A Chicago Update, Or Why Reading The Historian was a bad idea...

I am still in Chicago. It is still cold sometimes. Though sometimes it is actually quite warm, in fact, I ran around on Saturday in flip flops. Well, technically, I did not run. I kind of meandered slowly to and from brunch trying not to move my head around too much as I was still recouperating from the previous night's shennanigans...

A Back Story:

I am fairly apathetic when it comes to vampires and vampire lore. I never read Dracula or a single Anne Rice book, I never saw any of the movies, I think I've only ever put in those fake teeth once...

I bought The Historian because it was on sale for $7.99 in hardback at Borders and a great deal of people had told me it was an excellent book. I think I had some idea in the back of my mind that it was about Dracula but I was mostly focused on how it was supposed to be good and I needed a new book to read.

Fast forward to the past week where I have been racing through The Historian like a monster (it helps that I have no job, no friends and no real responsibilites to speak of). I started having the craziest dreams. None of them were nightmares about vampires or really had anything to do with the undead at all, but I found corellations between the dreams and things that were happening in the book. Example: Many of the places that they visit are large castles/monestaries that are near large bodies of water. I started having dreams about large bodies of water and walking around in huge buildings (ie castles) and they didn't so much scare me as totally freak me out. I am really enjoying the book and learning all this fun new stuff.

Jump to Friday when I am going out with a friend from NYC, E and all of her new PhD buddies. We start drinking at like 5 which, I am now realizing wasn't the greatest idea ever. But we needed to catch up, and by catch up I mean get really drunk with each other and retell all our favorite scandalous South Africa stories (and between the two of us, there are a bunch). We drink at a resturant, then at a bar, then we end up at this club that looks and feels like a Midwestern rip off of a tres-trendy bar in NYC, both named Apartment (well, technically in NYC its called Apt. but whatever). So we're drunk and dancing and generally having a great time and E starts dancing with a guy and wanders off with him. Her friend comes up and asks where she is and I say, "Oh [E]? I think she ran off with a vampire."

Yea, it kinda just came out like that and I spent the rest of the night very sure that this kid was a vampire. Not joking, I actually was dead serious that this kid (who was Eastern European and had a dark sinister look to him) was a real actual vampire. This deep seated belief in me probably had something to do with the 7 or so beers I'd had that evening; but it was still there.

And so THEN! (Yea, there's more. Sorry, this story is totally for Courtney, who could have just gotten it in an e-mail, but its pretty hysterically ridiculous, I figured I should share it with the general public) last night A and K, my guardians/landlords throw a dinner party and they and all their approaching-middle-age-ish friends get trashed. So I join in and we're running through bottles of wine like they're water and we're in the Sahara and someone holds up a bottle and the first thing that comes to my mind is, "Thats vampire wine." I manage to keep the thought to myself (but just barely) but can not stop staring at the label and I'm thinking, "Seriously, that is vampire wine."

And so we're gonna see how long this vampire trend lasts...and fyi, the ending of the book? So very, very disappointing. Also, my godmother and I are all wrapped up in the fact that Elizabeth Kostova is way, way, way too pretty to be a librarian.

Anyway. My first week and a half in Chicago have been a success. I have a job that starts in early November teaching dance, theatre and gymnastics to 1-8th graders and if you know anything about me, you know this is one of the most perfect jobs for me ever. Tragically it's only about 6 hours a week and so I do need a second job for which I am "searching" (I really am, but it doesn't actually feel like work since I don't get up until 11:30 and I do it in my pajamas). Now that I can use the internet in my house (sometimes, right now it's kind of being a bitch) I don't even really have a reason to get out of my pajamas ever for awhile I was going to the public library, and for that I felt I should put on some pants, if only because vampires are way more likely to come after you if you live in your pajamas.