this is the end, my only friend, the end

ah kids, i hate to do this to you, but i need to close up shop around here. dust bunnies are collecting in the corners and the cobwebs are hanging from the ceiling. my life has gotten busier, which means less reading and writing, unless it is work-related.
i started this blog a little over a year ago as a fun way to let whoever was curious know what i was reading and doing. reflecting over the past year, so much has changed: back then i was still fairly new to chicago and living in the ukrainian village. chicago has become my home now and i live in a completely different neighborhood with completely different roommates. a year ago i was a lowly secretary trying to find enough work to fill my day; now i am in charge of communications and media, which is much more work than i ever thought it would be but i love it. nearly a year ago i re-met an old friend from school; last week we marked six months of dating and growing together. last year i thought i would stay in chicago forever but had no clue what i would do with my life; now i have started to study for the GRE and will start applying to grad schools for my master's in library science (seems like a fitting profession, huh?).
all this and so much more in a bit more than twelve months. and if all of that can happen in merely one year, just imagine what kind of adventures the rest of my life holds...

welcome back (again)!

ah, that was a nice vacation. i did some traveling, got a lot of work done, and did a lot of reading. i just finished nelso algren's "chicago: city on the make," which was beautiful. i loved it. algren captured the feeling of chicago perfectly: the long stretches of desolate industrialism in the back-of-the-yards, the rain streaked windows of the el on a cloudy morning, the jumping blues clubs on the south side. and even with all the heartache and hardship in this town, we still love it and cannot leave it. as algren wrote, "and never once, on any midnight whatsoever, will you take off from here without a pang. without forever feeling something priceless is being left behind in the forest of furnished rooms, lost forever down below, beneath the miles and miles of lights and lights. with the slow smoke blowing compassionately across them like smoke across the spectrum of the heart."
do yourself a favor and read it.
next on my list is "maggie cassidy," jack kerouac's loveletter to the first girl who broke his heart. i picked up this one because i was reminded, when climbing up the skyline divide a few weeks ago, of kerouac's philosophy that "you can't fall off a mountain you fool." right, now you try to remember that when you're 6,000 feet up.