see as i saw

I didn't quite push my way into the throngs of people drinking out of boots and noshing on bratwurst, but I edged along the outskirts of the Christkindlmarket.  It was only an extra block beyond my bus stop and it seemed like a good, albeit short, diversion before finding myself in the usual evening situation.  Couch and pajamas.

Despite the fact that I work with three (occasionally four) men, they are all married men...each with a child under two years old.  Therefore, things flow pretty seamlessly between frat house humor and stroller chat.  I suppose there was only a trace amount of surprise when it was suggested that we have a cookie exchange on Monday.

So I have a weekend mission.  It involves at least a trip to the grocery story and an hour or so in the kitchen.  Let's hope I can match the domestic skills of my married male compatriots and arrive on Monday with a worthy batch of snickerdoodles.

Yes, Chicago, despite your wintry gray skies and freezing temperatures, I love you.  Despite that, I'm leaving you tomorrow.  To cheat on you with a city that many consider more prestigious.  We'll only be together for three days, so I hope you'll accept me back with open arms.

So I'm off to New York City tomorrow, before dawn even cracks, to visit the mother ship and add a few more tricks to my professional arsenal.  I found myself wondering if the streets of New York still have a constant odor of trash in the winter (I've only been there in August or September).  And for some reason I found myself feeling like I should set aside some time to peruse some of the iconic festive sights.

It's funny, because in Chicago I steer clear of the festive areas, clogged with tourists.  Of course, I've seen them all before, too.  No reason to subject myself to pandemonium when there's nothing new within it.  And after musing about the possible wintry smell of NYC, I walked outside into the Chicago twilight and it smelled like chocolate chip cookies.  It's one of those little things about the city that makes me smile.

And it sort of makes me think, for just a nanosecond, that the streets are going to start flowing with chocolate and my life will transform into a Willy Wonka movie.  Of course, there's always the dirty wet dog smell to convince me otherwise.  After four years, I'm pretty convinced that it tends to waft around the city on days with a combined high humidity and pollution level.

It's no secret that I've been craving travel and an injection of the thrill that comes from new places.  Unfortunately there are still many restless months ahead of me.  So I had to go with plan B, seeking new places on a more micro level.

I decided to go with the path of least resistance, hop a northbound #22 bus, and visit a little Chicagoan slice of Sweden.  Andersonville.  I've heard a few people in recent weeks extolling how cute it is with it's independent shops and neighborhood-y vibe.

After browsing the non-corporate options for coffe, I chose an unassuming cafe with a section of floor pillows with low tables and foreign currencies stapled to the pillars.  I thought about hanging around to people watch, but a storm was brewing and I wanted to wander a bit.

I ducked in a store here and there.  Peeked into windows and at menus for bars and restaurants that opened at later hours.  Amused myself with an eclectic and disarrayed collection of antiques and misfit odds & ends.

As I wandered out of my short exploratory jaunt, a rain storm threw me into the arms of Gap.  The reverie of novel adventure was broken and as the storm ceased, I walked out with a bag of goods and aimed my feet in the direction of my warm and comfortable couch.  It was a nice mini adventure to get my synapses firing and my curiosity piqued.  Unfortunately it's not likely to satisfy my craving beyond 24 hours, but that's okay.  I'd be more worried if the craving went away.

Some days are just off-kilter.  From nearly the beginning, this was one of those days.  An off-kilter day isn't the same as a disastrous one, where you can immediately pinpoint a catalyst.  For me, it starts with an underlying disjointed feeling, then slowly crescendos throughout the day.  Suddenly you're anxious, impatient and erupting without really understanding why.

And today I found that this juncture is where yoga is my friend.  For most of the session, my mind is working so hard to convince my body to be malleable that I don't have time to be caught up in the nitty gritty details of my day.  Today offered up a rather fitting mental exercise as well.

As we began class, focusing our minds and bodies, the instructor asked us to assign ourselves a mantra, completing the phrase "I am..."  Quickly cataloging my day, and maybe even a macro level of my life, I struck upon the realization that most of my tension was caused by my reactions to other peoples actions.

So my mantra became, "I am in control of my reactions".  There's not much I can do about what others say or do; my only power comes in the form of how I handle what happens around me or to me.  It's my choice to be upset or calm, the build something up or let it lie.

In an ideal world, this single yoga class would magically evaporate any future tension caused by reactions and expectations.  As a realist, I know that I'm bound to fail at it again...and again.  But I have to imagine that being cognizant, and reminding myself, that I'm in control will ultimately help.  Maybe it'll make me stop, think, breathe - thirty seconds of stepping outside the issue can deter escalation.

I mean, I could be all wrong.  I'm not a psychologist or anything.  My only other explanation, though, is that I forgot my earbuds this morning.  It was a rough deficit for the day, so there's a possibility that it threw everything out of equilibrium.

Sometimes there isn't much on my mind, believe it or not.  Today is one of those days.  I made it as far as the entry way after work, put on my pajamas, and settled into the couch.  Despite the voices in my head telling me to work out or work on something, I lounged, chilled, vegetated, whatever verb you'd like to use.

My greatest use of contemplative energy was how to use the five days of paid time off that I have this year, when I'm not going anywhere.  We have to supply our requests so that the managers can ensure coverage during the holidays.  So maybe I'll take off December 26 and a few random Fridays.  I'm horrible at using time off if I don't have plans to leave the country; next year's days are already numbered and accounted for.

So I guess I'll end on this note.  Today I'm thankful for the abundance in my life that I often take for granted.  Such as the fact that having more vacation days than I do plans is a problem.  Or that my company is funding lunches for the entire company from Monday through Thursday during the fourth quarter, so that we can remain focused.

I think you'll agree that it's quite rare to enjoy the scent of something dead and decaying.  This isn't as dark or strange as it seems, I swear.  It's just that I took a walk through the neighborhood after work today, taking in deep breaths of autumn leaves.  And I happened to start pondering why I so thoroughly enjoyed the smell of something dying.

I suppose this could be another one of those things that defines my rural upbringing.  It fits well with my enjoyment of the way fresh cut grass and sawdust smell.  And then there are bonfires, which are somehow amazing when you're in front of them and then obnoxiously pungent when you can't get the smell out of your clothes and hair.

This is another time when I start to compare my childhood environment to that of kids in the city.  It's difficult to imagine growing up without these things.  Sometimes I want to stop remembering them fondly and just do them again.  I want the tree in my front yard, being perched on a branch over a pile of leaves deep enough to cushion my leap of faith.  I want Friday nights gathered around a bonfire pit, staring into the flames and listening to crackle of branches.

If only autumn lasted longer.  And my parents still lived in my childhood home.  Or even a had a yard with deciduous trees.  Alas, I'll just have to look back fondly for now.

Sometimes awareness brings us clarity, lends a solution, or aids in decision-making.  But often awareness just makes us anxious, paranoid, and needlessly focused on things we can't really control.

I think that's why I have an issue with watching the local news.  It only took thirty seconds tonight for me to hear that a Chicago firefighter died of West Nile virus and that meningitis is breaking out in Indiana.  My first thought was, "Thankfully I have health insurance again" (eight months without it, now that's a fun exercise in anxiety).  Then I started to worry a little, thinking about how close to home a freak tragedy, accident or illness can be.

So what's the solution to that?  Stop living my life?  Become a recluse?  Give up the outdoors because I'm afraid of running into an infected mosquito or other contagious humans?

On other days, living in the city and hearing what goes down, the worry has extended to being mugged, shot or getting my car stolen.  Oh, and we haven't even broached how secretly sinister people can be while coming off as well-adjusted members of society.  Which is fine, you get the point (and hopefully I haven't sent you into a spiral of paranoia).

I'm all for erring on the side of caution and analysis in life, but there comes a point where you're better off not looking too closely.  I like vacationing in equatorial countries with rain forests, so I wear bug spray and drink bottled water if I must.  Short of an impenetrable force field, I'm pretty sure that's all I can do short of restricting myself from doing things I love.

 I have a tendency to use the phrase "nerding out" with relative frequency.  Today it was used in conjunction with the categories of words and Excel formulas.

One of my co-workers developed an affinity for the word "evangelism" in the past 24 hours, and it became fodder for office conversation.  Clearly this seemed like a relevant time to share my favorite word.  Sesquipedalian.  It's quite apropos; feel free to look up the definition and you'll see why.

Then it also seemed relevant to share my word find of the week, thanks to Catch-22: avuncular.  There are very few occasions that I would have a purpose for this word, but I'm determined to find at least one.  Although, no one will be likely to follow my train of thought since it's not exactly one the 1,000 most used words in the English language.

After a morning of word nerding, it was time to dig into Excel.  Granted, I've been seeking new formulas for stats analysis over the past four weeks.  Today just happened to be filled with "vlookup", pivot tables and "concatenate" formulas.  There's also an "isna" formula that's become my close friend.  I can't help it, Excel formulas are like my own nerdy form of digital magic.

I love and embrace my nerdiness; it probably makes sense that I end up working in tech start-up environments.

Some things that are constantly reinforced in my life: surprises are lurking everywhere and the past seems incapable of staying history.  I'm purposely going to leave this declaration in a relatively enigmatic state.  I swear that I make an effort to live a relatively unassuming and non-dramatic life, but it's worth noting that this diminishes none of the aforementioned enigmas.

In other news, my morning commute took an hour today.  One culprit was a little friendly morning road work on a main thoroughfare, and confused drivers with limited mental capabilities for understanding the concept of merging.

But in a freakier twist of events, a standing passenger fainted in the bus aisle and we spent fifteen minutes awaiting medical attention.  She regained consciousness quickly and, besides being a little disoriented and woozy, seemed like she'd be fine.  What struck me about the whole event was how quickly and automatically the passengers immediately surrounding her snapped to action.

One girl noticed the glazed look in her eyes and started to support her before she was even in full faint.  Another girl bore the body weight from the other side, while a guy moved her feet from under her to get her into a seated position on the floor.  As she started coming to, a guy was already on the phone with 911 and an unopened bottle of water was summoned forth.  As the minutes passed waiting for the medics, she was offered a seat, some granola, and a general outpouring of concern.

Although 90% of the passengers quickly removed themselves from the bus as soon as they realized we were stopping, there was a core who was more concerned about the well-being of a human being that getting to work by 9:00.  The girl sitting behind me even started her conference call from her cell phone on the bus.  And I bet no one on the other end had scathing retorts when she explained why.

I felt reassured about humanity this morning.  About my generation.  A small group of 20-somethings sprang to immediate action.  There was no by-stander effect.  And there was genuine compassion.  Kudos to all of those class-act individuals.  I'm proud to have shared a morning commute with you.

Honestly, it's getting more difficult to come up with something to say every day.  I didn't realize how much bandwidth my brain had for extra-curricular thinking when it was unemployed.  In the past three weeks, my social media access has dwindled and my visits to Pinterest have clocked in at zero.  I'm still managing to read books every day, but articles and blogs have fallen by the wayside.

Maybe it's just a readjustment period, since my information intake is so great every day I don't have the capacity to take on outside pondering.  So far I haven't even managed to get 50% caught up with my DVR.  And it looks like I'll be spending three of the next four weekends traveling, again.  How did I possibly develop such a busy life after eight months of going with the flow?

It's funny though, I've been through enough life changes to realize that a few months from now, everything that's pushing and pulling me now will come to feel like routine.  Despite how different my new office life is different from my unemployed life, or even my old office life, it'll start to feel like I've never been anywhere else.

Is it unusual to have a love/hate relationship with surprises?  When someone utters the phrase "I have a surprise for you", my mind is torn into two reactions.  At my core, I automatically begin worrying that I'll dislike or remain neutral to the surprise.  Since I'm virtually incapable of feigning excitement (a.k.a. lying), I'll end up inadvertently offending the surprise giver.  So before I've even experienced the surprise, I'm preparing how to make amends for my potentially offensive reaction.

Battling with that thought is a penchant to hold out a slender hope that the surprise will be amazing.  My mind starts to run away with possibilities, but my pragmatism always wins out, scratching each idea nearly immediately.  This leaves me with a vague sense of hoping for the best, but planning to be underwhelmed.  Maybe that's my personal mechanism of "under promise, over deliver".

There is a third point on the surprise continuum: the absolute surprise.  The kind that isn't promoted or hinted at beforehand.  It nixes the hang time that allows overanalysis, so the reactions will be truly genuine responses to the unexpected.  Of course, when you're known to process before reacting and are capable of being non-emotive, you still face a potential need to diffuse the situation.

Surprises are stressful.  They just happen to be a little less stressful when you don't preface them.  Yet somehow I'm still in favor of being surprised.  I do have a tendency to smell surprise in the air though, so I'm still waiting on an absolute surprise in my life.

Don't worry if you're confused.  I just wrote all of that and I'm still unsure of my own verdict on surprises.

First day in the Chicago office and this is where it begins to feel like I work for a start-up.  Three guys, a girl, and a mini fridge.  Before I even had my computer open, I was rallying to get a Keurig.  That request has been made to the powers that be (although I'm not entirely sure who "they" are).

An hour after my arrival, I was waiting on keys to both the office and the women's restroom.  It's a tenuous wait realizing that, should nature call, your best options are to hope another woman is heading in that direction (keep in mind that I only work with men) or heading down the block to Cosi.

In what was possibly a modern day miracle, by lunch time I had keys, a shelf and a wall installed at my desk, and had accomplished some real work.  Granted, a shipping error meant that I was still missing a monitor, keyboard and mouse, but there was Fresca in the fridge as a reparation.

I may have returned to the working world, but it feels nothing like the office routine that I've cycled through in the past.  And that seems to be a good thing.  It's only been one day in my new Chicago digs, but instead of heading for a rut it feels like I'm getting into a groove.  There's somehow both a minor and a distinct difference between the two.

Since I'm spending the holiday weekend at home and my training schedule in New York starts on Tuesday, today was technically my last day of "freedom" in Chicago.  I use the term freedom loosely, because clearly I'll still have full days to use at my discretion.  They'll just be called weekends and holidays from now on.

Something that I continually promised myself I'd do during my non-employed phase was take advantage of free days at museums in the city.  Without hesitation, I pay for art museums when I travel.  For some reason, in my own city, I feel taken advantage of when I'm asked to cough up $22 to enter.

Well, apparently free days didn't boost my motivation much.  Maybe it's because the museum campus seems so far away and not particularly convenient for me to reach via CTA.

But on this day, which also happens to be Andy Roddick's 30th birthday (no relation to this post whatsoever), I resolved to hit up the Field Museum.  Similar to my recent movie outing, I made myself bike to my entertainment.  Efficiency.  Hopefully I can apply such ingenious solutions in my impending career move.

I wandered around, reading maybe every fiftieth placard.  You'd have to be there from open to close to read everything; it's an information-dense museum.  I geeked out when I got to the triceratops fossils.  It was always my favorite dinosaur (yeah, I have a favorite dinosaur), which I chalk up to The Land Before Time.  What can I say, I liked Cera - a triceratops with a bit of a stubborn and independent streak.

After a couple aimless hours, I headed to the point of the museum campus where I could sit on the Adler Planetarium's lawn and admire the skyline view.  I like this city, I really do, and I'm ready for my next phase here to begin!

Disappointment is a tricky state of mind.  You have to be careful not to let it leach into other facets of your life or to taint the progression of the arena where it occurs.  As difficult as it is to view disappointment objectively, it seems to be the best approach for curtailing the possible negative aftermath.

When a situation doesn't live up to expectations, a palpable sense of disappointment can reveal how much it mattered to you.  By asking myself not only if I'm disappointed, but why, I learn a lot about the direction and intensity of my feelings.

As soon as I've let myself experience and assess disappointment, though, I attempt to move past it.  Wallowing won't make it better.  So I assume that it either occurred to create a path for something better or I merely accept that it happened and shift my focus to next steps.

Maybe it's a coping mechanism.  Perhaps it's the reason that people tend to bestow upon me the "grace under pressure" moniker.  I suppose I would rather just recognize and address my disappointment than let it own me.  Despite all of this, I still feel it, sometimes rather acutely.

For three years, my visits to the Loop were five days a week (not accounting for holidays and vacations, of course).  After January 13th of this year, it has been about five times total.  Every time I step off a bus and into the bustle, the environment feels concurrently familiar and disorienting.  It's definitely a long way from the baby stroller subset that flourishes in weekday neighborhood atmosphere.

I've definitely reached a point where the hustle and bustle is beckoning to me again.  The imbalance that led me away has been studied and broken down from every angle.  New parameters have been mentally drawn to ensure my work/life balance remains intact.  I always vocalized my desire to work for a company that believed in the balance, without realizing that it's a two-way street.  I also have to commit to maintaining that balance.

Stepping away to recalibrate wasn't always easy, but I've never had any doubt that it was the best move.  What I've spent eight months learning could've plagued me for years or even decades.

I'm sure you've seen just as many articles and debates about the death of face-to-face communication, especially in regards to Generation Y and whatever they're calling the youngins these days.  As I was texting away this afternoon, I started thinking about the way in which this habit has changed the way we write...or type, rather.

Traditionally, it seems that writing was of a more formal nature, obeying punctuation and syntax rules.  As we've relegated phone calls and personal interaction to the past, the non-verbal forms have taken on more casual proportions.

Abbreviations and acronyms are only part of it.   In fact, we try to type out our communication to convey even the intonations and expressions that you would experience in person.  Emoticons :-/, draggggging out words with repeated letters...ellipsis to demonstrate a dramatic pause or open-ended thought...

I'm as guilty as most (although I do avoid the acronyms, they just bug me), hiding behind my technology for communication.  As a self-professed introvert, it's easier and more comfortable to send an email or a text.  Since it's become a social norm, I don't generally think twice about it either.

Yet, as a lover of all things grammar, punctuation and syntax, I have a difficult time accepting the virtual slaughter of the written word.  Pun intended.

The first half of my day seemed intent on not going as expected or desired.  With a recruiter meeting scheduled in River North at 11:00am, I left my place at 10:25am to hop an 11 bus.

As handy as the CTA's bus tracker is, sometimes it lies.  I was supposed to have a four-minute walk that should've easily fit within my seven-minute clearance.  Instead I was a half-block away from the stop as I watched the bus accelerate southbound through the intersection.

No problem, there's always a 22 bus as an alternate plan.  Again I was left with seven minutes to book it two and a half blocks...in heels.  And clearly I haven't had a need to wear heels at any time in the past eight months, so blisters were already forming.

Guess what happened when I was a half-block away?  Southbound bus, intersection, acceleration.  Luckily I live at a virtual crossroads of buses, so I just kept walking the next block over to the 156.  Unfortunately, ten to fifteen minutes had already passed and I had another nine minutes to wait.

Anyone who knows me well is familiar with my anal retentive need to not only be on time, but early. And now I was not only destined to be late, but late to what was essentially a preliminary job interview.

If you'd like to fast forward about twenty minutes with me, I somehow managed to walk in the door, flustered and glistening a bit from the effort, only one minute late.  Then it took only another fifteen seconds to learn that my recruiter was running late.

Thus, I spent a half hour at the Starbucks patio on Franklin and Chicago, people watching and taking pictures of the 'L' tracks.  I felt justified in taking the afternoon off for napping and reading after all of the transportation excitement.  And I think I'll wear flats for the rest of 2012.

I'm so hot right now that I'm thinking about packing up and moving to northern Canada.  Tonight.  And, yet, I find myself hyperaware of how grateful I am for the air conditioning in my car and my apartment.  There's an extension of the gratitude when I consider that even though I don't have a job, I can still afford to have that car and that apartment.

The initial catalyst for this unconventional journey was to recalibrate and find the life direction that I really wanted.  By life direction, I know that I meant job.  Looking back on the past six months, and taking into consideration that I still don't really have an answer on the job front, I know that it has been more about personal development.

I've always been inside my own head, sometimes to a detrimental extent.  Nearly everything that drifts into my mind is analyzed, correlated and cataloged.  Somehow I let myself believe that this meant I knew myself, that I understood my world.  It amazes me to see how much there is to learn about myself, though.  I've discovered things that I'm far too sensitive about, things that I haven't been nearly appreciative enough about, and things that I've been unnecessarily clinging to.

It's so easy to get caught up in the daily grind, in our patterns, without turning a discerning eye on why we're doing the things we do or if we're on the right track.  Don't get me wrong, this has not been the easiest six months of my life.  I wouldn't call it a joyride by any stretch of the imagination.  In fact, some days it's an uphill battle.  But like any experience in life, I know that this stage is giving me necessary experience to reach the next one.  Sometimes I just get a little anxious for the next stage to arrive.

I would like to pat myself on the back for not only finishing the first book since I declared my reading challenge, but for accidentally choosing the LONGEST book on the list to get started on my mission.  Three weeks into reading it, I was struck by how odd it was that the Kindle app told me I was only 60% finished.  Off to Amazon.com to check the page count...656.  For some reason that knowledge got me hyper-motivated, and I raced through the last 40%.