One Month In
Alright, so I've been in this Nice place for over a month now. That's longer than a vacation. That's significantly longer than a camping trip. I have a favorite coffee shop in town and I know what kind of people to avoid. That initially wounding shock is more or less over. I have taken my first mid-term (B) and recieved my first paper (A-) and everything and everyone is very collegiate.
A month isn't a long time, though. It's not a year, and it is most certainly not four. And then the dreaded question comes up, did I make the right choice? A ha! Self conscious self doubt never fails.
Transcribed from journal; 6 October
On the El. The train. Meeting people 30 minutes away. (30 minutes of city). Can I call them friends yet?
* * *
The train is not full. It is 'express' going Downtown. The Loop. Passing next to public housing, mixed income areas, strained class battles. They pass by as pictures, fast and unreal. The trees are starting to turn. They shed on porches and windows close to the tracks. Framed by dirty deep brown brick. Boarded up windows like empty eye sockets. Tenements? Poverty? Gentrification? Home to someone.
On the train they fly past unnoticed, close but miles away by glass panes and electric currents and speed. The old woman asks for help navigating the stops and finishes her crossword.
She has to wake the other woman up to get directions. Most people sleep, or pretend to.
* * *
On the other side of the graveyard wall, past the barbed wire and stone and sanctified ground, two men sleep in a parking lot. Blankets make up their camp, hung on shopping carts and under their heads. They guard black plastic bags filled with anything. The dead sleep on the other side of the barbed wire, safe; the men sleep on their blankets. The train doesn't stop: it's express.
* * *
The spider web on the stoplight, the things you see from these elevated tracks.
The Lab
Evanston is a nice place. As is the Northwestern campus. But there times when it becomes impossible to stay in these nice places, no matter how much they try to suck you in.
Against an entire dorm floor filled with naysayers, tonight my friends and I got on the El at 1130pm and braved the hour long ride into Chinatown. What were we looking for? For the well hidden and completely out-of-the-way warehouse club, The Lab.
Clad in strange lamé and fur attire, with garrish makeup and glitter nails we walked the midnight streets, dodging 'panhandlers' and meth addicts; trying desperately to avoid those horrible situations one hears about on local 5 o'clock news. Crossing a pathetic excuse for a Chicago river we found our warehouse, wandered in through a door marked 'Lumber', and rode the service elevator up to the 5th floor.
Instant satisfaction, so to speak. Hard core electro-trash. Cowboy Bebop movie projected on the wall. Swanky couches and 'sophisticated' decor. Wasted 20 somethings and booming college students. This fabulous unnamed foreign woman. Photographs at every angle. Absolutly drenched (literally) in sweat.
Nothing in SLC could ever compare, sorry 80's night. Although, I doubt I'll go there again anytime soon. But it was more than worth it. +++
Now for sleep.
