It's o-fish-o at last

Remember I said I was distracted by something going on in my life so I didn't have the energy to write very much? I can finally tell you why.

We're moving August 1 to St. Augustine, Florida.

It's been a big secret because I didn't want to jeopardize my current job or make any waves until things were more settled. Well, my boss finally knows. It's all complicated how it worked out, but I literally said to her, "I've been holding my cards pretty close to my chest; are you ready for me to lay the whole truth on the table?" She said yes. And she was actually relieved that my suspicious behavior wasn't her or the department's fault, just a quirk of fate that Team Wy is leaving Chicago.

I'm scared. I already love St. Augustine, but it's a town of only 15,000 people. Chicago? Over two million. Sure I've lived other places that were smaller than Chicago, but I consider Chicago my adult home. I was a child in Kentucky, but I came to Chicago straight from my undergraduate degree and really grew up here. I learned to be an adult in Chicago, and this city is a big part of my adult identity.

If I felt like it, I could get Korean barbecue at 2 am here. In St. Augustine, the bars close at 1 am. Granted, I rarely stay out until 1 am, I've never actually gotten Korean barbecue at 2 am, but there's lots of things in Chicago I do often that I won't have there.

Really, it's the museums I'll miss. It's the sidewalks downtown full of people rushing to eat lunch in their hour break. It's the fashionable ladies, the radio stations that always know what I want to hear, the ethnic neighborhoods that take me to different countries without going more than five miles from my home. It's the anonymity. Knowing I'll never see someone again so I can create my personality however I want for those five minutes we interact. It's the smelly subway system that can take me to two airports from which I can go anywhere in the world.

It's my friends, my community, my source of inspiration.

But I'm ready for a smaller town. I'm actually quite tired of how difficult it is to live in Chicago. It's epic to go to the grocery store, where it's crowded and understocked. What I dislike most about Chicago is that everything is so used. Everything's been walked on or touched by countless people. Nothing is fresh. No matter how many power washers and street sweepers the city employs, nothing is new. My seat on the train? Has it been peed on recently? The door handle coming into work? At least 3000 other people touched it this morning. The bathroom at my favorite Indian restaurant? No one has cleaned the walls in a dog's age.

The last time I visited St. Augustine, at a bar my friend told me, "The bathrooms are pretty questionable here." I laughed. It was cleaner than any bar I've ever been to in Chicago.

And that's what I want. A new place, a clean place, a beautiful historic place, a small place, a new community, a new way of gardening, a new ecosystem. And I'm getting that.

But I'm still too busy to blog much as we prepare for the move. Sorry about that. Soon I'll be back from my mental distraction. I'm thinking of you often, though I write too little.