dom.blog

Usually I like to blog with nice photos of the people and places I’m writing about, so that you can skim past all the needless words and still get the gist. But on this occasion, I’m somewhat glad that the most I have from Saturday night is some very blurry screenshots:

Blurry memories

Long story short: some bar, my first karaoke night, being volunteered against my will, Call Me Maybe. It was great. And came as the culmination of a very lovely Saturday afternoon in Chinatown with Katie, Todd and a bunch of other Grouponers, ex-Grouponers and hangers-on. It’s always nice to find yourself in a good group, y’know?

While we’re on the topic of briefly trying something you know you’re going to be terrible at before scuttling away again, last week I resolved (for reasons unknown) to try indoor rock-climbing. So I did, with Taylor, although unlike me she didn’t turn up wearing jeans and asking questions like “so can I wear my boots?”.  Anyway, I was slightly freaked out to discover that in the rock-climbing world “bouldering” means “no need for ropes, just sign a waiver and try not to fall in an awkward manner”. Thankfully the place was pretty friendly, so no one pointed and laughed at my lack of upper body strength which prevented much successful climbing. But rather than change this, I’ve just reconciled myself to the fact that if I had been Mufasa I wouldn’t have been able to hold on for nearly as long as he did.

OK, so I can’t sing and I can’t climb. But I can go and watch plays. Awesome plays, like Bethany, another Common Room recommendation with a great cast and a well-crafted story set in a post-2008 world of failed companies and abandoned homes. It helps that The Gift Theatre is also tiny – I know I always say that small, intimate theatres are better, but I’ve seen plays with bigger casts than this had seats. If it’s sustainable, that would be utterly baffling. But either way, this is another great thing to go see.

Next stop: San Francisco!

On stage at Common Room

Remember Common Room? Wednesday night was the fourth outing of this theatre taster event, and the inaugural ‘interview an audience member’ segment which – as you can see – I made it into.

And this got me thinking… man, I really need to go see more of these plays which I’m hearing so much about. And that’s how I ended up spending this afternoon chasing a rabbit with a French accent all over the neighbourhood of Andersonville in Upended Production’s Alice.

Inspired by Lewis Carroll, the audience (who all take the role of ‘Alice’) are broken into small groups – each assigned a different rabbit – and move between whimsical and fantastical scenes staged in nearby streets, bars, shops. On the routes between each ‘scene’ there are also weird and wonderful sights and mini-interactions with the audience, like this:

One of the many roaming cast members. (Hopefully.)

I have to admit, I was a little worried it would feel a little too surreal in the sense of ‘arbitrary random stuff’, but actually everything felt very carefully put together and was surprisingly thought provoking. There are so many people I would recommend this to, and most of them don’t live in Chicago, but if you do you should check it out. (And next week I am going to see another production promoted through the Common Room – hurray!)

Late night pizza bite

Have been doing a bunch of other fun stuff, too. Like meeting up with the one and only Emily Boyd, who was visiting town from New York! I also almost broke Randi’s Californian heart by introducing her to the concept of full English breakfasts, which we made this morning. (Tastes like home!)

I also saw Saved, cheered on the Baltimore Orioles in the baseball playoff season, got treated to a swanky lunch at the Art Institute by a friend of Carolyn’s (still haven’t managed to go in to the Art Institute, mind) and went to my first Chicago jazz club. Which was a bit of a fail, actually, because although the jazz was good I decided that I’d prefer to be able to actually hear the conversation I was having, so we retreated to a regular jazz-free bar instead.

Aside from my own entertainment and shenanigans, in the past few weeks I’ve also started volunteering for two separate tutoring/mentoring projects. I will probably write more about these elsewhere, after a couple more weeks, but suffice to say it’s always an interesting challenge to work with children. And I don’t mean that as a euphemism for ‘difficult’ or ‘unpleasant’ – it’s just something which demands conscious adjustment after not actually being a child for a while. Pretty rewarding if you can get it right, though.

Just home from Six Flags, a US chain of theme parks with one place not far from Chicago, which I had suggested as a great option for a work team outing. It turned out to be perfect timing, too, because this was also Jill’s last week at Groupon, and I can’t think of a better way to say goodbye than riding a load of rollercoasters together. (My favourite was Goliath, for the record.) I have always been spoilt in loving the people that I work with, but it must make all the difference in the world.

Team photo (Robert, Jill, Katie, me)

This week I also returned to Second City, making good on my vow from my first visit. This time we saw the main stage show – and each consumed a pitcher-worth of cocktails – which is an excellent recipe for any evening.

On Saturday I also made it to the Chicago Botanic Garden with Randi, It was a pretty British-style trip, actually: catch a train to somewhere with a tea room, and pretend you haven’t noticed that it’s just started raining. But I’m very glad I remembered the suggestion to go, because it was beautiful, and just a really lovely place to wander about. (I can’t say the same for the patch of suburbia around it, which makes crossing the road feel like an expedition through an alien landscape. Love the city, hate the strip mall.)

Botanic Garden

In other news:

• I now have a rudimentary understanding of the rules of American football.
• In return, I have begun to indoctrinate newbies into the wonder of Doctor Who.
• UK timezones worked in my favour for once when it came to the Scottish referendum, because by the time I went to bed the result was pretty clear. Which was a relief, I’ll admit, but it’s pretty exciting that there’s still a head of steam for further devolution and constitutional reform. I hope both sides can end up feeling like winners in the end.

Well, I came back from Malaysia, obviously. But not before a lovely evening up on Helipad with Zee and Ellen, which – as its name suggests –  is a bar sitting atop a skyscraper. It’s remarkably calm up there, which is probably just as well because I could imagine a rowdier crowd occasionally bumping people off the edge.

Helipad

Back in ‘merica, I hit another milestone of cultural acclimatisation by whacking my first birthday piñata, plus a bunch of other fun meetings and gatherings. (Which included a pool party. I mean seriously, a pool party? My life is absurd.) I also saw Guardians of the Galaxy. Which was OK, I guess, though I wasn’t sure exactly what it was aiming at. (How funny is this supposed to be exactly?) And I have to admit, after X Men: Days of Future Past on the plane back, I am ready for my next film to be something a little grittier. Y’know – the moody existentialist broodings of a failed artist, in French – or something like that. Never thought I’d be asking for that.

I’ve also been wandering around feeling a little sad about Scotland. On the one hand, a peaceful referendum on self-determination is pretty much a miracle of democracy: this doesn’t happen very often, and something to feel proud of. But at the same time, I share the same apprehensions of lots of other English people for entirely selfish reasons. Scotland is great, and often wiser than its southern neighbour, and would be perfectly fine as an independent country within the EU. The fear is what kind of conservative backlash this may trigger in the rest of the UK. We’ll find out next week, I suppose!

In the meantime, and on a cheerier note, I finally got some photos on my wall up. There are lots of important people missing, but everyone here is loved:

Memories from home