gnat incurs an unexpected amount of muscle soreness

i am not an athletic person. by the time i hit high school i had tried and sucked at just about every sport there is, at which point i gave up and became a theater kid instead. by this point in my life i have made peace with the fact that i possess the coordination of a drunk ostrich (i have no data to support the assertion that drunk ostriches are uncoordinated - this is purely conjecture) but at the same time i tend to shy away from opportunities to showcase my profound lack of sporting ability.

this is why several months ago, when zain first tried to explain to me how badly i needed to experience the phenomenon that is whirlyball, i was completely closed to the idea. had he thoroughly explained what a game of whirlyball actually entailed, i might have been more amenable to it.

basically you take ten of these:

ten of these:

and ten of these:

and play a game somewhat akin to basketball.

my passing and shooting abilities were, predictably, nonexistent, but i feel my aggressive LA driving skills offset my other weaknesses. action shot!

...sort of.

i woke up the next morning with a surprising amount of soreness in a surprising number of areas, considering i had played a game throughout which i remained seated. this is, i suppose, a testament to how out of shape i am. i blame winter.

whirlyball wasn't invented in chicago, nor is it unique to chicago, but i had never heard of it before moving here. in fact there are only 17 whirlyball venues in the world, none of which are in california. (chicago has three; kid rock's house in the suburbs of detroit has one. the rest are mostly in places to which there is no reason to go except to play whirlyball.)

my apologies to zain, who for several months attempted to introduce me to something excellent and was met with nothing but staunch resistance. whirlyball is awesome.

gnat revisits al's (and gets it right, this time)

it's the end of the month and as of yesterday i had only completed one item out of five on my january chicago wishlist. totally unacceptable! not wanting to close the month with a dismal 20% success rate i crammed two more items from the list in at the last possible moment.

first, my triumphant return to al's beef:

i first visited al's with jalees and nicole back in august. i didn't find out until months later (thanks, man vs. food!) that REAL chicagoans get their al's beef "dipped" - the sandwich gets dunked into the vat of juice the beef was cooked in, because it just isn't messy enough to be worth eating otherwise.

so of course, i went back. i asked the guy behind the counter twice to make sure he actually dunked my sandwich this time, because it didn't look quite mushy enough to my untrained eye.

it was dunked, all right. as soon as i picked the thing up to get a picture it unleashed a greasy stream of liquid and i narrowly avoided a lap full of beef juice. the following is an actual look of shock and dismay captured by cara:

if you should ever find yourself at al's #1 beef, do yourself a favor and get your sandwich dunked.

this morning i walked down to navy pier to check out the snow sculpture competition at "snow days chicago." (see? i DON'T just write about food.) because i was feeling exceptionally touristy, i walked the scenic route along the lake. last time i was at this "beach" it was 95 degrees out... not so much, right now.

the snow sculptures were, predictably, completely awesome. i took a moment to discuss the ones i liked best with comedian bob newhart, a chicago native.

(just did some research. evidently this is his character dr. bob hartley's psychoanalyst couch from the bob newhart show.. for the purposes of this discussion i would like to pretend instead that i am on some sort of bob newhart talk show discussing snow sculpture ratings and how painful sitting on frozen metal couches can be.)

this wasn't one of my favorites but the others weren't quite as imitable as cranky captain america.

except maybe the medusa, but nobody was standing around to get a picture of my interpretation. it won first place!

my favorite was the second place winner. it's called "hommage a duchamp no. 2" and it's based on a marcel duchamp painting called nude descending a staircase no2.

i also liked this one, "that's a moray." yeah, it's actually called that.

an exhibition piece done by the team that won last year's competition. zoom in and look at the wrinkles in his face... that's all made of snow.

i'm not even certain i'm capable of putting together a half decent snowman. i haven't tried yet, but we're supposed to get a blizzard this week so there should be some prime snow frolicking days coming up.

the last two items on my list were a visit to the field museum and to go to a blackhawks game. both have been postponed (one due to a total fail on my part, the other completely zain's fault, or really zain's knee's fault) but by no means forgotten!