Introspection
Smashing, Baby
Smash has always been around: In elementary and middle school, I played, but in high school I stopped. In hindsight I notice the unsettling correlation between the exit of Smash from my life, and the entrance of the thesis statement into it. Life became a bit realer, a bit less fantastical. I couldn’t cite Wikipedia anymore.
Portrait of an Ivy League Crush
Hyper-extroverted and exceedingly interesting, charmingly awkward and theatrical to a fault, Chase was a veritable bundle of energy who thrived on captivating an audience.
Regarding My Future Unemployment
Dear extended relatives, family friends, former English teachers, gynecologists, and my brother’s roommates and their extended relatives, I am very tired of answering the same questions about my future, over and over. And I know, for the most part, you have only been asking to be polite, to make conversation, or so that you can compare me to your daughter (she wins, okay, she wins!). So to streamline the process I have compiled a list of the most commonly asked questions (and their answers) about my future and career goals.
J-Term Journal: On the South, Social Innovation, and Slam Poetry
After finals ended, I was ready for a break from Harvard. I packed my bags and boarded a plane back to Georgia, the place that for eight years I had called home. I was ready to celebrate the holidays, spend quality time with family and friends, and catch up on sleep without worrying about looming deadlines for papers, psets, or tests.
J-Term Journal: Tokyo International Airport
Why do people fall out of love? I write that in my notebook at Tokyo Haneda International Airport. It’s a lofty question to be asking myself at 6:00 a.m., when, beyond the concrete slabs of runway, a city is just beginning to wake up.
FM Editor's Note
This is the way FM ends. Not with a bang, but with 15. It’s also not the real end, but just the end for this year. We still have our Superboard keys. Steven S. Lee, you’re not reading this—and if you are, it’s because you Googled your own name. Touché.
The Science of Memory
I used to think that the best kinds of memories are the ones we invent for ourselves.
I Read A Lot
In middle school I had a free period during my second hour, and so I applied to become a library assistant.
PLUR As Told By Heidegger
Chances are if you’re reading The Harvard Crimson, you’ve never heard of Peace Love Unity Respect. The acronym is a silly combination of sounds—a feline’s pleasure with an extra letter snuck in—and the cliché it stands for wouldn't last a minute in college classrooms. But since the ’90s, PLUR’s been a credo and a life philosophy for rave subculture. This summer it became my personal mantra. This fall I’ve decided it was Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger’s as well.
Doubt It
There are only a few things, less than I imagined there would be, from my pre-college years that remain present in my thoughts. I have lost interest in the chaos of my city, Istanbul, in the “mosaic” of its culture, in the nebulous (substitute: sketchy) politics of my country. Only a few characters from my past follow me around Harvard Yard as I pace from the two opposite edges (and intellectual spheres) of the campus, from Northwest Labs to Emerson Hall.
Coordinates: Locked in Mount Auburn Cemetery
It’s mid-fall. The leaves are somewhere between dull brown and brutally orange on the last afternoon that it is not too crisp to walk by the river. We wile our way down past Darwin’s, the coffee shop we have yet to discover; across the crosswalk with the lights that never change to walk; and next to an unending row of fencing and hedges. The cemetery is still open for an hour this late in the day…is it six or seven?
Home in the Meadowlands
As she tries to wrap her lips around the hard consonants of the English language, my grandmother fumbles with my small Nike garments. Turning them over and over, she attempts to enunciate the lone word in her English lexicon without much success.
Coordinates: Walden Pond
Though I’m red-green color blind and will never understand the obsession with chromatic foliage, I hear Walden Pond is beautiful in the autumn. If you catch it on the later end of October, the drying air heightens the borders of faces or the edges of each watery ripple; everything has the sharp sense of coming into focus. Unfortunately, I went in July.
An Apology For My Hair
My most recent haircut was in New York City. I went in by myself and ducked into the basement of the huge Astor Place Hairstylist like I was trying to lose a tail.
In Defense of Full-Body Spandex
He opened the door to reveal a tiny room cluttered with ski waxing benches, oversized duffels, rainbow clusters of racing skis, and scattered posters of Olympic skiers peeling off the stark white walls. I could tell right away that this wasn’t the latest in ski technology: this was a home.
