Spring Break

So last week was Spring Break (Spring Break! WOOOOOOOOO!). When you go to school up north where it's still cold in March and you need to escape the gloomy gray weather for a week before you kill yourself or someone around you, usually this means that you escape somewhere south, maybe in Florida or Texas, where it is warm and you can go swimming and drink a lot and do other such fun things for the week.

Naturally, since I am now attending school in Houston, I decided to travel North for Spring Break, against the grain if you will. And so I spent five wonderful days in Chicago with Jill and Anne. We saw the CSO play Mahler 2, we ate delicious food at many fine establishments, including a steak house where our waitor's name was Gumer, and we saw the Contemporary Art Museum and the Shedd Aquarium (with its new shark reef exhibit). Also, I got to celebrate both my birthday and St. Patrick's Day in the windy city. It's pretty convenient that those two days come back to back, don't you think? After two solid days of merriment, though, I was pretty worn out. By the end of the night on Friday I was so tired that I couldn't even finish my beer. I know! But don't worry, Anne and her friend peer pressured me into finishing it anyway. Where would we be without peer pressure? That's what I want to know.

Oh, and last night Anne and I went to the Green Mill, an old (and I mean old) jazz club which used to be a hideout for gangsters, and now hosts the original Poetry Slam every Sunday. I was kind of expecting the slam to be corny and not very good, but almost everything was really quite enjoyable. It was a mix of comedy and serious poetry, and both sides had their highlights and lowlights. The funniest of the night, I think, was the guy who came up and ad libbed an 80's ballad-style song about Steven Seagal. It was awesome. Although he might be tied with the guy whose poem was about a blindfold that you could see through, which he bought thinking that he could win all kinds of blindfolded contests, not realizing that nobody trusts a guy who brings his own blindfold. The poem went off from there in completely absurd ways, and the delivery was so perfectly deadpan that it was hilarious.

I think that's enough information for now. If for some reason you want to know every small detail of my Chicago trip, here's a good place to find it. I'm going to go get some still much needed sleep.