Ah, the good old days...

Coming to you live from Chicago, it's the newest installment of If You Want to Know What I Think, Just Ask Me. The first in a long string of visits to a city that has pretty much become like a second home to me and will only become more so over the summer as I use intern supervision as a front for going to concerts and music festivals and gaying out with America's Next Top Model and vegan cupcakes that will take over the world.

I've had a few firsts in Chicago...my first short haircut was here, the first time I ever cheated on a boyfriend was here. Yep, proud moments those were. Having come from tiny Weeping Water, where there's as many people in the entire town as in three blocks in Chicago, it's sometimes stunning how much my life has changed.

I've been visiting Chicago regularly for two years now, and somewhere in those two years I entered my late twenties. I can tell because my itineraries have changed quite a bit. Usually, I fly in on Friday night and we hit Berlin as soon as I can drop off my bag. We'd leave just in time to get to Clarke's or the Pick Me Up Cafe just before the bar crowds and barely make it through some cheese fries or organic pancakes before we stumble home at 5 AM and get to bed. But lately...well, as Kris says, "I just can't wait to get into my jammas and get under a blanket and watch television. It's going to be even better than when we did the same thing last night."

And I expect to feel some nostalgia for the "good old days"...the days when I got shit canned drunk and tried to hit on gay guys, when we went to bars in Wicker Park and I hooked up with some stranger with a girlfriend and tragic Brittany friends who thought they were going to nail Kris, or when I rode on the float in the gay pride parade and was blatantly propositioned by a very cute lesbian. But I don't feel nostalgia for those days...because as much as the gays love me, they'd rather go home with Kris, and that stranger from the Wicker Park bar had weird balls and only had Gatorade to drink, and that lesbian may have been cute but she only propositioned me because I was on a moving truck and there was no way I'd actually jump down and go home with her.

So yeah, I'd rather sit in an apartment in Boystown and watch The Real World New Orleans and other late 90s flash backs and make vegan cupcakes and watch youtube videos of SNL skits mocking Project Runway. I really don't miss anything if I pass out on the couch at 10:30 PM. And if that makes me old, so be it.