Introspection
J-Term Journal: My Sun-Drenched Frozen Heart
I’m kind of addicted to sadness. Just the other day I was staring at the Pacific Ocean’s dirty-window sheen, discussing the futility of marriage and ambling down a beach strewn with scrappy shrubs and barely-clothed people. (No matter the weather, no matter the Ugg boots, Southern Californians always seem a little bit naked.)
Why I Like Football
Once somebody sent me a chain email that talked about the differences between football season in the North and in the South. It said that in the North women pack for a game by slipping a chapstick in their back pocket and a $20 bill in their front pocket. Down South, women attending the game need to sport a Louis Vuitton duffle with two lipsticks, powder, mascara (waterproof), concealer, and a fifth of bourbon. Wallet not necessary in the South, the article said—that’s what dates are for.
Brothers in Chief
When you grow up 16 months younger than your brother, competition and emulation naturally ensue from an early age.
The Leaves of Others
When I first met Wolfgang, who sells second-hand books on second-hand tables outside the Humboldt University in Berlin, he was matted and cross.
Fad Diets: An Investigation
That brought me to The Color Diet, something that I could at least camouflage as healthy. The Color Diet claims to introduce more vitamins into your meals by eating only one color a day. To prepare, I decided to eat a mix of every colored Starburst the night before.
Coordinates: WTF
Downtown Williamstown, MA has two streets: Spring, and Water. In the dead of winter in the Berkshires, it is crawling with shivering Williams College students seeking solace in the lone coffee shop. In the summer, it is actors clad sleekly in black and designers in paint-splattered jeans that stalk the two streets.
On Twinhood
I try not to drop the T-bomb if I can help it. I get on just fine by saying I have three siblings and letting people’s polite interest in my past be satisfied. Months or even years later, it’ll slip in by accident. People who think they know me inside and out discover that I am an entirely different personn—that they’ve never known the real me. At least, you’d think so based on their reaction when I say, “Yeah, I was skyping the other night with my twin—oh shit.”
Halloween: The Garment Disctrict
The Garment District has been appropriately reorganized in preparation for Halloween.
What Happens in the Laverie
One Wednesday morning roughly halfway through my time in Paris, at what should have been the endpoint of your average laundry cycle, I went to open the washing machine and found I could not.
In And Around Language: "Hack"
Although “hack” was not intended to have a negative connotation, it has often referred to those who used technology for malicious purposes; specifically, by gaining unauthorized access to certain computers and online information. However this wasn’t always the case, or the original intention of the word.
Junior Mom
Pulled over on the side of the road in my mom’s minivan, I felt like a more pathetic but less impregnated version of Juno. “Mom, I just can’t do this,” I choked out into my phone, tears streaming down my face.
The Word: Feminist
Around the time I first heard about feminism, my best high school guy friends came up with a scintillatingly descriptive nickname for me: Tits McGee. To be fair, we were 16 and didn’t know any better.
