THIS IS MY FRIEND ELLIE AND SHE DROVE ME HERE!!!

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 work. The other part is built on the fact that she’s the kind of friend who picks me up at the airport, and I wrote an essay to get her out of a parking ticket. Ellie’s one of the best people I’ve ever known, and a large part of why I’m here in Chicago now.

“Chicago has two seasons: winter and construction.”

-Ellie

Comments

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...

Speakeasy

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...

The Green Line

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 ...

Chargo

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