If you can read, you’ll have noted that the post below is password-protected. DM me on Twitter or drop me an email for the password, and I’ll send it to you if I know who you are.

This is for my own safety and yours.

Oooh, now doesn’t that just make you wanna read it?

This is not a particularly interesting post, but I’m puzzling over this and am sending it out to the intertubes for consideration.

I had a second date – if it is indeed a date – with Copper on Sunday night. He came over and we pretty much just laid around on the couch and watched TV. It was nice to be cuddled, nice to have someone to just hang out with at home, doing nothing. Chex Mix, beer and The Girls Next Door: it was a good way to spend a lazy Sunday.

Last night, Captain called me and we talked for about twenty minutes. The first three were nice and awkward, as they always seem to be with him, but we talked about books and history and other nerdy things for awhile, so we were both in our element and not so awkward anymore. Awkward returned when he tried to ask me out, and I do have to share it because it’s kind of cute.

Him: “So, I’m coming back into town this weekend.” (He is stationed about 100 miles from here.)

Me: “Oh, that’s nice.”

“Yeah, I’ve got a friend I have to pick up at the airport on Friday at like, 6:30.”

“Mmmhmm.”

“So, I don’t know, maybe after that we could, um, whatever.”

“You and your friend?” (This is my attempt at coyness.)

“No I meant you and me could, like, I don’t know…” He’s talking all stumbly which is kind of endearing.

“We could whatever?”

“Well, you know.”

“Hang out?”

“Yeah. I mean, if you want to.”

And so I have a date on Friday night with the Captain. For Saturday, I have plans to go to a winery with a friend who I know, just KNOW will invite along a certain fellow she’s been trying to get me to meet for months. Hooray wine, boo setup.

But I’m tired. Straight up tired, physically tired. None of this feels like it did when I first met the Ex-Fiance, or Tim, or E. I think I had it wrong when I wrote before about a “click,” because maybe that implies one of those all-of-a-sudden things that are really out of the ordinary. I don’t necessarily need that. But the warm fuzzy just-starting buzz isn’t there. The giggle-giggle-I-like-him feeling. The I-want-to- look-just-right-when-he-comes-over feeling.

Now it’s more of an I-don’t-even-need-to-shave-my-legs-since-I-don’t-want-anyone-rubbing- them feeling.

It’s not that I don’t like these guys. I think they’re both nice and I have a good time hanging out with them. I like the texts and phone calls. I like to be held. I like to be kissed. And while it’s probably too early to just call it with either one of these nice fellows, this “meh” feeling is kind of disconcerting. Dating is supposed to be fun, not meh… and it usually was before.

Today I wore my dance shoes to work because I knew I’d be on my feet and in dress clothes all day. I used to wear them when I was in theater, and I could stand or dance in them for hours in rehearsals. And this afternoon they gave me a whopper of a blister for the first time. First. Time. Ever.

So is it the boys or is it just me?

Two guys behind me in line at the bakery this morning were talking about their exploits at Lollapalooza last night,. I think they were already or still drunk. I like this city.

I’ve just finished cleaning up my hotel room and am killing the little bit of time I have before I need to go catch the commuter train out to the burbs to see my brother and sister-in-law and my baby niece Amelia. It doesn’t seem like I’ve only been in the Chicago for about two and a half days. There was the conference, of course, taking up the bulk of my daytime hours and confining me to beige conference rooms that could have been in any hotel anywhere. Outside the Hilton, the city really did make me catch my breath sometimes.

Technically, I live in a city. I lived downtown in Saint Louis for a year, on the twelfth floor of an apartment building half a block off the street where the urban revitalization project was just beginning to attract the hipsters and the yuppies were eyeballing the condo developments and the recent new branch of Good Works contemporary furniture right off the main drag. The streest were quiet during the day.

I think I was a little ahead of the game; after I decided I wanted to pay less money for more space and moved to the south part of the city, the boom happened. Washington Avenue is synonymous with trendy nightlife; the side streets teem with condos in converted warehouses. All the things that weren’t close by when I was there – a grocery store, a selection of independent coffee shops and bakeries, eclectic boutiques, a pharmacy – fill the ground-floor windows. The block-to-block patchiness has mostly disappeared in that section of town. My old apartment building is now closed for construction, and banners announce a new condominium community coming in 2009.

And yet what I was raised to call a city is nothing like this city. I’m twenty-seven years old, I’ve traveled, I’ve been in big cities here and abroad, and yesterday I hailed a cab for the first time. It was an unbelievably heady feeling. I walked about a mile and a half on Michigan Avenue the other day, not to shop, but to get from my conference back to my hotel. Streets are rarely a pedestrian thoroughfare in Saint Louis. If all we need to do is get from Point A to Point B, we drive. I live about one mile from my favorite Mexican restaurant and from my neighborhood Walgreens, and I’ve never walked to either one. I don’t think I’d ever do it alone. My neighborhood is not bad, but no one else is walking and safety in numbers is not a cliche.

Last night I went to a Chicago blogger meetup, and we ate at a restaurant and walked a few blocks to a bar afterward. At 11:30, we went our separate ways, to trains and apartments and in my case, a hotel. I was surrounded by respectable-looking people on the sidewalks everywhere I went. You can walk in The Loop in Chicago at night.

The fact that I am amazed by these things that are likely taken for granted by people in big cities everywhere is not because I grew up in a small town. I think it’s because I live in a city that is not a city. Cities on television and in the movies show people out walking all the time. Everyone walks to work, to the shops, to wherever they need to go. Scary things only happen on dark side streets, and people who do not come from cities expect this and clutch their fanny packs as soon as the sun goes down. People who come from a city like Saint Louis do the same. We’re not used to the idea of walking the city at night. And while I’m sure that’s probably the safest policy in most cities, fanny packs excluded and Chicago included, the fact that Wabash between Lake and Randolph was comfortably lit and peopled with respectable pedestrians close to midnight didn’t even give me pause until I got back to my hotel and realized that I was in The City On TV.

I’ve also just realized that this is the first time I’ve visited a city on my own for purposes other than tourism. I had places to go and set times to be there. I had to go to work. I had friends to meet, to do the sorts of social things that you do where you live, not where you travel. Maybe that makes me see this city differently than I ever saw London or Houston or Denver… or even Chicago on previous trips. It’s friendlier, more livable, more comfortable and more in keeping with the idea of what it should be like to exist in a city that IS a city. It makes me not want to go home just yet.

But if you’ll excuse me, I have to catch a train to Arlington Heights. If the baby doesn’t drool on my keyboard, I’ll come back and tell you the funny stories instead of boring you with my metropolitan musings. There are boys involved, and no matter what city I’m in, I like those too.

“What do you mean, it’s ‘not like superman?’”

“Well, it’s just a go-go-go thing, maybe bigger than usual…”

“I guess I’m not superman then.”

“It’s actually kind of annoying. Picture this:”

“Are you done yet?”

“I’m just trying to please you, baby.”

“You did. Twice. Twenty minutes ago.”

“But I want to again.”

“Get off me.”

“You have the sweetest pillow talk.”

“A girl can get sore!”

“Well, guys can chafe!”

“Then you just STOP!”

“Hmph.”

I was sitting at a stoplight today, next a souped-up Trans Am driven by a skinny punk boy. He was accompanied by two more, all of them tattooed and skeevy-looking. Miranda Lambert was doing her thing on the radio when these kids pulled up, bass thumping to an unidentifiable song. It may have just been a bass line, for all I could tell. But it blocked out my Miranda, and I did not like this.

They were waving and leering and the driver was revving the engine, nodding toward the stoplight.

I confess: even at the wise old age of twenty-seven, I bit. I cranked up Miranda’s “Gunpowder and Lead” and blasted the hell out of the soundbar. That stuff CARRIES when the whole top is off the Jeep. Their bass? Psshht, couldn’t hear it over Miranda growling about loading her shotgun. Then the red turned green and I SMOKED those kids down Kingshighway.

Maybe I’m a little petty. But Trans Am, schmans am. That might have been cool when I was about four. I bit because I knew they’d bite it. You don’t screw with my Jeep.