There's a conspiracy against my sleeping this morning.
First, I was awakened by a call from Rob's boss.
Apparently, he dialed the wrong number and called here by mistake.
So I was trying to get back to sleep, tossed and turned for an hour, made one of my cats curl up on the bed, in the hopes that the feline sleepy magic would work, then the phone rang again.
Oh well.
I had a little bit to drink last night. Not bad, only five shots or so, but I was up kind of late, so now it's time for me to try to wake myself up.
So, the neighborhood that Rob is staying in is as bad as I suspected. I looked at the part of Oakland from a map, and remembered it being pretty nasty.
Apparently, it hasn't improved much in the past eight years. He tells me that if he really wanted to find crack he wouldn't have any difficulty. Heh.
Ahh it makes me so nostalgic of when I lived in West Oakland in the early nineties.
Bad neighborhood notwithstanding, I wish I could be there. I think I'd still rather be in cracktown than in this bland, midwestern hellhole. Hey, bad neighborhoods I can handle. I just take the bart into San Francisco and I can go to a decent cafe, bookstore or restaurant. It beats the hell out of strip malls and blank farmer stares, drawling "well how 'bout that" if you venture out of their shared mind. And there is a shared mind here. People say things, and respond to things, as if you know exactly what they're talking about, as if their own brand of normalcy is some sort of absolute truth. So much so that there is no room for interpretation or doubt, there is no chance someone would not know what you're talking about or have a different perspective because they all share the same brain.
Zombies, I tell you, they're all zombies.
The irony of it all is that when we moved here we were burnt out on living in our charming little Humboldt Park gang neighborhood and run down apartment. That was a big part of it. We saw that for just a little more we could get a luxury apartment with all the bells and whistles.
Of course, there were other factors. People we knew told us things about this town that were so out in left field . It's weird, because this town kind of really over inflates itself in terms of what it has to offer. I think it's because so many people come from towns that are much smaller and don't know any better. and, some of you may recall, we had a good time when we visited. Of course there was the time that we planned to spend four days here, we were here for one day when Rob got the call that he had to be in Columbus by that Monday and we had to cut the trip drastically short. I sometimes wonder, if we had stayed the full four days, if we would have had enough time to discern between the hospitality of our associates and the sheer underlying suck of the town itself.
Weird.
Sometimes you wonder when it's such a delicate interweaving of chance why things turned out the way they did. Is there a reason for us to get stranded in this hellhole for a year? Or is it just circumstance, and a case of a classic bad idea?
Oh well. I guess when you have extreme circumstances for too long, you go to the opposite extreme. I mean, really, I don't need a work out room and tennis courts, indoor and outdoor pools and jacuzzis (I haven't wanted to use the inside jacuzzi since our security guard neighbor informed us that he frequently catches people having sex there, and it only gets cleaned maybe twice a month.) pet sitting service (they didn't actually feed the cats when we were in Europe. Luckily, we left them a lot of food.) dry cleaning service (they sometimes take two months to get our clothes back to us) hospitality suite for guests (it's rarely available and costs the same as all the hotels right up the street) or any of the other services. And having a great party pad doesn't help if everyone that you'd want at a party is in a city two hours away.
But in a way I suppose it's good.
Before I met Rob, I was forced to move to Milwaukee for a time. There was a lot of craziness that contributed, and I didn't actually want to leave Chicago.
But I only stayed there for three months. I hated living there, and was glad to be back in Chicago. But then we wound up living in that crappy apartment, and I got really sour on Chicago.
I think if I'd been in the situation I'm in now, where I was actually *forced* to stay somewhere I don't like for a year, I probably would have been a bit more down to earth about how to improve my situation. So who knows, maybe this is necessary torture .
We've joked about buying a house just so we don't ever get tempted to leave. Because, as utterly infuriating as the city can get sometimes, there's something so completely comforting and soothing about the old buildings and the trains. It's drinking a latte in earwax when it's snowing outside, it's taking the brown line in October, it's spending the afternoon at Lemmings in the summer. All these things really contribute to a certain feeling that makes it hard to stay away for long...
And on a side note, I must have sneezed fifty times while writing this...don't you just love November?