Goodbye, Chicago

I don't love this city, and of course it feels better to leave than to be left, but still it's not simple leaving it.

I'm returning to San Francisco today. My home-city. Maybe for a few months, maybe for forever. I don't know — we'll see.

Two roses

You see?

Knotty shoulders

In the Loop. Sometimes you just have to put your bags down and find a nice patch of pavement to do some shoulderstands on.

Not long now

Wicker Park again. I made a friend this year who lives there, a little bit odd of a story beginning with a set-up by our mutual matchmaker friend, and I don't know if we now will stay friends, though it would be nice. It's hard to tell with people in general, whether to stay in touch or not. Even best friends can be forgotten, even acquaintances can be kept in touch with, if the circumstances and intentions are right.

(Flatness is a strange thing): In Chicago, you can look down a street until it meets its vanishing point.

Retrospect in fragments

A mild case of geographic anomie.

Landing in Chicago was a bit of a shock to my system after a week and a half in small-town New Hampshire. The idea of going out into the suburbs sounded even worse, so I procrastinated catching my train for several hours. Financial districts are so strange at night, no matter what city you're in — the reverse of bedroom communities, dead after dark. A late summer storm hit; I chose a closed cafe and sat in lotus on one of their tables under the awning for a while. Pretending to be a person who minds the rain.

April, 84 degrees

Anticlimax

So I left the Chicago area and I thought it was for good. For indefinitely, anyway.










Nope. Eight more weeks of class (starting October). I'll rent a spare bedroom from an old lady and take three more half-semester classes. Those plus one online class plus the one joke of a class I'm taking in-person at present here in California will get me a B.A. in anthropology with a minor in German. (Finally.) (It hasn't been as long as it feels.)

Which also means that studying abroad next year in Germany is no longer in the cards. I'll find a way to get back there, though. My German is zang good right now but I'm not fluent and I want to be. I will be. Which means I'm going to have to live in Germany for a time. I'll figure out the auspices...later.

And I turned down the internship in Uganda that I told you I was taking. If I hadn't, I would currently be in the air somewhere between Amsterdam and Kampala.

I'd like a job. It's not in my control whether I get hired or not, but I'm applying to a couple each day, and I'll keep doing that either until I get hired or until my classes start.

Wicker Park

It is home to a seemingly unjustifiable concentration of wig dealers. Somehow the spring darkness makes it the right kind of place for wandering — but then, I feel that way about cities in general...

Backwards at winter

Lakeshore, late winter

Guest Post: Cold

By my Chicago girl.

Step out and
lungs gasp but

throat closes tight at the no, no,

no! of the cold,

and for a moment I am breathless.

It slowly slides through all
my layers,
a solid sheet of pin-pricking––

You don't belong here, my
body moans,
and for a moment I understand
that despite my honey-dark hair,
my blue eyes, my fair skin meant to drink in
this thin northern sunlight,
far,
far,
far back,
my family lived in Africa.

And it's quite laughable,
really,
the endeavors of
down and
wool and
leather,


for all never quite make up
for my heritage.

Knitting and watcher

Look how suspicious this man is of the girl sitting on the floor with a camera to her face. And he should be.

Today...

I woke up and the world had changed outside my window. Not the first snowfall, but the first blanketing. More pictures of that on film to come.


The snowplows and cars and feet come and disenchant it all soon enough, so when you wake up and see fresh snowfall, the best time to go out is NOW, with just your one pair of feet. I went walking and let snowflakes fall in my tea, watched them melt on my scarf.


Then in the afternoon, I went downtown to meet my Chicago girl at the Christkindlmarkt (German Christmas market). We had some Kartoffelpuffer from one of the food stands for dinner and I eavesdropped on the real Germans (native accents are delicious for the ears). It was kind of like a Renaissance faire minus the costumes and shows.


We also visited the Lincoln Park Zoo, which at this time of year becomes an electric garden, with lights growing from the trees instead of leaves or blossoms.





[somehow my teeth look ogre-ishly misshapen in the first one and it fascinates me.]


IN CONCLUSION: I love riding the train. I love that I have an old blogger friend who lives nearby. Coming back to campus and my room after an evening spent walking around the wintry big city feels so good that it's worth being cold. And I need to work on this paper. Cheers.

Bow wave

On the shore of Lake Michigan with my Chicago girl.




The waves were enormous that day; they were regularly washing over the path that lines the shore.

With the magic of double exposure (I took a picture of a wave on top of a picture of her), it looks kinda like she and the lens are being drenched by a bow wave. A happy analogue accident.




Oh, and these were the shoes I mentioned, the ones we had to hunt down so I could be taller than her.