makes me feel like a sore victor in the Punic wars. Carthage must be de-iced.

and it’s time to get on the bus. I now understand why the outsides of all the buildings in Chicago look smooth and completely flat. Why all the sidewalks are so enormous, like piers, and elevated from the level of the street by more than a foot. Why everything is constructed with exaggerated angles. Why the whole place looks like you took a picture of a city and clicked “Zoom In.” It’s to FIGHT THE SNOW. They built it bigger and flatter and pointier so it would have a chance of still being here in…four months.

It was so cold today on the way back from yoga that Eileen and I ran into a local high school to break the eight-block walk home. Thankfully, it was open. Some kind of Sunday meeting going on. I thought my fingers were going to fall off. And then I realized if I went home, I’d never leave, so I turned around and went to work in my workout clothes.

Just got home and lit the Hanukah candles – my first menorah, which my parents sent me from LA.

Today, I drove a friend to the bus station – my first time operating a vehicle in falling snow since the ’08 Convergence, and my first time navigating Chicago on wheels since we were apartment-shopping in August. I was driving an enormous Isuzu Trooper, with 4WD, and I still found it all but impossible to park, keep from skidding, etc. And unlike Indianapolis, these weather conditions are occurring in crowded city traffic.

North Avenue
(please don’t kill me, other drivers)
Fullerton
(please don’t kill me, other drivers)
Armitage
(please don’t kill me, other drivers)
Montrose

While I was trying to park in and around some growing snowdrifts, for the very first time since coming to this city, I found myself thinking, “It might have been a mistake to move to Chicago.”

The moment I set that car key down on my friend’s dining room table, I was, once again, happy to be here, and on foot, and I walked the long block between Damen and Western with positive exuberance at how cold I was, purposely stepping in the tallest snowbanks because I could.

When I got on the bus, the floor was slick with water, and I tried to put my transit card in the meter, but the driver told me to sit down so I wouldn’t fall. He did the same thing for everyone. When the weather is like this, people have to help each other out, or else, you know, be alone, cold, and grumpy, or fall down on the floor of the slippery bus… Maybe that’s part of why everyone is so nice here. The weather made them do it.

The snowbirds flee, the city becomes less populated, and those who stick it out either get really whiny or else form a sort of brotherhood. We’re all in this together, right? I think that’s what it’s going to be like for, as people keep reminding me, “the next FOUR MONTHS.”

Today, snow, and lots of it.

I was standing this evening, freezing in my knitted garments, at the bus stop on Division. Three intellectual boys with bright-colored sneakers were clowning in the cold, blowing breath onto the glass of the shelter and drawing hearts in the frost of their breath, smoking and blowing smoke into the air. They were talking about some ridiculously dressed woman they had seen earlier today. They said, “She looked like the Renaissance.” They were so smartsy and college about it, I had to laugh, we all laughed. I told them they were high on the temperature. They just moved here, too. We all just moved here.

Something is happening here. I don’t get on the Division bus without meeting another young person, another artist, who’s just relocated to Chicago, snow and all. The word is out that the scene here is as hot as the weather is cold, and the housing prices are half of what they are in LA, NYC, or SF. Everybody is moving here. And everybody who isn’t, should be.

I don’t ride the Chicago street bus without hearing people talking about vintage amplifiers. I don’t buy an EggMcMuffin at Adams and Wabash without hearing women talking about Stratford Shakes and the Goodman and ChiShakes and going back every year. There is a real audience here. For all the arts. I don’t even have to think about it. It’s all around me.

And now that Chicago is the city of Barack Obama, too, it’s the place to be for the politics as well. And the pride. I think the Grant Park energy is still ebullient in everyone’s faces. I saw a woman today wearing a T-shirt with the date of Obama’s first day in office on it.

This is the place to be, and I feel that even more strongly now that I’ve spilled myself on the ice for the first time, walking home on Rockwell.

It’s like, Welcome to Chicago. – SMACK! –

I can’t wonder, and I don’t, if my life would have been different if I had come here sooner. I only know I’m here now.