I spent the long Thanksgiving weekend with family in Vermont, mostly relaxing by the wood stove and going on morning walks with my brother's dog. I had brought along a Murakami book with me for the weekend but ended up never opening it; instead just reading through the New Yorker's feature on sixteen writers speaking to the Trump presidency. The response of each writer was varied, both in their subject matter and levels of concern, which comforted me since there still feels like a lot to dissect.

Other than a new lunchtime routine of making calls to state representatives, my day-to-day in Chicago has been mostly normal this past month; just working, reading (currently: Mia Alvar's "In the Country"), finishing an essay that doesn't seem to want to end, and hunkering down with graduate school applications. It feels a bit trivial to be spending so much time right now applying to grad schools but I remind myself to keep at it, knowing that despite everything suggested by our President Elect, the future is still female.