Half of the first year

I’m waiting for the pirate to do her work.

Tori Amos came to Pittsburgh on November 6, 1998, on her “Plugged ’98” tour. I had been living and breathing her music for two years at that point. She had gotten me through the worst of middle school, she had been the reason I started reading Neil Gaiman’s Sandman comics, and she was going to be only four hours away from my hometown in Athens, Ohio.

My mom let me skip a day of school and drove us to Pittsburgh, a city we both loved anyway, and we went to that concert together. I made a huge glittery sign that the guards made me throw away before we entered. I was 14, and most of the audience was older than me and younger than my mom. When Tori came onstage, I screamed and screamed and screamed. The show was incredible, even if my mom did get disgusted and bored by Tori’s ten-minute version of “The Waitress,” with its world-filling refrain “I believe in peace, bitch.” I bought merch (my mom paid for it). I was giddy for hours after. My mom and I had a great weekend together. As far as first concerts go, it set a high bar.

A post came up on Tumblr a few weeks ago, promising bootleg downloads for the whole tour. My heart stopped. I clicked the link, but it was dead. I wrote the owner of the blog, asking whether there was a new source for that particular date. I told her why it was important to me, but when she wrote back, she only said that she’d be out of the country for the next few weeks and that she’d get to it in March.

My mother and I are in that crowd somewhere. I’m waiting for the pirate to do her work.

Things I did on my first day of grad school

No one is surprised that I really take to approaching strangers, chatting for a few minutes and asking if I could take their picture. Our first assignment, in our first Methods class (where we learn both the skills necessary for today’s tech-wielding journalism and whether we have unexplored passions for new-to-us media creation), is to spend an hour in the Loop and come back when we’ve taken interesting photos of people. Along with two other girls, I head south and west, along Van Buren Street, across the river and down into Union Station. Nearly 70 shots later, I’ve talked with Ed, who works a newsstand behind the Chicago Board of Trade; the owner of a liquor store and bar that’s closing after 55 years in the same hands; Ellen, who insists she only takes good photos when she’s standing next to her brother-in-law; and a postman, pictured above, who says, “I’m just working, I’m just working.”

Turns out I’m super into this. Can’t wait until I get to do this and write about it too.

One of these mornings, you’re gonna rise up singing

One year ago today I took the GRE. I had only the vaguest idea of applying to graduate school, and was entertaining a few very different options, having recently gone to a nonprofits-focused grad school fair sponsored by Idealist.org. Public policy at the University of Minnesota, with a concentration in the arts? Editing and publishing in the book industry at Emerson College in Boston? A self-designed master’s program at my beloved alma mater, the University of Chicago?

Today I sent in my FAFSA and have been making calls about immunization records. This week I was accepted at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, something which makes me scream inside (and sometimes outside) every time I remember that it’s real. I’ll be starting in early January.

A few months ago I renewed my passport. My last was issued in June of 2001. I remember sitting there looking at the photo of that girl and feeling both distant from and protective of her. She has so much ahead of her — college and 9/11 and California and improv and fumbling through her twenties and writing novels and road trips and fights and career angst and losing her mother. Especially losing her mother. Then I started to wonder if I was being too precious and literary about this moment, but that path seemed like a waste of my time. Feel what you feel and screw feeling ashamed of it.

I can say without qualifiers that this has been the worst year of my life. My mother died of brain cancer on August 24. Nothing I can say can make sense of or communicate what that’s like, so I will just say that I love her and miss her and have been thinking of her so much this week.

Yet the phrase that kept popping up when I shared this news was I’m so proud of you. That’s exactly what she said to me my whole life, and what she would have said now. I can’t tell you what it means to me to hear it from all my friends and loved ones. She was a little less gone every time I saw those words.

This week I also left my job of three and a half years. I have a month of funemployment ahead of me, during which I intend to do every fun thing I’ve managed to not do yet in Chicago, as well as the more mundane things I’ve been neglecting (you do not want to know what my kitchen or my apartment in general look like right now). (Yes, some of this includes working on Innogen & the Hungry Half — many have been asking!) I’ll also have eight days in Seattle, which, between spending time with my nieces (and their young Great Dane) and marathoning British TV with Joe Armstrong in, is going to be beyond splendid. I need this month. I need a month that’s just good to me.

I’ve often felt like it’s hard for me to look back on a year and notice the arc or the personal changes. This year has been a stark one, bad and good.

Hug the ones you love and tell them so.

Statistically, the hard times cannot go on forever. And at last, they didn’t.

Happy December, friends. May the next year be new.

Laramie is my Ithaka

Holiday travel as a metaphor for existence, or at least your twenties? It could be a thing. I just wrote “I Made It to Wyoming” for Oy!Chicago, which is part travelogue, part confession of poor planning habits and part announcement: next week will be my last at my present employer. After that comes another adventure.

My first flight, the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, was scheduled to leave Midway around 1:30. I’m terrible about packing. I always tell people I have packer’s block, and can only do it the morning I leave. It only takes me half an hour at the outside, so I was prepared to enjoy a leisurely breakfast at my Lincoln Square apartment with a huge mug of my favorite tea. Until, of course, I remembered that I wasn’t giving myself nearly enough time to navigate a major airport on the busiest travel day of the year. I’m not saying the scene that followed was from Home Alone, but it’s not as far off the mark as I like to admit.

All My Hotspurs

Kenneth Branagh is the only Benedick; anyone else is just mouthing the lines. That’s what comes of having seen his Much Ado About Nothing at a very formative age. Even with the story reconfigured, as in the BBC Shakespeare Retold series, while I adore Damian Lewis’s take, it still looks odd to me.

I’m having this issue with a history play at the moment. Over the summer, the BBC released The Hollow Crown, a tetralogy spanning Richard II, both the Henry IVs and Henry V. Despite the fact that Shakespeare’s history plays have never really been my thing (I tend more towards the weird stuff), I was always going to watch these productions: Tom Hiddleston plays Prince Hal/Henry V. Now, he does a magnificent job, as does everyone on the cast and crew, but for me, someone else stole the show. Thanks to Joe Armstrong, I’ve become a total Hotspur fangirl.

Those were our times: Patti Smith’s Just Kids

I have two Patti Smith songs in my iTunes library: one is a live performance of “About a Boy” from the 1997 Tibetan Freedom Concert, and the other is a cover of “Don’t Smoke in Bed” from the eternally awesomely named Ain’t Nuthin’ But a She Thing. For most of my life, these and her status as “the Godmother of Punk” were all I knew about her. I never expected I would have feelings about her and her work, but as it turns out, that’s only because I hadn’t met her yet.

This story the world may read in me: Esther’s many feelings about Cymbeline

This past Memorial Day weekend I corrected a longstanding tragedy, which was that I had never seen Cymbeline performed. I’ve read it numerous times, but there’s a particular thrill in seeing a text you love interpreted in another medium—in this case, its right medium. The fabulous Alex agreed to trek down to Hyde Park during her visit to Chicago, and we showed up, full of dinner from a favorite college haunt, for an outdoor performance at the new (and stunning) Logan Center for the Arts.