mahiwaga

so to be honest, I decided to come out here because of a girl. now M can’t say I’ve never come out to visit.

but I was also intrigued to come back to this place, to see if anything has changed since a year and three months ago when I left this place, likely for good, except for times like this, perhaps.

I have discovered, much to my chagrin, that, without free plane fare and without leeching off of any of my friends, Chicago is an expensive place to visit.

I don’t know if it’s simply because I don’t get out anymore—at all, but cruising down the Blue Line from O’hare after all the airport workers got off at Jefferson Park, I noticed that there were a lot of young people out. not that there’s anything surprising with young people going out on a Thursday night (after all, everyone knows that the weekend starts on a Thursday) but, I don’t know. I suppose it’s just where I am in my life. All the people I hang with are either my age (circa 30) or older, and, sadly, most of the time, it is work-related. Man, I can’t believe I am calling early 20 somethings “young people”. Still, I’m kind of stuck on the notion that anyone younger than my little sister is pretty young. This despite my “baby sister” turning 24.

anyway, I realize I miss the big city. I miss the ability of being able to walk a couple of blocks from where I live and be able to find something interesting to do. I only actually lived in the city proper for 2 years (and out of that I spent nearly 6 months out of town) but I was in Chicagoland for 5 years total, and it’s strange to not be able to think of this place as home, as much as I bitched and moaned about being stranded out in the Midwest.

although, I suppose that was the interesting thing. I fully recognize that growing up in Southern California separates you from reality de facto, simply by the fact that you have to get in your car to go anywhere. Hence, trapped in your little bubble universe travelling at 15 mph down the 405, you really don’t get the same sort of city vibe. Mike Davis talks about the irony of artificial, Potemkin city centers dotting L.A.—Universal City Walk, Downtown Disney. Hell, that’s what malls essentially are—prototype arcologies, privately owned pseudo-public spaces.

I dunno. I’m starting to leave stable orbit and head out into the vast blankness of outer space, but it gets me thinking about the so-called “culture war,” which in some senses marks the divide between the people in the rural areas and suburban hell, and the people who live in the city proper. Sure, you can’t ignore the notion of race when discussing this, but to focus on that alone is oversimplifying. The so-called “Sun Belt cities,” of which L.A. is the prototype, and which easily includes San Diego, are really just hundreds of suburbs and private artificial developments that, after forming some critical mass, were amalgamated into these hellish places of big-box Walmartization and cookie-cutter tract housing with no true city center, no true central business district to speak of. in what may not be coincidence, these kinds of cities dot the landscape of the red states. I mean, the whole premise of suburban living is that is somehow approximates the wide-open spaces of the countryside and combines it with the consumer-convenience that civilization (i.e., city centers) traditionally provide. In my mind, it doesn’t work. Decentralization and hodge-podge unregulated development simply lead to the stagnation of youth (since they don’t have anything interesting to do or go to when they’re not at school except for the mall), the obesification of American people (since you have to hop in your car to get anywhere, and no one walks—there aren’t even any sidewalks sometimes), and widespread environmental destruction. There is also a sense that this disdain for natural ecology practiced by many developers leave unsuspecting suburbanites at the mercy of not-so-merciful Mother Nature. While New Orleans was destroyed, and Houston awaits the tender ministrations of Hurricane Rita, you can see every year how parts of Southern California routinely burn down (see most of San Diego County and the mountains in Ventura and San Bernardino Counties in the Autumn of 2003), and all those rapidly (and cheaply) built hillside developments tend to slide into the sea. (See Ventura County, Malibu, Laguna Hills.)

Not to say that the supremely centralized schema of urban development pioneered and well practiced by Chicago is the end-all, be-all. Chicago has had it’s share of eco-disasters. After all, a year or so before I ever came here, nearly a thousand people died one summer from heat-related conditions. But there is something about living in a city like Chicago, or New York, or San Francisco, that is missing from places like San Diego. (Oh, sure, L.A. is the prototype of sprawl and decentralized private development, but in it’s early history it developed more like traditional cities, and you can still see faint glimmerings of that when you wander around Downtown or K-Town.) The wackos on the religious right see the centralized city as fortresses of depravity and the libertarian disciples of Ayn Rand find the centralized city as the epitome of the welfare state, but it’s hard for me to relate. After all, the centralized city is the basis of civilization—without the city-states of Mesopotamia, without urbanization along the Nile, the Indus, the Yangtze, et al, what would life be like?

in today's trivial minutiae: I am typing this on my brother's Toshiba Satellite, horrifically missing MacOS X. It's really just the little things. Like how I don't have to reboot the stupid computer every time I wake it from sleep because I can't get back onto the Internet. Like how I don't have any built-in Firewire ports and therefore can't charge my iPod (because, like the scatterbrain that I am, I left my stand-alone charger in San Diego.) I've had to sort of shoehorn a UNIX like system onto Windows XP (by installing Cygwin) feh. the spacebar is screwed up for some reason, and I have to really pound on it to make it type a space.

anyway. I wandered the streets around the Mag Mile today, and I couldn't help but reminisce about all the times I've done this, usually in misery or loneliness or both. for example, I started thinking about that time when S left me in the Friend Zone, her rejection burning in my chest like Drano, all the while listening to M trying to rationalize a way to forgive her ex despite the fact that he had likely fathered a child with someone else (all the while stabbing my heart with little pinpoint daggers. ah the joys of the Friend Zone™) and here I was wandering these empty streets under a grey, dreary sky (I can't even remember what month it was because there were so many grey, dreary days over the past five years) chain smoking cigarettes and imagining how my life was going to turn out, how I was probably going to alone for the rest of my life, and how every day was the same, this low-level of mediocre misery. not the incapacitating grief of full-blown major depressive disorder, to be certain, but certainly as annoying and as draining as a case of infectious mononucleosis.

and it's interesting how when you go back to places that you haven't been for a while, all of the sudden all those emotions you left dormant come up to bite you in the ass, or at least make you trip as you're trying to step onto the curb.

what is interesting (and not a little bit pathetic) is that nothing has really changed. I just have a lot less time to wallow in self-pity these days. I mean, yeah, as soon as I'm done with residency, the rest of my life pretty much looks like that black pit of despair that imagined that one gloomy day as I strode down Michigan Ave, burning cigarette in hand. it's not a little pathetic that the one bright spot of the exhausting work I'm doing is that at least there are attractive, intelligent women there who talk to me and give me smiles of recognition, this despite knowing that (1) it scarcely means anything, and my desperation is merely a symptom of being single for far too long and (2) relationships among colleagues have this tendency to become far too complicated and volatile.

so here I am on day 2 of my vacation, whiling the time away in my hotel room, typing about how sad and pathetic my life is. as usual. I don't know, like I said, I'd rather not think about it, because the future, frankly, looks horrifically bleak on a more global level, and currently, I am from at least a purely monetary point-of-view, worth more dead than alive (because if I die or am killed, the insurance on my loans will cover my debt.) while, certainly, I could theoretically start making money once I am done with this particular stage in my life, the thought of working for the next ten years merely to bail out this sinking ship known as my credit rating kind of leaves a nasty taste in my mouth, and it's times like these that I feel like picking up and moving to Argentina, or preferrably somewhere where I won't get extradited for defaulting on my debt, or maybe joining a remote monastery somewhere, but oh well, whatever. As they say, we'll burn that bridge when we get to it.

it is moderately distressing that every time I come home, my mom(!) bothers me about my love life (or more accurately, the lack thereof.) it is painfully obvious to me that she wants to be a grandmother rather soon, and it baffles me how this is supposed to transpire.

I don't know, call it rationalization, call it sophistry. whatever the case, a string of disasters has rather damaged my ability to want to pursue romantic relationships. call it avoidance, call it whatever pathology you want, but I have a feeling that this is more than a transient thing. you know how people can have strokes, but how some people just have neurological deficits for no more than a day (a transient ischemic attack, or TIA), others have it for a couple days or so (a reversible ischemic neurological deficit, or RIND), while others, it just continues forever and actually gets worse over time (a cerebrovascular accident, or CVA) I'm beginning to suspect that, as far as my romantic abilities is concerned, I've entered the end-stage. as far as I can tell, there is no rehabilitating this cynicism and fear. I've closed off all possibility, and whenever there is a faint glimmer of hope stirring somewhere in the corner of my mind, the vomit reflex kicks in, the way someone with leukemia tends to throw up every time they come to the hospital, even if they're not even going to get chemo.

in short: as far as finding true love, getting married, and having kids is concerned, I think I'm pretty much doomed. I've crossed myself off of Darwin's list.

Again, rationalization. Sophistry.

so it is that subconsciously I tend to linger in the friend zone. Instead of pursuing possiblities, I deliberately let them go. abandon all hope, all ye who enter here. what the fuck is the point?

so I don't really now why I bother. there is not enough alcohol in the world that would get me to jump off this doomed train of thought, at least not enough alcohol without outright killing me.

drunk? who me?