Hello from fairly cold Chicago. It’s been a while and I wanted to check in.
I’m currently living with a friend in an old Lakeview apartment near Wrigley Field. it’s a great, central location accessible to many theatres and the CTA train. I’m not terribly far away from most of the places I’d want to visit and practice at. Work is about 40-50 minutes north, depending on conditions and whether I drive or ride a train there.
Aside from open mics and other random events people bring me to, I began taking improv class sequences with iO improv and The Annoyance, and taken advantage of student passes to see many of their mostly excellent shows. After a couple of years out of regular improv practice, I wanted to shake the rust and resume a creative practice. Restoring those habits is a struggle and at this point I’m working towards the breakthrough where I’m comfortably myself again. Here and there, I’m writing and working on my show material.
Adjusting to life in Chicago has been fairly difficult for many reasons obvious and not so obvious. My new job has a lot of demands and learning its many nuances has been a daily struggle. On top of that, Chicago is in many facets an aggressive and unforgiving place, despite its many pockets of community. Right down to walking down the sidewalk and driving down the street, people are ruthlessly, obliviously aggressive and self serving, and realize that I myself am fairly assertive in my commute. You have to be especially proactive and yet defensive in your moment to moment living.
But, most of all, it’s a casually corrupt place. When you think of the typical image of Chicago corruption, you think of backroom dealings between mob-quality suits. But a lot of the corruption here is honestly just a product of a simple, collective, spiteful laziness. People for whatever personal reasons don’t want to be responsible, so they aren’t. The mail carriers don’t bother delivering mail for days or weeks. Public service staff will fight with you and give you a hard time at random when you do business. Drivers en masse break traffic laws and put people in danger right in front of cops, and the cops don’t care. I’ve had to call or confront people directly and coerce them to actually do their jobs. I can’t even imagine how screwed I’d be in my personal life if not for how aggressively proactive I’ve been about confronting people and demanding they do what they need to do. Sometimes, Chicago feels like a third world country.
Society in general across the board likes to finger point at big boogeyman when the root of the problem is how we conduct ourselves, the standard to which we hold ourselves and each other… but it’s really bad in Chicago.
I knew all this would be the case coming in, but you still have to face and adjust to it. It’s never what you could possibly envision or expect.
I’ve had to remind myself, and others have had to remind me, that I’ve only been here a few weeks and there’s no way I could be anything other than struggling to acclimate to a strange new world. I am in general an aggressively proactive person, who wants to grow faster than most are capable or used to. For the most part, this attitude serves me well. You don’t do a lot of the stuff I have if not for demanding that much of yourself.
At the same time, it sets my expectations fairly high and I easily get disappointed at how far I am from where I want to be, even if the circumstances dictate it’s far too early to expect that of myself.
So I think a big part of my struggle right now is dealing with wanting right now to be acclimated and fully doing what I want to do with my life, even though after only seven weeks I can’t expect to get that far. I’ve done quite a bit and there’s quite a bit more to go.
That’s all I’ll say on that. I actually have a couple more topics I’ve considered and want to cover later. But I wanted to check in on where I’m at in life right now.