Chicago.4

On the last full day of my trip, I met one of my committee members (I hadn't been aware before this trip if she'd actually agreed to be on my committee or not). I discovered that she had.

I presented my paper on a very quirky panel. It was comprised mostly of second wave feminists who were really uninterested in politics. My paper, which was a history of political thought paper, was actually the most political paper on the panel. That's almost certainly the first and last time that that will be the case! One of the other papers discussed the disparity between the amount of domestic violence aimed against men and the amount of domestic violence aimed against women. The impression that I had from her talk was that if we could just even out the domestic violence, things would be better. There was also a paper discussing a temporary sexual contract allowed within the Shia Muslim community. The author of this paper maintained that this could be either a way toward emancipation for women, or possibly could encourage prostitution.

After a lunch with some colleagues and some old friends (where I accidentally ordered a Monte Christo, which is to say, somehow in the descriptions of Monte Christo's I always miss the part about them being fried and pick up on the raspberry part and order it, but I really only like french fries fried), I headed out for some walks. First, I headed out with one of my colleagues and encouraged him to look around Chicago a bit (he had really been focusing on the conference itself, which I've learned, after much conference experience, is not always wise). I showed him The Bean in Millennium Park. As a piece of art, the bean is nothing special--it is a large silver kidney bean. But close up, it's wonderful! The reflection of the sky line in its various curves and from its various angles is striking. My colleague was unimpressed. So I showed him the lake, which it is impossible to be unimpressed by:


Just imagine working in downtown Chicago, walking 10 minutes and then being by this lake. I think I've just been conditioned from years of vacationing at the beach to become entirely relaxed when I'm by large bodies of water. This definitely did it for me.


(picture)