Happy New Year! It’s been a good year around here so far. I’ve been assembling my thoughts on the New Year and the somber responsibilites of reappraising my life, but haven’t yet converted them into blog entry form. I am enjoying my last few days of freedom before classes start again, however. I hope to see Andy this weekend, and spend no time at all thinking about the ancient Near East. This is my last quarter of classes, and after that I start studying for comprehensive exams. It’s disturbing that I’m actually looking forward to that.
I’m trying out my new breadmaker tonight. It smells good. I live above a Subway restaurant, and when their bread machines kick in it causes my floor to vibrate. I hardly ever notice it any more, just like I rarely notice this hissing and clanking of the radiators, the car alarms and sirens from outside, the 5:00 a.m. garbage trucks in the alley outside my window, the sounds of the construction going on 10 feet away from my window (7:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m.)…okay, I do notice and I’m just complaining. I think I made a resolution not half an hour ago to stop complaining so much. Ah, well…anyway, the bread smells good.
You forgot to mention the frequent domestic disputes that people have in the park nearby late at night. Or do they keep their disagreements inside during the winter season?
Here’s a question for you. What do you like about Hyde Park? Does it have any redeeming qualities? Have you enjoyed living there overall, or has it been a mostly negative experience? If you had the option to live elsewhere in Chicago, would you stay in Hyde Park or would you leave without looking back?
Now that the school is being built where the park used to be, I don’t hear as many screaming obscenity-filled arguments as before. good things about HP? It’s the only place I’ve lived that’s somewhat racially integrated, which is a good thing. My church has some cool aspects to it, it includes many different races and socioeconomic classes, which makes it feel more like what a church should be.
If I had to stay in the city of Chicago itself, I would stay in HP. Some students flee to yuppieland in Lincoln Park and the like, but I don’t feel comfortable up there–HP is a good mix of students and middle class families and working people and despite the urban stuff I don’t like, crime, noise, and the like, I like this type of neighborhood better than the super-hip pasty white near north.
I guess like Lincoln, Neb., Chicago is a good place to have lived. But I’m looking forward to something new.