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Yeah, I have a big ol’ crush on Rahm Emanual. I’m not oging to lie. Not only do I have a penchant for Jewish men, I also seem to have a thing for arrogance. (No worries. In real life I keep the arrogance attraction thing in check.)

For those who are familiar with Rahm, you’ll find this funny. If not, I’m sure there are other blogs with things going on.

Last week I spent five days in sunny and warm Mexico. I can’t believe I came home.

Yes, I missed my Hambone. Yes, I missed my own bed. Yes, I missed eating my preferred foods, going to the gym, and my friends.

But the water was beautiful.

And the sun warmed me down to my bones.

And there was no email or Facebook.

And I even walked slower while I was there.

Goodness, do I need a change in pace and in life.

Since coming home from dinner on Wednesday, my ventures outside the condo have been minimal. The only things that come to mind are my treks to 7-11 for rations. Today I placed a huge Peapod order, further enabling me to not leave the condo except for work.

I am down to about two weeks left here. My condo is in show-able condition. It’ll be listed on the market early next week. I have boxes packed for my big move to Texas. I’m now calling about how to transport everything.

I’ve got some trepidation, of course. Any big changes would have that. But since coming back from Mexico, I’ve seen even more clearly why Chicago won’t work anymore.

Let the countdown begin.

In 1995 I was slated to begin classes at Lamar University in about a week. My parents were cautious about this step. They should have been, since I was only 15 years old. In an effort to give me the option to back out, they had me attend classes at my high school for that first week.

I showed up that first day, looked around at my surroundings, and then retreated to the bathroom for some breathing-into-a-bag time.

The superficiality of it all grabbed my shoulders and shook me. This was not where I needed to be.

The next week I found myself at my live-in nerd school. Sure, there was still high school bullshit. But it was the appropriate level of high school bullshit for my 15-year-old self.

Last week I was reminded of my first pilgrimage to Chicago. I was recently single, not quite particularly tied to Austin, and visiting a dear friend before she packed it up and moved back to Texas.

As 23-year-old dingdongs, that friend and I were hoping to try out what’s heralded as Chicago’s biggest party night of the year.

We started the night off at a typical Rush and Division bar, and then ended the night at a late night dance club on that same block. We woke up hungover the next day, enjoyed Thanksgiving with her sister, and then had a repeat of the night before — only with fewer people, since everyone else was off Thanksgiving themselves with their extended families.

The next year I partook with my friend Melinda. Instead of going too crazy from the beginning, we instead parked ourselves on barstools at another bar in that neighborhood. We again ended up at the late night dance club.

I can’t remember the subsequent years, but I do know that I’ve toned down my weekend celebrations considerably since then. Nights like the Thanksgiving Eve from six years ago went from occurring once a month to once every few months. Nowadays, they come about once or twice a year.

Most Friday evenings are now spent at a restaurant with friends, ending with us retreating home at a completely respectable hour. We all still drink too damn much (half-priced wine nights where everyone orders her own bottle), but it’s contained nicely.

There’s no bartop dancing.

There are no all-you-can-drinks where the only options are Bud or Miller.

Shots aren’t taken. Period.

Overall, the ridiculousness that used to accompany the weekends is long gone. And good riddance! It’s not to say that I don’t enjoy a rockin’ good drunk. I do. Sometimes I really do. But much like the 15-year-old Jo who outgrew her high school days, I find myself rolling my eyes at the tradition I’ve since learned is named Black Wednesday.

As in Black (Out) Wednesday.

Let’s face it: I’m now to an age where I’m just as likely to attend Black Wednesday as I am to wake up at 4 a.m. for any Black Friday event. It’s not going to happen.

Instead, a friend and I ate decadent pasta, claimed our half-priced bottles of wine, and then went home to enjoy a cozy drunken sleep.

All in all, I think this is another sign that my need for Chicago is done. Only a couple more weeks, and I’m off. May no more of my Wednesdays ever be deemed Black.

Almost not a day has gone by when I have not written or talked aloud of my love for you.

You are my greatest love, without doubt, the woman I love most on the face of the earth, easily, and without hesitation.

Though the earth may be beautiful, even its lovely element is not truly worthy of being touched by your footfalls. Even its most awesome and splendorous height is laughably far from being an adequate pedestal.

I long for you with every molecule of my body and my existence.

If I were to invent a new reason to love you for each new day of the year, I would never exhaust the reasons, though we lived a while lifetime together.

I will love you, even to the end, even when it is all going past.

No words of mine would adequately describe or do justice to what you deserve. This is only my very clumsiest attempt at the expression of something which is too sublime to be truly or wholly expressed, ever. These most descriptive but wholly impoverished words flit about the subject of you like decrepit phantoms in search of home, but they cannot ever come close to the centerpoint of the concept which is you.

I love you always, my love.

Seriously guys. There’s nothing fun or funny about your question. It’s insulting to me. It’s demeaning to my gender. And it’s complete uncalled for.

So, what was it about me that made you feel the need to shout out? Here I am, minding my own business, walking home from a great late-night dinner with friends. I’m wearing a pair of jeans, and a light weather jacket covers me. I’m not leering at you. I’m not doing some homeless person shout out to Jesus. I’m not flashing you. What was it that made you say, “Hmm. It would be really funny to pretend like this woman is a prostitute and shout out the car window at her!”

After you shouted and passed me, it’s kinda funny how the light turned red and allowed me to catch up with you without me even having to speed up my stride. It’s also kinda funny how you rolled up your window by time I approached. Was that your attempt at pretending that you didn’t just shout at me like a whore? Is it that when I came eye-to-eye with you and ended up being a middle-aged woman, you were embarrassed by your actions?

I also took notice that when I went into my purse to break out my mace, you realized that, yes, I’m crazy enough to use it, and you changed lanes as quickly as possible. Did it suddenly click that for every action, there’s a reaction? That perhaps you shouldn’t shout at people on the street, since she might be packing something in that designer handbag of hers that she’s not afraid to use?

Whether you realizing the error of your ways or being met with defensive measures, you would have thought that would have been enough. But, no. You still felt the need to lean out your window while driving off (you pansy ass!) and yell that I’m a cunt.

I’d like to point one thing out: you’re in a fucking Saturn. Go back to the suburbs, fuck your wife, and think about all the drunk assholes who will one day shout at your daughter like she’s a whore.

I rode the el exactly two stops on Tuesday. In the time between Clark/Lake and Chicago/Franklin, I swear I caught the beginning of a cold. I spent the rest of the night rubbing my nose with the back of my freshly-washed hand.

Living and working in the Loop, I don’t do much el travel anymore. Combine that with my admitted overuse of alcohol-based hand goo, and I’m sure my immune system isn’t as snazzy as those who brave the elements each and every day.

I had to break out the dreaded Neti Pot, the Zicam nose pump, and those Alka-Seltzer-like tabs of concentrated vitamin C. (Am I the only one who tosses the tabs into her mouth whole? Yeah, the bubbles are a little intense, but I swear that half the tab’s contents end up on the side of the glass instead of being dissolved.) Today I also headed to Walgreen’s during lunch for a huge sack of sugar-free vitamin C drops and the above-mentioned hand goo (plus aloe).

If I’ve got a few germs trying to break their ways past my nose’s protective hairs, I’m going to try everything I possibly can to stop those slimy fuckers from making it in. Better living through chemistry!

In addition to bolstering my defenses through artificial means, I’m also trying to take good care of myself. This means ordering juice with my vodka, drinking antioxidant-heavy red wine, and sleeping through my alarm.

I’ll let you know how well this ounce of prevention and heavy preparedness works out for me.

At 11 p.m. the night before, the phone rings. The caller forgot about the change in time zones, but we were on the phone long enough for him wish me a happy birthday at my midnight.

I smartly moved the phone charger into the livingroom and turned my ringer off so I could sleep until a decent hour. True to my guess, the calls and messages began at 7 with a call from my dad. He couldn’t remember how I old I was, saying, “Happy 28th, 29th, or… close enough, whatever it is.”

The next voicemail was from my three-year-old niece where she forgot the words and just repeated, “Happy birthday to Jo! Happy birthday to Jo!” in her precious little sing-song voice.

Then the texts. And more calls. And the emails. And the e-cards. And the IMs. And the Facebook and MySpace comments.

It’s all very nice and very much appreciated.

Happy birthday to me indeed.

Dear Facebook,

I hate you a little right now.

Fuck off,
Jo

In a city of 8 million people, you’d think it wouldn’t be too often that you ran into people. However, in my six years of living here, my policy of being a-okay with talking with strangers and proclaiming to become BFFs over flavored vodka drinks has me wide-eyed with the regularity with which I run into people.

It’s understandable that I can’t walk down the street in Boystown without seeing fifteen people I know. When it comes to the gays, I’m the gayest non-gay person in that hood. Between dinners at Minibar/Winebar, nights out at Sidetrack, charity events for any number of gay-oriented organizations, and my ever-increasing social network with that particular demographic, of course I’m going to know a bunch of people around there.

Lately coincidental stumbles from outside the gay-borhood have been especially frequent. I can’t subscribe to some cosmic pull bringing people from my past back into the forefront, but here they are anyway.

Last night I was walking home from work, when some guy came running out of the bar shouting, “Jo! Jo!”

I was far enough away to not think he was yelling at me, but I turned around anyway. My mental rolodex is pretty keen, and I narrowed him down to one of three of the cards in that never-ending file. The guy from kickball? My friend’s friend with the awesome wife? Some guy from the charity poker event I attended?

I got confirmation when his friend also exited the hotel bar, snapping both into context. The poker event it was.

After losing, the first guy started pounding the free drinks and went to the outside patio to smoke and talk with his then-girlfriend on the phone. The other guy and I went out for beers after the event, getting along pretty well. However, I ignored his future phone call for completely reasonable reasons.

Recently another person has thrown me off a bit in our coincidental encounters. Many moons ago I dated someone known as Shirtless Running Guy. (All guys get a name along these lines. It’s easier than saying, “Jason. No, not *that* Jason. The other Jason.”) There’s a beautiful blog entry I never got the cajones to post about him and how our lives wove this interesting little pattern in a three-year stretch that dates back to the Benito days.

And there he was, his face squinted in half-recognition, from across the gym. I was equally squinting (mine more a myopic narrowing of the eyes), feeling my nervous system working up to that freak-out that happens when you pass a cop going 5 over the speed limit. I averted my eyes and kept my focus on the workout at hand, later sending a quick email to address the spotting so it wouldn’t later be a big deal.

I got an email immediately back saying, “Ah, yes. I thought that was you. You weren’t wearing your glasses, and your hair is a lot different. Good to see you.”

On Saturday I had to do a little hiding, this time thankful for the new glasses and hair color making me unrecognizable by those from years passed. When I first moved to Chicago I had a friendly encounter with KungFu Jeff. (Again with the names!) There was nothing romantic about this whatsoever, and it was one of the things I very much appreciated about him.

KungFu Jeff and I used to go on random adventures in the city. We were walk-on extras in a movie. We attempted to launch modeling careers. We got drunk in a Starbucks on Rush Street. When I became employed, our daytime adventures came to a stop, and we eventually lost touch. Years later I ran into him working as a bouncer for a dirtbag bar I went to that night. He handed me a wad of free drink tickets and asked that I stick around at the end of the night.

Beers at the booth once the bar cleared out. Pizza from the late night stand. Phone numbers re-exchanged.

We met up a few more times for drinks and to hang out. Then one night it all came to a shattering end. KungFu Jeff decided that we should be more than friends, landed a smooch on me, and thought my insistence that that not happen ever again was actually me playing coy. Another landed smooch, I put on my jacket, picked up my purse, and ignored the two messages he left in the subsequent days.

Walking across Rush, there he was. Sometimes I swear my eyes have that face recognition software. In what was essentially a blink, I established that it him and was able to turn appropriately to keep my face hidden.

Avoidance. It happens.

And that was that.

The final recent running-into is actually quite upsetting. I was once quite close with this girl, and things drifted apart after I decided that she wasn’t someone I wanted to have around. There was always something going wrong with her, and it was dragging me down.

Her mom needing financial assistance. A whorebag friend embarrassing her at work functions. Her jackass boyfriend leading her on before screwing someone else. On and on and on.

I was walking back from the gym one afternoon, rocking the typical pencil skirt and fuck-me heels that make up my not-winter wardrobe. From afar I saw that jackass boyfriend of hers. Just as Shirtless Running Guy had a few questions about my identity, Jackass only met me once and certainly wouldn’t recognize me now.

As we got closer, his glare became even more obscene and intense. And then as we passed, he grunted.

I was so taken aback by his animalistic thrusting noise, I even couldn’t muster one of my typical jaw-dropping comebacks. I felt dirty for the appalling assault on my appearance, sad that my former friend chose to be with someone like that, and amazed that someone with those sorts of true colors would be allowed to respire the same air you and I breathe day in and day out.

I’ll take awkward encounters with charity-goers, gym patrons, and KungFu fighters any day. Just keep your grunters away.