Last Trip

I spent three-plus days in Chicago this past weekend, mostly just to visit cause it's Sara's spring break but also to attend our baby shower organized by her sister. I was one of four males attending this shower, all of whom were immediate family members. Baby showers just aren't attended by men. I'm not here to argue that, but I do wonder why we as a gender have been so easily spared them. The main point of a baby shower is for the guests to give baby-related presents to the expectant mother. Since only women can actually have babies, it makes some small sense that only women will give gifts to them, but what if a woman doesn't have very many female friends, what if more than normal of her closer friends are male? Does she then forfeit the ability to receive as many gifts? And what if you are a male and one of your best friends happens to be a woman, does she even invite you to her shower, or do you attend? Being a best friend, of course you'd be both expected and happy to give your friend something, but for this case the arbitrariness of your gender seems to confuse things.
A baby shower is even more simply a vehicle for gift-giving than is a wedding shower, and naturally wedding showers are attended by both men and women. At least at a wedding shower, there is a semi-reasonable desire for guests to meet whichever of the couple that they might not know; this doesn't apply for a baby shower, which is attended by all of the woman's friends who she'd presumably hang out with anyway. The whole point is the gifts. I guess what I'm trying to say is that if I were a woman with a single bank account, I think this is one double-standard that I'd actually be pissed about. Glass ceilings, sure, but we're talking about the tight financial noose of the baby shower.

In other Chicago news, this trip had an odd vibe to it in that it's the last time we'll be there together until we've moved there. (I will be making a couple solo trips out to job-hunt, but not with Sara.) There was a little more realism when we walked around a prospective neighborhood or we talked about what we liked about a place. It's also the first time I've been there since Sara got pregnant, so my perspective has changed. In both of these aspects, I'm much more fully prepared to make this move.
We've been pretty set about moving out there this summer for a long time now, but in most of those plans, it was more just an idea or a suggestion, with plenty of room for me to be hesitant or to harbor inhibitions. I guess this trip finally got me fully on board, finally sold Chicago to me.
As we talked about what aspects of a neighborhood were appealing to us, I even started to become more and more willing to live in her hometown of Evanston, rather than somewhere inside the city itself.* I'm going to be 30, with a new baby, so what's the big difference in living in a trendy neighborhood for me? Being in Evanston vs being in Lakeview or Wicker Park or Lincoln Square or wherever is basically just a difference of 15 minutes of commuting time for me to get to work. I'm not going to be going to bars with the same frequency, so moving from having 50 within a mile of my apartment to maybe 10-15 doesn't really matter to me. One of the things I've learned about NYC is that unless you're really getting after it, the bar scene here is really governed by the law of diminishing returns. The real difference between a spectacular bar city like NYC and any other only really manifests itself to someone like me in the variety of options available. You want to play bocce inside? How about sit outside in a 2,000 person (more? I don't know) beer garden? Maybe indulge in a microbrew tasting menu for dirty cheap just down the block? You want to have several different options of places to buy cheap growlers? You want to play pool for free? You want a top-scale cocktail bar? The diviest dive there is? Maybe a place with free pizza, or hot dogs, or popcorn, or cheese? Maybe pitchers for $4 and tons of sports on Sundays? Any kind of rooftop? A shoeless boardwalk bar? A Czech bar, a German biergarten, a Japanese sake house, a Puerto Rican place, a Chinese speakeasy...............this is the greatness of going out in this city, that I can have literally whatever I want. But I just listed a lot of different desires, and I'm not going to want all of them very often, maybe just once a year or less. More often, I'll just want to go to a regular place. Removing this smorgasbord of opportunity will maybe affect my life once every month or two, and that's not even really considering that Chicago isn't exactly limited to just strip-mall bars or Applebees.

Back to my point. I'm happy about our move and I'm mentally ready. I'm also extremely well-equipped for having a baby. Literally, I mean, we now have in our tiny apartment basically everything we might need to care for this baby, and we're still about three months away. There is an infant car seat in my closet where I used to keep sweaters. There is a diaper pail tucked under our table, a changing pad back behind our kitchen storage, a couple sheep's worth of clothes in the bedroom, and much more, even a stroller (currently collapsed). Three months will prove to be about enough for three people to be living in our little place.


* In some ways, this represents only a label, as Evanston is connected on the city's transit line, so it's not like some kind of car suburb. That the city line is drawn where it is as pertains to Evanston-v-Chicago, it's a wholly arbitrary. Rogers Park, the adjacent neighborhood that sits inside the city line, is actually a much less desirable place to live. The real difference in this case of city/"suburb" is that since Evanston is very traditionally liberal, the taxes are higher there, but that in turn successfully leads to better public services. Since we'll at least initially be renting, that tax burden won't really trickle down to us quite as much as it would to an owner.