In Limbo

It's been a while since I've posted, but I've had good reason and several unfinished drafts to show for it.

SM sent in his applications for graduate schools of journalism back in December, and time has been indiscriminately rushing by ever since. Of course, he was accepted into all four schools to which he applied — Medill at Northwestern, NYU, Berkeley, and Columbia University. By March, he had whittled the list down to the two best, Berkeley and Columbia, and we headed west to check out Cal on March 17.

It was both our first real vacation together, and our first times in California. For me, it was my first time west of Mandan, ND. I had a blast. Check out my iPhone pictures. One thing that stood out to me, though, was just the feeling of isolation; it was palpable. I felt that moving to California would be a conscious choice to leave my friends, family, and connections to a certain life that was buzzing about on the east side of the country. They are on a different frequency there that felt good just as much as it felt somehow selfish. Anyway, by SM's second day of admitted student activities, I was having a bit of a panic attack about being so disconnected. My pictures of California, I told him, were full of beautiful places; my pictures of New York were filled with my friends.

In the end, SM settled on New York, but necessarily on his own terms. In mid-April, we visited NYC for the Columbia admitted students weekend, and by the second day he was sold by the prestige, the challenge, and the job opportunities afforded by Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism.

And so on July 2, we shipped our things and left Chicago on a train. And I've been in limbo ever since.

I definitely feel less isolated than I think I would had we moved to Berkeley, but at this point, 8 days after leaving SM's childhood room in Goshen and moving into our new place on 30th and 9th, and 17 days after pulling out of Union station, I still feel like my feet have yet to touch the ground. I don't like it. It's not as much that I miss Chicago — I do miss certain parts, certain people — as much as I haven't fully grounded myself here in New York. And I'm not exactly worried as I am impatient; I want this feeling of detachment to be over. It makes me sad.

I wonder if I felt this way in college, when I first moved to Chicago. It's the only other time in my life when I've made the leap into such new territory. Maybe not, though, because I thought I knew Chicago, and of course I didn't, but I thought I did. It's strange. It will probably just take some time and some walking around and some feeling that I know this new place. It will probably also take some more detachment from Chicago: a new job would probably go a long way, for example.

I'll let you know how this turns out.

The New 'Hood

It's high time for a post about our new apartment. On or around July 1, SM and I moved into a new apartment in Chicago's North Center neighborhood. It's pretty awesome. The surrounding area is quiet, but has a bunch of cool restaurants and bars and cultural activities. We're pretty much just as far west as we were before, but we are 12 big blocks north. Also, we're now a 5 minute walk from the Brown Line at Irving Park, which is a huge improvement from the 20 minute walk we had before. I don't mind walking of course--the nice walks around the neighborhood was one of the things that attracted us to this spot--but when it comes to getting to work in a timely fashion, a 5 minute walk can make all the difference.

I've explained it this way: at our old place, if I was ready to leave the house 8am, my choices were to wait for the bus and get to the train station (to wait however long for a train) in 5 minutes or walk to the train station in 20 minutes. If I use CTA Bus Tracker to discover that there's a bus in 10 minutes, it saves me 5 minutes, but I'm still starting my commute at 8:10 instead of 8am. These days, I can leave whenever I want, and 5 minutes later, I'm at the train station on my own two feet, and there's usually a train (and a seat!) about every 5 minutes during rush hour. I'm getting to work consistently in an hour or a little less, instead of an hour one day, an hour and 10, 20 minutes the next.

If I'm going some place other than work, the CTA options are still plentiful. There's the Brown Line to the loop (or the Brown Line to the Red Line to 95th), the Ashland bus south but staying west, the Lincoln bus to the west of us going southeast, the Clark bus to the east of us going southeast, the Damen bus to the west of us running north and south, and the Irving Park bus down the block going east and west. Each of these options is within a 10 minute walk from our door. It's transit heaven!

Inside the apartment, it's absolutely beautiful. The building was built in 1931, and it's all brick on the outside, old wood on the inside (dark wood door with glass panes in the dining room, old style windows). It's large, with a sizable living room and bedroom, 2 closets, a hall way, a bathroom, a linen closet, and a kitchen with a separate dining room area. There are lots of built in cabinets and, as I've implied, tons of storage place, which was something we were adamant about on our search. There is also a dishwasher and a microwave above the stove. There is free radiator heat, which is pretty cool, because that's how I grew up. It's very much a practical and awesome place.

Another thing I like about our apartment is just the new perks of living alone. Alright, so I'm living with S, but he's no roommate or anything. We even have similar cleanliness and organizational habits and design desires, so most roommate differences don't even count. Anyway, there's so much you can do when you live alone. All the space is yours. All the food is yours. You don't have to move anything you don't want to. The TV is always yours. The living room is always yours. You can go into another room whenever you want. If so inclined, you can do any business you want in the bathroom with the door open.

But my #1, most favorite perk of living alone is that you can wear as little as you want at all times. (Gross Out Alert) You can walk around completely naked. It is in my top 3 most liberated feelings. One of the first things I do when I get home from work is take off my pants. It's awesome. And some days, you just need to strip down. It's your right; it's your place. If you don't already, I highly suggest getting your own place for that reason alone.

As my good friend OBM once said, "nudity and happiness go hand in hand in living in one's own place." If you don't like where you live or you're feeling down in a rut, I recommend shedding some of that clothing and taking a tour in your birthday suit. Go ahead. DO it. Take a deep breath and feel renewed. There's really nothing like it.

Snowballs

Do you ever have those experiences in which you have an idea you attempt to fill out in your head, but then a series of experiences causes the idea to grow into, not one, fleshed out idea, but several related ideas?

In high school, MCS and I would preface many of our latest thoughts and discoveries with a quick rundown of the train of thought that led to the epiphany. Here's mine: first I was fleshing out a post centered around these articles and my personal experiences and reactions to them as a black female, but then I started relating those thoughts to the book I'm currently reading, Sellout: The Politics of Racial Betrayal. After that, I was talking to KAC about the book as well as what another meaning sellout could be nowadays, especially since sometimes the most visible black people are those making a "bad name" for us and perpetuating terrible stereotypes that even our friends are guilty of believing we are only an exception to, as opposed to members of a heterogeneous race with many different types of people (see: "Kids 'Make it Rain' on Mom"). And then it all came back home with a stressful situation at work that I won't go into. All of this in a matter of about 2 weeks.

I don't even know where to go from here, especially since the work situation continues to stress me out and make me want to cry (as I did yesterday, alone in my office).

I can only conclude this: Race is a very complicated issue that has not yet gone away. I wonder, though, how much will things have changed by the time our generation are the ones running the world? How much of current attitudes (in multiracial communities) reflect the tension between the older generations -- so close to the Civil Rights Movement and its aftermath -- and the younger? I am pretty confident that while our generation is not by any means completely "post-racial," the playing field has and will continue to change along those lines. (That is not to say, however, that something bigger, like huge class-related problems, is on the horizon.) The question is, what effect have all of those multiracial TGIF shows and textbooks had on the growing adults of America? How much will be changed once we rule the world?

Say Shhh...

SM and I went back to Minneapolis for my brother's high school graduation last Saturday through Tuesday. After this weekend being so long what with work all day Saturday and everything, it seems like it was already so long ago, but I figure it's not too late to officially attempt to set down in writing a few reasons why I think Minneapolis is the greatest and a few other thoughts I have about the town.

I love the scale of Minneapolis. It's a lot smaller than Chicago, but it's still packed with a lot to do. Sometimes, I feel like a giant among the buildings downtown, but it's a lot more manageable, and its features feel functional and efficient, nothing more or nothing less than is needed. The layout is clean and clear. Also, skyways are amazing.

Public transit has gotten a lot better, and the plans for the newest leg of the Light Rail are in the works. One of the things I truly appreciate is something that evolves organically, and I think that MetroTransit under R.T. Rybak's guidance has done just that for the public transportation of Minneapolis. Instead of sprawling until it's too late to put together a working system, the city has taken the time to figure out what it needs and really promote it from a heartfelt place. The Light Rail is a prime example, as is the fact that downtown they already have the upcoming buses on display at bus stop kiosks, something Chicago has only recently caught on to. Also, speaking of transit, the bike system is amazing. This year it's been officially named the most bike friendly city, but it's been in the top tier in past years as well.

It's a great blend of city and nature. I never went crazy being in the city for long stretches because I could drive for less than 40 minutes and hit farmland or large estates. Even before that, there are just trees everywhere, in all neighborhoods, and the plethora of lakes creates mini oases out of many areas of the city without locking people in to super-defined neighborhoods. This is something I really treasure, because, while Chicago prides itself on its neighborhoods with distinct personalities, unique patches within the larger quilt, I am constantly frustrated with just how true that is. Unless one makes the effort to look at that larger framework, one can easily get caught up with the intricate patterns of one's own square. There are so many native Chicagoans (friends and family included) who don't know anything outside of their own neighborhoods. The neighborhoods are set up to be self-sufficient and can be quite isolating unless one's goal is to delve into a new place for the sake of seeing how it fits into the rest of the city. Unfortunately, that means the people who get the most out of this quilted metropolis are the outsiders who care to look.

One more thing I really love about Minneapolis is that it's free to live outside of the shadow of other cities. While Chicago is too busy going blow for blow with New York, there's enough Minnesota/Minneapolis confidence in creating its own thing. Who cares about New York vs. Chicago style pizza? Both are good, so don't waste time with imitations: just make a good pizza and forget the label. We don't need to stack ourselves up against other places when it comes to the arts either. Sure, we know that New York is a big place with big museums and theaters, but we've got our own theaters and museums and a deeply rooted appreciation of the arts that has garnered national attention without an unnecessary complex.

I could go on and on about the smaller and more personal reasons I love Minneapolis (it would probably be a list of names and places), but that would just be gushing, and it would be beside my point of pointing out Minneapolis's strength as a city. To temper the high opinion you all know I have for my hometown, I must throw in a caveat. I don't know much at all about the nightlife. I've enjoyed it, but I don't know it well enough to put forth my two cents on the subject. Unfortunately, I left Minneapolis just as I was able to take advantage of a very important facet of city life.

Whenever I go back, I get really excited, and then I realize I don't have anything to suggest to my friends when we want to hang out. Places I'd even vaguely heard of have turned out to have d-bag clientele or no longer fit who I am today. I feel powerless in that kind of situation, completely dependent upon the handful of my closer friends in the area who have stuck around to make their adult lives there. I would really like to be able to spend enough time there to make my own social decisions about the place. I'm sure it's always hard to go back to any hometown under those circumstances, when you've built your life in another place and grown into another person while being there, but I think it's especially hard, when one has such a glowing review otherwise, to be in the dark about a sizable facet of what life is for one now. Hopefully one day that will change, though. In the meantime, the places my friends have discovered and shown me have been right on target, and I look forward to the next time I get to visit my hometown, my territory, my state.