I used to live in DC. I worked downtown--such as it was--and lived with my parents in New Spring Valley in far-outer NW, a mile and a third or a mile and a half from DC's Red Line, depending on which station you wanted to go to. As I've mentioned, I don't drive. So my sister, in her glorious and copious patience, drove me to the metro most of the time. Yes, every morning (barring my five-week stint of doom-mono, or when she was out of town at trade shows), except when Mom did. Often she'd pick me up, too, at the end of the day. The rest of the time I'd walk: downhill is much nicer in dress shoes than up, particularly when there's precipitation.
Rush hour in DC is far more of a thing than it seems to be in Chicago. At least, that's my impression based solely on buses and subways. I'm almost pleased to say that I've never experienced the road-related rush hours of either city. I hear they're unpleasant. I suppose this is due to several things. First, DC is a far smaller city than Chicago, both in size and in population. Second, there are fewer metro lines (and fewer still that get the lion's share of rush hour traffic) in DC than in Chicago, congesting things further. Third--this one's just suspicion and speculation--the bulk of jobs in DC are governmental, concentrating the time at which people flee their offices.
The result of this is that I've never had to wait for a train to pass by in Chicago (Red Line, Blue Line, Brown Line, Green Line) as a result of it being overly full. In DC, I've had to let four consecutive trains pass (before shouldering my way on to get to my birthday dinner on time). One of the few pictures I have with people in it in DC (people there react to cameras being pointed at them as they might to loaded handguns in a similar posture) is of the Farragut West metro station (Blue & Orange Lines) at 6:00 on a Friday. There wasn't room to move on either platform. The escalators had been stopped so people wouldn't be shoved, lemming-like, onto the platform, causing others to fall (lemming-like) onto the tracks. People had backed up nearly to the gates. Trains went by, and still the tide didn't slow. It almost felt like the station wasn't big enough to hold the accumulated mass of commuters.
I lived a bit up the Red Line in DC. Not far enough up to get a seat in the morning (and getting a seat in the evening was more related to timing than geography), but certainly before the squeeze hit. And several stops later--at Dupont Circle, the stop before my destination--the train doors would open and workers would flood the platform and the streets. Those of us left on the train could breathe again, and try with better success to read our books, and generally carry on with our commutes.
I've already talked about my present adventures in commuting. It's settled down into something slightly more regular, modulated less by moving and more by my evening activities with friends or my boyfriend. But that discussion was mostly about routes and getting from Point A to Point B. This post is a discussion of the trains themselves, and their contents--people, in huge numbers. During the summer of my 2L year, I rode the Red Line daily from Streetervillehell down to Roosevelt, and I was always glad that I lived closer to Grand than to Chicago. The train would arrive at half past eight (or so. Or so) and would promptly disgorge half to two-thirds of its contents onto the platform before soaking up those of us there waiting. Half of my fellow commuters would step out into one station in the Loop or another, and it was just about empty by the time Roosevelt rolled around. The evening's return functioned similarly: empty train filling up in the loop, with a huge exchange at Grand--more getting on than off.
As may be clear, I spend a lot of time riding on trains. It always seems to me like the trains themselves are only a part of the system. Not in the way that buses and other such are a part of the larger public transit system, although it works that way, too, but rather that the trains wouldn't be a complete system without the riders. While on a train, I sometimes get this sense that the system--the train, the riders, the stations, the everything--is all working in sync, everyone getting on or off at their designated points and going about their daily lives from there and keeping the city running by so doing. And all the while the trains breathe people in at one point and exhale them elsewhere.
The title of this post may have been wrong: people are the blood of a city. It's the trains that breathe people.
Thursday, October 6, 2011
Friday, September 16, 2011
Roommates
I am an introvert. This seems to shock people who don't know me that well or who have only seen me in small groups, but it's true. I am an introvert, and it's not that I don't like people, or don't need people. It's that most people are fucking work, and dealing with them is usually draining to some degree or another. That, though, is not really what I'm going to be talking about today. Today we talk about roommates.
What, some of you might be thinking, is the connection here? I am a flavor of introvert I tend to refer to as a territorial introvert. I like having two things in my residential space, preferably to coincide with each other. First, a bolt hole into which I can flee when people are too much to deal with; second, a space that is mine. It's hard to say quite what qualifies a space as the latter, although it being under my sole control certainly goes a long way toward that. Anyway, roommates.
I, as most of you likely know, went to boarding school. I had one roommate there, and only for three months--he left on permanent mental health leave (independent of anything I did) just before Thanksgiving, and the fallout from that is a story for another day. I never had a single in college, and one year went through three roommates (one for failure to sleep on his part interfering with my ability to do so, one for the house manager's being uncomfortable with unofficial gender-mixed housing by a non-couple, and one to close out the year in hilarious fashion). After graduation was two years of living with family--but in my own room (mercifully, we agree, for all involved). In law school, I had 647' sq. all to my self (aside from occasional influxes of other people's cats, which I invited and enjoyed), and neither need nor desire for a roommate. Now, though, I'm living in Ravenswood with my esteemed roommate Laura, who sent me an e-mail asking if I knew anyone in need of a roommate starting mid/late-August. I responded by waving at her and saying something like 'me! Me!' So I am back in the land of roommates.
Up until now, I've had a low success rate with keeping roommates as friends. The first one disappeared, never to be heard from again (except when he and his parents came to get his shit three months later, and during the entire moving out process said not one word to me even though I was sitting in a choke point of the room playing Diablo). The second one was a very good guy who ran in entirely different circles. The year of three roommates featured two who are still friends and one whom I will never hear from again (and I lose no sleep over that). The roommate from the year after that has blessedly vanished from my social horizons, leaving behind only stories of how I accidentally created the impression of a complicated and entirely non-extant love triangle in a dorm I did not live in. My last roommate-ship had ups and downs, but we did pretty well together--the key, I think, was that I had the little inner room of our two-room triple that slept anywhere from two (in the beginning) to six (at the end).
All in all, my successful stints of rooming with people have happened in circumstances that included a reasonable and well-defined division of space (a half of the room, a corner of another enclosed by a bed and a desk, or an inner room). The other main feature needed was a degree of consideration--each for the other--on issues that defy such petty boundaries (sound, stench, temperature).
There're plenty of issues that factor into successful rooming beyond mere personality compatibility: temperature preferences, general cleanliness/messiness (two scales, there), sleep schedules, equitable division of chores, musical tastes, etc. Just about all of this (responsibility for common space and cleaning common items/spaces aside) can be rendered moot by multiple rooms.
In my new place in Ravenswood, I have my own room. It is glorious, if rather densely packed with boxes that needed to not be in the living room anymore. Most of those, fortunately, will vanish onto bookshelves now that my friends found that they were in possession of my bookshelf-pegs (thanks, guys!). It's got its own air conditioning unit, a soon-to-be-filled wall of bookcases insulating my room from Laura's, sound-wise, and a closet for me to throw clothes in. Essentially, it's a near guarantee of roommate success (aside from how Laura and I don't suck at communicating--we've instituted a practice of leaving notes for each other when I leave before she's up and when she's going to bed before I'm back).
Soon I will be all unpacked and shit. And it will be lovely. Soon also there will be the His and Hers Housewarmings (the date for the His portion of it TBD), as it's a small place and we know lots of people.
Those are my vague and nearly clinical thoughts on roommates. Next time I'll talk about night time, video games, stories, or some other heretofore unconsidered topic.
What, some of you might be thinking, is the connection here? I am a flavor of introvert I tend to refer to as a territorial introvert. I like having two things in my residential space, preferably to coincide with each other. First, a bolt hole into which I can flee when people are too much to deal with; second, a space that is mine. It's hard to say quite what qualifies a space as the latter, although it being under my sole control certainly goes a long way toward that. Anyway, roommates.
I, as most of you likely know, went to boarding school. I had one roommate there, and only for three months--he left on permanent mental health leave (independent of anything I did) just before Thanksgiving, and the fallout from that is a story for another day. I never had a single in college, and one year went through three roommates (one for failure to sleep on his part interfering with my ability to do so, one for the house manager's being uncomfortable with unofficial gender-mixed housing by a non-couple, and one to close out the year in hilarious fashion). After graduation was two years of living with family--but in my own room (mercifully, we agree, for all involved). In law school, I had 647' sq. all to my self (aside from occasional influxes of other people's cats, which I invited and enjoyed), and neither need nor desire for a roommate. Now, though, I'm living in Ravenswood with my esteemed roommate Laura, who sent me an e-mail asking if I knew anyone in need of a roommate starting mid/late-August. I responded by waving at her and saying something like 'me! Me!' So I am back in the land of roommates.
Up until now, I've had a low success rate with keeping roommates as friends. The first one disappeared, never to be heard from again (except when he and his parents came to get his shit three months later, and during the entire moving out process said not one word to me even though I was sitting in a choke point of the room playing Diablo). The second one was a very good guy who ran in entirely different circles. The year of three roommates featured two who are still friends and one whom I will never hear from again (and I lose no sleep over that). The roommate from the year after that has blessedly vanished from my social horizons, leaving behind only stories of how I accidentally created the impression of a complicated and entirely non-extant love triangle in a dorm I did not live in. My last roommate-ship had ups and downs, but we did pretty well together--the key, I think, was that I had the little inner room of our two-room triple that slept anywhere from two (in the beginning) to six (at the end).
All in all, my successful stints of rooming with people have happened in circumstances that included a reasonable and well-defined division of space (a half of the room, a corner of another enclosed by a bed and a desk, or an inner room). The other main feature needed was a degree of consideration--each for the other--on issues that defy such petty boundaries (sound, stench, temperature).
There're plenty of issues that factor into successful rooming beyond mere personality compatibility: temperature preferences, general cleanliness/messiness (two scales, there), sleep schedules, equitable division of chores, musical tastes, etc. Just about all of this (responsibility for common space and cleaning common items/spaces aside) can be rendered moot by multiple rooms.
In my new place in Ravenswood, I have my own room. It is glorious, if rather densely packed with boxes that needed to not be in the living room anymore. Most of those, fortunately, will vanish onto bookshelves now that my friends found that they were in possession of my bookshelf-pegs (thanks, guys!). It's got its own air conditioning unit, a soon-to-be-filled wall of bookcases insulating my room from Laura's, sound-wise, and a closet for me to throw clothes in. Essentially, it's a near guarantee of roommate success (aside from how Laura and I don't suck at communicating--we've instituted a practice of leaving notes for each other when I leave before she's up and when she's going to bed before I'm back).
Soon I will be all unpacked and shit. And it will be lovely. Soon also there will be the His and Hers Housewarmings (the date for the His portion of it TBD), as it's a small place and we know lots of people.
Those are my vague and nearly clinical thoughts on roommates. Next time I'll talk about night time, video games, stories, or some other heretofore unconsidered topic.
Thursday, September 8, 2011
On Mornings
I suppose the short story is that I hate them. A line I acquired from my father when I was younger sums it up rather nicely--if God had intended me to see the sunrise, He would have scheduled it for noon. This isn't really quite as cut-and-dried as it might seem. Most of my problem with mornings comes from an unfortunate pairing of facts about me. First, I am so much a night person that I could happily be nocturnal, but for the civilized world. Second, I do not do terribly well on a lack of sleep. Going to bed before midnight is not only difficult but disappointing. Therefore getting up before seven is somewhere between a chore and intolerable.
As far as I know, I've always been rather like this. My mother, an aggressive morning person (it seemed like it was not enough, growing up, that she be up at some ungodly pre-sun hour--all of the rest of us had to be up sometime shortly thereafter), has stories about waking me up for school. She would shout, I would protest that I was up--flagrantly lying, flat on my back--and so it would go for several iterations. She eventually settled into three methods of prying me out of bed. Yelling, tickling, cats. The first was the easiest, and probably the least effective. The second was the most effort intensive, but also the most effective. The third was the best for stories: she would lob a cat at me, on the assumption that its landing--all claws extended--would startle me into permanent wakefulness. The problem was that I learned to catch the cat, cradle it as an actual athlete might a football, and then pacify it by petting. And so I would roll over and return to vague sleep. I only have vague memories of this, but I'd kill for evidence of it.
Boarding school came, and college, and somewhere along the way my mother either relented or gave up (probably a bit of both, is my guess), and therefore just let me sleep unless it was absolutely necessary that I be up and awake and functional. It was a lovely compromise. Since graduating into the real world (a trial run after college and the real thing now that law school's spit me out), my mother is no longer my alarm clock. I suspect this is a good thing for everyone. Instead, my cell phone serves--noisily, insistently, inevitably--in her stead. Oh god the beeping.
Now, when I wake up in the mornings--for the first time I'm conscious of doing so, anyway, which may not strictly be the first time (although it often is when alarms are involved)--I am awake. That sort of awake that crystalizes everything you were thinking about just before you went to sleep. The sort of awake that scrolls your to-do list before your eyes as they open in budding horror at how late it is, even though it's painfully early. The sort of awake that causes you to vault out of bed in defiance of gravity and several other laws purely through force of adrenaline and terror. It's rather unpleasant, and I'd much rather ease gently into wakefulness sometime in the early afternoon.
After the energy of waking up is spent--often my the sheer drudgery of getting myself from my bed to the shower, often by way of the computer (those web comics won't read themselves)--I lapse back into a groggy state that seems zombie-like only because my brain and my body aren't in synch. The brain's working fine--often a bit too fast--but the connection's a bit wonky until I've showered, shaved, and generally clawed my way toward humanity. This may be why people think I'm bad at mornings. And it's a fiction I'll maintain for as long as it's useful to do so--largely because, as I said, I dislike mornings.
It being 10AM, I still would rather be asleep.
Next time, I will talk either about roommates or night time.
As far as I know, I've always been rather like this. My mother, an aggressive morning person (it seemed like it was not enough, growing up, that she be up at some ungodly pre-sun hour--all of the rest of us had to be up sometime shortly thereafter), has stories about waking me up for school. She would shout, I would protest that I was up--flagrantly lying, flat on my back--and so it would go for several iterations. She eventually settled into three methods of prying me out of bed. Yelling, tickling, cats. The first was the easiest, and probably the least effective. The second was the most effort intensive, but also the most effective. The third was the best for stories: she would lob a cat at me, on the assumption that its landing--all claws extended--would startle me into permanent wakefulness. The problem was that I learned to catch the cat, cradle it as an actual athlete might a football, and then pacify it by petting. And so I would roll over and return to vague sleep. I only have vague memories of this, but I'd kill for evidence of it.
Boarding school came, and college, and somewhere along the way my mother either relented or gave up (probably a bit of both, is my guess), and therefore just let me sleep unless it was absolutely necessary that I be up and awake and functional. It was a lovely compromise. Since graduating into the real world (a trial run after college and the real thing now that law school's spit me out), my mother is no longer my alarm clock. I suspect this is a good thing for everyone. Instead, my cell phone serves--noisily, insistently, inevitably--in her stead. Oh god the beeping.
Now, when I wake up in the mornings--for the first time I'm conscious of doing so, anyway, which may not strictly be the first time (although it often is when alarms are involved)--I am awake. That sort of awake that crystalizes everything you were thinking about just before you went to sleep. The sort of awake that scrolls your to-do list before your eyes as they open in budding horror at how late it is, even though it's painfully early. The sort of awake that causes you to vault out of bed in defiance of gravity and several other laws purely through force of adrenaline and terror. It's rather unpleasant, and I'd much rather ease gently into wakefulness sometime in the early afternoon.
After the energy of waking up is spent--often my the sheer drudgery of getting myself from my bed to the shower, often by way of the computer (those web comics won't read themselves)--I lapse back into a groggy state that seems zombie-like only because my brain and my body aren't in synch. The brain's working fine--often a bit too fast--but the connection's a bit wonky until I've showered, shaved, and generally clawed my way toward humanity. This may be why people think I'm bad at mornings. And it's a fiction I'll maintain for as long as it's useful to do so--largely because, as I said, I dislike mornings.
It being 10AM, I still would rather be asleep.
Next time, I will talk either about roommates or night time.
Thursday, August 25, 2011
Adventures in Commuting (in which I restart my blog)
Ladies and gentlemen, please don't panic. This is just a routine test. ...Actually, that's a great big lie. This blog's been dormant for more than a year, and only sporadically updated before then. Now that I'm all graduated and shit, there's much less excuse for a failure at regular posting (although I'm sure that I will persist in doing that, and in making excuses for it). That said, I am back online--I trailed off in a vague depression at 3L unemployment, and had intentions of restarting when I got a job. I never quite got the job that I'd imagined (I've got a this-is-a-pretend-legal-job starting next week and am presently temping with great hilarity at a synagogue in Hyde Park), but I am employed and therefore possessed of positive cash-flow, so I suppose it counts. That I'm working in Hyde Park is important context for this post--I'll talk about the gig here at some future point, I'm sure. Also about events of the last year, maybe. As I see fit. In any event, disclaimer aside, reintroductory verbiage accomplished, on to the post proper.
I am a temp. I work at a synagogue five days a week (three next week, and two thereafter until the High Holy Days and the system change are over, at which point... likely none). The synagogue is in Hyde Park, and I am expected to be here at or around (but no earlier than, as I won't be able to get in, and will invite Secret Service suspicion) 8:30AM.
I lived in Streetervillehell, as it was 6 minutes on foot away from classes. Classes, though, are no more, and I have moved up to Ravenswood where life is cheap and roommates are awesome. Well, to say that I've moved is not quite accurate: I (with the help of four heroic friends) have moved some of my shit, but not nearly all of it, as my old apartment will attest. The rest will come up within the next week, as I'm to be out of the old place by Wednesday.
Now, the reason for posting all of this, at perhaps too great a length, is that I have not had the same commute from Point A (wherever it be) to the synagogue and back twice in the week and a half I've worked here. I do not drive, and am therefore using only public transportation and my own two feet. So.
There are a variety of ways to get around this city, as most of you are doubtless aware. There are buses--lots of them, of varying speed, reliability, and quality. There are trains--my preference if they can get me even remotely near my target. There's the metra, if you're doing a serious commute and want to feel like you're a 1950s businessman.
The first day's commute was an adventure in three parts. I discount walking in all of this--at least in distances under a mile. Home to the Red Line (Grand) to the Green Line (Roosevelt) to the 15. The Red Line is... one of the better kept throughfares of the El, as it's where most of the tourists and a certain set of locals restrict themselves to, and encompasses Streetervillehell, Boystown, both ball parks, and various other places of moderate interest. The Green Line, by contrast, is... not that. It is less used by populations the city actively cares about, and white people seem to be at least marginally afraid of it (as an aside, the Green Line in any city whose public transit I've used with any frequency--with the partial exception of Boston--is usually one of the underused/underfunded/undercared-for lines). And the 15 is a local bus that runs slowly and infrequently along 51st/Hyde Park Boulevard. Total commute time approximately 1hr 10m. Stew drove me home that evening.
Last Tuesday's commute was less of an adventure, as it was a repeat of the first one. Still not enough time to settle in comfortably and read much of Kissing the Witch (a collection of brief, vaguely feminist retellings of fairy-tales. Quite good. Courtesy of Adam), but I did make progress. I found myself invited over to Stew's post-work, which turned into an invite to a dinner party, and thus was driven home thereafter--still no return commute.
Wednesday morning: same. Finished Kissing the Witch. Return commute involved waiting for the 15--for 40 minutes. Total commute time: nearly 2 hours.
Thursday! Same morning. Another stupid-long wait, but this time I took the 15 all the way to the Red Line rather than stop at the Green. Only 1.5 hrs this time.
Friday: skipped the Green on the way down--Red to the 15, which waited 15m to leave from the 47th Red Line station. 1hr inbound. Was advised that the 6 was, in fact, the way to get to and from Hyde Park in a reasonable fashion, so I tried that on the way home. 45 minutes of one leg of transit--heaven (and reading Chocolat).
Monday was the 6 both ways--a nice 12ish minute walk from my old apartment down across the river on Columbus, a similar walk on the other end, and about half an hour of bus in between. Confirmed my love of coffee for surviving mornings.
Tuesday had the 6 going down, but Stew drove me up to my old place. There was then packing and moving a fair amount of my furniture and suchwhat to the new place, followed by late-night IHOP and an air mattress in Hyde Park.
Yesterday I walked to work from Stew's, having woken up to an adorable flailing muppet of a dog named Charlie, as well as french toast. The 6 took me home, by way of my old apartment and a date involving two-plus hours of walking about the city, and involved the 6, the Red Line, and the Brown Line.
This morning was the Brown Line to the 2 (I hit Van Buren between departures of the 6), the latter of which featured a non-sensical stop for the driver to eat a snack of some sort while another passenger and I waited for him to keep things moving. Tonight, Bergy will probably sweep me out of Hyde Park the newly re-christened Mr. Bergy, for hanging out and moving of more of my shit.
Yes, this devolved into a variations-on-a-theme list, but there are two main points here: first, that there are a bunch of ways of getting around in Chicago, even if they're not all efficient or fast or reliable; second, that going halfway (or entirely) across the city for work is silly and, in the right light, rather entertaining. I'll let you know when I have a stable commute. Next time's topic (unless I feel like something else needs be addressed): mornings.
I am a temp. I work at a synagogue five days a week (three next week, and two thereafter until the High Holy Days and the system change are over, at which point... likely none). The synagogue is in Hyde Park, and I am expected to be here at or around (but no earlier than, as I won't be able to get in, and will invite Secret Service suspicion) 8:30AM.
I lived in Streetervillehell, as it was 6 minutes on foot away from classes. Classes, though, are no more, and I have moved up to Ravenswood where life is cheap and roommates are awesome. Well, to say that I've moved is not quite accurate: I (with the help of four heroic friends) have moved some of my shit, but not nearly all of it, as my old apartment will attest. The rest will come up within the next week, as I'm to be out of the old place by Wednesday.
Now, the reason for posting all of this, at perhaps too great a length, is that I have not had the same commute from Point A (wherever it be) to the synagogue and back twice in the week and a half I've worked here. I do not drive, and am therefore using only public transportation and my own two feet. So.
There are a variety of ways to get around this city, as most of you are doubtless aware. There are buses--lots of them, of varying speed, reliability, and quality. There are trains--my preference if they can get me even remotely near my target. There's the metra, if you're doing a serious commute and want to feel like you're a 1950s businessman.
The first day's commute was an adventure in three parts. I discount walking in all of this--at least in distances under a mile. Home to the Red Line (Grand) to the Green Line (Roosevelt) to the 15. The Red Line is... one of the better kept throughfares of the El, as it's where most of the tourists and a certain set of locals restrict themselves to, and encompasses Streetervillehell, Boystown, both ball parks, and various other places of moderate interest. The Green Line, by contrast, is... not that. It is less used by populations the city actively cares about, and white people seem to be at least marginally afraid of it (as an aside, the Green Line in any city whose public transit I've used with any frequency--with the partial exception of Boston--is usually one of the underused/underfunded/undercared-for lines). And the 15 is a local bus that runs slowly and infrequently along 51st/Hyde Park Boulevard. Total commute time approximately 1hr 10m. Stew drove me home that evening.
Last Tuesday's commute was less of an adventure, as it was a repeat of the first one. Still not enough time to settle in comfortably and read much of Kissing the Witch (a collection of brief, vaguely feminist retellings of fairy-tales. Quite good. Courtesy of Adam), but I did make progress. I found myself invited over to Stew's post-work, which turned into an invite to a dinner party, and thus was driven home thereafter--still no return commute.
Wednesday morning: same. Finished Kissing the Witch. Return commute involved waiting for the 15--for 40 minutes. Total commute time: nearly 2 hours.
Thursday! Same morning. Another stupid-long wait, but this time I took the 15 all the way to the Red Line rather than stop at the Green. Only 1.5 hrs this time.
Friday: skipped the Green on the way down--Red to the 15, which waited 15m to leave from the 47th Red Line station. 1hr inbound. Was advised that the 6 was, in fact, the way to get to and from Hyde Park in a reasonable fashion, so I tried that on the way home. 45 minutes of one leg of transit--heaven (and reading Chocolat).
Monday was the 6 both ways--a nice 12ish minute walk from my old apartment down across the river on Columbus, a similar walk on the other end, and about half an hour of bus in between. Confirmed my love of coffee for surviving mornings.
Tuesday had the 6 going down, but Stew drove me up to my old place. There was then packing and moving a fair amount of my furniture and suchwhat to the new place, followed by late-night IHOP and an air mattress in Hyde Park.
Yesterday I walked to work from Stew's, having woken up to an adorable flailing muppet of a dog named Charlie, as well as french toast. The 6 took me home, by way of my old apartment and a date involving two-plus hours of walking about the city, and involved the 6, the Red Line, and the Brown Line.
This morning was the Brown Line to the 2 (I hit Van Buren between departures of the 6), the latter of which featured a non-sensical stop for the driver to eat a snack of some sort while another passenger and I waited for him to keep things moving. Tonight, Bergy will probably sweep me out of Hyde Park the newly re-christened Mr. Bergy, for hanging out and moving of more of my shit.
Yes, this devolved into a variations-on-a-theme list, but there are two main points here: first, that there are a bunch of ways of getting around in Chicago, even if they're not all efficient or fast or reliable; second, that going halfway (or entirely) across the city for work is silly and, in the right light, rather entertaining. I'll let you know when I have a stable commute. Next time's topic (unless I feel like something else needs be addressed): mornings.
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