Not to brag, but I am really good at having my feelings hurt. In this particular case, I don’t remember what sparked it, but here’s how it has gone down in the past: I mention something I like—anything from puréed soups to the city of Montreal to a particularly lovely section of Bach’s “Wachet auf” cantata—and my conversation partner responds with a resounding “meh.”

Sticks and stones may break my bones, and words will never hurt me. Personal attacks? I can shrug off. Criticisms of my work? I can evaluate intelligently (and sometimes, I agree). But a that’s-so-boring dismissal of something I like? Then I’m all shimmering eyes and clenched jaw and sinking heart. And GChats to my friends, peppered with teenage emphatic consonant reduplication (“whyyyyyy,” “ughhhhh”) and demanding reassurance. Asking “when will I stop taking it personally when people dislike things I care about?”

Answers ranged from “awww” to “hahahah never.” Not the most positive prognosis.

If you love something, let it go, even if that thing is the organ that pumps blood through your body

I love a lot of things. Strange things, singular things, things with no competitive opposite to spur me into a zealous defense (Star Trek. No, Star Wars! Quit liking things I don’t like!). The things I love I love with such depth and yet such fragility that a chilly reaction on the part of my peers makes my chest ache. When eyes glaze in the face of the elegance and force of “O terque quaterque beati,” I deflate. When my boyfriend rolled his eyes at my favorite cover version of “Where is my Mind,”  I smacked the stupid car radio in my Volvo and cried for the rest of the long miles of Ohio.

See? Dumb things. Small things. Not things that normally engender steely differences of opinion and resultant emotional responses. Just trifles that come as treasures from my mind, My chouchous are personal and strange, and instead of building them up in the sights of those opposed, I just let myself crumble: this person is unmoved and bored; I am not. I am boring. I am wrong.

But, Phil-Collins-style, I can’t stop loving stuff. Stuff is so neat! Epic poems, graying tapestries, sweet potato fries, peculiar turns of phrase, really good cups of coffee, Thomas Tallis’s Spem in Alium, slang and junk and brussel sprouts with bacon. Knicknacks, kickshaws. Moments of magic in the late night and early morning. I want to pluck every charming chunk of creation and put it in my self, like a reverse horcrux, a jingling curio cabinet I carry in my heart (I carry it in my heart). So when these things bore others—or worse, merit no attention at all—it hurts.

After I asked the first question, I moved on to a second. What is it about passion that makes it so painful? And after I asked the second question, I was all, hahaha, doy. I’m the Worst Medievalist Ever! Answer: everything.

Passion—it comes from patior, pati, passus sum; I suffer. Yes, Latin! Roll your eyes all you want, but as far as unlocking long-hidden arcane power goes, etymology is the closest thing we have to runic inscription. Roots are radical*! And beyond that, this particular truth is strengthened by one of Western thought’s most insidiously fundamental ideas—no, not Jesus, but good guess. Fin’amor! Courtly love! You know, love is pain? You don’t even have to go all the way back to the twelfth century for that one; just listen to practically any pop song.

So passion is suffering, but to suffer is really just to experience (verb, trans. “Experience or be subjected to.”) Think of it this way: in Latin, the word altus can mean both “deep” and “high.” Passion’s the same: it cuts both ways. Profound all around. And if pain is part and parcel to being passionate, then suffer it unto me. I’d rather get bent out of shape when people roll their eyes at this beautiful expression of nostalgic futility (do they not GET how hard those Newfoundlanders had to struggle for their cod?!) than just smile dopily along to some Dave Matthews song. Passion, but not passivity. Ughhhh with the yayyyyyy.

*obnoxious tautology alert

We need to talk about the Renaissance.

Or, okay, I need to talk about the Renaissance. I’m having some confusing feelings. If you’re anything like my dear roommate, whom I will very kindly tell you dated Chaucer to “at least a hundred years ago,” you might not get why a Medieval Studies lady wouldn’t like Shakespeare, but the fact is that that the 400 years that separate my period of expertise from the Renaissance is roughly the same amount of time from the construction of the Globe to 2013. They are Different Eras.

But! I think I’ve finally shrugged off the Medievalist chip on my shoulder about anything post-Columbian and, well, it’s not so terrible. I still won’t go so far to say my thinking has been reborn (because, seriously, Renaissance? That’s just propagandistic. The term implies that all the important scholarly work fueled by Charlemagne and his contemporaries was just a looooong, dark, gestational period of the soul. To call the post-Medieval era a “rebirth” implies that Alfred the Great was NOT SO GREAT AFTER ALL, and I just cannot cotton to that).

However—as any Canterbury-bound Nun will tell you—Amor vincit omnia, and I have gone all weak-kneed and swoony for Elizabethan England. Love is strong as death, especially when a centerpiece of said love is death (Plague outbreaks! They are fascinating) There is beautiful, heavy-looking clothing, and religious unrest, and deep inquiries into what it means to be possessed of a human psyche. There are plays and poems and songs and dances. And it’s all so sexy. Seriously, I don’t think there could be another word for it (well, sensual would do in a pinch, but real talk: sexy just sounds sexier). All those John Donne poems and close-clutching gaillards and codpieces and farthingales are just bursting at the seams—mostly metaphorically—with a peculiar human ache. It’s enough to make you want to go all “PLAY A VOLTA!”

I can see you now, and you’re all like, okay, way to go, girl-who-finally-got-around-to-appreciating-a-significant-portion-of-English-history, but what does burgeoning humanism have to do with YA novels? OMG—or as Ye Old Teenz would say, God’s wounds. Everything.

The Renaissance was an adolescent age. Everything was new, possible, exciting, and strange*. For the first time, like Copernicus’s Earth-and-Sun switcheroo, people entertained the idea that man might make God, and not vice versa. And speaking of entertaining…there is the theater.

It was an art form without precedent. Greek tragedy and medieval mystery plays aside, the synthesis of the Latin-learned philosophy of the University Wits and the rustic comedy of tumbling and jigs brought forth something new, peculiar, and…still strange. O My America! Behold a wonder heere! The sentiment echoed across artistic media, but I have to suspect—and I do have to, because now I’m writing a novel about it—that when these young men got onstage and “not described, declaimed, or didactically evaluted, but rather dramatically recreated” the human thought process, the lines that they spoke were the best form of this new self-awareness. The thrilling adrenaline of being onstage for the first time echoes in every line of iambic pentameter, “the most natural verse rhythm there is, corresponding both to natural speech and to our heartbeat…” I mean, that’s it, isn’t it? That’s what art should do: magnify.

Swooning aside, and down to hard facts. I’m writing a book about young actors on the cusp. It’s the best. There are vulgar jokes (the wordplay! Ughhhh all the wonderful chances for wordplay!) and allusions to Ovid and hotblooded men in shirtsleeves. There are Lost Plays and Early English Playbooks and inns, playhouses, and guildhalls. There are morris jigs and Squeaking Cleopatras and bits with dogs. It’s really exciting and I’m really excited about it, partially for the long-lost joys of scouring articles, getting to know scholars by name, and making endless interlibrary loan requests, and partially for writing all the kissing scenes.

A thing that I learned: at the end of all Elizabethan plays, the company would come out again (or rise up from the floor, if they were dead), and dance a jig together. Since that is obviously THE BEST, I’ll leave you with this:

*Especially, ahem, these guys, AKA my bro-tagonists.

Last Friday, for the first time in five years, I took the 23 bus. Ten minutes, a handful of stops, a shortcut from gym to home. Or new home, I guess.

I’d always hoped I would get to live in Philadelphia as an adult. I’m not an Eagles fan and I can’t remember the last time I ate a cheesesteak, but my roots run pretty deep. Growing up, I had a dad whose job it was to inspire the whole Philadelphia region and remind it of its own greatness and a grandfather who’d saved Pennsylvania from nuclear holocaust (among other impressive feats of office). It rubbed off on me—not because of tribalism or sentimentality, but because I come from smart stock. They—we, I guess—know good things when we see them and don’t give them up. And this place is one hell of a good thing.

Philadelphia is a city of contrasts—colonial elegance and urban sprawl, world-class universities and a shamefully low literacy rate, endless, verdant parks and scraggly empty lots. There’s the perfect, classical order of the grid streets—numbers one way, tree names the other—and the do-what-you-want, shortest-distance diagonals of the well-worn Lenape footpaths that eventually hardened over into real roadways. And the names! Unpronounceable festivals of consonants and double sibilants. I was born by Tulpehocken, grew up following the Wissahickon to the Schuylkill, cut my teeth on Wawa hoagies, and now I’ve got a new home on East Passyunk avenue.

PASH-yunk, not PASS-ee-unk. I’ve actually had to practice this. My landlords did a good-natured double-take when I said I was born here. My right-side-of-the-tracks prep-school upbringing scrubbed out any hints of regional accent: I put a t in “water” and “orange” (color, flavor, or fruit) has two syllables, not one. But I’m intractably proud of Philadelphia, even if I don’t sound like it.

The 23 bus starts at the former site of Borders Books and Music in Chestnut Hill, where I would go after school in 7th grade to drink (and spill) Italian sodas on magazines that my friends and I never actually paid for. It cruises through the hippie-topia of sustainable, diverse small businesses in Mt. Airy straight on to Germantown’s Revolutionary War mansions cheek-to-jowl with check cashing joints and gas stations. It stops at Coulter Street for my pre-driver’s-license self to alight and go to homeroom in the Classics office at 31 West—“And to the church in Philadelphia, write Behold, I have set before thee an open door.” But it keeps on going, through North Philadelphia, to dim parts of the city I still haven’t seen, and then, when I’m ready, it grabs me at 12th and Locust, because I’m back, somehow, in Center City. It deposits me almost two miles further south, and from there, it’s only a few blocks walking to Passyunk. PASH-yunk. My home—all my homes—have a backbone, a current, a physical conduit to match my travels through time and space. It’s cool.

I haven’t been everywhere, man, but I’ve been a few places, and what I’ve come to realize is that it’s not the journey, and it’s not the destination either. It’s the revisit, the revision. It’s There and Back Again on Tolkien’s bent road. And this city—by design and by happenstance—is just that: the prescribed, dance-step precision of William Penn’s neat corridors and the heart-following, instinct-honing, and literal trailblazing of the Native Americans’ secret A-to-B routes. Either way, you get there and look back at everything. Life isn’t a trip, it’s a whirlwind—revolving around the same things but always lifting you up.

Welcome back, welcome home. My door’s always open.

My mom cleaned out some bookshelves the other day—the horror. She sent me a list of potential jettisons, just in case, and THANK GOD, because in addition to Anastasia Krupnik (taking this to my grave) and and The Aeneid, Book VI (ditto, since it’s only thematically appropriate), she was going to give away The D’Aulaires Book of Greek Myths.

I got this book from my fifth-grade teacher. I didn’t know it, but it contained my life’s mission.

Upper-right-hand proof that this is ex my own personal libris

Of course, I had no idea at the time. I was just a weird girl with a bad haircut who who still liked dressing up in her queen costume instead of getting ZAPPED. (Getting ZAPPED was a short-lived trend among my more preternatural classmates that involved writing a time of day on the back of the hand and the name of a member of the opposite sex on the palm. Flip it over before your time is up and you’d have to ask them out. Out where? Nobody knew.) We were assigned to read one story one morning per week and look up and define certain words therein in a notebook. For the first time, I had a planner: different subjects blocked out, assignments (plural) to juggle. I cried a lot (in class and out. I was a stressed-out kid.) But I loved to read.

Myths are funny things. They’re kind of like words—it’s hard to think back to a time before you knew them, like they’ve always existed in your Campbell-meets-Jung mental miasma. But there was a time, specific Monday mornings of my 10th and 11th year, when I was turning the pages fresh. I didn’t know that Athena was going to pop out of Zeus’s head or that Atalanta was fast or that Aphrodite was going to wash up on shore like a plastic, dolphin-killing six-pack holder. I also, for obvious reasons, did not learn the extent of (or even the meaning of) philandering in Greek myths, though I did get to unlock other new and arcane-sounding words: aphrodisiac, athenaeum, cairn, even cereal. Fourth and fifth grade were like a secular age of reason; I was ready to learn and everything I learned stuck. The Middle Ages, the Greeks, and how to write a check (Mrs. Hineline was comprehensive). And every Monday, more stories.

The year waned, middle school loomed, and I ran out of book. No more colored-pencil D’Aulaire illustrations and no more myths. There can only be so many, after all. The book’s ending made me sad—not how the stories terminated, but that they had to stop, period.

The Trojan War happened. The last story was about Aeneas escaping. Right-side pages were getting thin. But when I turned the last one over, there they were again, all the Gods on little name-tagged clouds: Zeus/Jupiter, Hera/Juno, Athena/Minerva.

Salvete, amici novi!

I remember the feeling so clearly: it didn’t have to end. There could be more. I don’t think I’ve felt so powerful an emotion reading, before or since. It was wonderful. From then on, my destiny was written—not in the sense that it was predetermined, but that it consisted of things written down. Scripta manent.

But that was it, for then. I didn’t know. Later, there would be French, and Latin, to layer one understanding of stories on another, and then history, and then college, and then writing, and then back to my old house and my old book where I’d refind the stories I’d traced in endless iterations.

Look; they’re all still there.

Having a life mission sounds quaint, self-important, and dramatically dire by turns. But if I have one—and I think I need one—this is it. That turning-the-page feeling. It’s a kind of quod est demonstrandum—what IS to be done—which is just a present refreshment of what was, once, to be done (QED, as it were). In other words, the same thing as other people have done. The same stories they’ve told, but in other words. The form of QED is an impersonal imperative, a form that English lacks. The idea that something can be universally necessary—it’s very Latinate, I think, and very wonderful. Or I wonder about it, anyway—what it means for everyone and what it means for me. What is to be done, in the face of so much time, so many stories? Participate. I want to take things from one place to another, because that’s what stories do. Translato studii: the translation of knowledge. Tell and re-tell. One day it will be pleasing to remember even this.

Keep your books. Keep your word. Keep going.