Another Day, Another Dollar (Kinda Sorta)

It's hard to believe it's been two months at this point, since we have been stay-at-home. Blursday is on it's way to becoming a formal word but I think for those of us lucky enough to work safely from home, the days are a giant lump of togetherness. I feel pretty fine for a person who hasn't seen anyone (except Instacart shoppers) for over a month and half. It helps that a. I am used to communicating with my partner over phone regularly (cause consultant traveling); and b. I feel fairly fulfilled by my online social life. 

One of my favorite things is a Saturday game morning (which for others is a Saturday game night, given their time zones). It distracts me enough to drink a smoothie with enough healthy ingredients to make up for the various deficiencies I might be developing. We also had a mini grad school reunion, and it's hard to believe we are five years away from that time. 

What's Your Pandemic Personality and Other Stupid Questions

When acrylics are not an option,
Static Nails to the rescue

One of the worst takes so far (far below the take that people who work for places like Instacart and Amazon are making a freewill choice) is that we must use the Pandemic to self-improve, and come out on the other end better and more accomplished people. This is a bad take. For many, many reasons. For starters, it's a pandemic and not a vacation. It's stressful. It's traumatic. We have to stay at home, it's not a choice we are making (of course there is give and take on this depending on where you live). Our "best selves", whatever that may be, isn't going to emerge just because we suddenly have free time. A lot of us actually don't have free time -- think of the people working + raising and schooling kids + being caregivers and more. Some folks are trapped in abusive, dangerous situations. Our support 
There are obviously some of us who can make choices, which make the situation less worse. One of the first choice or realization should be to ask yourself: are you able to work from home safely and stay employed? That in itself is more than most of the world; although it may seem like this is the dominant way of working, it is not. I think it's okay to whine occasionally as long as we don't lose that perspective. Sure, it sucks to be inside when it's a nice day outside. But it's absolutely nothing compared to having to go outside because you have zero choice. Unemployment is not a choice most people make willingly. Nobody should have to remind others of that but apparently we do.



I have found that after reminding myself of both my luck and privilege, it becomes easier to switch to seeing minor irritations for what they are -- minor, insignificant irritations. If you have made it this far, perhaps you are interested in seeing my list of little pleasures (and just to absolutely clear, I would happily trade all of these to not be in a pandemic world):

1. The ability to sleep and wake up at my natural wake up time. I am not a morning person. In fact, I am a better person when I wake up at 8 am. That is not an option on a regular workday. I am enjoying it for now.

2. Actually utilizing my whole wardrobe of workout clothes. And, and, and actually using them to workout! Not every single day but a lot of the days. Not always cardio but often. 

3. Doing laundry regularly (okay, okay, once a day). Apparently there are no 'coin collectors', whoever those people are. So the quarters keep showing up and laundry is basically free. I launder everything, I dislike the idea of soiled clothes or linen. Anything that can be washed must be washed.

4. Starting to reduce my grasping/hoarding mind. I definitely had a period of this in March, and I finally seem to be moving away from it. I have enough. There are a lot of reasons for having scarcity mindset but I think it's time to start letting go of it a little.

4. Talking to people I haven't spoken to in a decade, half a decade, or even few years. Zoom/videos can be exhausting of course, but it has been nice to catch up with folks. We may not be as close as we once were but our lives intersected and may still intersect in the future and it's just a nice feeling.

One overall theme (not unexpected at all) is that people's lives have taken expected trajectories, and mine has not -- depending on which decade you use as a baseline. At 25 I did not imagine that, at 33 it's a choice I've made. But I still find myself trying to explain my life as a series of choices versus things that happened to me (partnered but housed separately, child/less/free etc, my work which is.. not a traditional path but really not that unusual either). I am not sure why I offer the explanations without anyone asking: guilt? certainty that people have those questions running in their minds? Who knows. What I do know is that I have not really encountered (visible to me ha) judgment, rather kindness. I think this is a result of two things: my wise choice of friends (:)), and the overall maturity that comes in your thirties -- people see both the ups and downs of their choices and realize there are more choices out there.

On that note, back to puttering around the house before it's wine-o-clock ha.

May you live in interesting times...

Some generous soul left laundry
 quarters at all the machines

is fabled to be a curse and one can see how. Times right now are certainly...interesting, although I think that's a poor choice of adjective, given that calamitous and destructive are more applicable to the majority of the world. It's an odd helplessness, when inaction is supposed to help. I've reduced my consumption of news even more; what do I do with the endlessly rising numbers? Instead I finish the entire season 4 of Kim's Convenience in 2 nights, and I recommend it highly to you. But of course you won't watch it -- we all have these shows friends and colleagues recommend to us as must-watch. We file them in some neglected corner, sticking to what we know and enjoy. Occasionally our preference and the recommendation overlap, and it's a happy Venn diagram for a while.

Results of my accident stockpiling

On Friday I video-chatted with dear friends from grad school. I don't think anyone has vocabulary for what is going on, and so we also use humor to cope. Of course Saturday morning I woke up at the early hour of 7:30 am (it's all subjective) and could not fall asleep again. During the day I did face masks, hair masks, nail masks. I took the trash out, did laundry, cooked chicken, organized the spice racks, finished a (lighthearted) book, ironed clothes and more. All of it felt futile and the name for the feeling fell into place then: it's futility coupled with lack of an adequate purpose. As someone in the best possible situation currently, the inaction feels inadequate and irresponsible. It isn't as far as social distancing and staying at home is concerned. My grocery trips, while a piece in staying sane during this, will be reduced. What is a helpful distraction for me is likely certain illness for someone else, and wildly impossible. I am also deeply influenced by the Lori memes and am here for them! You gotta love the folder! Also the city and state level leadership is very heartening to watch, especially in a time where folks are doubling down to demonstrate federal incompetence.

Day...Whatever

Listen, are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life? 
~Mary Oliver, Have You Ever Tried to Enter the Long Black Branches

It's been a minute (or maybe fifty, who knows). I haven't been too stir crazy on the weekdays, there is still work, enough to be done to keep the day busy. There are phone calls and video calls and all sorts of things that give the day a purpose. But the weekend felt a bit claustrophobic, especially because the weather was gloomy with gale-like winds. But even as I whine, I still know and count all my agnostic blessings regularly. There are a lot of them.

One interesting thing I am learning about myself is that the structures which are harder for me to put in place during regular days are easier now. Not because any of it is fun but because I know that it's a slippery slope when you let that first sink-full of dishes pile up. So I've been diligent about trash and wiping things down and running the vacuum cleaner. It's not productive per se, but it's movement and action. 

In the Great Hoard of 2020, the one thing I did not stock up on are quarter rolls. This is no small thing. If the only way you can do laundry is by painstakingly inserting quarters into an unpredictable machine, you do not want to find yourself without quarters. Or close to having none. Of course, as with all things that went scarce in the Great Hoard of 2020, so did quarters. They are now being rationed. I have general anxiety about a bunch of things but I have not stopped talking about quarters for a while now. I finally have three rolls now, yay local Mariano's, but I don't think I will ever be able to stop hoarding them. Or worrying about them. I do A LOT of laundry, and I think it's partly because it's the thing that feels most in control. Things are falling apart but I have clean linen. The world has been acting a fool about toilet paper and I would just like a realistic prediction about when they will be back on the shelves. And no, September of this year is not an acceptable answer. There will be books upon books upon case studies upon interview questions about the Great American TP Shortage of 2020. History is being written, and the villains are revealing themselves (people who bought 17000 sanitizer bottles, video game companies that tried to declare themselves essential services, organizations preparing to absorb the stimulus checks their employees receive). We see you.

Oh October!

I don't know where October went. I do know that it snowed in October, the scariest thing about this Halloween. My mom left in the middle of October, the teacher's strike started the next day, and the subsequent eleven work days were..something else. We returned to regular work on a Friday, and it was disorienting to say the least. I think the weekend helped in resetting. It's been busy, good busy, but still busy. I still haven't figured out the complete trick to getting my mind to quiet down completely so I have a million thoughts flitting at any given moment. That's a stressful mind space, it does make me feel that in addition to whatever I am worrying about, there are things I am forgetting to worry about.  

Teatro ZinZanni

 As my mom's trip winds up, I was looking for a play or performance that I could take her to, as a fun, one last thing to do at the end of the trip. None of the current plays appealed very much to me, and so I decided to look for something more magic or musical-like. For the record, I strongly dislike musicals and prefer my dialogues spoken and not sung. But this wasn't for me. I found something called 'Teatro ZinZanni' or as it's described 'Kit Kat Club on Acid'. Coincidentally we had been watching the season five finale of Schitt's Creek and this felt intriguing. So I did a little research, looked for discounted tickets and took the plunge -- the tickets were a pretty penny, this whole venture cost me two hundred plus. I am trying to shift my discretionary spending away from shopping and towards experiences so...

It wasn't the best day to head downtown because the Chicago Marathon was taking place and we had to walk a couple of blocks in the truly windy city. Once we reached the venue, there was an actual red carpet towards the elevator. We headed upstairs, there was coat check and a photo booth and a boutique store to buy things and a bar. I've been trying to be more fiscally wise and I was pretty determined to not buy random things (and tbh as much as I love my booze, noon on a Sunday was a bit early for me). We got 'upgraded', which was the obvious result of the show not being sold out but hey, I am not complaining. 

(Non)Fiction

I've been to the Athenaeum theater only once before for a play titled 'The Dark at the Top of the Stairs' (a play by William Inge) -- the interesting plot was surpassed by stellar acting. On a whim we decided to see a play on Saturday - (Non)Fiction, booking the tickets on Saturday afternoon -- I've rarely seen the smaller theaters packed to the brim in the way you see at the Goodmans and Steppenwolfs of the city.

Spoiler alert if you are planning to watch the play! 

Taste of Chicago 2019

I went to the Taste of Chicago after..four years. I went there my first month in Chicago and it was an experience, but I hardly knew my food preferences the way I do now. Back then, I just ate to live, now in addition to that, I eat for flavor and texture and more than sustenance. We (bf and I) went on Saturday, day 3 of the four day festival. There were pop ups each day as well, that's not something I remember from my visit but imagine has been around for a minute. We pretty much loved everything we ate and so now have new restaurants to frequent soon (since we don't spend enough money on eating out already lol).  

In terms of buying tickets, they should have had stanchion I think. Although I also think it shouldn't be that hard to have self-service kiosks for ticket purchases or the option to have tickets on your phone that the vendors can scan it. Maybe by 2020.

Kimcheese Fries

Let's start with the chicken noodles from Ukai -- straight up delicious. We also tried jerk chicken from a place whose name I marked on our flier and then promptly lost in the post-trip exhaustion. It was almost 90 degrees so there was a lot of sweating, and there were a lot of people. Next up were amazing pierogis from Kasia's (a name that haunts me because of the Rabbit Girls story, rather real life experience). Then some tamales and it was time to take a break because it rained suddenly. I'm a classy lady and I promptly wore my poncho, which in retrospect looks like it could be a garbage bag. This picture of me eating kimcheese fries (yes, you read that right) wrapped in my fashionable poncho, sums up 2019 well so far.

An Exercise in Itself

I don't think I set foot in a gym before I was 26 years old. As far as I can remember, I've always felt awkward in the space (it's less now but it depends on how familiar I am with the space). I didn't exercise a lot and if I did, it took other forms: like the time I joined karate lessons or my walk-jogs in the park. I only started going when I started my graduate program, not from a place of wanting to exercise but rather knowing that it was both good and necessary for my health, physical and mental. It was a giant gym, a monument to the sports culture of the university. I mostly stuck to the treadmill and yoga classes but there was the one time I tried running on the indoor track and the other where we went swimming (and managed to somehow lock ourselves out of the swimming area).

What do we do when the internet fails us

My favorite is the one above

So the internet at work is down. Two hours into the work day, it stopped. Four hours later we learned it wasn’t going to come back on for the rest of the working day. Still, no one told us we could leave, so here were most people, hanging out, catching up, taking walks outside, where spring has started showing the promise of summer. I could complain about the day I lost but I’d rather think of it as a day I got unexpectedly. It is (and is not in some ways) surprising how crippling it is to not have internet access. It’s been slim pickings for writing. I don’t have coherent long-form thoughts around any one topic. Instead my mind flits from mental space to physical space and back and forth and so we go on. Life is busy, busy enough I would say, but not the pace of busy I am used to. This is interesting; I had some idea about how “on” I always was but until recently I hadn’t been able to quantify the hours it consumed. On a lighter day, I did so many things I was appalled, because I seem to be deeply invested in doing, much more so than I had thought.

Theater Week: Fulfillment Center and The Realistic Joneses

Chicago Theater Week is coming up and it is probably one of the most interesting weeks of the year for me. Of course, it's never just a week and plays start before the week and continue on afterwards.


In my first year I went to four plays in a week. That was an overkill and in years since, I have used a different approach.What I value most from TW is that it introduces me to theaters that I absolutely did not know about. The Goodman, Steppenwolf, Chicago Theater etc are good but the theater there isn't always what I enjoy. In recent months, the plays that I see on there are also not plays I want to watch -- either the description feels too vague or the plot is just not for me. I know that I like my plays to be at least somewhat solid -- I need a beginning, a story and some sort of an end. Metaphors and all are fine in small doses, but if everything is a metaphor for something or a tangent, then the play is not for me.  Note, I am not calling them bad plays. They have their place and they have their people. I am just not one of them.

In the last two weeks, we went for two plays and honestly I was pleasantly surprised (we've seen some that felt real shitty and a few months ago, walked out of one at Steppenwolf). I must say they were both at small theaters, one with a very bare bones set. Both have fairly tight seating, no coat checks and both these plays had no intermissions. If you are like me and have to pee pretty regularly, that is not a great thing. Also, if like me you have at least two bags post the work day, plus a giant coat, it is cramped. But I recognize that this is the price of watching quality theater put on by people/groups that do not have access to large amounts of donations and grants in the same way I imagine the Goodmans and Steppenwolfs do.

When Mother Comes to Visit

My mom is visiting. It's becoming a tradition that when she visits I plan a short trip somewhere fun and frivolous. Last year it was Universal in Orlando. This year we are in Los Angeles, a city that was the first city in this country that I visited. I was sick at the time and bewildered by the enormity and how to navigate my way around. But I remember the trip to Universal and Disneyland as being marvelous, if only because of how far removed they were from anything real. Between that memory and S's gushing praise for the city from a recent visit, the plan was solidified.

Getting her from Chicago was not a nightmare even though our original flight was delayed enough for us to have missed our connecting flight and so Southwest rebooked us onto a direct flight with no fuss. Our suitcase didn't arrive with us and honestly it was remarkable how easily they found it and delivered it to our hotel. I was both grateful and also unperturbed by this -- losing a suitcase is not fun but it is also not the worst thing that could happen. As long as all lives and limbs are intact, it could always have been worse.

Yesterday was spent taking a bus tour of..well not just LA but also surrounding cities. Griffith Observatory has to be my favorite and if I ever come back, I plan to hike the trails there. Everything else, Venice Beach, Santa Monica, Rodeo Drive, while entertaining was so far removed from what I think of as reality that it didn't really interest me much. Learning about the likes of Petra Ecclestone is hardly a way to feel good about yourself and I am working hard to avoid comparisons these days, I find that I am leaning too easily into the dissatisfaction that comes with them. Hollywood boulevard was lively and had stores we could enter knowing that of something catches our eye, we could buy it (Marshall's, Forever 21). It was also good for souvenirs (I'm a sucker for a whimsical magnet).

I type this from a 30 minute long queue for a Matterhorn ride that better be something special because this is an interminable line, further disenchanting me from this fairytale world.

My favorite part so far is the fact that my mom and I both enjoy the downtime at the end of a day full of touristy activities. Being able to buy my own wine (as opposed to the exorbitant hotel prices) also makes my holiday better.

Septembers/End of Summer

The days are flying by, so sometimes I let the weekends crawl and it feels glorious except when I remember the entirely uncertain premise my life is built on here and all the things that remain undone or unlisted or un-imagined. Also I got a matching night suit set and it makes me feel much more grown up. As does the weight, a general sense of worry about the little family I have, the dawning realization the different forms drifting can take. This may not be my last city stop in life and that is, as the kids would say, totes okay, but that won't stop me from slowing down just so I can remember some moments.

Popping In, Hey Hey You

My wonderfully apt shower curtain

It's been a while hasn't it? I'd count the days except they would turn into months and I'd tell you all the things that changed except it would become a book. The best parts? I moved into my own apartment, I have my own room AND a spare room, I have grown up furniture. My recliner now has a companion love seat and I have a dresser. The dresser is gorgeous, it has a mirror that brings the room together. I enjoy having a room of my own in an apartment of my own and it has felt both natural and decadent, a little whisper of how marvelously selfish of you? The feeling of waking up and wandering into the living room and using the coffee maker to make myself a cup of average coffee (my skills are still sub par), of eating a meal at the table, so simple and yet so significant.

Day 6 and 7

It has been busy, busy enough that there was little time to write and post this. But today is Saturday night, I have had one of the best naps of my life and I am wide awake in a way I never am in the week. I am a little bored and not in the mood to work. To be honest, I am not in the mood for computer screens either. I've been apartment hunting and that was the only thing I left the house for today.

...

Decal on a Wall

There's lots going on. Work is in full momentun (and I am enjoying it, even though it has crept a little into my weekends and weeknights). Most days I feel fierce, occasionally I find myself a little tired and today I found myself amused and appalled -- so your regular work life. I have realized that along with the things I do well, I also have to remember that I tend to bluntness and directness that can seem abrasive. I also ask a lot of questions and push hard when I don't get clear answers. This is good to get work done but isn't always a great interpersonal trait. It is what I tend to naturally though and so I have to be conscious about it.

Summer in Chicago is full of hope and sunshine and it is good for my soul. Although without coffee I am nothing. I've been changing the room decor in spurts and now have two walls that are bright and cheerful - one of them has a lovely wall decal sourced via Etsy and the other has cheerful and positive posters from TJ Maxx and Etsy. I really struggled with mood recently and I have decided I can use all the good cheer in my life. 

Flying

The days have been flying. If paperwork and bureaucracy had allowed, I would have been in India right now. But I am not. I am here and the days have been full to the point of bursting. I've transitioned into a new role, which I am enjoying tremendously and which also needs me to handle several moving parts and constantly be on my toes. I am learning to redefine for myself what prepared for the day means as well as to remove some of the everyday decision fatigue.

Summertime

Summertime in Chicago is beautiful. It is sunny and warm and gorgeous. Both the lakefront and riverfront are delightful. The weather is perfect right now -- the winter has gone and the harsh summer is not here yet. The weekend was easy, full of activities and laughter. As always, when a lot is going on, there is not much to put in words here.

Centennial Wheel

Diwali ki Badhiyaan

I'm back, back and back. I have Netflix in the background, caffeine in me and the laundry done. Take that jet lag (I don't think I get jet lag but it is a good substitute word for my regular tiredness for a week). It was an exciting trip and eventually it flew fast. I met friends and family. The wedding was so, so much fun. I danced my heart out and simply couldn't get enough. It was full of love, laughter, jokes, sunshine, music and booze. All great ingredients for any celebration. It also helps that I have lost my shyness and can enjoy the moment.

Here's what is going on

This is my life in pictures these days. I am settling in, everything is unpacked if not correctly stocked and shelved. The neighborhood feels familiar, the dogs don't bark as much when I enter. I know my bus stop and even a few stops before. I have made it to all the giant superstores and hope to explore all the local grocery stores and thrift shops soon. Fall is almost here (you can tell by the amount of pumpkin spice latte advertisements).

I opened the door today only to see this. Now it won't lock properly. 

I poured some butter and Nutella on waffles and called it a day.

Wall decorations. I loved the golden earring above and recently lost one. 

The blue and pink triangles are relics from college.

Blingy earrings I still don't understand why I bought them.

But they look lovely on the wall.