#WhereIsJa

Song: I'm Real x Ja Rule Feat. Jennifer Lopez

So, grad school isn't just sitting in one's room doing work 24/7 and it's definitely not writing everyday, so whoever believes that real writers have to write everyday, I send you to Not Writing by Anne Boyer who perfectly explains the writer's lifestyle.

In my time of not writing, I found out that Ja Rule would be in Chicago. That's correct: Ja Rule, Mr. What's My Mother****ing Name? R U L E, Mr. Murder Inc., Mr. My career was destroyed by Eminem during its peak and I haven't been able to bounce back since and also brought down Ashanti with me. Yes. Him. So of course, I must go see the man whose CD Pain Is Love played in my mother's 2003 Trailblazer on my way to the bus stop. The man who got me through late nights in college by making appearances on my 90s/2000s Pandora station with rare versions of some of those songs I listened to as a child. And when I found out it was $3, I went to workshop and told my entire class about the concert and RSVP'd.

I took a train and a bus to get to the venue at 6:45 for an 8 o clock show. I had 2 Dirty Shirley's (an alcoholic Shirley Temple) and a pretzel with beer cheese (if you haven't had beer cheese - NC has the best beer cheese). Two people from my cohort came to enjoy Ja Rule with me and while we spent hours standing in the the "third/fourth row" of the club, listening to suburban Chicago rappers, followed by Texan rappers, and in between all of that we had DJ Oreo and DJ Elz killing the turn-up game (usually I hate DJs because I don't anything they played, but they included a nice mix of 90s/2000s music so I was in my zone) and we waited for Ja.

Something random, but this night reaffirmed once again that Chicago is the place for me because CHICAGO LOVES KANYE and I LOVE KANYE and so we can be just one big YEEZUS loving family.

Anyways, at 11 o clock, after a shot of tequila that quickly wore off with the playing of DMX and Back That Ass Up and This Is How We Do It and Back to Back, on and on, and while falling asleep on my feet and not trying to hide my yawns, Ja Rule finally comes out on stage. At this point I have lost both members of my cohort, having been separated by grinding couples, too young to actually know Ja, but I'm enjoying the show because this is Ja Rule and he looks exactly the same. I'm videotaping this entire show, screaming the lyrics with all of these people, holding my camera up in one very tired arm while the men surrounding me are all sharing the smallest roach I've ever seen and thinking they're being discreet - just FYI smoking marijuana in public is not discreet, it has a very distinct smell, so... - and I'm falling in love with Ja all over again. I leave after Ja performed all of my favorites (40 minutes in, Jah Bless), pushing my way out of the hottest crowd I've ever found myself in, and I grab a water while I request an Uber.

The Uber guy and I talk about rap (he was a 50 Cent fan, and of course in 2001 a Dre fan) and we talk about rap battles, so Ether, Jay-Z and Nas, Meek Mill and Drake, and all the while home I am distracted from the overwhelming amounts of homework that I put off for Ja. I slink up to my apartment, exhausted and ready to get out my little ratchet-basic outfit, and prepare myself to wake up in 7 hours to do 4 dense readings and a reading response before my noon class.

But it was all worth it. Sometimes you just have to do it for Ja. (If you don't know what "Where is Ja?" means here.)

With Classes Comes Writing...

Song: The Bloom (ABG 3) x Wale Feat. Stokley Williams

My workshop professor is buds with two of my favorite authors. I found that out while I chatted with them over their cigarette during orientations. Honestly, I think my workshop professor is the coolest professor out there and I've had some pretty great creative writing instructors and they've definitely made the top 5. T is a genius.

T epitomizes why Columbia appealed to me. They want us to hybridize and explore our nonfiction, breaking boundaries on and off the page, because there is no "right" way to write CNF. So we're reading and writing and writing what we're reading, reading what we're writing, and exploring how far we can push, press, and mold this genre into our own. I'm into it. Mainly because whenever I write something short it's this poem-essay hybrid thing and I submit to magazines calling it a "poem-essay hybrid thing" and that doesn't seem the most professional to me, but it's the best I can do at the moment.

I like my essays to have the lyricism and rhythm of poetry, while being formatted as an essay. I'm a long-winded writer and speaker, I can go on for ages bouncing from subject to subject, threading every story together and that's exactly how I write. When drafting, I'm an overwriter, which is better than being an underwriter because for me it's always about where to reduce and which parts to remove and not that much of what's missing and this should be added. I like drafting - does that make me weird? - it's nice to watch this amorphous glob of letters become something after working over it for a really long time.

When I started classes, I was really worried I wouldn't have anything to write about, but for me, being in class really inspires me to write about topics bigger than myself, or about things that aren't focused solely on a single aspect of my life. Since I don't have classes on Tuesdays, I just write because I don't have much else to do (sometimes I do my homework, sometimes I just write), so I have like 4 different essays cooking right now. I have an essay on religion in the works (that probably won't be finished for a year or at least a few months - needs some research), another one on hair, one on recklessness, and one about character portraits. But of course, these are all in the works, so something to be excited about, but not too excited about.

What's wild to me is that there are first year students here who know their thesis or have an idea of what they want to do, and I'm just sitting here, two weeks into classes, lollygagging about trying to write and explore and take my time. Nonfiction is so broad and everyone is interested in so many different things that I've come across a lot of different perspectives and narratives in workshop and it's nice not to be hit with mass amounts of essays on running or why people are writers... Fortunately, I was blessed with a diverse cohort *applause* and faculty.

This school, this city...everyone is just so cool and I've somehow managed to slip my way in without seeming too uncool compared to everyone else. At first it was intimidating, but now I'm starting to feel the cool vibes and it's not so hard to fit in.

Mixers, Mingling, & Mattresses

Song: Amazing - Kanye West Feat. Jeezy

In case you missed it - I like to call myself a writer, I even have it tattooed, so I guess it's legit enough. I write mainly Creative Nonfiction (CNF) and I've developed my own sort of style of writing over the past few years, I tend towards the more lyrical side but also the raw.  Anyways, I came to this city to get my MFA in Creative Nonfiction, and that's the plan for the next three years if this first one goes smoothly.

On the first day of classes (for everyone else) and the eve of my first class, I find myself excited for - dare I say it - workshop. I'm excited because I've been socially motivated enough to trek down to the loop and attend orientations, mixers, and events and in doing so, I've met and bonded with a ton of people from my cohort and the other programs, which has gotten me excited to start another academic journey.

GSI Instructor Orientation - My roommate and I get up super early and dazzled ourselves for our first event as graduate students. And if you're curious on how a graduate student should dress, feel free to check my Pinterest style page, but really it's all about staple fashion items, personality, comfort, and confidence. Anyways, we take the Blue Line down to the Loop and enter "The Moose Building" - that's what I'll call it. We're early so we end up scoping out the educational floor and trying to get into our graduate lounge without any success. People trickle in and no one talks to anyone until the professors decide to ask us all where we're from and follow up our awkward introductions with an ice breaker (the one where you're forced to mingle and then that person introduces you to the class...yeah). We get the low down on how we will be instructed on being instructors of first-year English/rhetoric classes, and personally, because my awkward-self loves to teach people (any of my BtB students reading this?), I'm excited for the opportunity. The few CNF students in the orientation group up and we hover in front of the door, trading schedules and figuring out who's in which class.

There's another orientation for the entire Creative Writing MFA program after that one, so some of us go hang out in the graduate lounge. Something I love about talking with people passionate about writing is that anything goes, everyone's stories are always relevant no matter the topic. So, we trade stories, talk about the program, ask each other questions, joke around, all that stuff that level 10 minglers are good at (I'm a level 3.5 if you were wondering)...This little group of MFA students we've created ends up sauntering down the street to Harold's Chicken, which is apparently some of the best fried chicken in the nation, and eight of us squeeze into two booths and sit for an hour socializing over fried food. All I have to say here is: catfish nuggets.

CWD MFA Orientation - Attention t-t-t-teachers and students: I find myself in a room full of professors and a few more students than earlier. As the professors introduce themselves, tell us what they teach, what kind of writing they specialize in, and what they've recently published, they constantly remind us that we have picked the best time to enter this program: exciting things are happening. A sort of electricity buzzes through the room with how excited these professors are about the upcoming year and our incoming cohorts and one can't help but start to feel it too. We're split into groups by concentration, so there are 3 CNF students and 3 CNF professors in one small room. We go through this uninteresting packet about the program, but I'm more interested in the way my professors seem to bounce back and forth off of each others, the rhythm weaving its way between them: the soft spoken, but intense one; the hyper, but thoughtful one; and the quiet, but aware one. They tell us there's 9 in our cohort, which is apparently a good size, and they continue to encourage us to take classes outside of CNF and to participate in events put on by programs outside of creative writing.

GSO Mixer - I arrive at the mixer an hour before it starts and order my favorite: a mango margarita, and glad I did because liquor was not on the drink ticket. So, feeling my margarita, I wander into the other side of the bar and sit at a table alone. Again, I'm not the best mingler, so I'd rather people approach me and start talking (of course RBF makes this a little difficult, but...). A second-year from Music and Management talks to me, telling me all about what it was like for her first year and what she does around the college/city, and then she floats around. My graduate ambassador sits down with me and asks me about myself, but I don't really know what to say, like what am I supposed to tell her?

Hi, my name is Negesti and I don't really do much besides work and learn, sometimes I have fun, but most nights my education keeps me warm.

How about no. But fortunately, she brings over more people from our program. A girl I haven't met and a guy I met earlier and the three of us spend the rest of the mixer sitting at this table talking about randomness and mingling with anyone who stops by our table to greet us. All in all, it's a good time, but I have to reject an invite to an after-mixer bar gathering because I'm still carrying catfish nuggets, my bag, and desperately need to get home to nurse an impending ear infection. I gain a few twitter followers and walk to the Blue Line alone.

Other things I did to mingle with people - I helped decorate the new creative writing graduate lounge, and after awkwardly writing: "One does not simply sit down and write" (based on a meme) and "Self-promotion is not frowned upon here:" I meet more second-year students from the fiction and poetry programs, while also being reacquainted with some of the first years I've already met. I went to convocation (and the grad student coffee prior to it) and the beliefs about how weird and eccentric this school is were confirmed by the hordes of freshmen screaming "HELL YEAH! HELL YEAH!" at the ceremony and the DJ who proceeded to kill the beat as everyone raced down to gather free stuff. Not going to lie, I was told I could grab the free stuff too, but being short and young made it so that no one asked any questions as I procured every item possible, and the only time I revealed my "year" was while signing up for make-up/special fx club, to which they responded: "As long as you know shit about make-up, we don't care!"

And outside of all of these events, I have begun to develop real, legitimate, healthy relationships with people in and out of my cohort and I'm loving it. Sitting and talking for hours about whatever - writing relevant or not - and getting coffee/meals, making plans...it's exciting.

So, on this eve of the beginning of my graduate student career, on this day which most likely begins the next three years of my life, I received my mattress. Rolled up went the air mattress I've been calling my bed for two and a half weeks, and gently laid on my hardwood floor was a brand new mattress. This is a really big moment for me because an air mattress is not the most comfortable thing in the world, it was cool for two weeks, but these last three...? Anyways, look at me doing adult things and figuring out this life!

I've got my textbooks. I've got fresh composition notebooks. And I've got a ton of pens. Now to pick out which excerpts to read for my workshop tomorrow morning as an introduction to myself...

The Girl In The Back Of My Head - I Hate Her

Song: Dark Times x The Weeknd Feat. Ed Sheeran

Saturday was the first time I cried in Chicago. I guess I should be proud of making it more than a week, but I'm not. Where do I begin? On Friday, I started to feel an ear infection coming on, so after a painful night of sleep, I put on a sweatshirt, some leggings and ventured to the nearest urgent care facility. This place was almost 2 miles away, but I didn't think the walk would be that bad, being that it was a straight shot. So, it takes me about an hour to walk to this place and I'm dripping with sweat, my Elon sweatshirt clinging to my back because I'm so hot and my feet are killing me from being suffocated in rain boots for so long, but I made it, so I check in and everything goes great because I was right: I did/do have an ear infection. I tell my really cute doctor to just send the prescription to the pharmacy down the street, I'll pick it up, hop on the train and ride all the way back home. I go to this fancy Walgreens: 3 floors, escalators, really clean - the whole deal. And I'm amazed that a Walgreens can look like this, but since I've walked 2 neighborhoods away and found myself in Wicker Park, where a lot of things seem to be fancy and its overcrowded with salons, I can only assume this is normal in Chicago. This pharmacist tells me that he has given me more than I was prescribed, which he thought wouldn't be a big deal, but it has bumped my prescription for ear drops to $110 - ear drops! So we go back and forth, me shocked at the price, him trying to figure out where to send it, so finally I tell him I'll call him, avoiding his eye at the misfortune of my life of getting sick and having to pay over $100 for a tiny bottle of ear drops, and I run out of the obnoxious store before I end up crying in public.

I see the blue line sign, so I walk towards it, frustrated and in pain, and I see a sign: BEST DONUTS IN CHICAGO. Keep walking, you can't afford a donut, but still, I turn around and dig in my purse for the little bit of cash I have somehow managed to hold onto and flirt with the donut guy, talking about Columbus (he was just there) and what foods to eat there, and I leave with 3 glamorous donuts. I Blue Line it home, thinking that the only way this could get worse would be if someone was going to rob me for my donuts, my phone, my change purse, etc and imagining the breakdown that would ensue, the swearing, the violent attack on the imagined criminal with my umbrella, and the eventual sobbing of losing my possessions. Fortunately, my donuts and I made it home, beating the rain, and in my empty apartment (my roommate gone for the weekend) the pitiful sobbing began.

Overwhelmed, frustrated, broke and in pain, all I could ask myself was: should I have come to Chicago or should I have just stayed in Ohio?

I like to pride myself on my spontaneity and trusting that fate/life/God will guide me in the right direction when it comes down to it, but Chicago was a last minute decision. A non-refundable deposit I put down because I wanted to get an MFA and further my learning and career. So far, there have been a lot of things that should have made me back out and not move here, but I did it anyway, trusting that this is the right move - the only move that would make sense, and yet still, Chicago has shown me very little reception. Sure, I've done a few things and met a few people and gone a few places, but there is a nagging girl with relaxed hair smoking a cigarette in the back of my brain and she crushes the butt with her dirty Sperry before telling me that I did the wrong thing. I hate that girl, it's okay, it's a mutual feeling. And I want to prove her wrong. I didn't come to a city where I knew no one to go to a school I knew very little about to end up feeling bad about myself and unworthy of the artists this city has nurtured. I came here to learn and make art, so I will suffer these awkward beginning months and hopefully by the brutal winter, this city will have learned that I'm here to stay for the next three years (at least), so they better get used to it.