Everything works... I don't know why. I was messing around with navigation and suddenly stuff started to work.  I changed the manifest file for the ItemListActivity so that its parent is itself, so that I could try to get the navigation to work. but then the navigation started to work without me doing anything. suddenly it worked. wtf.  now it works pretty well, but I still need to do a few things so that it handles the button press well.
what the fuck