reaffirmation

Thanks to a kick in the butt from my friend leeann (who has blissfully started posting regularly as well), I have started making writing part of my routine. Funny, because I have no routine. Ironic because I'm trying to make a living out of writing. Anyway, we'll see how long my inspiration lasts.

I sat outside the Tribune Tower this afternoon, stiff, because I didn't want my button-down shirt to become untucked from my skirt and underwear (as an extra precaution) or stuck to my perspiring body resulting in huge, transparent, smelly sweat spots. I shamelessly envied everyone who bustled around the tower because they had probably lived in the city for more than three weeks and knew what they were getting themselves into by walking outside, they also probably had jobs that paid at least a few dollars per hour, and maybe they also had cars: a luxury that would eliminate the need to leave one-and-a-half hours before a scheduled appointment and worry that they'd be late anyway when the bus or train didn't come or stopped needlessly. Or that the predicted three-inch rain and thunderstorm would actually come and I would walk into the building looking like a fish out of water. Which, I suppose, I am.

"Most people go the other way," my contact at the Tribune told me several times today. Yes. Most people go the other way. But I'm happy with my soon-to-be-apartment that costs approximately $400 less than I could expect for a moderately nice bedroom anywhere on California's coast. I don't mind the weather. In fact, the variety and unpredictability are rather exciting, though the winter is still a long way off.

I was sitting there stiff, envious, unfriendly, fidgety, thinking I could never translate my love for college journalism, for comparatively small-town, weekly, subscription-only business journalism, for affluent high school journalism to neo-gothic building, city crime journalism. I know next to nothing about this city. I had never heard of an alderman (which are apparently part of the government here). I'm fresh out of college and i'm shy, without experience or talent. Traveling silently to the loop each day dressed in a suit doing something terrible and boring in a cubicle is what I want: it's easier and faster.

I walked out of the building walking quickly, clicking my heels confidently. I considered untucking my shirt. It's nice understanding something. The bus routes in this city I don't understand (I had to ask the driver both ways on Michigan Avenue where it stopped). Nor the government. Nor the weather. Nor the accent. Nor the segregation. But the Tribune's sprawling newsroom with its white boards and desks and meeting rooms to discuss design and lead stories and photos, style sheets, breaking news... I understand all that. Writing a story for such a publication, even something as lowly as an obit, is scary and daunting and seemingly impossible... at least that's what my doubting mind tries to trick me into believing. But I know can do it: I've done it before.