A Quick Note on Public Transit

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.

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Quest Fullfilled

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...

Pride Fest

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...

The Honorable Thing

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...

Chargo

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