Category: Chicago Life

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August Thoughts – Completed in September

Since I started this blog in 2008, I usually would post a back-to-school post, mourning the end of my summer and hoping that I would have the strength to endure the coming school year. This is school year #2 I am not returning to school, and I am still trying to adjust to the new normal.

I still have the compulsion to buy school supplies. I don’t think that instinct will ever leave me.

I still enjoy the personalities of teenagers and kids in general. After years of living in a fairly secluded development, I am part of a larger development that is ALIVE. Today I saw some kids were selling something — probably lemonade on this hot day — and I felt bad when I drove by them twice without stopping while I ran errands. When I knew I was done shopping for the day, I stopped. They were selling lemonade and bracelets that they made. I picked up one of each, overpaid, and told them to keep the change. The looks on their faces were worth it.

I remember the days when my friend Suni and I would hold Kool-Aid stands at the end of our driveways. We had themes, such as Hawaiian hula girls (an idea from Suni’s creative mother, Val) and we were always so delighted when someone stopped for some of our Kool-Aid. We were even more delighted when someone gave us a bigger bill and told us to keep the change. We were going to be RICH! I would be dreaming about all the candy I would be able to buy with that money.

Even though I don’t teach school now, I still get a kick out of the teenagers I encounter around town. I told this story on my Facebook page, but I think it’s worth repeating. I stopped by Starbucks after buying a huge bag of bird seed from the local Tractor Supply. It was sitting on my passenger seat. When I pulled around to pick up my coffee, the barista asked me what the bag was, and I told her it was bird seed. (I always love how so many teenagers have no filter; if they want to know something, they will ask!). I told her I liked to feed the birds in my yard. She said, “Oh, you feed the birds? That’s cool.” All of a sudden another teenage barista came running over to the window. “YOU HAVE A BIRD?” she exclaimed. I hated to disappoint her, but I couldn’t pretend I had a bird with me when I didn’t. “No, I just like to feed the birds in my yard.”

Her crestfallen face was almost comical. “Oh,” she said, “people always bring their pets through here. I haven’t seen a bird yet. I was hoping you had one.”

That’s the energy I miss. If you looked tired and worn out, they’d tell you. If you looked nice, they’d tell you. If they thought your lesson sucked, they’d tell you. As a rather reserved introvert, that took some getting used to. I had to let go of my pride and get used to standing in front of the peanut gallery every day and being able to take their criticism AND their praise.

I think I will forever be in the middle of that paradox – loving the idea of teaching but hating the red tape attached to it.

I have been gone nearly every weekend for the past few months as I have traveled around with my husband’s band. To say that I am exhausted from being on the road is an understatement. It is fun seeing different towns and seeing old friends at different events, but man, I miss having lazy Sunday mornings where I could relax with a good cup of coffee while snuggled in bed. The schedule will be slowing down slightly in upcoming weeks, so I hope I am able to get some long-awaited projects done.

I’m slowly discovering where the antique stores are around this area. I visited a couple a few weeks ago and picked up a couple of treasures. I saw this rooster tray the first time I visited one, and then I brought my husband back to the store later so he could see it. I knew that since I kept thinking about it, I probably should just pick it up, and now it has become part of my kitchen decor. There is something about funky 1950’s chickens that I just can’t resist.

At another nearby store, I ran across a bunch of boards that had retro matchbooks on them. There are few things I love more than retro advertising, so I picked up a couple of the boards and have a strong urge to go back and get the rest of them. Zoom in on the pics if you can; there are some fun designs. I do want to unstaple some of them to flip them around. Some of them don’t have the most interesting side facing forward, in my opinion.

Although I’ve lived in my house for 9 months, I have been undecided about a decorating strategy. My old house was all 50’s, and because it was a 50’s house, it all fit. My current house was built in 2005, and a lot of my 50’s stuff just doesn’t fit in well with the more modern feel of this house. However, I love old advertising, and I love funky little things that you can’t find at Home Goods or TJ Maxx, so I have decided to start collecting some of those items and using them to enhance these spaces. Funky chicken is now adorning my kitchen, and the matchbooks will provide entertainment to anyone using our bathroom off the kitchen.

I’m all about bathroom entertainment.

Until next time . . .

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Settlin’ In

*****NOTE: I originally wrote this post in March. I had forgotten I wrote it and noticed it just now when I came here to write a new blog post. Although we have now lived here for 9 months, the sentiments are still the same. Therefore, there will be two posts dated today. **********

have lived in this house for three months now, and I am gradually getting to know the area. Still haven’t met the neighbors yet — cold weather kind of puts a damper on that — but I trust I will meet them as the weather warms up.

There are things that I love about living here, such as the convenience of living near pretty much any store I want to go to (something I definitely have not had for the past 23 years). I am getting used to the commute, which can be surprisingly good or frustratingly slow, depending on the day.

I think the biggest thing I’ve needed to get used to is “the fire.”

When my husband and I were traveling to this area often, before we lived here, we would drive by “the fire,” which is visible from the interstate, and we wondered what it was. We would describe it to people and ask what it was, but no one seemed to know.

“The fire” is a natural gas plant and it’s about five miles away. I’ve never lived close to industry like that, and we are learning that living next to one provides some dramatics. About a month ago, I heard a dull roar outside and I was curious as to what it was. I opened my front door and exclaimed, “Holy crap! Come look at the fire!” Usually, you can not see the fire above the houses in my neighborhood. That night, though, the flame shot up in the sky. My husband I watched it for a while and then I said I wanted to get a picture of it closer. When we were about on the edge of town, the fire died out. According to my local Facebook groups, the event triggered multiple 911 calls, as this area is growing rapidly and there are many new locals, like me, who have never seen that before. (No, I was not one of the 911 calls . . . ). Here’s what it looked like that night:

The other night I could hear a low rumble when I woke up at 2:30 a.m. I pulled my bedroom shades up and could not believe what I was seeing. I ran downstairs and took this picture from my front door — a sight made even more ominous-looking because of the low cloud cover that morning.

From what I understand, the fires escalate when there is excess gas to burn off. I don’t know anything other than that, but it has been interesting to see what “the fire” looks like every day.

I have slowly begun to explore some of the antique shops in this area. I have become a lot more selective about what I buy, though, because moving tends to make you realize that you have TOO MUCH STUFF! I did visit an antique store about 30 miles away a few weekends ago and I scored some great tablecloths, including a brand-new-looking Simtext tablecloth that came with four napkins. All the cloths were reasonably priced, so although I only walked away with one that had a label, all the cloths were in great condition. They’re a little wrinkly in this pic, but you can see the patterns:

A couple of months ago, my husband’s aunt passed away. When we went to her house to get some sentimental objects, like photographs, we were walking through the basement when I saw a cracked ice table (no chairs) with legs that were so totally atomic and rocket-ship inspired. I will take a pic of that soon after I get the table back together, and I will probably be offering it for sale because, c’mon, no one needs TWO cracked ice tables, no matter how cool they are. I had never seen a table with legs like that and I just could not leave it behind.

So, like I was saying, I have learned to not keep so much stuff. <eye roll>

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New Job, New State, New House . . . Same Me

Happy New Year! As I sit at my kitchen table in my new-ish house (new to me, anyway), I am full of pensiveness on this New Year’s Day.

A year ago, I was deeply unhappy in my teaching job and desperately searching for answers: what career could I go into? Did I have enough skills to switch to a new job? Was I even able to learn enough before the next school year in order to change careers? Was the thought of doing something different just a temporary feeling and I’d get over it eventually?

Let’s face it: I had a decent-paying career with a top-notch insurance plan. I had holidays and summers “off” (I put that in quotes because, as an English teachers, many of my breaks were overshadowed by essays I had to check and other work that just could not be done during the school day). But my holidays were never long enough, it seemed, and I started to seriously dread going back to work. I very much experienced the “Sunday scaries” — that feeling of dread that teachers have on Sundays or the last day of break where you know you’re going back to endless piles of papers, emotional overload, and stress.

It was about this time last year that I started researching schools where I could learn how to transition into instructional design. I knew it would cost money, and I knew it was going to be a financial setback of sorts. I wanted to train, I was highly motivated, and I wanted OUT of education before my mental health deteriorated. I worked like a dog for months, threw myself into the job-searching routine all summer, then was handsomely rewarded just as school was starting back up by getting hired and being able to work right on Michigan Avenue in downtown Chicago.

A year ago, I could not see any of that as being a reality. I had a lot of doubts. I had not been in job search mode in years and I didn’t even know if I had a resume hiding on my computer somewhere. All I knew was teaching, and I paid a little too much attention to the naysayers who said that teachers flooding the ID field were making job attainment nearly impossible.

I wish I could say that I was one of those “I set goals and reach them!” kind of people, but I’m not that methodical, nor that organized. All I knew was that I was in a job that was killing me with stress and that my values no longer aligned with the way I was expected to teach. That was the fire that sent me charging ahead.

This past year was a challenging one for many reasons; not only was I trying to change careers, but I was trying to relocate to another state. That meant putting $$ into my house to get it ready for sale, uprooting myself to a state I’ve never lived in, and adjusting to a whole new way of life. I traded a 7-minute commute to work through nearly empty streets for a 45-minute commute on a busy expressway.

However, I am here a year later looking back over the transition and giving out a little sigh, saying, “I made it.” I look at all the little baby steps that got me to where I am now and I am so grateful that I took those steps – however frightening they may have been at that time.

Change is hard. Change is damn scary. Change is incredibly difficult and sometimes frustrating when you don’t have the right support system in place. Most of that fire for change is going to have to burn in your soul and you’re going to have to keep feeding that fire yourself. Change is going to require believing in yourself and where you want to go in life. Close your ears to all the ones who want you to stay where it’s comfortable and familiar for them. Find the cheerleaders. Believe everything they tell you about your talents, your strength, and your ability to do whatever you want to do. They’re the ones who will be at the finish line and genuinely happy for you. Find your tribe and kick others to the curb. Clean house if you need to.

I don’t think I’ve ever thrown out so many rah-rah statements in one paragraph, but I cannot impress upon you enough: if you’re happy where you are, great. If you’re not, start envisioning what you want and do whatever you can to get there.

Trust me: in a year, you’ll be looking back with a smile on your face.

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Hi, I’m an instructional designer

Yes, that title means that I GOT A JOB.

I have tried twice to write a blog post in the past couple of months. I even had the same title for the last two attempts: Free Fallin’. That is how I felt this past summer as I worked to get a job and was getting nothing but crickets for most of it.

I never finished and published the last two blog posts because I felt like I was just whining – whining about being done as a teacher and the mixed emotions that caused, whining about the job search and how frustrating it was, and whining about stressed I was.

No one wants to read that. I was bored as I re-read my own writing, and that is always a good indication that such writing does not need to be read by anyone else.

They’re still there in my dashboards as drafts, and I will probably keep them as a reminder of what this summer was like. I am hoping that I do not have to be unemployed again anytime soon.

Like Forrest Gump would say, “That’s all I have to say about that.”

Toward the end of August, just as school was starting and I was reeling with feelings of panic about how I was going to stay afloat with no job, I got a call just as my husband and I were starting off for a visit to Chicago. The call was from a place I had interviewed at the very beginning of August. Although I had asked for and received an update about the job a week after my interview (the VP of Professional Development was on vacation and would be making a decision shortly), another week went by without any word, and I figured that they had gone with a different candidate. But on August 24th, they called and offered me the job, and I happily accepted. I even pulled over on the side of the road to get my laptop and digitally sign and return the offer letter before they could change their minds.

Feeling relieved does not begin to describe what I felt. Days after I had gotten my last teaching paycheck, I got a job! I started on September 7, and it has been a month and a half of absolute joy and relief. That sounds like an exaggeration, but I honestly mean it. I hadn’t worked in the corporate sector for 24 years. On my first day, my boss took me out to lunch and said that she did not want me working on weekends or even thinking about work. If she happened to send an email on a Saturday, she said I was under no obligation to read it or answer it. Work-life balance is very important to her, and I am still trying to get used to having a job where work-life balance is valued. In teaching, it was expected for us to work nights and weekends to keep up with everything. It was accepted even though it is a horrible habit to get into. At my current job, we leave work AT work, and that is exactly how it should be.

I have lived in small towns for most of my life, so you can imagine that working on Michigan Avenue in Chicago is a bit of a change. My commute to work for the past 17 years was 7 minutes long. Now my commute is 45 minutes on a good day. We are able to work whatever hours we want to make up a full day, so I have started to leave for work at 5:15 a.m. to get to the office at 6:00 a.m. That lets me leave work at 2:30-3:00, which is just as the rush hour traffic is starting to ramp up. Although I don’t like the traffic, I only have to deal with it two days a week because I am remote the other three days of the week.

I love to people-watch, so some mornings I will go to the Starbucks that is across the street from me and I’ll sit facing the traffic so I can watch the city wake up. The Starbucks I go to is attached to a hotel, and it is fascinating to hear all of the languages spoken by the patrons who filter in from there.

There is always something happening on Michigan Avenue, and I love going for walks during my lunch break to see what is going on outside. I never feel unsafe, though, because the cops are thick around there. Every day there is at least one cop car right outside my building, just hanging out and waiting for stuff to happen. Some days it is hard to see the realities of life when a homeless person winds up sleeping in front of my building; I am certainly not used to that sight. But most of the time what is happening on Michigan Avenue is entertaining and interesting to watch. And if there’s nothing happening, the people-watching is always good.

Even though I’ve been employed for a month and a half, I am still trying to find the right words to summarize how this year has been. I have always been a small town/country girl. The largest city I lived in was only had about 150,000. I’m not used to congested freeways and vibrant downtowns and skyscrapers and lots and lots of people. But for some odd reason, this feels right. I will always be a country girl at heart, but the time was overdue to move away from the small town where I’d been living for over twenty years. I was tired of not having any privacy because I was a teacher in that small town; quick trips to the grocery store often meant conversations with fellow teachers, parents, or students. While I love seeing people outside of school, sometimes I just wanted to be invisible, get what I wanted, and go home. (Other teachers will understand that feeling.).

It’s taken a lot for me to get to the point where I was comfortable challenging the status quo. If you would have asked me twenty years ago to move to Chicago, I would have gotten wide-eyed and said, “NO WAY!” My brain would have been overloaded with a long list of all the things that could have gone wrong with a move to the big city.

When I was in my mid 20s — soon after I had my first child — I started having major anxiety related to the huge responsibility of taking care of a child. All the what ifs got me big time. What if he got sick? What if he choked? What if he died of SIDS? What if I turn out to be a crappy mother? What if he has special needs that I can’t accommodate? What if? What if? What if? While I was 8-months pregnant with my first child, 9/11 happened. That is probably where my anxiety stemmed from. Suddenly the world felt steeped in chaos and I no longer knew what the future would be for my child.

It was, quite frankly, paralyzing. I stopped enjoying everyday life and most of my waking hours were consumed with fear. I eventually decided to go on anti-anxiety medication, and I will never, EVER take that route again. I truly believe such meds do nothing to cure the actual anxiety; they just mask it. What I was really afraid of was having a loss of control over, well, pretty much everything. I wanted to control whether my child was sick or well or whether or not he lived a long life. However, I was floundering in the wake of the simple reality — very little of that is within my control. I avoided airplanes because of my fear of flying; I avoided traveling to big cities because I feared possible chaos; I avoided social situations where I felt unsure of how things would unfold. I missed so many opportunities in my life because of fear. That fear was preventing me from living my life.

Living in a small town did little to assuage my anxiety, as I felt *seen* everywhere I went. As an introvert, I was not used to that sort of life, and I really struggled with it. I just wanted to go out in public and not know a soul.

I learned to live with the non-anonymity of a teacher’s life over time. I started to just expect it and anticipate it. I knew I would see them, so I stopped fearing it. I took the time to have conversations with the students working at the grocery store or K Mart (while it lasted). I learned that it was a good thing to be able to have “normal” conversations that had nothing to do with school because it helped humanize me to them and helped me get to know the other facets of their personalities.

I stopped the anti-anxiety meds about a year after I started taking them, and the withdrawal was brutal and scary. Lots of weird things going on in my brain that I can’t even begin to explain, but obviously the medicine was doing something to my brain as I weaned myself off of it. I started to take a hard, honest look at what was causing my anxiety, and only then was I able to move past it.

My anxiety was caused by a loss of control at a time when I felt I needed ALL the control. I wanted to ensure that my children were safe; I wanted to make sure that I was safe; I never wanted to find myself in any sort of emergency; I had a weird, dark obsession with stories of chaos where people had to rely on their instincts to get them through. I wondered what my instincts would lead me to do. I doubted whether I would make good choices.

I have learned that there is very little that is linear and predictable about life. If you try to control the trajectory, you will fail big-time, and you will also incur a lot of unnecessary stress. Do you remember that song that came out in the 90s called “Everybody’s Free to Wear Sunscreen”? If not, here it is. It is a surprisingly deep song that spoke to the anxiety I was feeling at the time; in fact, I used to have the lyrics printed out and hung on a bulletin board in my classroom. I wanted my students to internalize the advice because it was so freaking true.

You do not know what will happen in life. Some horribly bad people live to be 90 and never pay for their mistakes. Some really good, kind people die at a young age and never get to live a full life. The injustice of that stings, but it’s not an isolated example either. One of the stanzas of the song is this:

Maybe you’ll marry, maybe you won’t
Maybe you’ll have children, maybe you won’t
Maybe you’ll divorce at 40, maybe you’ll dance the ‘Funky Chicken’
On your 75th wedding anniversary
Whatever you do, don’t congratulate yourself too much
Or berate yourself either
Your choices are half chance, so are everybody else’s

All we can do on this earth is do the best we can with each day we are given. As I type this, war is raging in the Holy Land. Again. People are suffering and wishing they were elsewhere. Meanwhile, here I sit in relative peacefulness in the suburbs of Chicago. I do not understand why I have been able to live a decent life while people across the globe are suffering, and dying, and fighting for basic freedoms.

I also know that I can’t do a damn thing about it.

I also know that taking chances and facing uncertainty head-on have done wonders for me in the past few years. People may not understand your choices, and you will undoubtedly suffer some criticism for what choices you do make, but the important thing is that you feel OK with what you’ve chosen to do.

It’s your life. No one else’s.

I think living in Chicago has given me the anonymity I have desired for so many years. I can go shopping, walk down the street, have a glass of wine in a restaurant without knowing a single soul, and that is liberating. On Michigan Avenue, when I walk down the street and take pictures of buildings, I am just another person in a sea of tourists. I listen to the sea of dialects around me and know that this is all just as new to me as it is to them.

For me, anyway, I have made peace with the idea that life happens and there is very little rhyme or reason as to why some of us make it to 90 and some die as infants. I don’t know why evil people are allowed to run free while good-hearted people die from cancer. All I know is that each one of us is given a gift every day we wake up to a new day.

It is up to us what we choose to do with it.

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