Follow the Yellow Brick Road

Good afternoon "cloud",

I have spent the last three days looking around in awe at the changes that can happen to a city in two years. James and I took the Amtrak train to Kansas City on Thursday and it has been quite a vacation.

I think now would be a good time to tell the story of exactly how (and why) I moved to Chicago in the first place.
When I was six years old, my parents granted custody of me to my grandparents and I moved from Kansas City, Kansas (Wyandotte county) to Prairie Village, Kansas (Johnson county). From then on, my grandparents became my parents and my biological parents became two people who I visited on weekends and saw on holidays. My biological mother died shortly after that and the rest is history.

That information is important in order to understand my feelings when my Grandpa was diagnosed with - and eventually died of - pancreatic cancer in 2009. After that, I had what most people would call a breakdown. I immediately dropped out of college (where I was a sophomore at the time) and moved back in with my Grandma. We fought all the time and I realized that moving back home was a terrible idea. I had recently come into some money and, after a weekend trip to Chicago in June, I decided I wanted to move there. By July 1st, 2010, I was moved in to my first Chicago apartment.

I have visited home about twice a year for the last two years. Since I left, a lot of things have changed. The neighborhood looks different, the city looks different, some of my old hangouts are gone or have changed. I am not a fan of change, so a lot of these things really bother me. After I left Shawnee Mission East (where I went to high school) they remodeled it and it doesn't look anything like it used to. I went to visit an old teacher last year and the changes bothered me more than they should have. I had to ask for help to get to his classroom, as everything had been moved. I went back to my Grandma's house and cried for half an hour because of those changes. I really don't like change.

However, bringing James with me makes things like that less painful. I get to show him - the born and bread Chicagoan - my old stomping ground and that makes me happy. We've had a lot of fun this week but I'm ready to get back to Chicago and start another job hunt. We leave at 7:30 tomorrow morning.

Thanks for reading "cloud",
Lauren

Coming up:
Movie review: Captain America
Business review: Amtrak
Reaction post: Amy Winehouse and the Norway massacre