Chicago

So here I am at LAX again, and just like the last trip, I killed off my lay-over time by doing a trip to Santa Monica, except this time, I was actually doing more of Christmas shopping rather than clothes for myself.

The past few days in Chicago have been great, albeit the weather being a tad extreme. Well, at least I got my winter wonderland. It was snowing (mercilessly) everyday I was there, and that makes walking on the streets really difficult, as the once white snow turned into yucky grey slush pretty quickly under the feet of thousands of city shoppers. It is a beautiful city, just like many people told me it is. I particularly like the part where the Chicago River runs through the city, and it is also the first time I see a great lake (Lake Michigan) frozen over. I must ‘fess up I didn’t do anything deep this time round, but just shopping, chilling and eating, although I did make it to Union Station. It is the place where Anthony Edwards bid Sherry Stringfield farewell in ER some nine years ago. I still remember the scene as clearly as the first time I saw it. It clearly left an impression, so it was only natural that I want to be there.

The work over in Argonne was completed, of course, but certainly not with a bang. The results were not very exciting, and the tension between my two co-workers were compounding as the days went by. It had ended up at a point where the two refused to talk to each other, but through me instead. I felt like a child caught in between his bickering parents. In the first place, I was not suppose to be handling the work single-handedly, I was just the machine guy who happened to tag along. All this while, I couldn’t really say I see why I was chosen to go on this trip. But in any case, I chose not to analyse it too much but to be grateful for the opportunity and to want to learn something out of it. Turned out that I did learn plenty, thanks to the two who refused to co-operate with each other. It was easy to see why they hated each other’s guts, because in the first place, I am no fan of either of them too, but that’s another story altogether. I was thrown into a situation where I had to do the work myself however unsure I might have felt at that moment. So it was a blessing in disguise, sort of, for me. But it was nonetheless very stressful. I am just damn glad it’s all over, for now. As far as the year is concerned, work is not complete yet. There is still plenty to take care of when I get back on Friday and all the way till Christmas.

It took me eleven years (of watching ER) to actually be in Chicago, it is certainly long overdue. What about my once crazy dream of going to Montana? After all, wasn’t that the place that got me interested in the United States? So interested (and obsessed) that I actually egged my (then) best friend to flee the army to go to. That dream is not fulfilled yet, but many things have changed since.