Connection 0 of 3: Overview

I’m feeling disconnected. Not just out of proper context, as I had been when I went to visit in Toronto, circa 3 or 4 years ago, but nearly lacking completely in context. This is both new and … not.

The last time I haven’t been so context free since I moved to chicago the first time, and to college. In college, there was nobody I knew. I got excited when I spotted the scary guy who’d ‘hosted’ me over a sleeping bag weekend, and the homo dancer dude whose floor I slept on that same trip (Lysander?). Neither really remembered me. I built a social life from the ground up, like most college students do. It’s expected, most people have the same experience, and so it’s comparatively easy.

In chicago, the only people I knew in the area were , , and . I signed up with front runners (gay running club, with which I’d been affiliated in pittsburgh; it has chapters all over the place) and the gay swim team. Through , who I met from frontrunners, I became acquainted with (and signed up with) the Chicago Gay Men’s Chorus. I met Stephen Starkey at Motorola, and Glenn-Paul through gay.com (hey, yet another reason to swear off). Most of the rest of my social life was either conducted through these groups, with these individuals, or with people I met quite randomly.

This didn’t make for the deepest of roots in chicago. So now I’m feeling disconnected or shallowly connected. I’m going to examine this in a series of 3 posts over the next couple days: the first devoted to family; the second devoted to friends; and the third devoted to sex and romantic relationships. Each of them promises to be fairly lengthy. For now, I’m off to the apple store to bitch about my iPod and my unusable cd-rw/dvd player drive, as well as to get some blades.