It is four in the morning, and I am on my way to the all night pharmacy to buy vitamin C. This is his idea of birth control, not mine, but I am deranged with love, and his suggestions are gusts of air into my pinpricked balloon. I will not take a pill because there is no time for a trip to the doctor. He will not pull out early like a teenaged boy. We will be as close as humanly possible without actually eating each other alive, and we can do this with the utilization of internet advice and six bucks at the Walgreens.

We’ve only known each other for five days, having seen each other a total of seven times. He’s home on winter break for the holidays, from a university in a state that I’ve heard of but have never actually seen, a place that I could identify on a map only if it was clearly labeled. When he speaks, I see him in a scholarly turtleneck, strolling through a campus that is constantly the cliche of fall foliage, of burnt orange leaves and a brisk chill in the air that makes him feel alive and strong. This movie-beautiful place is where I sometimes like to imagine myself as well, thick books tucked under my arms and a calendar stuffed full of coffee dates with professors for philosophical arguments and existential flirting. I am pretty in these scenarios, with an unassuming, silky brown ponytail and big, wide eyes that soak in the world. I am better than I am, than I ever could dream to be in my ordinary life of a childhood bedroom, a shit job, and a failed stint at the community college.

At twenty-one, I am haggard. My limp hair stinks like fried food and cheap beer. My skin is pinched, and my eyes are small, dark, and hard. I’ve realized that I’m not learning anything new these days; for every fact that my new boyfriend has absorbed in his stunning career as an intellectual college hunk, I have lost two, two or three. Third grade is gone. Multiplication tables, state capitals, animals, and homophones, all gone like drops of oil from a leaky car.

I met him in my best red sweater one day after Christmas. There he was in the designated coffee shop at the designated time, glorious and electrifying and ordering two large lattes. His online picture had been grainy and of poor quality; I had strode in prepared to greet my destiny with confidence and pride. Instead, I crumbled back into myself almost on the spot. His beauty and brains were razor sharp, tearing me to pieces upon first glance and first words. Nonetheless, when we sat in his car after coffee, he gently laid his head in my quivering lap and touched my nose, my eyelashes, the tips of my fingers, my mouth. And when I cried a little, he knew better than to ask why.

The next night was the first time he brought up the mystical, baby-prevention powers of vitamin C. Twenty-eight hours had elapsed since my red sweater and hot latte, and we had decided it was time to have sex. When I tentatively asked about rubbers, he shrugged and stated that he never had a need for them. His former lovers had all been virgins, and neither a cause nor concern had ever arisen. A virgin can’t give you chlamydia, AIDS, or herpes. A virgin, with her aura and aroma of pureness and cleanliness, was a free bus transfer, an open express lane, a wink and smile that everything was going to be okay, and you could do anything, go anywhere. Admittedly, pregnancy was a passing thought, but it was a wrinkle so mild that it couldn’t technically be counted as bothersome. After all, everybody who slept with anybody knew about vitamin C treatments- didn’t I?

I don’t know if he purposefully sought out virgins, if he walked around the swirling yellow leaves of his campus wearing specially manufactured night vision goggles that zoned in only on the untouched blank slates of the sexual world. Either way, he seemed visibly disappointed that I was not one of these angelic and wondrous beings. He asked about the two other guys, and I fumbled, unsure of what light to portray them in. Douche bags or knights in armor, men who barely spoke to me or admirers who recited poetry from invisible flowerbeds on my parents’ front lawn. After volleying for a few minutes, after breathing and running his fingers through his sweet-smelling hair, he asked if I had at least used protection. Of course, I had used protection, I told him. I wasn’t an idiot. He waffled for a moment, ran through the scenarios, then proclaimed that while I wasn’t obviously as ideal as a virgin, I was close enough, and we could remain unencumbered and natural without any pesky testing or unnecessary nuisances.

I went through a whole bottle of vitamin C after that night and during the hours of the next day, and, now tonight, I am going back for more. I don’t know yet what all of these vitamins will do to me; I don’t realize that, when my period does finally come in a few weeks, I will bleed heavily and violently, as if I am a soldier that has been shot in the heart, the leg, the head. There will be so much blood that I will weakly wonder where it all came from, how in the hell it is even remotely possible for one woman to create so terribly much. I will ache and be unable to stand; my jeans will not fit properly due to my stretched and bloated belly, and, on the second day, I will pass out in the bathroom, hitting my head on the corner of the sink as I go down.

And because I will desperately be telling him everything by that point, I will relay these hilarious details to him in short story form. Beginning, middle, climax, surprising end. This will be over the telephone that I clutch so tightly that it almost pops from my sweaty hand, as he is then back at school and I am then stuck, alone, in my childhood bedroom. I will work hard to keep his attention, fighting to be louder than the voices I hear behind him. Surely, it is a party in his lavish dorm room that is comprised only of temptation and seduction, of beckoning, burgeoning virgins and the hot, crippling sparks I’ve noticed he emits from his flesh.

Today, both my coworker Salty and my husband ("The Cheese") used their lunch hour to get their hair cut. This is totally a guy thing; women, as a rule, do not treat beautifying themselves as an errand to be performed along with grabbing some fast food, dropping off a DHL package, and picking up the dry cleaning during their free sixty minutes between morning work and afternoon work. The lunch hour is reserved for two things and two things only. Eating, preferably with a friend, and possibly shopping.

Except, of course, for me. I've had many a hair cut on my lunch hour, at the same $9 place in our plaza that Salty frequents every six to eight weeks. Although, I haven't been there ever since I discovered that I could cut my own hair in front of the mirror using kitchen scissors and two rubber bands. In the past five months, I've saved $18. With tip, maybe $22.

Usually, I don't think of how much of a "guy" I have become over the past ten years or so. It's a non-issue in my lackluster world. Then, I get invited to one of those jewelry parties- you know the kind, the Lia Sophia gatherings that are all rage in my income and social bracket. And a small knot forms in the pit of my stomach because I don't want to go. I don't like jewelry, I don't want to spend over five seconds looking at jewelry, I don't want to sit in a room with over four women and less than one man. I don't understand jewelry. Clothes, I get. Clothes serve a functional purpose and can flatter the body. But jewelry? Earrings and necklaces and rings and bracelets? I never understand why people spend money on jewelry, why it's important to have more than one set of each to wear for the occasional wedding or funeral. I would rather spend money on food or alcohol, movies or books, games or puzzles, cigarettes or lottery tickets.

I never knew what to do when I get invited to one of those parties. Do I go to be social, pretend to be interested to be nice, and then leave with empty promises of "Lemme look at the catalog and I'll call you"? Do I accept the invite while also warning, "It's doubtful that I'll actually buy anything"? Do I pretend like I have something else to do on a Thursday night? It's a conundrum every time. And if I do go, I inevitably feel weird about myself. Here I am in a roomful of women who do not get $9 haircuts on their lunch breaks (or cut their hair themselves with the same scissors they use to cut turkey breasts), here I am in my husband's socks and a four dollar t-shirt, here I am with the one and only purse that I own.

Last night, I came home from work and had a hankering for some stuffed mushrooms. However, two problems quickly presented themselves. One, I'd never made stuffed mushrooms before and had no idea what I was doing. Two, I knew that breadcrumbs were a necessity for the mushroom stuffing, and, wouldn't you know, the last of our breadcrumbs had been used last week for Chris' Jupiter Balls. For those of you who don't live in my house, Jupiter Balls is what Chris calls his six-pack of single serving meat loaves. When I asked him why they were called Jupiter Balls, he replied, "Because they're weird." And, believe me, while weird isn't necessarily an accurate description of his many meat loaf incarnations, it's a pretty good starting point.

Nonetheless, my belly wanted stuffed mushrooms, and I knew I had to make do without the breadcrumbs since a trip to the grocery store was out of the question. I think we got almost a foot of snow last night, effectively canceling the other, more exciting Friday night plans I had made earlier in the week and also ruling out any quick jaunts in the car. I'm lucky I made it home at all last night; I slowly slid past car after car stuck in ditches and snow banks, and I wasn't going to push my luck by heading out again.

Thus, a fabulous new recipe was born. And I'm going to share it with you now.


Caesar Crouton Stuffed Mushrooms

Ingredients:

Ten to fifteen decently sized button mushrooms
Two to three desperate handfuls of Caesar Croutons, depending on the size of your hand
Two palmfuls of Romano cheese
Two slightly smaller palmfuls of shredded mozzarella cheese
Two or three shoots of green onion
Olive oil

Directions:

1. Stem the button mushrooms, then dice the stems up and throw them in a medium sized mixing bowl. Lay out the mushroom caps on a lightly oiled baking sheet.
2. Crush the Caesar Croutons, but don't crush them into a fine powder. Leave enough chunks so that they're still identifiable as croutons. I used a big heavy flashlight to crush my croutons, but there's probably a better tool for this. Anyway, add to bowl.
3. Add cheese to bowl.
4. Dice up green onions, add to bowl.
5. Add about four good turns of olive oil to the bowl, then mix with a spoon. Taste your stuffing and revel in the fact that the croutons have added so much excellent flavor. Add more of whatever to suit tastes.
6. Stuff mushrooms with stuffing, really cramming the stuffing into the caps and letting it overflow like a glorious, tasty volcanic eruption.
7. Bake in a 375 degree oven for twenty to twenty five minutes.
8. And then- mission accomplished! Eat to your heart's content, maybe saving three or four for your husband to try when he gets home.

De-fricking-licious! Whoever said "Necessity is the mother of invention" was totally on to something. Down with breadcrumbs. Up with Jewel-brand Caesar-style croutons.

Tiny Mix Tape

Shuggie Otis- Inspiration Information
- This song came from the "Six Feet Under" soundtrack, but I couldn't remember which episode it was featured it. So I checked IMDB. It was the episode "Familia." First few plot key words for that episode:

• Car Trouble
• Insult
• Broken Glass
• Sex In Chair

It was a pretty good episode.

Peter Sarstedt- Where Do You Go To (My Lovely)
- "The Darjeeling Limited." Unlike SFU, I remember which scene they played this song in. Every scene. Or pretty close, at least. Nonetheless, I think this song is pretty, and makes me feel young in an old-fashioned way.

Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin- Pangea
- I find myself singing "It's always something, it's always something" on mornings at work. The "send a wire, write a letter" part usually works as well. Wires fund loans. Letters inform when loans are in default. It's a tangled web.

Kate Nash- Mouthwash
-I'm glad I don't have freckles.

Set Me Free, Why Don't You, Babe

My co-worker Salty and I have both signed DNR forms this week, Do Not Resuscitate. If either of us pass out at work or go into sudden cardiac arrest, we have designated each other to be responsible for making sure our other co-workers leave us alone. Salty has promised to kick anyone in the face that attempts to give me CPR, and I have promised that if he is the one to pass out first, I will create a distraction. Look at me, I'm doing a handstand!

I'm a little worried about Salty; he's taking the DNR thing a bit more seriously than I am. He signed up for a new email address this week. PLSDNR@Salty.Com. Oh, Salty. Little do you know that I am incapable of standing on my hands.

It’s been the end of the world since the beginning of mine. When I was ten, I read my parents’ books: “Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sex (But Were Afraid To Ask)”, Danielle Steel’s “The Promise,” cowboy stories by the long dead Bret Harte. I read old magazines, and then I read through a Bible study correspondence binder that my father, mostly likely on a drunken whim, had ordered from Time-Life. Jesus seemed like my kind of man, making dinner parties an absolute roar with his fish and bread tricks, but then came the binder divider labeled “Revelations.” And there it was, clearer and heavier than the outcasts of Poker Flat; the end was nigh, and the Rapture was upon us.

I was afraid of being alone when Jesus rang his Judgment Day bell, when he swooped down from the sky like a mighty, prehistoric bird and herded us into lines labeled “Heaven,” “Hell,” “The UnBaptised,” and “Let’s Hear What They Have To Say First.” I would be lost and tiny in a crowd of frantic strangers, both sinners and saints, and I would not be able to find my father. I would search through rock, rubble, and fire, my hand extended and anxious, while Jesus angrily yelled at me to get back into my line. Long gone was the gentle, lamblike man from earlier in the binder. The Jesus that I envisioned coordinating Judgment Day would be cruel and snappish like mid-level management near quarter end. He would be impatient when he demanded me to account for myself, would be heartless and inflexible when I pleaded for him to page my parents to have them meet me at the service counter near the golden stairs.

I could not sleep alone; I could not play in the basement alone or wander too far towards the back of the yard. For many months, I cried and prayed and begged that the Rapture would only take place during family meals, just before salad or the clearing of the table. I did not tell my parents how terrified I was; I thought that speaking my fears aloud to other humans would twist my fate into something worse. And so, when my father told me, “It’s not the end of the world,” during a crying jag over a dropped ice cream cone or a missing Barbie head, I would only cry harder, unable to catch my breath, unable to see, unable to free myself from his pants leg. “Don’t provoke Jesus,” I wanted to say, but didn’t. I didn’t want to provoke Jesus, either.

My vision of the Rapture is not as clearly horrific in my adult life. I have read that the Mayan calendar comes to an abrupt end in December of 2012; I have read this prophetic factoid in between online comic strips and emails from my mother asking when I will visit next. And I will not be surprised if we don’t make it to 2013 without a holy intervention; I am too surprised that we’ve made it this long.

Sometimes, when it is very quiet, and I am home by myself softly slicing into zucchini or emptying the vacuum cleaner of dust clumps, I think, “Now?” The sky is often a brilliant, cloudless blue, and the only noises are the furnace kicking on or the muffled splash of dishwasher spray. Jesus is still running Judgment Day, but this time things are calmer, more subdued and well-organized. He comes to get me himself, stepping out from the coat closet, and for some reason wearing my bathrobe. He lets me do what I need to do first: run a comb through my hair, slip my drivers license in my pocket, draw the living room drapes. My hands tremble only slightly, and it does not occur to me to ask if I can make a phone call or pen a quick note. Eventually he issues a wink, a comment on how lousy the world has been at predicting his times of departure and arrival. And when we've lingered for too long in small talk and chores, he asks, “Are you ready?”

Dear Jackie In The Past,

Don't worry, you will get married. He'll be a nice man, the kind of man that you do not actively seek but that you one day stumble across and discover, to your surprise, fits you perfectly. He is gentle and sweet, and will be able to make you laugh with little to no effort. He will be the kind of man that your friends refer to as a "good guy," the kind of man that will one day win your heart, on accident, when he is able to look a playful, disfigured child right in the eye and smile, wink, and call her a cutie-pie. This is the kind of thing that you always thought you were capable of, but you aren't. You are too self conscious for the both of you, even here in the future. But he, he is not. He has a solid, decent heart, and one day at a Bakers Square, you will be seated next to a toddler with an inverted face, and you will realize how much love he is truly capable of giving, and it will make you feel ashamed of yourself, but so, so proud of him. This will be your husband, and while you may not always deserve him, you will know, without a doubt, that you have unwittingly found the best in the bunch.

But life is not finding a man and getting married, although I know, in your teenage years, that you fear that you will never find anyone to love who will love you back. You are awkward, shy, and convinced of so many things that are not true. I want you to shake yourself, because I am not there to do it for you. Don't waste your time feeling bad, because that is not the point of being young. I wish you could enjoy yourself. Yet I don't want you to stop reading Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath; I don't want you to stop writing your bad poetry or thinly veiled stories. I don't want you to suddenly try out for poms or find the courage to ask the popular boy if maybe he would like a blow job in the movie theater. This isn't you, and it isn't us. Instead, I want you to embrace who you are, and I want you to stop being so afraid and uncertain. Everything will eventually be okay, and your only task is to believe this.

When you are nineteen, you will have the chance to go to Italy for two weeks. You will have the money, and your shitty job will not care if you take the vacation time. You will be so close; you will have the forms, and you will have discussed it with your parents. I backed out at the last moment. I did not go because I was afraid of going with a group of students I did not know, of leaving my shitty job for fourteen days, of spending the cash that I had sitting, dormant, in a savings account. I should have gone, and it is something I think of now, eight years later. Go, please, for the sake of your future, just go. I want to know what it is like to leave America. And, no, Mexico does not count.

You should probably go away to school, too, instead of commuting to Columbia. The train ride will make you feel like you're going to a job. You will feel a million years old; instead, you should move away and go to keggers and become involved in various college-themed activities. You should not identify with the the forty year old commuters when you are twenty. There is something inherently wrong with this, and it will screw you up. You will always feel older than you actually are.

The good news is that, here in the future, you do not look older than you actually are. Dare I say that you will age gracefully. Sometimes I look in the mirror and I see a fifteen year old girl, a pretty fifteen year old girl. And I think of you, and I wish that you could see it, too. You needed the image that I have now, the image that is mostly useless to me but would have meant so very much to you.

I also want to tell you that the mistakes of your parents have nothing to do with you. I am not a licensed therapist here in the future (I'm a banker- can you fucking believe that??!?), but I can say, without a doubt in my mind, that their problems are theirs, and they do not belong to you. The spousal abuse, the way your mother makes you feel so crazy that you fear your mind might explode, the shame you feel when you side with your father- you have to let that go as soon as you can, because if you don't, it will fuck you up. You may have been created and raised by them, but you also have the power to separate yourself from them. And, surprisingly, you have the power to respect your mother for who she is and what she has gone through, and to be able to love your father unequivocally. It is okay. He is a man not too different than the one you will find yourself marrying; he has a good heart. But everybody has problems, and you will have to forgive him. He loves you. He will never hit you, and the one time that he comes close, he will later cry to his wife. The woman that he does hit. I don't know if that's the definition of irony, but while it's fucked up in its own way, it's still okay. Just be there for him, and when you move out of the house one sunny day, at least have the decency to say good-bye to him. Don't take off when he's not around.

I want you to pursue writing. As I mentioned before, you're a banker here in the present. I suppose you derive some pleasure from your job, but you are not who you thought you would be. Your writing skills have declined greatly in the past ten years. Or they have stayed the same. Either way, they have not progressed, and they should have. Here in the present, we still have the writing talent of a seventeen year old. As a seventeen year old, we'd be told that we show "promise," that we could eventually parlay our skills into something much greater, if only we'd work at it a bit. But we don't. You don't, I don't. And we should. For the love of God, do not one day burn all of your writing in a bonfire in the backyard. You will wish, years after the fact, that you still had the poem "Matthew," the poem that had to do with rocks and sky, the short story of being in Racine with a confused boy and a wise Aimee Mann song. It's all gone, though. You'll get rid of it, and you shouldn't. Don't.

Also, please don't start smoking. Here in the future, there's no foreseeable end to it. I hope we don't die from lung cancer, but if we do, I will blame you completely, Jackie In The Past. It's not cool. It smells awful. If you could smell your car now, you'd faint.

Nonetheless, even as a banker who does not write, even as someone who did not take the trip to Italy or go away to school or learn how to effectively deal with her family, you've turned out mostly okay. You have a nice house, the aforementioned nice husband. You have a nice life; you learn how to cook, how to win at poker, and you have a good job. You have friends, and you have not gained any weight. You have not suffered any great tragedies, nor have you dealt with a depression as heavy as the one you feel during those awful years in high school. I do have to warn you, however, that you will continue to dream of high school well into your late twenties. You will have nightmares; you will not be able to shake the awful dreams that come to you in the night and make you feel, again, as if you are nobody, nothing. But you are somebody, something. You have made good on so many levels, and I want to remind you that you must hold on to this. Charge ahead, and let go of the things that won't let go of you. Keep only the promise that I am pledging to you. Maybe we'll both be better because of these pledges.

I guess I don't know; I guess you'll have to tell me.

Jackie In The Now

Susan- Aimee Mann

I am ridiculously awful at making small talk, be it with a client, a coworker, or a casual acquaintance. Usually, I like to smile, nod, and leave it up to the other person to pick a topic for us to discuss while we wait for something interesting to happen. Or I open with, "How are you?" and hope that they fly with that question, hope that they spin some grand tale describing that they have been wonderful ever since they found that envelope of cash in the toilet tank at the bar. I am usually able to then pepper our small talk conversation with appropriate questions, but the questions are only injected to prompt the other person into speaking more. Were the bills dry? Are the toilets in that bar nice? Do you think you accidentally intercepted someone's drug money and will now be murdered in your sleep by the envelope's rightful owner? The overall goal is that I do not have to contribute anything of my own to the conversation, because, as I said, I am awful at making small talk.

This weakness of mine is my fatal flaw, and I often feel bad about my personality, life, and subsequent self worth when I find myself in a situation with a person who is normal, or- even worse- just like me in regards to their small talk skills. A person who is not a super strong conversationalist and that is comfortable in rambling and/or drawing me out of my shell. Me and this or normal or subnormal individual will both stand around, looking and feeling stupid, while I rack my brain for something- ANYTHING- to say. And the things that come out of mouth- if anything comes out at all- are absurdly dull. Weather is the big one. Traffic is the other one. If there's a holiday coming up, I'll mention that the holiday is approaching. Easter, that's on a Sunday, right? Yep. Easter... Sunday.

This can't go on; I am an intelligent, mildly interesting woman, and here I am, completely unable to produce small talk. I have to be able to do this, to be able to lead a conversation that doesn't completely suck ass, and if I don't overcome whatever invisible obstacle I've set up for myself, then I will continue to never amount to anything. And there are so many things I want to amount to before I turn 30. Such as becoming a good conversationalist, an excellent small talker who leaves strangers and semi-strangers wanting more, more, MORE.

Thus, I've decided to come up with a list of topics that I will keep handy inside one of the more prominent folds of my brain. Topics that I will bring up as soon as I find myself begging, "How are you?" or saying, "How about that snow?" The list will, hopefully, be ever growing and ever changing. Nonetheless, this is what I've come up with thus far:

1. The public library. I'm always the only person there in my demographic. Everyone's either thirty years older than me, twenty years younger than me, or there with their small children. Am I the only 27 year old taking advantage of free books? Why do I always feel so weird there??

2. Eggs, and how I wish you could buy them one or two at a time. Of course, if you purchased loose eggs that didn't come in a container, transportation of a single egg could prove to be very problematic. Don't you think?

3. Super delegates, and how I think becoming one would be a good career move for me.

4. Don't you giggle whenever you see signs along the road that say "Free Dump?"

5. Flying cars, and how we should have had them by now. I feel so misled by the cartoons of my youth. This can then evolve into a conversation about one of my all time favorite movies, "The Jetsons Meet The Flintstones." Classic time travel flick.

6. Famous people I have met. This conversation can't go on for very long, unless my small talk partner has actually met a famous person. The closest I've ever come is sitting next to Hank Azaria in a Bennigans. Although I have corresponded with several novelists, but do novelists really count as famous people? They're just like me, only with a better grasp of the English language.

7. The lottery. What I would do if I won and, more importantly, how I would go about protecting my winning ticket. My boss has said that he would place his winning ticket in a jar, and then put the jar on a string around his neck. This, I think, is a pretty fool-proof plan, unless he neglected to empty the jar of its jelly-marinara-artichoke hearts first.

8. Bloggers who actually make money from their blog.

9. Children, and how I still can't fathom that it's possible to make people. To create an individual. To push a baby out from what has, to date, been mostly an In Door, at least when it comes to solids. Hmm, may have to be careful with this topic.

10. Least favorite smells.

Looking over this list, I realize that I may possibly change into the kind of person who is bad at making small talk to the kind of person you just avoid talking to altogether. I guess that would be one way to solve my problem, but this is not the ultimate goal I had in mind. The ultimate goal is be the person you invite to a large dinner party full of people who don't know one another because I- yes, I- will be the person to tie the party together. The person who will bring up topics that everyone will want to discuss and weigh in on. Plus, I don't know if I've mentioned this yet, but I also want to be the hottest person at that dinner party. But that's a new to-do list for a different day.

Palatine wants to secede from Cook County, and I, for one, think that this is the most inspiring piece of news I've read in a long time. Why should the suburbs have to pay for the city's budget woes? The latest sales tax hike in Cook County means that most residents are paying around ten percent for every purchase, and that's so incomprehensibly insane that border communities like Palatine either have two choices: lose revenue to the more reasonable, surrounding counties OR secede and start their own county. Obviously, they have to go with the latter. However, regrettably, the new county would be called "Lincoln County."

Not that I have anything against Honest Abe; I just think that Lincoln County is a piss poor name for what would be a historic secession, perhaps the most historically important secession since the south became the confederacy, since West Virginia seceded from Virginia (Note: I'm not sure if that's accurate), and since I personally seceded from my maternal relatives (Note: Those people are bat shit crazy!). Lincoln County, as a name, does not evoke the feelings of pride and retaliation that it should. Instead, the new county should be called: "Freaking Awesome County" or "In Your Face County" or "Todd Stroger Should Be Eaten Alive By Maggots County." That last one may be too long to fit on a map.

Either way, it's nice to see the suburbs fighting back. And while I am no longer a resident of Cook County (and I only spent 6.50% on my sales tax this past weekend when I did some shopping), I would strongly consider moving to Lincoln County if the whole thing were to happen. Or "Ha Ha- Without Us, Cook County is Fucked County." You know, whatever they decide to eventually name it.