When I come into work, there’s always a stack of projects waiting for me on my desk.  There’s web articles to review, blogs to edit, marketing data to analyze, keyword research to take care of, and a dozen other small things.  The morning goes by really quickly since I’m literally swamped with work.  Sometimes, I even have to be reminded that it’s lunchtime.  The afternoon slows down a little, mostly because I’ve gotten a good portion of my work done and everybody’s really just killing time until we can leave and go home.  Unlike most of the other jobs I’ve had, this one doesn’t drag.  Well, actually, it does, it just doesn’t drag that badly.  I worked retail at this mall bookstore and that dragged horribly.  Imagine sitting in a small bookstore at a mall for hours and hours and having nobody come in.  I had no enticement to go and be nice to the few customers that actually came in since I was paid hourly and didn’t get any commission for any extra sales I made or anything.  Sometimes, I’d flatten an empty box and lay down on the garage can behind the garbage can so that I could sit down.  My bosses didn’t like that, but thinking I was going to stay standing for 8 hours straight was ridiculous. 

My boyfriend, Joe, and I wanted to get

Wicked Tickets

because everyone that we know has seen this musical. We were surprised to get tickets to see Wicked but had to sit on the upper balcony of the theater. While we were there, a woman had a heart attack. The ambulance came and two paramedics took her away. As the show carried on, we watched in horror as another theatergoer tried to get this woman’s heart pumping again. It was obvious that she was dead as she was blue in the face. As we were in the balcony, the performers had no idea that anything was going on and the paramedics soon took away the woman. It seemed as if she had gone to the theater with another elderly woman. My boyfriend and I offered to take the woman home. The strangest thing was that this woman who we ended up driving home was Mrs. Murphy, my second grade teacher. She was pretty shook up about her friend but didn’t seem to realize that she was dead. Neither Joe nor I wanted to say anything so we just chatted on our way back from the play. It turned out that Mrs. Murphy lived right down the street from me!

My father and my mother used to help out our local alderman during election times.  Not just for when he was running for alderman, but for the few times he ran for state’s attorney and lost.  They’d pass out literature in the neighborhoods and make phone calls and that sort of thing.   I know the alderman’s office really well.  I was there all the time as a kid.  There’s all these directories.  A Bucktown Chicago neighborhood directory, a directory of all the train lines, a downtown directory, and more.  There are also all these brochures about health and safety.  Whenever my parents were there, I’d sit down in the lobby and start reading through all those things.  My parents sometimes had me run up and down people’s front stairs to put literature about the upcoming elections for the alderman into their mailboxes.  They just assumed I’d go on helping them when I got older as well.  But when I got older, I had work and school and just didn’t have time to be going out there, doing work for an alderman I wouldn’t vote for.  Yeah, he was a likable guy, but he never did anything for the neighborhoods.  He’s made a lot of promises he never kept. 

For father’s day, I called up this

residential deck cleaning

service and hired them to go and rinse out the deck at the back of my parents’ house. I don’t know if they’d ever had that done in all the years they have lived there. But now the back deck looks good as new and they could even host BBQs out there if they ever had any. My parents have never been too social. When I was growing up in their house, I never even knew any of our neighbors. Sure, I saw them around. That was inevitable, but I never knew any of their names or what they did. The metra train ran near the house so there were these elevated train tracks nearby. Most of my friends lived on the other side of the train tracks, though it was really all the same neighborhood. One of my friends’ dads told me that when he was a kid those train tracks might have meant something and divide up the neighborhood. The kids would play baseball against each other and compete and be rivals over everything. I’ve never thought that way. I actually always wondered why my parents were never too friendly. Maybe they thought they were better than everyone else.

I may not know my way around a carbide end mill like a professional carpenter, but I have some experience with woodwork. When I was in college, we often built things. My roommates and I built a really nice bar in our house our senior year. My roommate Jeff kept saying he did not thing that we did that great of a job on it, but it was sturdy and lasted the whole year. We even got a faux granite counter top for it, and stained the rest so it looked really nice. We even got some track lights to put over the bar, and built some shelves behind the bar to hold all the bottles. We all joked that it looked so good that we would never have to go to the actual bars anymore. We also built a beer pong table for that room, and painted the Indiana University basketball court on the top. It looked really great. My roommate Zach had a couple of neon lights, so we put them in there, and the room really had the feel of an actual bar. I kept telling them that all we needed to actually open up for business was a pool table and a liquor license.

I found myself back in Austin filing bankruptcy. This was the end of one chapter of my life, but I would move on.  I had a good lawyer who was going to help me out and try to save a few things that I worked so hard for.  After this was done, I would take what few things I had left and head back north.  I would try to cross back over some of those bridges that I burned so long ago.  I had no choice.  Nothing was left for me here.  I had made a quick trip back home when I was trying to decide what to do.  I ran into some old friends and we started to talking.  I missed it.  I missed it all.  I was a fish out of water.  I needed to get home.  They say things happen for a reason, and I guess my going broke happened for a reason.  I packed it up and went back north with just a car full of stuff.  I said goodbye to 20 years of  living.  When I got back home I got a room at a cheap motel and set about looking for work.  When I stopped to have breakfast at one of my old favorite places I ran into Nora.  I hadn't seen her in nearly 30 years.  We had been sweethearts for awhile.  She owned the restaurant now.  She invited me to stay awhile and have a cup of coffee with her.  I was glad I did.

I've been working on a special project. I'm not going to tell my boyfriend what it is. I want it to be a surprise for our one year anniversary. I think he is going to be shocked to see that I figured out the perfect data storage solution for every single love letter he's ever written to me. He probably thinks I threw everything away, especially the ones from the very beginning of the relationship. He was pretty positive that I didn't like him but I really did. I just didn't say anything! I can be pretty good about hiding my feelings. I think this will show him how much he really does mean to me. He knows that I'm better at showing people how I feel and this is the perfect way to do it. I think this way he'll actually be able to see the extra time and care I put into this and that will speak louder than anything I could've ever said with words. This is mostly for him, but I would be lying if I said I didn't have my own selfish reasons for doing this. I wanted to have a lasting record of all the beautiful things we've said to each other.

Lisa and I actually made plans to meet again later that week for lunch. We decided that since she was moving, we might as well try and see as much of each other as possible.  This time I went to her neck of the woods, a little further south. She so happened to bring her new boy with her. I do not remember his name at all though. I am horrible with names and have simply ended up naming him golf aid because it was one of the more interesting things about him. Unfortunately, I let pass the window of opportunity to ask what his name was again. So then I just named him golf aid in my head, which was kind of bad because I did not know what to call him and I did not want to offend him by not calling him his name. I spent most of the lunch trying to avoid having to say his name which made for weird conversation and a lot of eye contact. I was hoping that at some point he would have gotten up and when to the bathroom, but I was just my luck he never had to go. I must say, one of my more uncomfortable lunches I have been too.

Growing up in my parents’ old neighborhood on the far north side of Chicago, I used to be within walking distance of just about everything.  My school was a mile away, a mini-mart was a half mile away as was the train station.  The gym was 2 and a half miles away and the park was actually a block away.  There was even a Chicago Permanent Hair Removal Clinic where my friends and I hanged out in the parking lot to smoke cigarettes.  Sometimes, we’d even badger the people coming out of there having had the Chicago permanent hair removal treatment.  Yeah, I was an annoying little kid.  Anyway, when I grew up and moved out of my parents’ house, I moved into the more southern neighborhood Wicker Park.  Technically, Wicker Park is still a north side neighborhood, but its farther south than Jefferson Park, which is where my parents still live.  The train’s still close to me and the bars and restaurants I like are also close, but my job is down in the loop.  I also have to drive out to Wrigleyville to see my doctor if I have and my dentist, whom I’ll be seeing this Saturday, still has her office in Jefferson Park. 

My boyfriend and I have quite a bit on our minds lately. It looks like we're going to have to file for bankruptcy.   About two years ago we decided we were just going to go for it and buy a house. We were sharing a very small apartment and we started to feel like we weren't safe living in that area anymore. Sometimes we would come back to our place late in the evening and find someone sleeping outside near our doorstep or we would find a bunch of broken glass bottles all over the ground. Anyways, we didn't have a lot of income but we both felt we could make it work. Unfortunately we put our trust in the wrong people and wound up getting one of those predatory loans and our expenses spiraled out of control. We're going to have to make an appointment with a bankruptcy lawyer to discuss our options, but thankfully we have them! At first we both felt like it wasn't an option but the more we realized what we could do once we lightened our financial load we started to feel pretty optimistic about the whole thing! I really feel this woke us up. Now we're making more responsible decisions and we're really looking forward to wiping the slate clean.