Chicago Seemed [ ] Last Night

I've been away, but now I'm returned. First to answer a question regarding the last entry: "What good is a non-existent friend?" I usually answer questions personally, but since the question was anonymous, I'll have to answer with another, similarly public, question: is a non-existent friend worse than a friend who makes one feel not like oneself? In other words: is having company but being shunted into a deterministic role, one which I've no desire to play and every desire to revolt against, really preferable to having no company at all?

Anyway.

Thing 1.

I've moved. This is not some kind of metaphor. I left the University Parkway apartment a week and a half ago with most of my belongings. Nothing of mine left at that place now except dust, garbage, and furniture I have to sell. (And whatever Esteban has.) Moving made me realize I have too many things: too many CDs, too many binders of notes from college (fully two crates full), too many pens and Altoids tins full of coins and paperclips. Just too much, too much, and too little that I can bring (my desk was too big for my new room), and even less that serves me. I think when I finally leave this town--whenever that ends up being--I'm going to make a list of everything I actually need, which will probably begin with my laptop and end with my guitar and include two weeks' worth of clothing in the middle, and ditch everything else.

But the new place is nice. Recently renovated with washer, dryer, and central A/C. I've got a nice little room with west-facing windows that get a lot of sun in the afternoon. Mike and I had an adventure hauling our box springs up to the second story ledge with ropes. It's quiet out here, this far from the thoroughfares of Charles Village. This is what I had in mind: serenity, sunlight, space for contemplation; but I've unexpectedly begun to miss some of the elements of apartment living. Geri who was nice and lived with her boyfriend (?) upstairs, with their adorable beagle Oscar who barked day in and day out. The kid upstairs on the other side of 106 West University with the violin. The girl on the third floor across the who played showtunes on a cheap Yamaha keyboard by the window. She wasn't a great pianist, but a couple times last semester I took a break from studying for a cell bio exam to sit at the window and listen to her play, and when I looked out I saw people from around the building, and the Carolina next to us, looking out their windows, trying to find the source for the synthesized Phantom of the Opera coming down the alley. Once I wrote "Encore!" on an orange Post-It and left it on her door. The next day it appeared in her window, stuck to the music stand. A few weeks later I left another Post-It saying the people in the Carolina were listening. The day after that there were two orange Post-Its in the window.

Another issue is my newfound home security paranoia. Sometime this week I was sitting in my living room downstairs and looked out the window, and realized that mere inches of concrete separated us from whoever wanted to walk off the street and up the steps and on to our front porch. All they had to do to see Bex's nice TV was to press up to the first story windows. One front door, that's all there was, no need to break through a second apartment door upstairs, no other apartments to distract attention from ours, no downstairs foyer with the leasing lady watching everyone pass by on working hours during the weekdays. I've been careful to not leave my laptop on the couch with the blinds up. I'm considering putting a deadbolt on the basement door.

Maybe that's the flip side of moving to a quieter neighborhood: feeling more exposed. Especially since there aren't many other students around.

Thing 2.

Last weekend I went to Chicago for the Pitchfork Music Festival. I was there with John and Mike last year, but this year we brought a posse: Diamond, Maura, Bailey, and Diamond's friend Lauren. Lauren and I arrived ahead of everyone else on Friday; we met up with Rachie and her friend Jason from Northwestern, hit up Millenium Park and wandered along Lake Michigan. Lauren traveled with a Galaxie 500 CD, hinted at a history of substances up in New Brunswick, and liked Slowdive. Missed out on seeing Dena and her family again, but I couldn't really find time to head 40 minutes out into the suburbs.

The music was great, of course; I missed a few of Mission of Burma's songs, but Sebadoh's performance convinced me that Bubble & Scrape, which I'd not paid particular attention to before (except "Soul and Fire" and "Think (Let Tomorrow Bee)"), was a flawless album. The bands I saw with very little prior knowledge of all put on good shows (except HEALTH, who impressed me as being more concerned with having good hair than making interesting noise rock)--Fuck Buttons, High Places--but the bands I liked the most were the bands I knew I would like, for the most part. I jumped and shouted along to Hold Steady and charged headlong into Dinosaur Jr's moshpit. Caribou, The Apples in Stereo, and Spiritualized were great as well, but I saw them from a lazy distance.

We found the Marina City towers, as seen on the cover of Wilco's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. I drank lots of water. I was armed with an (legit) over-21 driver's license this year, but I only bought one beer on Saturday and Sunday each; I didn't want to risk dehydration, or zoning out at the wrong moment and missing something cool. Hanging out in hotel rooms and bars at night was a different story. I shot pool with Bailey in a bar while "Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots pt. 1" played on the jukebox, and met the wife of The Apples in Stereo's drummer on the roof of the Bottom Lounge. Lauren and I played shuffleboard against some irritated-looking girls and won ourselves some new Sauconys, which should arrive in the mail sometime. Speaking of shoes, my sneakers aged 4 years in as many days. Somewhere along the line down from half a bottle of wine I got into a discussion with Bailey, who reminds me in every way of a more cosmopolitan Fiona, about what it meant to fall in love, and to my great surprise we agreed. At night Diamond, Lauren and I shared a king-sized bed in a very drama-free way.

Really, on top of everything, Chicago is simply a beautiful city. I first passed through Chicago in the early winter of 2002 and since then it's been at the top of my list of favorite American cities I've visited. (We'll find out in a couple months where Boston stands.) I arrived this year with a new appreciation for this city: after an hour or two of wandering the Loop with Rachie and Lauren I started to notice the huge number of bikes locked up on every corner, people walking hybrids along the sidewalk, and track-bike courier types weaving between cars under the elevated rails. Then I realized how amazing it would be to race down one of the flat, straight, smoothly-paved downtown roads, swing onto Wacker by the river, cross a bridge, and maybe eventually glide past the shores of Lake Michigan. Turns out Chicago's the biking capitol of the United States. Just another reason I want to live there at some point. That and the pizza. But really, visiting's never enough; I wish I could live in several major cities simultaneously.

Which is another interesting point: besides the party in one of JJ's friends' ridiculously posh parent-owned condo, which could've happened in any other city with a similar crowd, I felt at home in Chicago, despite having maintained a staunch small-town Baltimore mentality for the past few years, and believing that I simply didn't move fast enough for a big-city lifestyle. It's almost misleading to refer to Baltimore and Chicago both as "cities": I wonder what it would be like to live there and know that the city infrastructure actually supports you in some way, that the place actually looks nice, that you can walk ten blocks in one direction without wandering into the ghetto, that you can go places without driving, and so on. Seems almost too easy, from a Baltimore perspective.

One way or the other, I'm back now, still a bit stupefied from the trip, but ready for things to happen soon. I finished The Summer of Naked Swim Parties, a novel written by one of the writing instructors at my school; I wonder if it's strange that I feel deeply sympathetic toward a book about a 14-year-old girl's summer of sexual awakening in 1976.