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Life Aboard Mazurka

The ordinary and extraordinary tales of living on a boat in Lake Michigan.

Monday Dec 25, 2006.     By Jessica Herman

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Not many of us in the city think of our habitat as overwhelmingly natural. Perhaps even fewer among us have thought about living on a boat in Chicago. Thanks to Felicia Swanson's blog Life Aboard Mazurka, we can begin to imagine what that life might look like.

The professional writer began blogging about her daily experiences the day she married and moved on her husband's boat in Lake Michigan. In order to provide a context for new readers, she keeps her first post at the top of her homepage and adds every new episode—three to four entries per week—to the bottom of the blog. Her entries range from the mundane-turned-intriguing (ie: methods of waste disposal) to grander observations about her relatively unknown and community-focused neighborhood in the River City harbor.

After living in the city for 12 years, Swanson says of her home, "It's quiet. There's space. It's changed my perspective: It's a common idea that if you live in the city you can't find nature [and that] you have to go out to find it…But the river and lake are such a big part of what drives Chicago. Keying into that everyday is better for my emotional health. It's easy to get stuck in the concrete."

What's the gist of your blog?
Daily life on a boat in Chicago.

If I read your blog today, gimme me one thing I'd learn.
I was hoping you'd ask me that. You'd learn how to pump out the waste you keep on board. Soon you'll learn how to wrap a whole boat in plastic.

How do you pay the bills?
Writing for UIC [in the college of nursing, putting their print and online magazines] and freelancing. I've written for New City and The Gazette.

Your computer is surrounded by…
(She laughs and then responds) Fishing equipment, nets, bumpers…they call them bumpers but they're like big plastic inflatable [things] you attach to the side of the boat when you're docked somewhere. And lots of line and life jackets…There's a small room in the front [of the boat] with two bunks. That's my office. One bunk is my desk and the other the recliner.

When you aren't loving blogging, you're loving BLANK in Chicago:
I run. Swim. I eat in far in too many restaurants. Last night I was at Las Pinatas. I'm also downtown at Blackie's.

Name a local blogger extraordinaire.
Disaster Relief. It's four or five women and their online dating adventures. It started with an idea that a couple of them had last year—they thought it would be funny to post an ad on Craigslist post-Katrina saying 'Katrina ruined your life…[We] have an open heart and want to reach out to you'…The last line was 'Gimme a call…I'll rock you like a hurricane.' They got a ton of responses, some serious and some who got the joke.

Jessica Herman likes peeking into other folks' lives, which sure helps when she's grilling hip Chicago bloggers. If you'd like to shower a little love on a local blogger whose antics and anecdotes are your favorite flavor of procrastination, shoot her an email.