Chargo

My greatest battle of wills in Chicago, my huge arc of self vs. self conflict, has been avoiding bookstores as much as possible. Bookstores are my Achilles heel; I can't remember a time in my life where I couldn't spend hours and a significant chunk of my bank account in them. These bookstores have been even more alluring because, through all of Pride month, just about every bookstore I've passed has had a Pride display, tables full of books full of gay. Today I finally gave into the temptation and visited Unabridged, a bookstore in Boystown. The Pride displays were beautiful. This lapse in my self-control lead to the fulfillment of the quest I failed last night. I went into the store hoping to find two gay books, one history book and one fiction book. Almost right away I found The Stonewall Reader in the Pride display. This book is exactly what I wanted. It's a gay anthology with three distinct sections: before Stonewall, during Stonewall, and after Stonewall. Pengui...

Last night I went back to the closet, this time with Ellie in tow and a specific mission in mind. One of the Pride events I signed up for is a rainbow bar crawl set for tomorrow afternoon into evening. The event is one of the special ones to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of Stonewall and the place that bars as a whole had in the Gay Rights Movement. When I read that description it occurred to me that, while I know plenty about Stonewall, I don't know much about the role of bars as a whole. I was hoping that if I went back to The Closet on a Thursday Sue, the bartender who was there the first time and made a point that she was old enough to be my grandmother, would be there again and might be amenable to giving me a gay history lesson. Unfortunately, Sue wasn't there this time. Instead a beautiful young bartender with a bright hummingbird tattoo on her bicep took her place. Still, I enjoyed showing Ellie my favorite place in her own city, and we made nice conversation w...

Last night, to continue my Pride week extravaganza, I went to another Second City show, this one their Saulute to Pride. Following my knowledge from my first Second City show, I arrived an hour before the show started, fifteen minutes before the doors would open. My obsessive timing was rewarded with a seat so close I could literally reach out and touch the stage. I was seated next to another woman around my age who was also there early, and we made pleasant small-talk. I learned that she was also from out of town, but was in for her job with a journalism non-profit. She had been a communications major, and had just graduated the previous May. Given our overlapping interests, we found plenty to talk about. Before the show started, I ordered the Pride Party Punch off their special Pride show menu. It was a delicious rum-based drink, and the sour-candy pride flag was a welcome surprise. The show itself was the funniest and most relatable thing I had ever seen in my life. I...

On Monday, Ellie and I sort of went to a speakeasy. Really it was a themed bar, and there were some interesting contradictions to the story like the bar being in a bougie neighborhood and the fact that the online address for the bar lead to their valet station, but given that we don't live during the 1920's Prohibition, I think they got the vibe pretty close. It added to the experience that I, and then we, managed to get a little lost looking for this tropical speakeasy-themed bar, Three Dots and a Dash. The first error was entirely mine, a simple case of walking the wrong direction on the street after I exited the train. After that, it seemed to be by design. I followed the mapped directions to the bar, but when Siri declared my arrival, nothing that even resembled the entrance Ellie had described was anywhere nearby. She had told me the bar was situated in an alley that was lit by tiki torches. Even when I walked the rest of the way down the street, I didn't see the ent...

I almost decided not to write about this, and it was the strangest feeling. I love to write. Writing makes me feel more connected to myself and the world. I don't think I've ever had something special and thought, Wow, I really don't want to write about this  before. For some reason, this time, it almost felt wrong. It felt like letting go of something I desperately want to hold onto. I guess the tradeoff of writing like this is that I end up having to share what I'm writing about with the world, or however much of the world wants to listen. I'm not sure if I want to share this. There's a piece of myself that wants it to belong entirely to me. That doesn't feel quite right either, though, so I'm going to follow my usual instinct and write. Hopefully, as writing always seems to, it will bring me answers. On Saturday I attended my first major pride event, Pride Fest, with Chloe and some of her friends, at least some of which are now also my friends. I wa...

Here's what our parents don't always tell us about doing the honorable thing when we're young and they're trying to teach us right from wrong, folks: sometimes doing the honorable thing kind of sucks. Today I had to quit the job that was so hard-won, because obviously that's the right thing to do when I'm not going to be in the city for much longer. It's a fact I've been stressing about and losing sleep over for two nights now. The night before my final call to the voter outreach people, I was worrying about having to quit if it didn't work out. The night after, it was a more solid worry. I imagined just about every worst case, including people being mad and people being disappointed and having mistakes I had made during training thrown back at me to prove I had never been invested in the first place, thoughts I knew had no ground but still couldn't shake. The knowledge that I was going to do this face to face only made my worries worse. Life i...

Today I made my last effort to get through to the voter outreach organization I applied for a job with. It didn't work. My inability after a full week to even get in touch with these people marks the end of my efforts to stay in Chicago. It's clear at this point that nothing I came here to do is going to come through, and with that being the case it's not worth it to fight the battles I would have to fight to stay. I'd be lying if I said there wasn't a tinge of melancholy to the way I'm feeling about this right now, but all-in-all I'm okay. This blog has been important to me, and being able to look and see just how many posts I've made in the two weeks I've been out here fills me with pride. I'm happy with what I've done. If I go home now, it's a victory. If I tried to drag it out the rest of the summer for the sake of staying with no real opportunities on the horizon, that victory would sour. Still, it's not time for a wrap-up po...

Today Ellie took me to what is literally her favorite place in Chicago. It's the place she's been the most excited to take me to since I got here. Ellie is absolutely obsessed with Costco. She will sing its virtues with every breath in her body. You can get everything you need there, she says, and in ridiculous quantities. Her favorite thing, though, is the food. We literally went to Costco for dinner. I have to admit, it did not disappoint. I was so hungry I forgot to take a picture of the food, but I can describe it to you now. A giant hot dog, about half a foot in length but unfortunately not Chicago style, a medium soda, and a churro the size of my forearm all came to me for about three dollars. It was probably the cheapest meal I've ever had and by the time I was done with it my stomach was just barely edging toward the wrong side of full. It was really solid comfort food. We went there from my latest attempt to get through to the voter outreach organization. Su...

While I was downtown, I decided a trip to a certain Chicago landmark was well overdue. The Bean, formally known as Cloud Gate, is a giant silver bean-shaped statue in Millenium Park, done by artist Anish Kapoor. If you follow anything art-related, you might recognize Kapoor as the selfish artist feuding with Stuart Semple because Kapoor got himself exclusive rights to the darkest shade of black ever invented. This feud is also where I know The Bean from, because Ellie sent me Facebook events in the wake of this feud that had to do with painting The Bean Blackest Black, or Semple's counter, Pinkest Pink. The Bean is evident as soon as you get into Millenium Park, and it is kind of mesmerizing. It shows a distorted but somehow very inviting reflection of the city around it. I definitely didn't expect The Bean to speak to me. Near The Bean is this sign with a QR code... And if you use the QR code... The Bean calls you! And The Bean has a lot to say. It introduc...

I have to admit something to you, dedicated Chargo readers. Depending on how the rest of this week goes, we may be approaching the end of the line. As you know, I did manage to get a job last week, but I only work that job three nights a week. That's not quite enough to keep up with the cost of living in Chicago, and I'm having a difficult time finding another place to live. There's a chance I could stay with a friend for a while, but in the interest of trying to stay longer, I'm mostly working on finding another job this week. At first, I pictured a large search of all the downtown areas for whatever coffee shop or retail job I might be able to get hours at. My search has become far more focused now. I'm trying to get a job with an organization that does voter outreach. Courting this organization is going to take a lot of time and energy, and it's likely I won't have any left to look for a different job. I've decided it's worth the risk anyway. I ...

Today it happened, folks. I had an actual conversation on the Green Line. I was sitting across from an older woman in the same area as another young woman. When I first got on the train, that seemed like the obvious safest spot. There were two other women, no men, and I was in the back where I could see everything. I started to question that a little bit when the older woman started scratching herself everywhere, but she was still a tiny frail-looking old woman and I wasn't the only person there, so I didn't worry about it. Eventually the train came to a weirdly long and unscheduled stop. I didn't think about it too much, because there have been construction delays lately, but then a police officer came into our car and moved swiftly through the emergency door. That was enough to get me to pause my podcast and look around, which is when I made eye contact with the old woman. Now, one thing I have learned about Chicago, but I suspect about any city, is that people here fol...

Today I went on an adventure with my roommate, Sylvia, to The Second City comedy club in the Old Town neighborhood of Chicago. The Second City is a legendary comedy club that has produced names such as Tina Fey and Amy Poehler. It was featured on an episode of Anthony Bourdain's series Parts Unknown as an iconic spot in Chicago. Going to a show at The Second City was something that was non-optional when I came to Chicago, and Sylvia and I decided to go to a best of show. We got to the show about an hour early, just slightly before the doors opened. This turned out to be a fantastic idea, because we got seated right in the second row. The only people who had better seats than us were people who paid about twice as much for the show for tickets with priority seating. I definitely didn't mind having an hour to sit in the showroom. There were little pamphlets to read that included a menu and it gave me time to really take in the atmosphere. I bought a drink in a souvenir glas...

Anthony Bourdain is one of my dad's heroes. Dad has a habit of sharing the things he loves with me, so Bourdain is quickly becoming one of my heroes too. This is why I may have been abnormally excited to get a job answering phones at a local pizza place. At first, the excitement was practical; an income is an important step for me if I want to be able to stay in Chicago this summer. Then I thought about Dad's copy of Kitchen Confidential that I got half way through before I had to leave, and I got really excited. I turned up to my first shift fifteen minutes early, as per the overlap of Bourdain's standards and SEA's standards. A thrill of excitement ran through me as I was directed back through the kitchen to begin my training. Ellie joked, when I first got the job, that I wouldn't be very busy because people order online so much now. It turns out that answering phones includes online orders. All in all, my job includes answering phones, taking orders off of onl...

...But sometimes it's literally rainbows and butterflies. I spent the day today exploring the city with my friend Chloe. A fun thing about Chicago museums is that most of them have free days. They're exclusive to Illinois residents, but you don't have to have an Illinois ID to participate. All you have to do is give a zip code, so the Oak Park zip code works just fine. This morning Chloe sent me a list of some places she really likes around the city that were free and we decided to go to the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum and the Lincoln Park Zoo. They were close enough together to do both. In the early afternoon, Chloe biked over to her aunt's house where I'm staying. Then we walked to the green line together. We talked through some of the things that had been bothering me last night, and Chloe gave me a couple stories about weird encounters she's had on public transportation, and a few tips on how to make it feel less sketchy. It felt the least sketchy it...

Today was almost the first day I didn't publish something. I want to try to make that be for good, unselfish reasons like I don't want to worry anyone back home or I think the world needs more optimism, and I only want to write when I can be positive about things. Both of those statements are kind of true, but the honest truth is I almost didn't post tonight because I feel shitty and stupid and worn-out, and I just kind of want to curl into a ball and hope that I sleep it off. I'm still writing right now because I feel like if I don't post something, I go from feeling shitty and stupid and worn-out to being defeated, and fuck it all if I let that happen. Back home I definitely took the fact that pretty much everyone knows everyone for granted, and I was bored with it. I wanted to go out into a bigger world and meet new people. The problem is it's pretty much impossible to meet new people in a city as big as Chicago. It seems counterintuitive; I'm surro...

Ellie and I are having an impromptu sleepover because the bus apparently gets less reliable the later it is. I was already pushing the limits of how late I was comfortable staying out, and the bus was running more than fifteen minutes late. If it ran much later, I knew I would be lucky to get home by 12:30AM. I'm running a delicate balancing act right now between things that scare me because they're new and things that scare me because they should actually be scary. I never want to miss out on something because I'm scared of the world, but I also don't want to be an idiot about it. Tonight I decided to err on the side of caution and walk the six minutes back to Ellie's house. In the future I've learned I shouldn't push my comfort zone quite so hard if I know I'm already staying out kind of late, and for tonight I'm safe at home with Ellie.

I'm not totally sure what I was expecting out of a beach day to a Great Lake. I did remember flying over Lake Michigan on the way into the city, and how eerie it felt. The water seemed to wobble, but it didn't quite roll in the way I'm used to from oceans. There was a layer of what I think was fog sitting on the surface, but also may have been cloud. It was pretty, but it felt slightly wrong. I definitely hadn't expected the sand. I'm not sure if it's naturally that way or if it's something Chicago did on purpose, but the shore next to the water is sandy in a way not dissimilar to a beach back home in New Hampshire. The lake also had waves, not as big or rough as we see in the Atlantic, but certainly larger than I'm used to seeing from a lake. It reminded me more of the Caribbean Sea just looking at it. According to the totally reliable research method of skimming the first page of Google results without actually clicking on or reading anything,...

I want to put a disclaimer on the beginning of this post. I have not done extensive research on the Chicago public transit system. After today, I'm thinking maybe I should. The disclaimer is that this post is based almost entirely off of my own impressions from riding the Green Line and the things people I know have said to me about it, and not on any empirical data. That being said, I'm not technically living in the city right now. I'm living in Oak Park, which, if I remember correctly, is the first suburb west of Chicago. I did not understand that it was a suburb until I really went into the city. For the folks back home, Oak Park reminds me a lot of Concord. From what I've seen of it so far, it's pretty similar in terms of size and how much stuff is going on. It feels like a city to me, but I came out here to experience Big City, so I go into Chicago pretty frequently. I've mostly stuck to the Hyde Park area so far, because that's where Ellie lives ...

As fun and exciting as it is to be in a new place for the first time, especially a place like Chicago, eventually you have to slow down a little. After two days of running around and exploring non-stop, most of my muscles were displeased with me and all the sleep in the world didn't seem to be enough to help, so instead of another grand adventure I spent the day in with Ellie and her mom, Julie. We watched two Iliza Shlesinger comedy specials and ordered in deep dish, which was just as good the second time around. I was also unleashed on their home bar. The thing about deciding to make drinks impromptu is that you don't necessarily have all the ingredients. Instead of going out and buying stuff, I just improvised. They had Bailey's in the cabinet, and that's always delicious, so I decided to look up recipes involving that. I saw Mudslides and remembered my dad making them, so that was my go-to. We didn't have coffee liqueur or heavy cream on hand, so those wer...

Today I had an adventure in meal planning. This is my first time living alone without the safety nets of a college campus, so it's also the first time I've really had to feed myself. I was blessed with a dad and a stepmom who genuinely love to cook, and shared that love with their children. Unfortunately, I was not blessed with the patience that is an integral part of how they create such wonderful things in the kitchen, and I haven't spent as much time cooking with them as maybe I should have. This lead to the interesting conundrum of me knowing what making stir fry should look like and not really knowing how to replicate it. My first step was to locate everything I needed to make the food. Not going to lie, this step felt more like stalling. Then I got into the chopping. Watching my dad chop something in the kitchen is truly something to behold. He's gotten to the point you see on cooking shows where they cut things so fast you're sure they're goin...

 went on my first grocery shopping trip today, because as amazing as yesterday's food related adventures were, I can't afford to eat out all day every day (though I did go to Brown Cow for ice cream tonight, and Bear Claw ice cream is amazing). I learned the interesting way that Chicago is among the places in the US that charges for plastic bags. The point of this is to decrease their overall use in an attempt to mitigate environmental damages. According to a WTTW article from 2018, the bag tax was started in 2017. Before charging for bags, 80% of Chicagoans used plastic bags. At the time of the article, that number had dropped to 54%. When I went to get groceries I didn't know that, but I did know I would be walking, so I emptied out my backpack and brought that with me. My plan was to put as many of the bags as possible inside of my backpack to make it easier to carry everything back. The cashier asked if I needed to buy any bags, and I said no, thinking she meant t...

I spent the morning out in the suburban area I'm staying in right now, Oak Park, with my friend Chloe, her mom, and my roomate Sylvia. We went to see the live-action Aladdin remake, which was actually really good. They changed enough to keep you wondering what would happen, but kept true enough to the original story that it didn't feel like a betrayal. After the movie, we stopped in a bookstore across the street, The Book Table. There were a lot of interesting books, but the thing that caught my eye and absolutely floored me was the small display of pride flags in the window. Honestly, the display wasn't anything fancy. It was just a couple plastic bins filled to the brim with pride flags, but it was filled to the brim . There were so many pride flags, some I didn't even recognize. With shaking hands, I picked up my own pride flag, the bi pride flag. It was the first time I'd ever seen one in person, not just in a picture or a drawing. It was a real, tangib...

Everyone has heard of Chicago Deep Dish. Just because you’ve heard of it doesn’t mean you’re prepared for it. When the pizza came out, it was nothing like I expected (aside from the obvious depth), but it was the first time in my life I truly understood why some people call it “pizza pie”. However, I have to say those who apply the title to flatbread pizza are doing this Chicago classic an injustice. Chicago Deep Dish towers higher than I have ever seen any pie tower. Most striking, however, was the fact that the pizza was inverted. Ellie and I got a pepperoni deep dish. The bottom layer was the pepperoni, then the cheese in the middle, and then the sauce on top. Each slice is gargantuan. A misunderstanding lead to our dinner being much later than expected. Even with that delay and our ravenous appetites, it was a struggle for Ellie and I to get through two slices apiece. As I sit on the Green Line writing this, one more slice waits in my backpack to be breakfast before grocery sho...

For my first meal in Chicago, I went to a restaurant that, according to Ellie, will make any Chicagan's eyes light up. Portillo's self-describes their style as “‘30’s Prohibition”. The restaurant started out as a modest hot dog stand out of Villa Park in 1963. Portillo's opened in Chicago in 1994. They serve, along with an array of other delicious things (including this chocolate cake milkshake), the traditional Chicago hot dog, something I didn’t know existed until Ellie demanded to know if I would get one. The signature Chicago hot dog was allegedly created by two European immigrants at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. The hotdog includes a beef hotdog, a poppy seed bun, yellow mustard, chopped white onion, sweet pickle relish, sport peppers, tomatoes, a kosher dill pickle spear, and celery salt. When I first unwrapped this beast I should’ve felt trepidation, but hubris won out. The thing sitting before me was a wonderfully monstrous creation, and I was ready for it...

Nothing takes the edge off arriving alone in a new city than being picked up at the airport by your best friend. You should have seen the glee of our reunion by the luggage claim. You would think it had been two years since we last saw each other instead of two weeks.Meeting Ellie made coming into this adventure feel a little more like coming home. Ellie and I met our Freshman year at Bard. She lived across the hall from me, and the sign on her door warning of her guinea pigs drew me in. She let me hold them and the tentative friendship began to form. The friendship became less tentative after I ran across the hall to the sound of screaming. Ellie, my dear city girl, was being terrorized by a stink bug, something she had no context for.  A large part of the foundation of our friendship is making fun of each other for where we’re from. I tease her about being a bio major who’s terrified of nature, and she teases me for not knowing how sidewalks and public transportation ...