(Okay, a couple of tech warnings today before anything else: 1) I just consolidated a bunch of old journal entries earlier today, so those who read this through my feed are going to see them all show up again in their RSS accounts - not much that can be done about that, so I apologize; and 2) the portal between my T-Mobile account and my Gmail account is down right now for some reason, which means that none of my outgoing emails are going out. And I know there are some people who are waiting for email from me right now, so I apologize for that as well. Hopefully whatever's wrong will be fixed soon.)

Okay, so how do you keep a German busy for two weeks? I know, it sounds like the beginning of a dirty joke; but it's a question I find myself actually asking these days, in that we're maybe a week or so away from a visit by my friend Alamar. A little backstory, for new readers who need it...

Alamar (not his real name) is a grad student in the German city of Giessen, studying applied physics or applied engineering or something technical that I don't quite understand. (Giessen, for those who are curious, is about 45 minutes northeast of Frankfurt by train or car; it's a town of maybe 80,000 or so, 30,000 of whom are students, and when I visited reminded me very much of a place like Ann Arbor, Lawrence, Chapel Hill, Iowa City, etc.) Alamar and I met randomly in fall of 2003, when I was checking out random blogs by German punk and goth kids, trying to get some advice on indie-rock venues before making my first tour of the country. Alamar and I were originally supposed to only hang out one night that tour, at the Frankfurt poetry slam, which we did; but then for reasons that are too long to get into here, I ended up having to leave Berlin on that tour about two days earlier than expected, and Alamar very graciously invited me to come stay with him and his college roommates for 48 hours instead. And I had this really great time - one of the unexpected highlights of that tour, actually - which then led to Alamar and me hanging out again during the next year's tour, in Frankfurt again.

So now Alamar is coming to visit America; not his first trip here, but the first I think in awhile, and definitely his first visit to Chicago in particular. And so of course I'm now starting to obsessively worry about entertaining Alamar while he's here, because I tend to always get a little obsessive when someone visits and I'm suddenly the host for their trip. And I'm not sure where exactly this comes from, my obsessiveness over being someone's host, and making sure that the person is having a fun time; partly from the way I was raised, I suppose, where being a good host was always considered an important subject, and partly my genetics, because I've always just been obsessed with making sure the people around me are having a good time. (I used to throw these sorta infamous parties when I was younger, that people would get all excited about whenever they were announced; I'm sure everyone had a good time at them as well because of this obsessiveness of mine. Man, I wish I had a big enough place here in Chicago to throw parties again on a regular basis! Oh well - once my arts center is open, I'll get a chance to start throwing some really fun parties again.)

The ironic thing about all this, of course, is that when I'm the guest at other people's places, I could care less about this subject - that is, I don't ever expect my own hosts to provide any entertainment for me, and in fact can even sometimes perceive it as disruptive, depending on how many plans I had on my own on that particular trip. And I'm sure Alamar is feeling the same way, that he's not expecting me to provide all these fun experiences for him to have while here...but damnit, I just have to do it anyway! I mean, this is not just a result of being an obsessive host either, but also because of the city where I am; namely, I always feel this weird compulsion whenever someone visits to be this great Chicago ambassador, and to show those visitors in this profound way why I love this city so much myself, why I love living here full-time so much. And of course, that's one of the greatest things about Chicago when it comes to friends coming and visiting, in that there are just hundreds upon hundreds of fun things to do on any given night here, to match whatever it is that your guest likes doing themselves the most - indie-rock bands, literary events, nightclubs, sporting events, restaurants, sightseeing, shopping, and it just goes on and on and on.

Alamar in particular is a goth kid (or "dark" kid, as it's known in German slang), so that of course neatly helps me figure out a lot of our daily options, since Chicago is so entwined in the history of goth music and still has such a large community here. There are, for example, at least half a dozen all-goth clubs here in the city, another dozen who have weekly "goth" nights, lots of retail stores for just goth clothing and goth music, other stores for such related items as gargoyles saved from torn-down buildings, etc etc. So, I'm sure that this subject unto itself will be filling up a lot of our time while Alamar is here - visits to Neo, to The Alley, to Smart Bar on goth night, to Exit and all the rest.

And then another thing we're going to do while Alamar's in town is visit the headquarters of Fermilab, out in the suburbs, because I guess Fermilab is a sort of mecca for the type of people who study whatever that is that Alamar studies himself. And that's been interesting, trying to figure out how to get there without a car, because I myself only get out to the suburbs literally maybe once every three or four years, so am of no more use than a tourist when it comes to the Metra and Pace systems here in the "Chicagoland" area. (For those who are curious - you take a Metra line from Union Station downtown to Geneva; then take a cab from there to the Fermilab campus in nearby Batavia. God only knows how much it's going to cost us, or how long the entire trip will be. As always, lots of photos and audio during the trip itself!)

So then what else? Well, I'm sure I'll be dragging Alamar out to a number of literary events while he's here, because this is something else he's interested in. And Alamar's interested in going out and seeing my friends in the Mud Queens of Chicago perform at the Around the Coyote arts festival on September 10th, so we're planning on going out to that as well. And Around the Coyote will just be a cool thing in general for Alamar to see, so I'm sure we'll end up spending the entire evening over there.

And what else? I mean, we've got, what, twelve days or something to kill altogether. So, of course we'll spend a day touring the Loop, and I'm sure I'll give Alamar the little guided tour I learned way back in 1994, when I worked at the Chicago Architecture Foundation (my first job, actually, after originally moving here); and there's also a free opera concert in Millennium Park while he's in town, so I thought it'd be fun to do that for a bit as well, because Pritzker Pavilion with an orchestra playing is just something everyone should experience at least once. And then I'm also doing something I did when another German friend of mine, Dirk Huestrunk, visited last year, which is basically contacting all my friends about the idea of getting together. And that's always a deceptively fun thing for a tourist, to just have a chance to hang out with locals for an evening and shoot the shit (or at least, this is always one of my great cheap pleasures when I myself travel), so I'm hoping that as many of my friends will say yes to this as possible.

Whew! So between this and just taking it easy at my apartment, hopefully these plans will add up to Alamar having a really fun time while he's here, and being yet one more European who can go back to Europe and announce to his friends, "You know, those fucking Americans actually aren't as totally evil as we might all think." I'm a big believer of this - that the most profound examples of international diplomacy always happen on the personal, one-on-one level, and that we should all be striving for more understanding and more fun times between cultures. Anyway, like I said, lots and lots of reports, photos and audio reports to come.

Some random notes, while I'm here...

--Hey, well, you're welcome to all those people who wrote yesterday and thanked me for linking to them, in honor of BlogDay 2005. In particular, B. (author of Boys Will Be) wrote with a recommendation for new visitors - that they start at the beginning of her archives and read forward, since she's now dating someone seriously and of course doesn't have too many new stories anymore about crazy sexual experiences. And I'd recommend this as well, because her stories there are more stand-alone ones than part of an ongoing narrative, which means you can pretty easily go back and read old posts and not be too lost.

--Hey, so, I just finally learned how to set up mailing groups in Gmail - which is actually incredibly simple, but is not documented in any way at all at the Google help center, meaning that I've thought this whole time that it couldn't be done. And I figured a lot of you were probably in the same position, which is why I wanted to mention it. The trick's real easy - simply create a new contact like normal, but then add as many email addresses in the "main address" entry field as you want. Gmail will actually remember all the addresses you enter, and will send your outgoing email to everyone in the list, whenever you put that group's nickname in the "To:" field.

God, Google, why don't you fucking mention this in your Gmail documentation? I've been continuing to use my clunky, nasty Hotmail group-mail capabilities for the last six months of having a Gmail account, simply because I never realized that Gmail could handle group-mail lists! Anyway, so I'm glad to finally learn that group mailing lists can be maintained in Gmail, and I'm sure some of you are now as well.