Updates

Okay, I lied about going to bed and having no time to blog during finals week. I'm having too much fun right now (this will be my third post in the last hour), and I know I won't be able to sleep for another while anyway.

I was going through my old entrees and realized I went for a long while only blogging intermittently. As a result, there's no record of some major lifestyle changes I've made this past year. Most notably, I never mentioned I don't live at this condo anymore, which was in a really sketchy neighborhood on Chicago's west side. For those who don't know, there was a homeless shelter behind me at this place and once a week the Salvation Army truck would park beside my building and hand out food and drink.

Back in September my room mate was coming home at night when a thug on our street picked a fight with him. We shut ourselves indoors but the guy came back with reinforcements at 4 in the morning, jumped our gate, and pounded on the front door looking to jump my room mate. I've never had to call the police before that morning, but we grabbed our things when the officer came and got the hell out of there. A week later we started apartment hunting.

I have to say, a lot of good came out of that night. I live in a bigger, nicer place in much better neighborhood now, and just a ten minute walk from campus. There's actually businesses and restaurants around me, and a lot of my friends live within a few blocks from here. Actually, I feel this move had to happen in a way, like my life couldn't have become what it has without the move, and I can hardly remember living at the old condo. Even returning there from class last semester seems like a vague memory.

On the home front, my mother took her boyfriend to Thailand last month to meet my family and, I suppose, show him what he's getting himself into. Apparently he loved the trip, and my family loved him: even my grandmother, who we thought might have a few old-fashioned reservations about the guy, didn't object. He and my uncle became drinking buddies, my little cousin liked playing with him, and he can imagine living over there after retirement. He even refers to me as his "other son" now.

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Something about blogging tonight and writing off the top of my head is really therapeutic. I should do it more often. Sometimes I hold back on strictly mundane blogging because I have the sense I should produce something "literary" all the time - that is, write personal essays, cultural critiques, and little articles, as if this were some sort of magazine. That's bullshit. I know hardly anyone's reading stuff like that, and for once it's nice not to think about structure, plot, narrative arc.

This blog is for me and I write for myself. I often lose sight of that.