Dirty Thirty: Kalamazoo Who?

The Dirty Thirty was drafted in my early 20's.
Life was A LOT different back then - to sum it up, I had no dependents, well other than a cat named Sassy.
I had recently finished school, gotten my first job and moved away from Chicago to the exotic city of Kalamazoo, MI.
Despite the fact that Michigan was only a few hours away from IL - I felt like a complete foreigner when I moved in.
My boss filed me into his phone directory under the letter H.
How could this be possible you ask since my first name started with K and my maiden name with S?
Oh, because it was filed under HMP...High Maintenance Princess.  True Story.
I didn't quite get it until I met my co-workers - all males, except for one female who hunted, skinned her own deer, drank hard alcohol all of the time and never wore makeup.

The apartment I lived in was considered "upscale" for the area - but there consistently was a film to the water.  When I was gone for a few days a gelatin like film would form in my toilet bowl and it would literally peel off the sides of the bowl like skin when I flushed upon my return.  I was so repulsed, I refused to use the dishwasher or the sink so I lived off of bottled water, paper plates and never took longer than 5 minute shower.

The winter days were long and soggy.  I remember one January where there were 18 days without sun.  No sun.  I hopped onto a flight and as we broke through the cloud cover, everyone on board shielded their faces unsure of what the bright light shining into the windows was.  I now know what vampires feel like.

I traveled 20-26 days out of the month.  I had to be in the office by 6 and rarely left before 6:30 in the evening.  I remember one morning being unable to locate my ice scraper, having to sub in my credit card (which cracked), getting into the office at 7:30 and being greeted with a good afternoon, glad you decided to come in today.  Really people?

It wasn't all bad - people were nice, the airport was so small that the TSA agent (yup, one) and the person behind the airline counter would remember you by name and on the weekends that I was in town I could drive to Chicago in about 2.5 hours.  (This made for some excruciatingly long drives back at the butt crack of dawn on Monday mornings and some very unproductive Mondays in the office after a weekend of whooping it up back home).

Thankfully when this list was drafted I was back in Chicago with friends on one of those said business trips - it was decided that number one on the dirty thirty was to get out of Kalamazoo.

What's crazy is the number of San Diegans I have met, since leaving, that were born and raised in the 'zoo - looks like we did end up having something in common.