The other day in class, this guy Ron whom I’ve never spoken to before followed me out into the stairway.  I was lighting up a cigarette and then he asked if he could bum one.  I handed him one and lit us both up.  He wore this long overcoat with a lot of pockets and started looking through them, asking if I might want Wicked tickets, Bears tickets, Cubs tickets, or if there were tickets to an upcoming concert I wanted to see.  I asked him where he got all these tickets from and he laughed.  He said his brother worked security at a lot of those venues and knew some people at the ones he didn’t work at.  He could get into almost any event or concert in Chicago if he wanted.  But he also got tickets to everything and tried to sell them.  It was basically his part-time job while he attended school, but he actually made as much money as if he were working a full-time job doing it.  There just weren’t any benefits or a long-term guarantee that he’d keep getting work doing it.  That’s why he stayed in school.  Also, he really wanted to be a writer one day so he needed to take writing classes to know what he was doing.