Introspection
The Space Between
Harvard is represented in my head by a large Venn diagram. The two overlapping crimson circles are labeled “Before” and “After.” The first circle encompasses my freshman and sophomore years. The second contains my junior and senior years. They are separated by the year I was gone. Not many things fall in the overlap.
If This Were a Romantic Comedy
Here’s how it happens. We meet in the soft evening light at a national landmark, preferably he Empire State Building or the Eiffel Tower, but I guess the Chrysler Building or something could do in a hurry.
Oh, Sushi.
I am too old for this. Last week I arrived at a house party only to spend the first 20 minutes putting the finishing touches on my gender studies junior tutorial syllabus. Tonight is squishy, slushy, miserable, the kind of night that will leave the streets shiny, lethal disco floors by morning. It’s 11:30 p.m. on Saturday, I’m trudging alone down Mass Ave on the way to Eliot Street, and I have never more deeply regretted the existence of New England.
Modern Love: Canajoharie Creek
Within the first two weeks of having met him, I learned two things: 1. He was married, and had a child. 2. He had terminal brain cancer.
J-Term Journal: Drive
Rolling her head back against the driver’s seat and snapping her gum, M asked the question that had been ricocheting through the air since we all came home from college: “Where should we go?”
J-Term Journal: Alaska
When I tell people I’m from Alaska, I get a variety of responses from “You must get a lot of snow!” to “Doesn’t it get dark there all the time?” to “Do you have penguins?”. I’m not kidding about these. I’ve heard them all, and more. Alaska has such a distinct character that most people feel they’re well acquainted with the “Last Frontier.” Unfortunately, this acquaintance often seems to stem from a regrettable combination of Sarah Palin and TLC.
J-Term Journal: Dog Sledding
If someone had told twelve-year old me that I would someday voluntarily join a dog sledding trip in January in Maine, I would have put down my cold medicine next to my three inhalers and wheeze-laughed until I cried. If someone had told fifteen-year-old me that I would someday voluntarily wake at 6:30 a.m. to shovel dog shit, I would have rolled over in bed and asked for ten more minutes.
J-Term Journal: Munirka
Then the dust got so bad in the winter you had to do the floors every day, twice a day, grime thick on the table, my laptop, our books. I hardly left the boys’ place. Woke with my mouth glued open and my nostrils dry, construction workers banging across the way. Deep in the night (and we all crashed at their apartment in a last study binge, kept jagged hours in the sore-throat tipsy-sunny early December, scrambling to get papers done) the watchmen knocked their staffs against the bone ground calling jaagte raho! jaagte raho!—stay awake!—striding in tandem like the ladies that power-walked together every day down the streets of my New Jersey housing development.
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.)
J-Term Journal: Ode to My Roommates
On weekend afternoons in cafes over lattes or weeknights over drinks during the semester, I’d often put lecture notes aside to share my half-joke revelation about how to best savor time at Harvard: books, I declared, would always be here, but the electricity of connection between people around us is only now.
J-Term Journal: Kolkata
It was an outrageously funny but simultaneously frightening moment, which in retrospect seems to be the kind of thing you secretly hope for when you travel far away from home.
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.