I haven't heard from my parents, which I assume means they're not coming this weekend. Another week then. With the possible exception of my computer, what I want most is a chair.

And of course I'm too cheap to buy a new one.

My interactions with the natives have been limited. The Hyde Park neighborhood seems to be mostly black, though I did once wander into a posh Jewish neighborhood I can't seem to find again. Another time I bumbled my way to a different cheap grocery store -- part of my ongoing quest to buy a cheap sack of potatoes -- in what was recognizably a bad neighborhood, far from my apartment. Standing in line with a handful of groceries I realized they only accepted cash or ATM cards, and left emptyhanded.

I should note, before you get the wrong impression, that the (very) suburban neighborhood I lived in for a month in D.C., a place I stubbornly and incorrectly refer to as Brooklyn (after my subway stop) was predominantly black as well. So this isn't entirely new.

It is a bit more of a culture shock this time around, which probably testifies to the dearth of interaction between me and my neighbors in Brooklyn, a place where my only outdoors activity was walking to and from the train station twenty minutes away. I remember a surly Metro operator, an old religious woman, and a smart-mouthed little girl.

Should I say culture shock? That seems a little un-P.C. to my ears, maybe because I've had too many classes with Prof. Goldgar and tend to think of culture as the sum total of works and performances in a given language... but subculture shock sounds too cute and condescending, so here we are.

(Somewhere, Republican scientists, having perjorated the label "P.C." into oblivion all-too-quickly, are working on a term for the P.C. that dare not speak its name. Otherwise how can they fight what they can't name, what no one will now own up to?)

Culture shock aside, I'm getting used to the casual street-level interactions -- people in big cities are constantly without watches, cigarettes, directions, change -- which always come when I'm in a daze. I'll hear my voice and it's a shock; I never got into the habit of talking to myself and for now, who else is there?

When I get my bike I'll be hermetically sealed from the pedestrians, and Hyde Park will fade a little, background again.

Though I'll admit to being a bit nervous around the groups of blacks, muscular twenty-somethings, who hang out on some of the corners, I'm familiar enough with big anonymous cities to know that no passerby cares enough about Our Bold Hero, individual, to do him any harm. Each to his own world, and all that.

Sometimes a couple will walk by, speaking this fast and accented English I can hardly understand. They called it African-American Vernacular English in linguistics, but personally I think that title is absurd, and a bit racist.

Whatever I'm hearing, it amuses me on occasion. I swear I've never heard so many occurrences of the lexeme "play" in a single conversation as I did the other night.

Other times it's frustrating. I had no idea what this teenage kid was asking me the other day, and he had to repeat himself three times before I realized he was if I had a transfer. I don't know whether that was AAVE or his accent. If the later, I didn't realize there was a strong Chicago accent.

Of course I stick out like a sore thumb on occasion. When I was lost in the bad neighborhood a little boy scornfully addressed me as "Des Moines," an epithet from outta nowhere. On Sunday, having walked ten blocks to the One-Stop, the best grocery store I've found so far, I soon realized I was the only white person there.

Most people didn't care -- there was a big sale and we were all excited, friendly, celebrant, even though it was only grocery shopping -- but in line a man asked if I was from the university, and when I said yes he nodded as if that put everything in order. Outside I transferred everything to my satchel for the walk home, and as I transferred box after box of Jiffy Corn Bread mix (6/$1) a thin, bearded man outside the store noticed and started ragging on me in what was unmistakably a friendly way.

"Jiffy Corn Bread!" He shouted, exuberant, "You gonna make some corn bread? Did you get any greens, sir? Got any greens in there?"

I chuckled a little, and he moved away after imparting a quick blessing. I was blocks away before I started wondering what qualifies a vegetable as "greens," and I spend a while kicking myself for not asking him such an obvious lexigraphical question. And "collared greens," if that's how it's spelled?

Similarly, during a brief exchange with some older women near the potato display, I'd refrained from asking them for a quick and easy sweet potato (35 cents/lb!) recipe, figuring that the harmless question was much too racist.