A Year Ago

Approximately one year ago today, I completely blew an interview for what I could reasonably call a dream job. Looking back on the odd, confusing answers I gave during that ill-fated meeting, I can see it clearly for the instance of self-sabotage that it was.

I was restless, you see. I was itching to leave town. I really wanted this job, but I did not want to be in Minneapolis. I still kick myself over that interview, but I'm forgiving, too; I had something I needed to do. Two months after the interview, I finally accepted that I had to do it now, or risk having my soul digest itself.

Since I moved to Chicago last October, I've done a lot of things that I'd never done before. I wrote sketch comedy and dabbled in improv; I went to dance parties in lofts, and day-tripped to Michigan, and hugged Aidy Bryant; twice I got within smelling distance of a job at The Onion.

But last night, I wanted to know not what has happened to me in the past year, but how my life, as it stands now, has changed from the way it was a year ago. Given a snapshot of then and now, what is different? What is the same?

Here's what I came up with.

Things That Are Different From One Year Ago:

1. I have a nephew.

His name is Caden, and he is objectively adorable. As a result, I have a hopeless case of auntie pride. For the record, I'm aware of what I'm doing. I've been forced to look at photos of babies with whom I have no connection and no shared DNA; I know what it's like. But now that I have photos of my own to share, I really don't care whether you want to see them or not. One moment I'm thinking to myself, Don doesn't really want to see these photos, because he has no emotional or biological attachment to Caden, and the next moment I'm shoving my iPhone in front of Don's face.

"LOOK AT MY NEPHEW."

"LOOK AT HIM."

"AND THIS ONE."

"ARE YOU SEEING HIM?!"

Don follows proper etiquette and smiles adoringly at Caden, then takes advantage of the next pause between photos to show me a few shots of his nephew. We're fools in love, the whole lot of us.

2. I nanny for a 4-year-old named Kai.
Kai wears fitted tees with shark and dinosaur graphics; he absorbs everything he hears (yesterday he used the word skittish correctly); and he's perfectly capable of blackmail. A scene from last month:

KAI BLACKMAILS MEGAN
SCENE ONE
Living room

(KAI is shaking a sippy cup of milk, fascinated by the way the milk appears to grow as his shaking produces more and more air bubbles.)

KAI

                        (Looking at milk)
It's getting bigger!

MEGAN

Yep, but you're spilling milk everywhere.

(KAI continues to shake sippy cup and MEGAN grabs a paper towel from the kitchen.)

MEGAN

                        (Wiping the floor)
Okay, no more shaking, Kai, you're making a mess. 

(KAI ignores MEGAN and continues to shake.)

MEGAN

Kai, please stop doing that.

KAI

But I have to!

MEGAN

Why do you have to?

KAI

Because I want to!

MEGAN

Having to and wanting to are not the same thing. Now please stop, or I'll have to take your milk away.

KAI

                            (Angry)
No! I'm gonna - I'm gonna say that you said the wrong thing.

MEGAN

What did I say?

KAI

You said stupid.

(MEGAN and KAI stare at each other. Kai resumes his shaking without breaking eye contact with MEGAN. MEGAN says nothing, the coward.)

(End scene.)

3. I take an improv class.
I'm nearing the end of my improv run at The Second City. I could continue on to the last two levels of the program, but for now I've had my fill of awkward scene work, delusional/mentally unstable classmates, and teachers who creepily goad us to incorporate lust into our scenes whenever possible (okay, there was only one of those teachers). All that aside, improv has been abundantly valuable to me. It's taught me that stepping out before you are ready is essential to moving life forward.

4. I'm regularly eating flax multibran flakes, soy milk, and those dried cranberries that come in the Trader Joe's Trek Mix.

These are things that I was not eating one year ago.

5. I live in a neighborhood with an ice cream truck.
An ice cream truck that I may or may not have actively sought out on a particularly desperate evening. In vain, I might add.

Things That Are The Same As They Were One Year Ago:

1. My preferred way to spend a Friday night.
Really. It hasn't changed a bit, and I have written proof. I have this book called Q&A a Day that asks me a new question every day for a year. Under each question are five separate spaces for five years of answers, so you can see how you answered the same question a year ago, two years ago, etc. I always cover up the previous year's answer until I'm done writing this year's answer, to ensure that my past response has no influence over my present response. This year, when asked for my favorite thing to do on a Friday night, I wrote, "Make a big bowl of pasta, pour a large glass of vinho verde, and settle in for an evening of tailored programming." Then I looked at my response from 2013: "Make angel hair pasta with tomatoes, pour a glass of vinho verde, and plug into an independent or dated film on Netflix." No difference whatsoever, except that I apparently want more pasta and wine this year.

2. My unstoppable predilection for doughnuts, croissants, and ice cream.
I am constantly discovering new bakeries and ice cream shops in Chicago, and frankly, it's a little overwhelming. Sometimes I think that I'll grow weary of these things, or at least one of them, if I eat enough. But no. Nope.

3. I'm still wondering what's next.
A year ago, I was romanticizing being on my own in a big city. Now I'm wistful for more peace and quiet, more lakes, more family. See, these are the kinds of problems you grapple with when you're restless by nature, and white, and priviledged.

Anyway, this was a lot of information. I just shared a whole bunch with you.

To sum up,

 

The First Week

Welcome to Irving Park, my neighborhood of residence for at least the next few months. It wasn't my first pick, as this station is a good 8-minute drive / 25-minute walk from my apartment. It's the main reason I decided to take my car to Chicago, as much as I wanted to rely solely on mass transit. The truth is, having my car here has been really nice. After unpacking on my first day, I got into that trusty gray Camry to go to Target. My mom and sister had left me a few hours prior, and I was feeling alone, vulnerable, and a bit lost. The minute I started driving, though, this sudden rush of confidence and invincibility surged through me. I felt like Harry did when he took flight on his Firebolt during the First Task: suddenly at ease, because I had this piece of familiarity in an otherwise unfamiliar place. Also, Katie Perry's "Roar" was playing on the radio, and that junk is pure magic. It was my first euphoric moment of "Holy shit, I've finally done it. After all this talk, I'm here. I'm living in Chicago."

I've enjoyed a handful of similar moments since I got here. But those fleeting highs aren't really what I came for. As expected, the last 12 days have brought me face to face, on multiple occasions, with the real objects of my pursuit.

Aloneness

Eating pasta while watching Netflix alone in your twin bed on a Friday night feels slightly more glamorous when you're doing it in Chicago. But I won't pretend this kind of behavior is a consequence of my being new to a city - I pull that kind of shit all the time. What I'm not used to is having entire days to myself. Nowhere to be, no one to see - just me and my own agenda that unravels as my fancy directs it. I don't mind this a bit. I'm a selfish person, you see. Or at least I feel that way, when a person I actually do care about talks to me while I'm reading or something, and my reaction is to wish that I lived in a city where no one knew me so no one would bother me. (At a recent interview I was asked if I'm an introvert or extrovert, and when I answered introvert, the woman assured me there was nothing wrong with that, that her sons were both introverts and they got along fine at their jobs. As though introversion is a mental disorder with which one must find ways to function normally. At the time I was amused by her remark, but now...perhaps she was on to something?)

I've unconsciously surrounded myself with strong, somewhat wild female characters who seem to be at ease, and perhaps at their best, when they're alone.

Discomfort

Breaking down and crying in the middle of a restaurant after your mom and sister, who will be leaving you in Chicago in a few hours' time, ask you about your Thanksgiving plans is uncomfortable. But it's a great way to usher in the thousand more inevitable moments of discomfort to come. Like the one where you get up and move to the other end of the rail car to distance yourself from a screaming toddler AND a muttering old man (they were not traveling together, thankfully). Or the one where you have to read something you wrote to a classroom of fifteen peers and hope to God you get some reaction. Oh, and that other one where the overenthusiastic improv student takes it upon himself to teach you and a couple other rookies how to freestyle rap (too much too soon!).

And then there's just the general discomfort of missing people, and not being sure how long you can keep this up, or what exactly you're after, or if it's possible to go back to what's most familiar merely because it's what's most familiar.

This is my living room floor; it won't have any furniture for a while. This is another source of discomfort, as I value aesthetics and coziness. But there's a silver lining here, and those who know me well can probably guess what it is. I gravitate toward the center of these things - they're perfect for practicing your pirouettes and six step. 

In the midst of all this, I'm finding great comfort in riding the el, the raised doughnut selection at Jewel-Osco, and http://seinfeld-episodes.com. 

Comedy

It's a novel thing to be around people who take comedy so seriously. In one of my classes, the instructor doesn't really laugh. If he thinks your joke is funny, he'll tell you why it worked. If he doesn't, he'll question the people who laughed at it and then turn to you for an explanation. My other instructor (who looks, sounds, and talks like Steve Martin*) is a bit more gracious with his praise, but asks us questions about the characters we've written as though they're real people whom he genuinely wants to get to know. 

Here are a couple bits that intrigued me most during my first few classes. To be clear, this isn't me thinking I'm equipped to give you a lesson in comedy. If I come across as didactic, it's because they taught it that way.

> Satire is the highest form of humor because it carries a subtext that the audience arrives at on their own. The message is always an astute observation or opinion about the human condition or the state of the world. This is different from snark, which is more direct and nasty, and therefor a lower form of humor.

> One rule in writing satire is to "comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable." This is why virtually all satirists are left wing. Right-wing doctrine tends to favor the status quo and isn't inclined to correct systemic imbalances and inequalities - which is the opposite of comforting the afflicted.

> One instructor claimed that professional writers don't like to write, they're just compelled to write (an interesting statement, though I don't think the two are mutually exclusive). If you're not at a point where you feel compelled to write, a good exercise is to set a timer for 30 minutes and write continuously for that period of time. Write whatever comes to mind without self-editing, and keep the words flowing, even if they're filler words, like "I don't know what to write." This way you become comfortable churning out garbage, and writing becomes easier. He likened it to milking a cow: if you do it every day for two weeks and then skip a day, the thoughts build up and you're compelled to let them out. What is more, you can begin to guide your thoughts so you're producing workable material.

*may actually be Steve Martin?

Before I moved here, I had read this article about our tendency to imagine ourselves failing, and how when we fail in our imaginations, it's always much more dramatic than it is to fail in real life. I imagined myself failing in the sense that I'd be so unhappy in Chicago that I wouldn't be able to focus on any of the things I came here to do. I imagined myself crying, a lot. Now I know how ridiculous that'd be, given my current life of creative pursuits and scant responsibility. But I couldn't be assured of this in advance, because as I said before, it's tough to enjoy a perspective you haven't yet earned. Still, it's probably worth it to discern when your imagination is encouraging you and, conversely, when it's being a conniving ass.

Moment of Comfort: Lincoln Park Farmers Market