April came with two long weekends in a row, which meant I kept going back and forth to Chicago. Had I known the calendar would be this generous, I might have emptied my pockets and gone to Korea instead, but honestly, it was a very fun two weeks.

Now that the weather is warming up, I’ve been wanting to properly enjoy romantic Michigan again. One evening after work, I drove out to the lake to watch the sunset and discovered that half the town had apparently had the same idea. Cars were lined up facing the water, older couples sat together waiting for the sky to change, and I joined them. While waiting, I sat on a swing for a while.

The swing looked tired to bear my weight lol

Then, Chicago!

Lily Allen was in town, which for me was an EVENT.

I wonder how many people my age still know Littlest Things.

The YouTube video is so old now that the pixels themselves appear to have retired.

She is one of the few British pop artists I’ve consistently liked, and I still listen whenever she releases something new. My private formula for honorary British citizenship is apparently: grow up with Lily Allen, watch Harry Potter, read some Frank McCourt, done.

The new album is steeped in heartbreak and resentment, and the Chicago crowd adored her. Before she came onstage, people spent nearly an hour singing along to the pre-show music, followed by another thirty minutes of waiting. By the time Lily appeared, we had earned her through suffering.

The show itself was excellent: sharp staging, good lighting, strong vocals, and absolutely no interest in subtlety. Gunshot effects appeared throughout. At one point she opened and closed a refrigerator while a pair of severed female legs in high heels appeared as part of the set.

The album had feelings.

The venue was beautiful too.

The next morning I woke up and, somehow, my hair looked fantastic, so naturally I went out for breakfast in honour of the occasion.

Another Chicago stop was the Botanic Garden, because anyone who has skimmed this blog—including my mother—already knows I like trees, grass, flowers, and nearly anything green enough to photosynthesise.

The problem was that it was early April.

The parking lot was packed, which seemed promising, until I saw the bare trees near the entrance.

Nothing had bloomed.

Nothing.

A very large number of us had apparently driven to a botanical garden to inspect dormant vegetation.

I am willing to believe the locals knew better.

Even the evergreens looked like toddlers.

We were all idiots together.

The following weekend was EXPO Chicago. I had been wanting to see contemporary art again, and because the fair ran all day with talks scattered throughout, I wandered around slowly.

Chicago artists had some of my favourite work, followed by Dublin and Taipei. Across the fair, I kept noticing hazy, muted colours interrupted by fluorescent accents. Straightforward primary palettes were relatively rare. I was also surprised by how many Korean artists were there—Seoul, Busan, Gwangju, Daegu.

Much of the Korean work had that fine, compact, carefully worked quality I tend to like, with East Asian visual sensibilities appearing quietly rather than loudly. I loved it, although for a moment I wondered whether some of the booths were getting lost in the scale of the fair.

Then I reached Daegu.

DAEGU-CORE.

The paintings were huge, confidently spaced, immediately visible. The booth felt almost physically satisfying after so much dense installation, and people were packed inside.

I had planned the day around a panel called Vienna Beef: A Conversation Between Chicago and Vienna. Every time I thought I was about to get bored, someone said something interesting; every time I started getting sleepy, someone said something I could follow, so I stayed for the whole thing.

My understanding was that the artists were discussing the importance of experiencing work where it was made, resistance to art being endlessly relocated, and the ways cities created by people develop shared characteristics that feed back into creative work.

Afterward, I did a second lap around the fair.

The first time I watched the art.

The second time I watched the artists.

And artists at art fairs are BUSY.

Many sat behind their work with laptops open, reading emails with the concentration of corporate employees at quarter-end. You imagine the artist contemplating beauty beside the canvas.

In reality: inbox.

The Daegu artist, however, was fully alive in the crowd, talking freely with visitors about the work.

Very impressive.

Very Daegu.

On the way back, I finally stopped at Saga Taco, which I had watched being built two years earlier. The tacos were excellent enough that I may go occasionally, frequently, constantly—unclear.

I’ve also noticed that after getting baptised, drinking less, and possibly simply becoming a woman in her thirties, one beer is now enough to make me soft and sleepy.

A profound physiological development.

By then Chicago had become genuinely nice in the warmer weather. Even the seagulls seemed thrilled.

And then Holland exploded.

Flowers everywhere. Cherry blossoms, tulips, downtown suddenly looking like someone had turned on every seasonal effect at once. This is the most heavenly part of the year here.

There also seem to be an unusual number of young trees this year—tiny, with lemon-green leaves, absurdly cute. By now, I thought, surely even the Chicago Botanic Garden must contain something alive.

The roads, unfortunately, entered their own spring season of chaos.

There have been endless lane closures and a surprising number of gorilla drivers. One morning on the way to work, I came face-to-face with a car driving the wrong way. The driver was so confident that I started checking my own mirrors, wondering whether I had somehow become the one doing it wrong.

No.

They were.

What impressed me was the commitment. Even with correctly moving traffic all around them, they simply kept dodging cars until they reached their intended left turn.

Why have laws.

Then I took an Uber and encountered a car completely flipped over in the road. A police officer was directing everyone to turn right.

My Uber driver looked directly at the officer and performed a U-turn.

I told him not to and said I didn’t mind being late.

This information was not considered operationally significant.

Otherwise, life has been quiet.

One evening I was sitting on the sofa listening to music and pulling at my hair when I happened to pull out one white hair.

Not one I had been searching for.

A random one.

Somehow worse.

I would now like a comfortable, padded coffin.

Meanwhile, Daegu Beauty remains extremely fashionable. She seems to enjoy dressing well but dislikes having it noticed, which means teasing her exactly twice is very entertaining.

Two is the correct number.

Then I heard that a manager at one of the outsourcing vendors had apparently gone almost completely grey.

That made me unexpectedly sad.

When I first got involved, I assumed the company had already been operating successfully in Korea and would settle in here quickly with a little support.

Apparently this was another reminder not to run operations on assumptions.

For a while, I had felt mostly relieved that I escaped outsourcing management. Several people even told me I had done well to get out. But hearing about him made the whole thing feel less funny.

I had probably assumed other people tolerated work stress roughly the way I did because my own earlier experiences had generally been manageable. Pantos had nice people. At CJ I had certainly been grilled hard before being dispatched, but I also learned a lot from the managers there and never thought of the experience as fundamentally terrible.

Different site, different people.

Different personalities, different pressure, different reactions.

Obvious in retrospect.

At the moment, though, I have spent about a week feeling almost nothing.

Very mellow.

Maybe letting go halfway really is relaxing.

I check the morning emails. When lunch arrives and the food looks good, I go eat. Afterward I buy a Polapo, ride the elevator upstairs, take my vitamins, drink coffee. If someone stops by, I answer. I glance over to see how Peter is doing, occasionally bother the manager in the neighbouring area, listen when the men around the office start getting worked up about something.

And somehow the day passes.

I actually like it when my desk is quiet.

It feels stable.

The weather has been cloudy and slightly cool—too warm for a real coat, too chilly to go without one comfortably. Soon it will probably become aggressively hot, so I’m trying to enjoy the in-between temperature while it exists.

For once, I am getting the full transitional season.

Florida around this time last year was wonderful, though.

Maybe I’ll go back in winter.

I also retook the MBTI recently and, after years of getting INTP, somehow got ENFP.

Excuse me?

Where exactly is the ENFP.

I assume there has been an administrative error.

Time itself has become strange too. I barely go anywhere lately except occasional trips toward the lake for old-fashioned fried chicken, and yet Monday becomes Thursday almost instantly.

Then suddenly it is Friday.

Then May.

Every year I go through my résumé once and clean it up, and every year I look at the previous version and think:

this is terrible.

It is two pages.

I have now spent several years discovering new ways for two pages to be wrong.

Even giving it to AI doesn’t quite scratch the exact itch. Maybe I prompt badly. Or maybe there is still something irritatingly human about knowing when a sentence technically works but is not quite right.

I’ve also been thinking about the moments over the past several months when I reacted too sharply.

Looking back, I still think the observations and feelings underneath those reactions were largely correct. That doesn’t mean every response was ideal. It means the discomfort itself was not imaginary.

A lot of people survive organisations by staying unobtrusive and blending in. Under different circumstances, perhaps I could have done the same. At the time, the environment simply did not support that kind of quiet passage.

There had been warning signs I noticed and then ignored because things seemed fine again. And once someone decides to pick a fight with you, the second, third, and fourth rounds may no longer be fully yours to control.

What I still regret is that when situations became harmful, I had very little sympathy left for the people who participated in creating them.

Maybe that says something about my own limits too.

At this point, the most I can do is look around carefully, do what is available to me, and let the period become an experience rather than forcing it into a clean moral conclusion.

There is one thing I can say without much hesitation:

I did eventually get to try what I wanted to try.