Introspection
The Word: First
Lately, people have been asking me how I like being the oldest of four children. “That’s a lot of pressure,” everyone says. “They must really look up to you.”
The Word: Control
I’m a human being with a heart and two working thumbs, so I’ve been playing Smash since I was six or so.
Primary Source: 2003-2004
It is only in a song, after all, that ‘G’, ‘C’ and ‘F’ make sense. It is only as a name that ‘A’, ‘B’, and ‘C’ are fully functional.
Endpaper: A Cocktail Bar in Madrid
It’s human nature to obsess over other people, but this type of enduring enchantment with such a small moment means something else.
Coordinates: Mount Auburn Street
If you look down past your phone, you’ll see the sidewalk bricks play a game of reverse Whack-a-Mole, rising unevenly out of the ground to fight back against your steps. Even if you survive the cars and the middle fingers and the tourists and that tenth Lumineers song, they still seem to say, screw you. Your foot strikes a particularly raised brick. You stumble. You look around but shake it off.
Better Than Solo
I learned that even though I thought I had to be alone to figure out my thoughts, sometimes another person can help you sort them out.
Being Still
Moments became unspindled, blown open by the rush of activity, and, as I stepped into my first semester, I was swept into an insidious cycle of busyness.
Lonely Together
We don’t have to share our most personal space, our most personal lives, with someone else. Oftentimes, though, I want to.
Laura Goes To IHOP
Heat and fluorescence and red-blue-yellow cleanliness spilled out across the sidewalk in a broad half-moon. IHOP glowed with silent vulgarity.
Enlightened
I find the thought of unbridled success even more frightening than the thought of struggling to get there. Indeed, keeping my villain alive just a little while longer kept me struggling, struggling to the bitter end. But she gave me a reason to get up in the morning. I needed her.
Safe Haven
I was raised in the boondocks of Arkansas. The stereotypes that just popped into your mind? They probably apply.
Here's the Story...
But the plots, the theme song, and the characters were not, in retrospect, the real reasons I tuned in, nor were the fashion and lingo of the 1970s the show’s main draws. It was the fullness of the family that pulled me in, rerun after rerun, in my afternoons after elementary school.
Endpaper: Final Postcard from Home
Harvard isn’t an easy place. It seems to run on anxiety, which first struck me when I moved into a too-small dorm room on a muggy August day more than three years ago.
Emily B. Zauzmer meets Barry Williams.
Emily B. Zauzmer meets Barry Williams, the actor who played Greg Brady on "The Brady Bunch," at his show in Branson, Missouri, in August 2015.
Endpaper: Find Yours
Name an issue, and I would kick out a hackneyed one-liner you might find on a liberal Democrat’s campaign website. She would push back, and, with that, the game would begin.
The Word: Color
The questions that most other applicants probably answered so quickly and mindlessly were the ones that held me up longest.