Day 67

Happy 1: Morningstar Stock Forum. The forum was held downtown at the Palmer House Hilton. Since I arrived by myself, I had to find my own way around, which was confusing but I figured it out. There were seven forty-five minute sessions throughout the day in which the speaker, generally the CEO or CFO, would talk about the company: current position, past performance, future goals. I attended FedEx, Choice Hotels, General Mills, Boardwalk Pipeline, Strayer Education, Wipro, and General Electric; some of these presentations were better than others. The day was broken up by a catered lunch. I sat down to eat with my supervisor (he came later in the day) and was amazed to see six different utensils placed around my plate and a cloth napkin folded into a flower. On my plate was this strange lettuce sculpture. Upon further inspection it was lettuce decoratively placed inside a red cabbage shell. There were lots of interesting vegetables in the salad that I have no idea what they were; I tried really hard but didn't eat very much of it. At first I was really disappointed because I thought that was the meal. Boy, was I surprised when this old man whisked away my salad and replaced it with a yummy pasta dish. After that we ate a fruit cup dessert. The plate had a pretty design on it; but alas, it was no design, it was fancy frosting/sauce. In the afternoon there was snack time, too. There were huge yummy cookies, chips, pop, water, juice, basically anything you could ever want. I was going to grab a bottle of water but something caught my eye: La Croix Natural Berry Flavored Sparkling Water. How could I pass up something with the word 'sparkling' in its name? Sad to say, it tasted terrible. To be honest, I only took it because it looked super fancy. Funny story: Earlier in the day I was waiting for the next session to begin and was sitting in a comfy chair, or what rich people call comfy. This Indian guy asked me if there were any goodies in the Morningstar bag (every attendee got a bag with information packets in it). I told him there was a pen in my bag. He asked if it was nice. I told him it was pretty good. He said, "Let me see it." Alright, whatever floats your boat, buddy. So I whipped out the pen, he took it and turned his nose up at it. I said, "It's not good?" Apparently not. Come to find out, he was the CEO of one of the companies. Yeah, if I were a CEO I wouldn't be impressed by some free crappy pen, either.

Happy 2: Chicago Symphony Orchestra. We always get the cheapest tickets for Fine Art events. At the CSO, that means sitting at the very top of the concert hall in the nose bleed section. I could see the stage fine, it was minuscule, but I could see it. The seats were so straight up that I felt like I was falling forward which gave a whole new meaning to the phrase 'sitting on the edge of my seat.' All of the music was composed by Aaron Copland. The entire concert was phenomenal but my favorite song was Appalachian Spring, which is the piece I've been focusing on in my Art Encounter papers. The music was rich and beautiful and it sent chills down my spine and brought tears to my eyes. Yay for classical music.

Crappy: Given that I spent my day at the aforementioned activities, it was a long day of sitting and listening.