Location Taken: Chicago, Illinois
Time Taken: January 2008

You know, my time in Chicago wasn’t the happiest (something about it ending with a social phobia triggered nervous breakdown), but I still look back on it in a positive light.

It’s probably because it was the last time I was fully independent.

I’ve spent the years since then working on fixing all the mental quirks that caused that nervous breakdown in the first place. My social phobia had been held in control by very flimsy mental structures, sort of like a flood wall built out of random debris that just happened to be at hand. That sort of wall works, in a soggy sort of way, until the flood gets too strong. And then it’s just washed away. I spent years, to keep with the analogy, removing that debris from the flood plain and building a proper wall made out of proper dirt and stone. There’s still some weak spots, places where I all of a sudden realize my social phobia is acting up in very peculiar ways. But at this point, the wall is built, the weak spots are filled in, and I’m getting twitchy about reclaiming my independence.

Which, alas, would be far easier if I’d spent the last six years working full time rather than rebuilding and expanding my brain. Stuff like “Read half the science section at the local library” just isn’t what recruiters are looking for.

I’m not even joking about that statement, by the way. I have read approximately half of the science section. Well, a bit less if you toss in the social sciences, since I focus on the earth sciences. And a bit more if you remove all the books oriented towards helping high school students and younger. And, of course, it depends on the library. My local library has a lot fewer science books than the main branch library, and I’ve hit the main branch a lot. And my local library is currently closed for renovation, so that percentage will likely change when it reopens…

Which, of course, is why I don’t actually put “read half the science section” on my resume.

And wow, I’ve gotten pretty far off of the topic I started on, haven’t I? I went off on one tangent, and then on a tangent to that tangent. Does a tangent to a tangent even truly exist in math? Wouldn’t it just be the same line as the first tangent?

Right, Chicago. I may have been socializing far too much for my poor brain to handle. I may have been without local friends and unable to make new ones due to the social phobia demanding I keep away from people. I may have failed all but one class that semester due to the results of the nervous breakdown (it’s tough to get an A when you can’t go to classes or do certain homework projects). I may have run rather low on money and had to figure out how to buy two weeks of food for $20. But you know, even with all those problems, I still enjoyed my time there.

Now, it’s not the classes or the fellow students that stand out in my memory, like most extroverts would expect. It was the city itself that I enjoyed living in. I’m not sure if I’ll ever live in the depths of a city again (too crowded), but I enjoyed exploring all the unique places and museums, especially the Asian district just north of my place, and taking the train around everywhere was a blast, and finding an excellent Asian bakery that sold these delectable egg tarts just a couple blocks from where I lived, oh my those were tasty…

And even having to stretch a dollar to fit 14 days of food into 20 dollars was oddly fun. I hit the local Asian supermarkets and found noodles and vegetables at far lower prices than the American supermarket I usually visited, and then I had fun really working my blossoming cooking skills…

So yeah, while I’ve been thankful for the safe and loving environment my parents are providing, since it allowed me space to remove all my debris-ridden defenses away from the flood of humanity, I keep dreaming of moving away, finding a place of my own, living life in patterns of my own invention…

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