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Every June, more than 50,000 conservative suits descend on Chicago for NeoCon (National Exposition of Contract Furnishings). There are so many of them, I feel like I never left my lovely hometown of DC, where Capitol Hill politicos run rampant and style still runs short. (Sorry, DC, you’re trying!) NeoCon is the most important show in the American contract furniture industry, with $25B in sales even during an economic slump. Your office chair, desk, and file cabinet were probably first scouted here. You haven’t given them a second thought once you were situated, and why would you (*yawn)? Fortunately, someone else is paid to do so and that person goes to NeoCon.

Established in 1969, NeoCon is always held at Merchandise Mart, a historic structure built by Marshall Field & Company in the 1920s. Once the largest building in the world at 4 million square feet, it has its own zip code and is a monument to architecture, design, and merchandising. It’s quite fitting that NeoCon is here: a pillar of a traditional American industry inside an American landmark. Merchandise Mart is now home to high-end designer showrooms, ad agencies, tech firms, and government agencies.

What you may not realize is that NeoCon is also a huge meat market.

Are you disappointed in your lack of photo-posing skills? Do you have frands with arm-squishing issues? Do you want to see Denuologists photoshopped with scary smize eyes? Then DenuoU is back with our latest educational SlideShare, Smize: More Than Just Smiling.

Quick, you’re late to Paris in 1906 and your go-to corset is still at the cleaners:  what do you do? It is precisely occasions like these that I regret anchoring the bulk of my wardrobe in the Muppets heyday circa 1979. So I get over it and go. After all, this is the meal that’s a solid year in the making.

It’s my trip to Next, Grant Achatz’s restaurant masterpiece. Achatz is Michael Jordan in the kitchen, augmented by a Shakespearean bout with tongue cancer, a story coming soon to theaters. He continues to floor diners with Alinea, consistently ranked one of the best restaurants in the world, and is now upping the ante with Next and it’s impending neighbor Aviary, a ballsy reimagination of the cocktail lounge.

As my first three months here at Denuo come to a close, I can’t help but compare my new environment to my old. I began here as an administrative assistant in January, leaving behind a career as a massage therapist. I went from working at a small but busy spa one mile from my apartment to working in a giant building in downtown Chicago. My five hour work days that began at 3PM have become 8.5 hour work days that start at 6AM. A casual stroll to work has become a full-speed walk to trains where I sit for 50 minutes trying to avoid eye contact with everyone around me. And really, let’s not even talk about the elevators.

After watching An Inconvenient Truth,
Kennedy helped her cardio striptease workout studio become LEED-certified.

I want a book deal.  And not the kind where I have to sit down and write a fricken novel.  I want the kind where someone essentially copies and pastes posts from a blog I make, I write a small dedication to friends and family, and I distribute throughout kitschy stores in malls for people with money to burn.