101 Things

I had a favorite professor in college. She was an English professor who loved Shakespeare, and I loathed Shakespeare. And also I was a geophysics major. So it was a bit improbable that she should be my favorite. But we all hung on her every word for an entire semester of classes (a feminist writers seminar, not Shakespeare, thankfully), and we were far from the only ones. My university’s marketing department had huge posters on the walls with biographic profiles of eight students. All eight were asked their favorite professor. Two of the eight named my favorite professor as their favorite professor. Neither was an English major. A favorite author of mine who’d attended the same school as I did also named her in an interview as her favorite professor. The lady had an impact.

(I will always, always remember coming back from spring break immediately after the war in Iraq had started. We arranged our chairs in a circle as we did every Monday morning, and she told us she’d taught through three wars and felt that we needed to acknowledge the events at hand before moving on with class. And then she read a poem about how the arts carry us through uncertain times, and then she stopped reading the poem because she began to cry, and then after a gorgeously touching, brief moment, we moved on with class. And I wanted to be her when I grew up, to be able to handle difficult things with grace, which up until that very moment I had assumed meant the total suppression of external emotion. But anyway.)

The favorite professor told us once — us: a class of twenty or so young women, all of us women — that we all needed to live on our own for a year. Just a year. Just to see how that was. She said that we’d learn things about ourselves we could learn no other way but to live alone. For a year. Everyone must do this thing. And so when my last roommate moved his girlfriend-now-wife in with us and the place was just too small for three, and I had a brand new job that paid me reasonably well, I decided it was time to see for myself. And so I found a lovely apartment in a 1907 brick building in a perfect location in my favorite neighborhood, one with high ceilings and sunny windows and vintage molding and antique radiators and hardwood floors and a farmhouse sink and a clawfoot tub. It was perfect, and I loved it instantly even though it was the very high end of what I could afford, and I have been living there ever since last August, and it has easily been one of the best years of my whole life.

It’s been a great year in large part because of climbing, but climbing is expensive, and so was that perfect apartment. And so I’ve found a room in a lovely little house with two lovely women, and I am looking forward to this new phase of living in a house with people again, and I am also really looking forward to paying less than half the amount I’ve been paying in rent for the last year and change. But it has been a stressful week of packing and cleaning and moving, made worse by the fact that I am leaving on vacation this very evening to go climbing. Which, by the way, is a thing I do now, I guess? Go on vacation to go climbing. But anyway.

This morning I polished the final few scuffs off the wall where my beloved blue bicycle had leaned against it, and I painted over that spot where I’d splashed the red hair dye over the sink, and I locked up and slid the keys under the door. And then I cried at the bus stop for a moment, waiting there with my red suitcase and green climbing pack. It was a really good year, living alone in that perfect apartment. I am so sad to see it go, but paying less in rent will allow me to do other exciting things, and frankly I do really like living with people, and so: Here we go.