Introspection
Where's Home?
I was running along the Charles when I first wrote the essay you are reading in my head. At first, I thought I’d touch on how having grown up as a military child influences the way I perceive the world. I imagined sharing anecdotes of driving away from a city I loved and watching it disappear in the rearview mirror, or how I learned to use the cardboard boxes as sleds in a neighborhood-wide game. But that piece was written before COVID-19 began to wreak havoc across the globe. It was the piece I had in mind before we were notified of the University’s decision to send us home, for our safety and the safety of others.
My Apocalypse is Driving Twenty Minutes to the Burger King Parking Lot for WiFi
"Sustaining remote connections to both my academic and social life has required a new commute: a 20-minute drive to the Burger King in the next town over."
An Imperfect Plan
By the time an at-large terrorist was found hiding in Sant Sadurní, it felt like I had been there for months. A fact check reveals the actual time elapsed: one week.
The Generic Glory of Gay Instagram
Glory, it seems, is pretty generic nowadays. But Ian Spear and Rex Woodbury, an Instafamous gay couple, are particularly good at glory.
The Other Dog
Ask anyone who knows me — I cry easier than a toddler at the dentist. But for some reason, it wasn’t the hundreds of patients we’d seen in various stages of disease or the abandoned children ecstatic to receive their first toy who finally broke the dam on my tear ducts. It was a stray mutt minding its own business in the corner of a park in Concepción, Iloilo.
Puppy Love
"When people ask me about the most memorable thing I saw on my trip to the Philippines, I don’t tell them about the stray mutt."
Waves of Asian America
It is a trope in popular and academic writing alike to say that the absence of a precise definition of “Asian America” is what binds the identity together — that Asian Americans lack not only a literal common language, but also a common “language” in terms of a unifying ideology through which we can better understand each other.
Poorly Drawn Noses
Comics are defined by rules: sequence, the presence of panels, cartoonish drawing. The comics that I like best are those that kaleidoscope the form — distorting it, playing with it, and breaking it.
Contemporary Romance: Scattered, Smothered, and Covered
I wish I could pinpoint what exactly it is that keeps me coming back. Perhaps it’s the knowledge that Waffle House will welcome six bleary-eyed high school seniors who can’t help but order the entire menu on a Saturday night, just as it will welcome families the next day in their Sunday best and truckers who’ve driven across countless state lines the night after that.
Contemporary Romance: My Sister by the Sea
No matter the age, or how many times she choked on the sea, she was always babbling, giggling, and shrieking; despite purple, chattering lips, she never admitted to being cold.
Contemporary Romance: Standoffish
It didn’t take me long after that to realize something had changed. Platonic touch had been something out of my grasp before, something that I welcomed at the moment it happened; now, it was something that I actively avoided.
Is My Back Straight Enough?
In January, Tyler T. Johnston attended a meditation retreat by himself. It prompted a series of questions about what the self even means.
Chicken Feet
It was like this culinary cold war, a pissing contest for who’d eaten the weirdest animal appendage. I was hurt, not just because I had lost the war (my mom was never able to find frozen sheep penis at the grocery store, not even at Whole Foods), but because we were fighting it in the first place. What were we trying to prove? And to whom? Why?
A Rose by Any Other Name
So, for me, the name is not so much an allusion to the grandeur of the Parthenon and the philosophers who ruminated beneath its shadow; rather, it sparks an image of a hard-working, small-town, Greek-American immigrant.
Clothes Pile Graphic
"The sun set on the other side of the river and the air got chilly. My friend Olivia ran back to her room in Lowell to get us blankets and sweaters and sweatshirts."
Why We Don't Wear Harvard Gear
No one wanted to wear it. We threw it around the circle like we were playing a game of hot potato, chucking it from one person to the next, shrieking “You wear it!” “No, you wear it!” Everyone wanted to wear Olivia’s other sweatshirts, which were faded and looked vintage, or her fisherman sweaters. To wear the Harvard sweatshirt would mean being the odd one out.
The 2019 Beanpot
Derek Schaedig #30, a goaltender for the Harvard men’s ice hockey team, made his career debut on January 26th vs. St. Lawrence, making three saves in the 2018-2019 season.
Down but Not Out
My name is Derek Schaedig. I am a goalie for the men’s hockey team at Harvard; I am a sophomore studying Psychology; I am a writer for The Crimson; and in April 2019, I was diagnosed with major depressive disorder, more commonly referred to as depression. I am not immune to mental illness, and neither are many student-athletes.
Bottle Breaking Frames
One of the boys had brought a six-pack of Corona, and as he popped a bottle cap off on the edge of the formica countertop, I realized he was already drunk.