist colony. Part is the expectation. Part is the change of scenery. The brain knows it's elsewhere.
I love this museum because it's very small and good and has a great gift shop. In the fall it's got altars for Dia de los Muertos, and you can watch people make sugar skulls.
TWO. If you're a woman in Chicago who's been treated for cancer in the last year, you can get five free massages and five free spa visits at Thousand Waves Spa. If you're in chemo you won't want to use the hot tub because you're more susceptible to germs and infections, but you can use the sauna and steamroom and sit in the relaxation room and read magazines and drink tea. It's all very lovely and quiet. And free. Though if you can afford to, it's nice to tip the massage therapists, who are students.

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Get out and row!

My rowing coach met a guy in a bar, and one thing let to another, and this is the result:
an article about ROW by the guy from the bar. It's from Gaper's Block and gets a lot across about our coach and team. Here it is.

Save the date, Sept. 11, for our fundraiser and silent auction in a Chicago gallery to be named later.

Chicago-area readers, are you breast cancer survivors? Do you want to get more active? Try rowing. If a pre-Title IX asthmatic wimp such as I can do it, you can do it. Each one according to her abilities...


Karl Marx was a southpaw. Would he have rowed starboard?

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Living While Black/O, the Tribune

[Is this breast black or white?]

For a while, there's been the term DWB--Driving While Black--African-American drivers report being pulled over for this offense. Now we're finding out (again) that it's dangerous to be LWB, especially in Chicago. Today's Tribune reports on a study that showed that the African-American death rate from breast cancer in 2005 was 99 percent higher in Chicago than for white women, a fivefold increase since 1990.
This is not new. Chicago Magazine reported on this a couple of years ago, or a version of this--a previous study by the same researchers at the Sinai Urban Health Institute. The same bad news: Chicago is worse than other cities. The gap between black and white health here is widening. The Trib is careful to quote an African-American doctor who partly blames the victim--the problem is partly lifestyle, she says; partly it's poverty; and partly lack of knowledge about health.
Hmm, says Cancer Bitch to herself, why is it that this is the only person in the story who's identified by race? Could it be that everyone else quoted is "normal," i.e., white, and so doesn't have to be identified?
The health study was published online yesterday in the American Journal of Public Health, the Tribune avers. It identifies Steve Whitman (no race), director of the Sinai Urban Health Institute as the author of the study. The conclusion drawn from the study, according to the journal abstract: Overall, progress toward meeting the Healthy People 2010 goal of eliminating health disparities in the United States and in Chicago remains bleak. With more than 15 years of time and effort spent at the national and local level to reduce disparities, the impact remains negligible.
You can find the abstract of the piece here. You can get the article for 30 bucks from the AJPH site.
Along these same lines, but even more depressing: A Rush University Medical Center study published in November showed that Chicago's black and white breast cancer mortality rates were the same in 1980. This was also in the Chicago Magazine story. From that piece, by Shane Trisch:
We've arranged things in this country so that the darker your skin, the shorter your life will be--Steve Whitman.

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Property

I dreamed last night I told Mayor Daley that I would pay more property taxes in order to provide hot water and shelter for everyone. (In the dream, the amount I paid was about half what it is in reality.)

I am a homeowner. I have a stake in the city. In the neighborhood. We have boxes on the front porch awaiting pick up by strangers who are moving. (One of the wonders of Craig's List.) The next-door neighbors are selling their house. I told them the boxes would be gone soon, that I didn't want to lower their property value. When I was in junior high, our principal said that if girls wore pants it would lower the property values. In eighth grade there was a protest. I didn't take part. I was too chicken. But a girl named W wore jeans, and in Mrs. F's math class she put her feet on the empty seat in front of her. Mrs. F jumped on it immediately: When girls wear pants they put their feet on the furniture. In school, the desks were always called furniture.

By high school we were wearing cut-off jeans and halter tops, though that principal put a stop to flip flops, then known as shower sandals. It was a safety issue. The principal liked to defy the school district and had a flowery sign over his office that said Love Room. Or something like that. There was a smoking area outside, which was considered progressive. No one brought up the health issue.

I remember a discussion about having police in the school. I don't know why it came up; maybe because drugs were found in lockers. I was on the student council and that was probably where we discussed it. Some of us objected (did I? I don't remember) and the counter argument was, If you're doing nothing wrong, why would it matter? And: If you're driving and you see a cop, what's your reaction? My reaction is I'd rather not see them. I tense up. I check my speed. And is that good or bad?

Now we have cameras at intersections to record erring drivers. When I lived in Miami, I remember there were police cameras on South Beach because there were so many muggings. This was when it was populated by frail, retired needle-trade workers with Yiddish accents. What does the city owe us and what do we owe the city? Chicago is like a nation-state. It could be very democratic, with 50 representatives on the city council. But I think a majority of them were appointed by the mayor. Meanwhile, I have not protested enough that yoga classes were discontinued a year ago at the park district when the teacher retired, and the district still hasn't found a new teacher. The park district is a public body that is supposed to be responsive to citizens. But the citizens needs to make themselves heard.

***
But what is property? Architects see buildings as containers for shapes. I don't believe exactly that property is theft, but most property in the US was originally ill-gotten. We feel that we don't deserve this big house. We also feel a responsibility to keep it up. It's about 110 years old and historic in a general way. We don't know its history. The headquarters at school is a mansion that came with a scrapbook about its history. It was built for the publisher of a long-dead newspaper and Will Rogers came there once to a party. When I went to the Millay Colony for the Arts, I saw that each person who stayed in a room wrote her or his name on the jamb. At another artists colony, Ragdale, the residents write notes in a notebook in each room. We have our say. We note where we were. What we did. I walk down the streets of Chicago thinking about what it looked like 50 years ago, a century ago. Some people go back further, and see prairie grasses and swamp where skyscrapers are now. (In French, gratte-ciel, sky scratcher--aggressive in both languages.) And part of everything growing around us, the trees and fertilized grasses and flowers, are tiny fragments of people who used to live around here. I assume someone somewhere has hypothesized about the process, about how long it takes for a body to decay in the ground, then become part of the atmosphere and material world. We bring dead flowers to decorate graves (we in general, not Jews) and then some caretaker takes them away. Jews leave stones, and eventually the stones become part of the earth and so on.

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