Well, on Monday d.w. and I made it back from our little weekend jaunt to Chicago. While we were there we did our part to bridge the internet/reality divide, stopping by with Samantha from Back to Me, who is easily as cool in person as she is on the innernets. But that whole bloggers-are-actually-three-dimensional-sentient-beings thing sure takes some getting used to.
Yikes. You know you need to get out more when real human contact becomes a novelty.
Anyway, where was I? Oh yeah. We had a blissfully relaxing weekend
with various college and grad school friends who all somehow managed to
get sucked into the Midwestern vortex from Florida, New York, and
southeastern Ohio (totally not the Midwest -- it's like West Virginia without the inbreeding) upon entering the real world.
I was about to go into one of those totally uncreative "What is it with people getting sucked into the Midwest?!" rants, but I think I'll take a different tack. Because really, Chicago is a totally cool place. For a city so relatively young, I just love how bursting with history and memory it is. Untold decades of deferred maintenance and outright neglect have slowed the relentless advance of sterile urban homogeneity. Train platforms remain creaky, gnarled wood, and the once elegant, now rusting wrought iron trusses are held together by 132 coats of paint, urine, and hope.
And the apartment buildings! While ascending the back stairs to our friend's fourth-floor apartment, you could feel the memory of the place seeping up through floorboards worn to concavity.
But you know, something tells me d.w. wasn't feeling it. That's the other thing about Chicago: it's got a hell of a lot of stairs when you're 30 weeks pregnant.
I totally feel that about the Northeast too. I grew up in suburban LA where stucco ranch houses and strip malls prevail. Out here there may be subdivisions, but they don't look absolutely identical, and there are actual homes that are older than I am! Plus these rock walls (hello Robert Frost) are just too groovy, coming from the land of concrete block highway soundwalls.
Posted by: Henitsirk | 07 September 2006 at 02:12 PM
It's interesting that you can comment on the Midwest with such precision.
I don't really think I knew what the Midwest was (what made it differnet than other places) until I moved away four years ago.
Chicago was always the "big city" for my family, but only now am I beginning to see what gives it character.
Posted by: spain dad | 09 September 2006 at 05:28 AM
Mmmm, just got done cataloguing a whole bunch of Chicago architecture. I am so envious, I've ALWAYS wanted to go there!
Posted by: Lauren | 11 September 2006 at 10:03 PM