Chicago, I might be breaking up with you

This is Part 2 in the Humdrum series/journey toward homeownership. Enjoy Part 1, where I worry-debate over the pros and cons of buying a house, here. If you’re new to Humdrum and would like get it in your inbox, subscribe here.

If you asked me, in 2019, if I would ever consider moving away from Chicago, the answer would have been “hell no.” I moved to the city in 2006, found an apartment and roommate online (not Craigslist but close enough), sold my car and quickly learned to navigate the CTA as well as any local. I found a job, changed jobs, and started building a career. I made friends and fell in love here. This is my home. Or I once felt it was my home. The ability to choose where to live is a gift. I first chose Chicago.

I knew from all the small and mid-sized Midwestern towns I’d lived in growing up that I did not want to live in any of them. A trip to New York at 16 was that first slap of recognition that a city was where I was meant to be, followed by another ~5 years later, only this time I was in Chicago. My friend and I sat with our toes in the sand at Oak Street Beach, our gazes to a sparkling lake and our backs to the John Hancock Building and the Sears Tower and the whole glittering city pushed up against a blue sky that went on forever, and this time it was this magic I wanted to be part of. 

Less than a year later, I was here. I was giddy, and a little smug that I escaped the boring existence of those small Midwestern town I grew up in. I felt like I was espcaping the stereotypical trappings of heteronormative suburbia that I never wanted: the husband and wife each with their own car in an attached garage, commuting into the city to work, the silent neighborhood that looked the same as the other silent neighborhoods that stretch on and on because everyone was tucked into their isolated bunkers. The ennui of the weekends, only the shopping mall and the movie theatre and Dairy Queen parking lot for fun. 

No doubt some of these feelings were rooted in teenage angst. But I also wasn’t interested in the traditional trappings of adulthood: marriage, car, house, kids. The only thing I really wanted was a cool job that I cared about in an exciting place, a place with millions of different people and a music scene and museums and art and shops (so many bookstores!) and festivals and beautiful buildings vibrating with energy. Chicago represented possibilities and told me important things, fun things, interesting things were happening. I only needed to find them. 

It felt right when I got here, age 22, very green and starry-eyed. I moved because I wanted to this time. I was chasing a feeling and I followed it to someplace big. Maybe I was searching for that feeling of home or to be in a place that felt more like me.

In the decade plus that I’ve lived here I did feel that Chicago was home. I’ve done so many of the things I wanted to do: I’ve meandered around the art museums, gone to concerts in small clubs and big venues with new friends. I’ve been to Cubs and Soxs games, sipped cocktails at bars all over the city, ridden my bike down Lakeshore Path and hung out at the beach. I even have a cool job now.  

But. . . after years of working on Michigan Avenue, and sharing sidewalks with lollygagging tourists with their cameras and shopping bags, the giddiness of landing that first job on a world-famous street has, many jobs later, morphed into a persistent, low-level crankiness. I had once been thrilled by The El, but the time to commute is erratic, often times it’s too crowded, smelly, loud. Two-plus hours of my day is on a bus or train with me trying desperately to become absorbed in a book or some nonsense on my phone so I won’t notice how stressful this all is. 

The city can wear you down after a while. Other people stop becoming people but obstacles in your way. The pandemic has only intensified these feelings. I’m glad that I live in a neighborhood where everything I need (grocery, pharmacy, coffee) is within a 15 minute walk, or a short bike ride. I avoid leaving my neighborhood if I can. But hovering on just these few streets when I know there’s more a little further away has started to make me feel trapped. Like I trapped myself because to leave my neighborhood requires time, energy, and/or expense. I must gird my loins. 

Even before March 2020, I had started to turn into a homebody. Concerts became rare and only if the venue had seats. Definitely no more 4 a.m. bars. I didn’t wander around different neighborhoods or meander around shops so much anymore. Logan Square and other neighborhoods to the south and west might as well have been different states. Happy hours became rare. Meeting a group of friends required a certain mental pep talk. Part of me will always want to sit on the couch with a glass of wine and a book. Date Nights might entail the occasional show or dinner out, but a lot of the time we stayed home. The bright bustle of the city I’d loved so much I’d mostly stopped being a part of. 

There’s a second part to this story: it’s that of a deeply self-absorbed kid growing up. Or maybe it’s growing out. I wrote in my book about this vision I had for myself when I was in my 20s, about being some fabulous world traveler who would bounce from place to place wearing fabulous scarves and doing something equally fabulous before leaving. Living out of a suitcase, being tied to nothing, seemed so sexy and free. 

10+ years later and I am embarrassed by this fantasy. Bouncing around from place to place has started to feel selfish. To be clear, I don’t mean travel or going on a trip. I’m talking more about a mindset, a way of approaching the world that means not knowing, or caring to learn, much for the people or communities or environment around you. It’s a way of staying separate, aloof. I do not think this is a good way to live.  

The person I was when I moved here, that person who wrote that book, is not the same person I am now. I often think about a question Anne Helen Petersen posed in her Culture Study newsletter, “How has the pandemic radicalized you?”

And this is one of the reasons it has radicalized me, put into sharp focus that which was blurry before: this idea of community and connection and family. The part that wants to put down roots somewhere and grow out instead of in. As much as I love Chicago, as much as it’s been my home, I don’t feel that it is my home. I’m trying to articulate that sense of being a part of something, perhaps it is belonging, and what I experience here is its absence. 

Still, I love this city, and the friends I made here. I get that glitter-feeling when I catch glimpses of the skyline. There’s this stretch on Clark Street in Rogers Park, nine miles from downtown where you can clearly see the Sears Tower, massive and solid, and I’m momentarily wowed and I feel a tug again of how lucky I am to live in a place with such a building, that I can even see it from my own neighborhood.

That doesn’t change these deeper, squishier, harder-to-define feelings. But I also feel certainty, like I did that day at Oak Street beach, toes wiggling in sand. It’s time to start over, try somewhere different. Maybe this new town will fit, maybe not, maybe in five years I’ll want to come back to Chicago. I don’t know, that’s the scary part. But I know I’ve been radicalized out of the big city. My teenage self would freak.

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I want to buy a house, but I'm scared

I think I’m going to buy a house! Over the coming months, Humdrum will be a series of essays about this home-buying journey. Topics include, getting comfortable with dropping all my savings on a piece property, choosing where to live, wtf is a mortgage/is it a scam, and more! Enjoy Part 1, where I worry-debate over the pros and cons of homeownership.

Mortgage means “Death Pledge” in Old French. 

Ever since I learned this, from a friend’s Tweet of all places, it’s all I think about. Home ownership = Death Pledge. Home to the death. Death home.

You see, my partner and I are considering buying a house. This terrifies me, owning a house. Growing up, my family moved three times before I voluntarily split for college in Wisconsin before I moved to Chicago. Even here, I move every few years, upgrading apartments to ones with more light and more space. I haven’t stayed in one place for more than a four years since I was 16! My brain struggles with the concept. It felt like freedom to not be tied to any piece of property. 

On the other hand, I’m tired of apartment life. Neighbors are loud, winters suck when you have a dog that needs to be walked three times a day. I want a garden, a vegetable patch, a big yard for the dog. I want to paint the kitchen crazy bright colors and get a decent fridge and install shelves and hooks for all my plant babies. 

But the financial burden and risk involved because I want to futz around with decor without losing a security deposit does not seem worth it. I was in my early 20s in 2008, that age where you’re meant to save money to buy a home. I remember the wrenching stories of foreclosures, friends of friends losing their homes. Money gone, a piece of them, gone. I had voluntarily left a bunch of homes over the years, but to have one taken away was unimaginable. I didn’t want to ever be in that situation.

I asked some homeowner friends my age what they thought of buying property.

“Convince me,” I said to my friend A. in a playful yet deadly serious way. “Convince me that we should buy a home.”

“You can do whatever you want,” he replied in a tone full of confidence. “I could knock out a wall,” he said. “All I need is a sledgehammer.”

The I-can-do-what-I-want attitude sounded like the reasoning of an entitled teenager, not a 40 year-old man. That must have shown on my face because then he talked about money, the most material, practical thing for adults. He and his wife had a fixed mortgage: monthly payments would stay the same over 30 years. They’d recently refinanced and will spend $350 less on their monthly payments, which will be done in 2049. 

“I’m going to die in this house,” A. announced. He sounded...satisfied. Pleased even.

That perhaps terrified me even more than the money and logistics and just the overwhelm at the process for buying the house. 2020 violently demonstrated that you can’t predict the future. And to be beholden to a piece of property for 28  more years is beyond what my puny imagination can conceive. 

Buying a home is more than just the structure, the property. It seems to me that buying a home is making a massive gamble on the future. What you’re buying into now probably won’t exist in 5, 10, 20, 30 years. I don’t mean just the house: neighborhoods change, towns change. What if obnoxious neighbors move in who like to shoot rifles in their backyard and hate dogs and have loud parties at 2 a.m.? What of floods, tornados, fires? What if another derecho tears through and blasts off your roof? In the face of climate change and catastrophic events destroying homes and displacing whole communities, the idea of owning property feels absurd. The color of the kitchen is irrelevant if the whole house will get obliterated.

Further, there’s a tremendous emphasis placed on owning a home as a path to wealth, which can feel like a bad joke since it often leaves behind communities of color and younger people and Millenials who are saddled with student loan debt and graduated into a tough job market.

I may have made it through the tough job market, but what if I lose my job and can’t afford my mortgage in the future? Outside the money involved with the purchase, what about the money to maintain the home? The time and energy involved with the constant upkeep: mowing the lawn, shoveling, cleaning gutters, replacing fridges and washers… Even the fun stuff like decorating feels like so much. A start-up I once worked with was building a product whose selling point was helping homeowners manage the upkeep of their home: routine HVAC checks, gutter cleanings, chimney cleanings, miscellaneous plumbing disasters, and random handyman needs. (Get a good handyman, another friend’s advice). 

And then there’s the Big Stuff: you need a new roof, the air goes out on a 90-degree day, your basement floods. Fixing that is expensive! It’s a hassle! It’s stressful! Why do we do this to ourselves? Of course I like the idea of a fixed mortgage vs. the constantly rising rent. That’s obviously great. But outside dropping a load of money on buying a place or dealing with the vagaries of a landlord, what are the other realistic options for stable housing? There aren’t many. And though I love the idea of buying an airstream and living from the road, I also hate long car rides.

While talking to A. and his wife, we were all sitting outside, sipping gin and tonics and indulging in snacks. She pointed out her plant experiments: blueberries, a lime tree, azaleas, turnip greens. Her husband had taken over the one-car garage with his tools and woodworking equipment and a beer fridge. He’s working on staining the chairs the same red-brown hue as the table. 

I saw how my friends could actually do what they wanted, and they had the space to do it. With the benefit of ownership comes a different kind of freedom. They could endlessly experiment and customize and mold the place to their tastes, adapt it to their hobbies and lifestyle, and make something their own, a true expression of themselves. And then they invite friends over who share in that. Yeah, that I-can-do-what-I-want argument was spot on. 

Honestly I’m just talking around my anxiety, the anxiety of parting with a large sum of money, anxiety around commitment to a piece of property, anxiety of not being able to see into the future, or even make a decent prediction. I shout into the void: Is this a even a good idea??

Of course no one can predict the future so the question is what am I going to do now. My therapist suggests reframing my thinking. The decision should not be about good vs. bad, but is the decision grounded. Do you have solid, meaingful reasons for the decision you make?

It’s a privilege to have options. How do you weigh the scales, of money and expenses and all the items you could neatly calculate in an Excel sheet against those intangibles, those things that are hard to pin down but take up a lot of space in your heart: the desire to feel like you’re home, of sitting by your garden with a glass of wine while your partner sips whiskey and your weird little dog sniffs the air and watches the shadows grow longer.  

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Shorten the work week

I opted to pause writing for a while this summer after a successful #1000wordsofsummer, partly to take a break and partly because my partner was getting foot surgery in July. I didn’t see how I could maintain both the time and mental space to be creative on top of the day job demands, the dog, and whatever other responsibilities I had to pick up around the house.

Though the surgery itself was relatively minor (no physical therapy or anything like that needed), Chris had to stay completely off his foot for over two weeks before slowly, gingerly, putting weight back on it. Even though the pain was overall more achey than hurty, the most he could do that was use crutches to carry himself from the bed on one end of the apartment to the couch on the other. It’s frustrating, to be rendered suddenly helpless. 

I anticipated walking the dog would be my sole responsibility while he recuperated, as would preparing meals, washing dishes, cleaning the kitchen, etc etc etc. I anticipated the extra time this would take. What I did not anticipate was how draining all of this could be. That worn feeling, not the kind of tired like I didn’t get enough sleep or I worked out really hard, but that feeling of being worn inside my bones.

It wasn’t just the physical labor that was so draining but the emotional and mental labor too. To constantly check in, to ask, to remember remember remember to do all these other little tasks, and ones that you’re not used to doing. None of this stuff was hard by itself (e.g. bringing him lunch) but they were just more that had to be slotted around all the other work and home and dog things. Together, they can crowd up your mind, like you keep shoving more and more stuff onto a shelf, and what was once tidy and organized is a heap of shit threatening to fall on your head. 

But as Pop said in Moonstruck, the greatest film of all time, everything is temporary.

That worn feeling passed after a couple weeks, once I recalibrated to a new rhythm, and Chris’s foot was healing well enough that he could start putting weight on it, and we could return to pieces of our old routine.

I can’t help but feel relief that we had no kids to also worry about, just a mouthy dog. Relief too that both of us could work from home, that we could afford to pay someone to clean the apartment, that we could order food. All of this eased the burden of both working a job and taking care of someone.

Friends, a couple, bought a house last year, an adorable brick one with a beautiful, huge backyard garden. They have a toddler and they both work fulltime. They want to cut back on work hours: maybe she goes part-time and he demotes himself from his leadership position so he can work four days instead of five. Caring for the garden and the house and a toddler, they said, is a lot of work, a lot of time and a lot of energy. A weekend isn’t quite enough to manage all the tasks needed to maintain and sustain their life plus give them time to rest, pursue hobbies, spend time with friends, to not work.

You might have heard about that study out of Iceland last month, that showed the positive affects of a four-day work week? This prompted a question to the CEO of my company in a meeting, if we would ever move to a four-day week. He hedged, of course.

What my company has been doing is Summer Fridays, and by that I mean half days on Fridays, not this fake summer Friday thing some do where you have to “make up” the hours during the week. We get a full half day. (Not too big a stretch to go down to a four-day week?!?!?!) Even if I don’t take the full half day, shutting off my computer at 3pm instead of 6pm feels like a blessing. I’ve been given the gift of time! I take the dog for meandering walks without rushing through the park to get to my next meeting, I check on my plants, I start dinner a little earlier. Every once in a while I’ll schedule a massage, but usually that extra three-four hours is spent doing some kind of dog, plant, or home care.

A thing my friend with the big garden observed that’s been rattling around in my head: the labor of thinking about the home tends to fall to one person. I’d wager that in the majority of cis-het relationships, that role falls to the woman. And I certainly feel that, felt that more acutely as Chris recuperated. That time was really temporary, a handful of weeks, but thinking about, caring for, working on the home and the general business of running a home? That’s much less so. It feels like it never ends.

The discussions on shorter works weeks can focus on how workers (knowledge workers, office workers) can be as productive if not more so in four days instead of five. That argument might help the bosses feel better about not losing productivity (and therefore, money) with one less work day. But that misses the point that we work outside of the office too. We have children and pets to take care of, homes to maintain. Work is required outside the office so that when we show up to the office, we’re able to do that kind of work too. These spheres are not separate, as this past year and a half as clearly demonstarted.

The fact that a four-day week or even permanent Summer Fridays is being openly discussed at work, and that there was not a definite “no” signals that at least in certain corners, productivity is being re-revaulated, as well as what kind of demands a job can make of you and your time. Though the 4-day week dicussions can focus on that crew, we should remember the doctors, nurses, nannies, caregivers, service workers and every kind of worker. Burnout is affecting everyone, everyone needs time to rest and to have a life.

It would be so great, wouldn’t it, to have a permanent half day or one full extra day in the week to do things that you need to do, but without the rush and stress and sometimes half-assing it when you try to shove those chores around other chores, around other obligations?

I like my job a lot and feel lucky that I found my way to a career that is creative and challenging and pays well. But I do not want to spend all my time thinking about that work. I’m fantasizing about what else I could do with permanent extra time beyond the routine/home tasks: volunteering, working on art projects, seeing friends and family, and writing of course. All those things are deserving of care and attention, just as much if not more so than our paid work.

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Gimmie those good smells

I walked into my office bleary eyed on a Monday morning to see a trail of ants on my desk and a clump of them whirling around on the floor. How, why? Less than 24 hours ago I saw not one. In a fit of anger and shame, I mushed all of them with tissues. I was invaded last year and I knew how to get rid of straglers: with smells. I spread cloves all around the perimeter of my office and unleashed an ant deterrent—a sachet reeking of lemongrass—in the small room. If those didn’t work, I had a vial of peppermint oil ready to deploy. Humans find peppermint invigorating but ants are supposedly repelled. 

The cloves and lemongrass did the trick and the ants have been gone for weeks now.

The lesson: smell is powerful. (I had to work from the living room the day I smell-bombed the ants). We don’t give our sniffers enough credit. Humans can smell 5 million different molecules, which is less than a dog but way more than what bet I you were thinking. Smell helps connect us to the world around us on some deep, animalistic way. We’re just not aware of it most of the time. There’s a story in my family of how my mother smelled gas in our home, called the gas people, who detected nothing with their science instruments. My mother insisted she smelled gas and finally, using dish soap applied to a pipe, they saw the bubbles that showed them what my mom knew all along: there was a gas leak. This is an extreme case, but this sense alerts us, gives us signals to what’s going on in our environment. Our nose knows when there’s spoiled milk and moldy food in the fridge, when that sweatshirt needs to be washed, when it’s going to rain, when the grass has been cut.

Can you imagine not having a sense of smell? I can’t. (Even with really bad colds, I could still smell; it was just muted). Besides the variety of environmental cues smell provides, it can also be mood altering. I remember once, in the Before Times, feeling anxious in a grocery store and going over to the soaps and randomly picking up the ones that sounded interesting (French lavender, some bergamot concoction) and after a minute or two, the anxiousness dissipated into calm.

English is a crappy vehicle for describing smell. This fascinating New York Times Magazine articles points out how use proxy words to describe smell. A scent is like something else. It’s not a thing in itself, like colors. The only exception I can think of is petrichor since it is that particular smell of the air after a rain following a dry spell. But try to describe the scent of a rose, of a forest, of what you ate last night. It’s hard.

I wonder if this is why descriptions of an aroma can get crazy (think of those florid wine descriptions!) because in order to describe it, you have to reach for other words: “Baked apples with cinnamon left to cool on the window sill of a cabin in a forest on a foggy spring morning, near a bush of roses ” sounds actually quite nice to experience but a bit unhinged when it comes to describing a smell, wine or otherwise. What’s funny is I don’t know if these descriptions even work all the time. There’s so much mashed together. What the hell do baked apples, fog, forest, roses, smell like together? On the other hand, really interesting, evocative scents (wines, perfumes, memories) have so much going on that I wonder if we need these ridiculous descriptions in order for our own personal brains to make sense of it?

But with smell, it also goes beyond just trying to convey what your nose picks up. Smell is deeply connected to how we think and feel about a thing. It triggers emotions and memories as mysterious as our beating hearts. It is, your grandmother baking cookies, that cool spring day you sat outside drinking cocktails with your friends, a Florida beach on spring break. Describing a smell can be a deeply personal thing that can make it hard for someone else to get it in the way you do.

I’ve recently gotten back into perfumes (I’m ordering sample sets every week) and this is why it’s fun to talk about perfumes, and scented things in general, with other people. We can interpret them so differently and scented products can smell so differently on us. Smell is personal: how our bodies react to the scent, how we think about it, what it reminds us of, if we find ourselves so captivated that we are still thinking about that one scent nine months after we first tried it.

Or maybe we’re not consciously thinking of any particular scent at all, we’re just going about our business, and then boom, we smell it and we’re right back in that memory.

I’d love to hear your favorite scents or scent memories! If you’re into perfumes (if not, consider it, it’s fun!) here’s three perfumers who are creating awesome stuff: Imaginary Authors, Ineke, and Zoologist. Or if you want a monthly sample pack of a variety of different perfumes, checkout Olfactif.

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Let me work from home forever, please

I am a person who craves solitude, who needs it in order to function, both in that fill up / replenish energy way and to actually do my work.

So I have not been sad about the forced working from home the past year+. Before, I’d feel a pinch of guilt, wondering how far I could push my boss before they subtly hinted that they “missed” me in the office and would I be in for that Friday meeting?

I hope this past year means I won’t ever have to go back into an office again, except maaaaaybe on occasion. This might not be possible; office leadership has started talking about “when we’re all together again” and re-opening offices in September. They haven’t used the word “family” but that’s the vibe I get. Is everyone desperate to go back to an office, to work among many other people, but me? 

I get missing colleagues, I do miss IRL facetime with mine, and the impromptu coffee breaks and chatter about what you watched last night, or plans for the weekend. For me, the benefits of working from home far outweigh missing that facetime. Not seeing my friends and actual family, the sameness of these walls, that is what is making my nuts, is making me sad.  Not working from home.

I get that some professions are better suited for in-person (teaching, arts, jobs at labs, travel industry jobs and so on) but a design and ad agency? To some, the answer is “yes.” My office prides itself on being collaborative, of different disciplines (the visual designer, the product designer, a creative director, a content strategist, etc) shut into a glass-walled conference room and attacking a whiteboard with sharp lines and loose squiggles. As a researcher, I am sometimes in on these “working sessions,” and I love them. I love feeling part of the process, of making my own squiggle lines, of batting ideas back and forth. It is a needed break from the solo hours I need in order to plan research studies and analyze data. 

But I also see that we can collaborate just fine remotely. Maybe it does work better to be in person. I don’t know, it all depends on you, your team. It still feels strange to me to hear someone in leadership talk in such glowing terms about “being together.” We are colleagues, not a family. And I’m fine in my quiet office at home, and so grateful I have this space. And yet, I felt the energy of being together. I too, am tired of Zoom. 

Where to go from here? Wherever it is, I hope there is flexibility. I hope this year has shown us, especially our bosses, that we need more understanding about our colleagues’ lives. We’ve seen the cats clomping over the keyboard, the babies sitting in laps, kids peeking over their caregiver’s shoulder, heard the dogs howling at the front door. Feeling supported is what we need, not an arbitrary demand on where we do our work. 

I wonder about control, and how much of the general push to go back to in-person work is about bosses wanting more control over their employees’ schedules and work lives. Productivity software already exists for this (and thankfully not something I’ve used). And it’s a ridiculous idea, right? Why do we have such a hard time trusting our colleagues? Trust that we’re all trying, trust that we’ll meet our deadlines. Shouldn’t that be the starting point, an assumed thing? The energy of monitoring could be so much better spent cultivating a supportive work environment, and seeing employees as people with messy lives. Not productivity machines.

Anyways, there are good reasons to work from home and work in-person and crappy ones for both. What I want is for that to be acknowledged and to be able to choose where I work best. That’s what most of us want, to be trusted to make the decisions that work best for us. 

This post was inspired by Anne Helen Petersen’s newsletter Culture Study. Her newsletter is one of my faves for the interviews with fascinating people you didn’t know you wanted to meet and thoughtful takes on cultural topics as wide ranging as work, gender, and the Baylor influencer twins.

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