What I've Been Doing

Round-trip train home: 4 hours
Car ride from train to home: 1.5 hours
Trip to Iowa: 6 hours

Round-trip train to St. Louis: 12 hours

TOTAL: almost 24 hours

24 hours of travel in the past two weekends (the first for a wedding, the second to visit friends) has left me exhausted. It's time to stay in Chicago and start summer! Life is beginning to surge into the city now that the temperature has risen, and this Sunday--weather permitting--I hope to attend my first two barbeques of the year. I've turned down playing on a volleyball team due to lack of skill/funds, but plan on going to egg my friends on and gaze at the "puppies." (Apparently this is new slang for "eye candy," which I much prefer.)

While I've been burning a candle at both ends--per the usual--I'm attempting to find a balance between going out every evening and staying in every night. A nice mixture of the two would be good--or at least more than an hour a day at home before rushing off to do the next thing.

This week I had off Tuesday--but last night I went out to a bar, tonight I'm taking a group of backpackers from the youth hostel to Second City for improv, and tomorrow four or five friends and my brother are descending upon the city for a party. We're going to a high school friend's place to party hard before he his surgery next week, which will remove a tumor in his frontal lobe. While there will be beer aplenty and a boisterous crowd, the ritual shaving-of-the-head at the end of the night will certainly strike a serious note. He'll be fine--they miraculously caught it in time through a series of coincidences--but the fact that he's 25 and having brain surgery is sobering. Which we definitely won't be. Sober.

The weekend will round off with a show at a bar featuring my cousin's second-cousin-once-removed (so close family, that), Charlotte Martin. Check out her website--it's quite good music. And finally, Sunday I have a graduation to go to for one of my best friends, followed by a barbeque on the beach with the Frenchies and Germans, and a graduation party barbeque.

And then on to next week. So far I just have Wednesday, Thursday, and Saturday booked, but I'm sure the days will fill up as they always do. And this is why I never get around to working on my scholarship essays, finishing my scrapbook from London last year, or working on genealogy. Last week I could've kicked myself for not starting back up on that (my goal was to begin researching family history again in the summer, once the scrapbooks were done). I found out that my late grandmother's cousin, a bastion of family lore, and my late grandfather's sister, his last remaining sibling, both died. I'm pissed at myself for not getting the ball rolling and for losing the priceless opportunity to ask them about my family. And now they went and died on me! I've learned my lesson, and will grill my grandmother's siblings very soon.

Or not. Because I'm busy every night. What to do, what to do.