urban camping in the shanty town

My first week of working and living in the apartment I'm subletting this summer has been quite the adventure. When I arrived in Chicago I was actually not even allowed to enter my apartment because it was being fumigated for bed bugs. When I did make my way into my apartment it turned out that my room in the apartment was actually uninhabitable because of the broken washer and dryer, the construction equipment, and strange pile of rope that was filling up where I would have liked to have put my bed in my tiny room behind the kitchen. This was the result of major renovations to the small laundry room/bathroom attached to my room. These renovations themselves were necessitated by the state of utter chaos left in the apartment by the previous tenants who I assume must be the dirtiest hipsters ever. I missed out on the real madness that my roommates saw (sink torn out of wall, full kitty litter box in a closet, and piles of chicken bones and other assorted remnants from what must have been an excessive number of trips to Harold's Chicken Shack). Life in Shantytown (my affectionate name for apartment, which I think is better than other ideas that my roommate Sara put forward like shithole and crack den) is getting better. Slowly. Very Slowly. At some point though I think it may be a little more habitable.

My two internships have gone well in this first week. Working at the Institute of Politics has been quite the experience thus far. As the only intern and one of two employees at current I do a lot of different things. I just wrote a social media strategy but I also had to make an excessive number of excel spreadsheets to organize survey data. There's not too much consistency to it but mostly my life at the IOP is centered around me google searching an unimaginably large amount of things, making the occasional phone call to someone at Georgia's 13th Congressional District Democratic Offices, and attending meetings with University folks.

Writing for the office of Campus and Student Life website is nice. It's good to do journalistic work and actually be given time for it although the amount of waiting you have to do for email responses is somewhat frustrating I really like the job. I have a feeling I'm going to know and unreasonable amount about the administration at the University by the time I'm done. Also, all those people who send out those campus wide emails are actually real people. All those names on those stern and informational emails I've received over the past two years from the University turn out to be people who work on my floor (and even bring me ice cream to my cubicle).

I'm pretty pleased because this year I finally met my goal of working somewhere with air conditioning. So it's hopefully a final goodbye for me to wonderful jobs like chopping firewood and staining decks.

a last trip home

I find myself for the first time in sixth months back in my boyhood home in Virginia. I've always loved the Piedmont of Virginia and it'll always be my home but coming back here this week I've felt like I'm saying goodbye to the home I grew up in. With every single trip I make to a familiar site I know that it will not ever really be coming back as much as visiting. I am burning my bridges with Virginia and learning to leave behind all my memories in preparation. It's hard accepting that I've left and that now I live in other places. There was a certain permanence to my move when I left my bags in Chicago before returning home only with a solitary duffel bag. This time my journey back to Virginia was not so much a homecoming as it was a vacation from life in Chicago. In the next year I will not live in one location for more than three months at a time and I will at last accept that my wandering feet have said goodbye to Virginia. From now on when I return to Warrenton, Virginia it is only a fleeting interruption from my travels because I have decided I cannot ever move back to home. There is too much of the world to see for me to spend much more time in this little corner I know so well.