The Masterplan.

Welcome, welcome, welcome! So, for those of you who are not an aunt or one of my siblings, I’m Doireann and after two years of talking – and two more years of not really doing anything about it – I’ve upped and moved to Chicago. I’ll be here until the United States government throws me out in February 2020 and this blog will be a chronicling of the whole experience; a Speaker’s Corner from where my musings and observations will be released to the world, hopefully with some measure of succinctness.

I’m here because a trip to the States a few years ago awoke in me a burning interest in American culture – the full works; a subscription to New York Times, inhalation of all the This American Life episodes, beelines to take the tours of Americans at work and a fervent curiosity about The World According to Americans (spoiler: there’s no such thing, you know, like there’s no such thing as The World According to Europeans). Previously, a friend of mine had availed of this visa and as well as giving her a whole extra outlook on life and culture, the professional experience gained on an internship landed her in a dream job within weeks of coming home. Having no idea what to do with my life, the idea of experiencing the culture that seems at once ubiquitous and foreign and giving my future some bit of shape (it’s currently the shape of Slimer from Ghostbusters) seemed to be a win-win situation.

But, before I actually did anything about being a grown-up, before I pulled out that poor old battered CV and my red pen, I took one look at the rain and the snow lingering on Chicago’s footpaths, literally wagged my finger at it and said aloud, “Nope, that’s not happening”. I unzipped my massive suitcase, tipped about a quarter of it into my rucksack, hopped on a bus to Memphis, TN and spent about five weeks around America’s south. Over the course of those weeks I made my way to Nashville, New Orleans, Austin, El Paso, Albuquerque, Santa Fe and the Grand Canyon – the joys of which I’ll be outlining in future posts. Considering the trip was pure, unadultered indulgence, it turned out to be a really useful preparation for life in the States. My eyes were opened to some of the realities of race, identity, religion, politics, environmentalism (or lack thereof), education and culture in this enormous country. This blog should have been started on the road – God knows, there was plenty of time to be doing it – but procrastination disguised as consideration is kinda my thing. And talking about doing things without actually doing them, that’s another thing… as is forgetting to brush my hair. Anyways, because I didn’t come across a single other person travelling by public transport and because there’s much to learn from journeying on America’s public transport, there will be blog posts on that. Excited?!  

I had pretty much made up my mind to come back to Chicago once I had seen the Grand Canyon and so, after a 34hr train journey (actually grand and pretty reasonable, I thought, at $179), I returned a week ago to Chicago to be a real person who gets up at 8am and eats dinners and applies for jobs. At home and on the road, the image of my Chicago life had been that of a dream job simply presenting itself and my life taking shape all by itself (denial, basically). Shockingly, after just a week here, neither of those things has happened and in the midst of job-hunting (and all the self-doubt and “who in God’s name would want to employ me??” that goes along with it) the sorting-my-life-out buzz doesn’t seem as quite as clear-cut as it did. However, since arriving, everything else has fallen into my lap so far – I got to move in with a friend, the former housemate left me the bed, I live beside the lake, my travels were brilliant – and I simply don’t countenance any notion other than I’m meant to be here and a job will come about (i.e. “it’ll be grand”). Now I spend my mornings job-hunting and in the afternoons I hit up the museums and sights of Chicago, and diligently follow the golden rule of relocating: say yes to everything.

So yeah, that’s it really. I hope to post on the blog twice a week, and will muse on a range of subjects (i.e. whatever notion I take on the day) from politics to podcasts, books to booze, history to Hulu, with a smathering of WHY ISN’T  X THE SAME HERE AS IN IRELAND?! Come May, there’ll be a fair whack of GAA too. It’ll generally be upbeat (I fully intend to limit any instances of feeling-sorry-for-myself to WhatsApp or my new local) without being dosey (I’m not Jenny Joyce out of Derry Girls… I wish I was Michelle) and laced of course with the lowest form of wit, sarcasm – which happens to be my second language. So, until next time, tell your family and friends and EVERYONE.

Don’t, I’d be mortified. Read it in secret. Much like you would Ronan Keating’s biography. Just better.