Write a brief essay on 1 focused subject of interest.
17 thoughts on “Essays for Week 3”
Why you Should Jump in Freezing Water
My friend and I trek up to the Falls of Lana by Lake Dunmore. I’m nervous as hell. I had met him the night before and he asked if I was interested in doing some cold water therapy. I said I might be. Now I’m here, marching up the trail in the cool forest air, dreading the impending icy chill. We break off the trail and cross a stream, finding ourselves atop the picturesque waterfalls, crashing into a beautiful, dark pool. Shit, this is gonna suck, I think with giddy anticipation. Quickly we change into our bathing suits, anxious tensions running high. Suddenly I’m in the water. One step, another. It’s painfully, bitingly cold. My feet feel on fire. I cautiously wade further in, my friend already chest deep and yelling like a madman. The cold tugs at my body and my skin tingles intensely. Finally, I dunk my head, completely submerged. By now I’m yelling like a madman too. I feel alive, every fiber of my body vibrating at full capacity. At some point my body adapts to the cold, and it doesn’t hurt any more. It just feels awesome. Another frozen minute later, we get out, adrenaline coursing through my veins. I yell and whoop, the chilly air now feeling warm and comfortable after the icy water. My friend and I share a manic smile, feeling liberated, empowered, wild, and happy.
As you should never go alone, ice bathing is an incredible bonding experience. All hardships bring people together, this even more than the rest. Why? It becomes the achievement you are proud to have overcome together. Additionally, in the freezing water you don’t have any spare energy for filters; you have no choice but to be your truest self. Hence, afterwards, it becomes much easier to be with each other, because you have already seen past all the superficial layers we put up around ourselves.
When I first went with my friend I had no idea how influential the experience would be. At the Falls of Lana, you are in the midst of nature’s beauty and awesome power, you feel connected to the earth. Stress is out of sight, out of mind. Work is forgotten. You are simply challenging yourself against nature, just as humans have done for thousands of years. The adrenaline is timeless. The satisfaction is timeless. The camaraderie you build is timeless. Here at Middlebury, we have an incredible opportunity with our access to the outdoors. Within 20 minutes drive, we can escape the campus bubble and experience this natural power. There is no excuse for us not to take a trip to the Falls and remind ourselves of what’s truly important: We are alive. Everything else can be solved along the way.
I’m not even close to an expert on Go. I don’t know the rules, and I don’t know much about the history of the game. But there’s a documentary on Netflix which portrays the journey of an AI system named AlphaGo, from defeating the grandmaster of Europe to becoming the best “player” in the world. There’s a moment in the film where AlphaGo makes an unorthodox move against Korean champion Lee Sedol, named “move 37”. This move, while not optimal for winning points at the beginning of the game, increased the overall probability that AlphaGo would win. The computer doesn’t care for the margin of victory, or following traditional strategies. AlphaGo calculates which move will most increase the probability of victory, based on millions of games simulated against itself.
I’ve read the Wikipedia article for this match over twelve times. I don’t know why.
When I was a sophomore in high school, I worked in an ice-cream shop in Paraguay for a month. In my free time, I walked around the town, ate upwards of thirty empanadas per day, and played chess with a Paraguayan grandmaster. He had polio and wasn’t able to stand, so his brother (who owned the ice-cream shop) would carry him into the parlor through a back door. I don’t remember his name.
Our conversations were brief. My Spanish isn’t great, but I learned the names of each chess piece so that we had a basic vocabulary in common. He was very patient. Each game was an awkward dance, as he tried to explain mistakes in my approach.
“The center. The center. Win the center, and you win the game. Never give up your control of the center to your opponent.”
This was a simplified approach to chess which ignored centuries of strategy, but it gave me a sense of control. I had an immediate reaction to each of his moves. Even if I lost the overall match, I felt secure. In fact, I would prefer to lose matches by following the doctrine of “the center” rather than win a match through a series of patchwork moves without an overarching goal. By the end of the month, I was probably worse at chess because of my devotion to this approach. And I wasn’t good to begin with.
The Wikipedia article, which was last edited ten minutes ago, seems like an artifact from the future. Or rather, it seems like a relic buried in a time capsule, and re-opened by future generations of engineered intelligence. “How quaint, AlphaGo’s understanding of board games. How refreshingly alive.” A mind far removed from our own will recognized the fingerprints of human personality on AlphaGo’s strategy, stubborn flaws that our scientists have overlooked. Perhaps its processors will simulate a wry grin.
A typical poker table has a length of between 92 and 104 inches, a width of 44 inches, and a height of 30 inches. The weight of the table can range from 200 pounds to 350 pounds. Tables are usually oval-shaped and covered with a green poker mat that allows the dealer to slide the cards across the felt into the hands of the poker players. This action takes place hundreds of times throughout the course of a session, and each of these occurrences is referred to as a hand. In Texas Hold ‘Em Poker, the variant of poker most people are talking of when they say the more general term “poker”, each player is dealt two cards face down at the start of the hand. They are then subject to a series of decisions that involve betting. Over the course of the hand, the dealer reveals five cards – the first three are referred to as the flop, the fourth is called the turn, and the fifth and final card is best known as the river. The final round of betting takes place at the river, and if more than a single player still remains in the hand, there is a showdown. The player with the best hand wins. This set of rules, combined with the single condition that there is no monetary restriction on the value of a single bet other than the amount of money your opponent has, is the entire premise of the game referred to as No Limit Hold ‘Em.
Winning at the game activates a rush of dopamine inside the pleasure centers of the player’s brain, exciting the mind and creating a craving for more. This makes poker, like other games at the casino, a crowd favorite for casino crowds all around the world who are chasing a high. The rushes of getting good cards, a lucky river, a big-money hand are similar to those experienced by gambling addicts.
But poker is not gambling. In the words of Al Alvarez, poker is as much a game of luck as rock climbing is a game of taking risks; there’s an element but it’s not the whole picture. In reality, like most things, poker is a lot more complicated than it seems on the surface. For a young bachelor chasing a high in Las Vegas during the weeks leading up to his marriage, poker is a game of chance; a place to gamble. But for veteran pros like Doyle Brunson, poker is a game of skill; a game of tricks, tells, numbers, and strategy. This has been proven time and time again by the fact that the same individuals end up on the final table of the world series of poker year after year. The greatest poker players have learned to learn the table’s playstyle, to read their cards, and play based of their opponent rather than their own cards. A great poker player isn’t lucky. A great poker player is in absolute control. A great player isn’t defined by what he does when they have good cards, but what they do when their cards are weak. They are defined not by the hands they win, but by the hands they choose to fold. A great player makes the right decision, and sometimes that decision doesn’t lead to victory but to a smaller loss.
In this way, poker is not just a game but a rock-solid analogy for life. It’s a game with an element of luck, the cards your dealt matter, but there’s more to it than that.
I can’t stop staring at his bald head. The reflection of the spotlight that is supposed to be on the speaker drew my eyes to his head. Bobbing in the light, in the front row, thinking it’s the crispiest apple in the tank, but no one’s biting. Ok, I am. I’m wondering about his head. Does he lotion it? Does he shampoo it? Or condition it? I surrender that only he knows what goes on atop his head. I’m on to the next wondering.
The speaker shuts up. They have nothing to say now. In fact, they’re gone. The audience stays gazing, nodding heads ever so often when they imagine something important was just said. Their chairs are gone, and they float contently in the same position as if the chairs were still there. The bleachers are gone and now the audience, those in the very depths, in the dark distance from the bald head, float fifteen feet from the waxed floor. They keep gazing, even the one’s gazing at their shoes, who must have seen the bleachers disappear from under their feet. The waxed floor is gone now, the walls, the ceiling, the stage, the lights. They keep gazing. I’ve seen it all happen, the only one to notice and my eyes have been glued to this bald head.
It’s all very funny. A hundred people floating, no chairs, floor, building. No speaker, no speech. So content floating, organized in rows, nodding heads in unison, even laughing into empty space. A few lookup, stretching, see stars. The wind whips through their hair, starting on the right, dancing through curls and frizz and tangles, skips the bald head, dancing through the gray and black and blonde, releasing on the left, victorious in tying stands in knots and in stealing the thin layer of warmth nestled between raised hairs and goosebumps. It’s all so funny.
Most of the time, deconstructing is terribly funny. Take away the building, take away the context, take away the structures and what’s left is something hilarious. People floating. People staring at nothing. People dancing to nothing. People gathered for no reason. Hilarious.
Deconstructing becomes less funny sometimes. When I’m the target and I find neurons and hormones and cells and atoms and no magic, no floating, no fun, I only laugh a little to counteract the wave of anxiety that knocks me out reality and leaves me swirling around in dizzying, useless thought. Then I deconstruct someone who seems more than neurons and hormones and cells and atoms. I conclude they’re magic. They’ve got something I could never have. Between each atom is a sparkling, flowing, light breeze that breathes their effortlessness to life. But a few swirls later, and I’ve torn everything apart. Loose nails, shredded insulation, dumb theories, broken glass, corrupt systems, stupid hypothesizes, shattered picture frames scatter from the epicenter of deconstruction.
His bald head is gone. Vanished and this time it’s not my doing. I stay gazing at his space. I do it so much, so I guess it’s an interest. Thinking about this and never finding the answer. So, I think thinking is useless.
If you take a scarf, a hat, some socks and dip them in wool you’ll have a day immune to wind. Yarn knitted to make armor around the fleshy soft of your body, to cut up and out against the pierce of a cold day. But when the sun breaks, you want to shed–to let your body wash up against the sweet memory of the sun.
You can hear waves when the days warm, hear them reach up and falter against rocked ledges, taking the memory of natural formation back to the secret deep of the sea. Those days, always warm, felt on your face, cheeks hot and ears burning. Dry, hot air of Southern California, heat brought out from somewhere deep down to wash out the sweet breeze of the Pacific from an open mouth along its ridges. Heat nipped into a sweat, cold biting into a closer bundle and unbroken shell. Warm palms on upturned faces, sweet kisses (always by a coastline, to carry away whatever came out of the touching–back to the sea and her sweet promise of fullness and mystery.)
When you wrap yourself up in the winter, you watch movement through windows and hot tea. A season not meant for the soft and unspoken, screaming out through the wind and the cracks in windows. And when you shed, show skin, your nakedness takes on a body of emotion unfelt by the warmer days. Goosebumped bodies and dry air, delicate mornings and nights of burning breath. The mornings–
If you take a scarf, a hat, some socks and dip them in wool you’ll have a day that starts with the sunrise. Snowcapped green against a backdrop of fresh yellow and sweet, achy pink. You’ll want the backdrop just for yourself, want to keep it locked up in the spread of your palm for when the chill leaves and you can see again. You’ll want it for the day of your shedding, so that you can run out to its rising with a knowing of what kept you before. If you take–
There is a moment just before it snows that you can see the air, that you become aware of how its invisibility fills the gaps in everything. The space between your fingers becomes a substance not an emptiness. You smell the air and your nostrils are filled with this something, once nothing, and it doesn’t have a smell. It tastes still — is that even a flavor? You reach out your hand only to clasp hands with a snowflake and stare into its infinite slightness. You look up towards the sky to see the source of this chilly companion and see nothing but a backdrop of clouds. All around you snowflakes fall, dotting the emptiness. Are the snowflakes something swimming in nothing, or are they holes in the vast something?
They say that as a lawyer you should only ask questions you already know the answer to, but I’m not a lawyer, and neither are you. Asking a question — a real question, one you don’t know the answer to — is like snowfall. There is a moment, right after you ask, when the air becomes still and quiet and dull. You become aware of how silent it is, you become aware of the nothing that is now something. Is silence the absence of noise or the presence of silence? You become aware of your shoe that’s untied, how the lace limps loosely onto the floor. Your right pant leg is cuffed more than the left and it’s excruciating. Every detail, the little insignificant particulars, become all you can see. You assess all of your faults, your deformities, your weaknesses in this moment to brace yourself for what is to come: the snowfall.
Your mind races to predict any and every judgment that could come your way so that if they come they are expected. You form a chainlink suit of armor built of infinite imperfections; each unique, each it’s own perfect snowflake of fault. You await your sentencing, await some scoffed remark of how simple your question was. The silence becomes all that you can hear, it traps you, wraps its tendrils around you and squeezes until the air leaves your lungs and you are powerless. You asked the question, your turn is over.
These milliseconds are each an eternity, and as you stand their helplessly, you crave the relief of an answer. You glance up as lips begin to move and hang desperately on their formation.
The snow falls whether or not you want it to. You cannot control it or halt it, so you may as well enjoy the comfort of its authority. You give in to its splendor and admire it. This tiny snowflake, that could fit a million times in your palm, has more power than you ever could. You recline into its agency and smile.
Your answer comes, judgment free. Your vulnerability has been rewarded with helpfulness.
I have never understood how planes stay in the sky. I once asked Dad to explain the physics behind these flying machines at a restaurant. We were seated by the window and I watched a plane soaring above us outside. He yanked a napkin from the napkin holder on our table and retrieved one of the pens he always keeps in his pant’s front pocket. But I was nine years old and Dad wasn’t very good at explaining the fighting forces of gravity and thrust and rapid airflow to nine year olds.
Here is what I know about planes.
When I was a toddler Dad used to take me on walks around the block in the indigo evening. I had a habit of crying (about everything and anything) and Dad learned one night that the best way to turn off my wails was to bring me outside and let me look at the planes. I sat on his hips and my arms wrapped around his neck as he coaxed me to turn my head upwards at the sky. At first the stars would greet me, and then the planes would begin to appear— their blinking white and red lights crossing my vision. Dad would make up stories about the passengers and their far-away destinations. He would tell me about the pretzel snacks they were munching on and the drool hanging out of the mouth of the sleeping man in seat 15A. The walks would end when my tears dried on my cheeks, their salt forging trails to my chin.
When I was thirteen I read a cheesy teen novel about a girl who would sit out on her back porch and send love to the planes passing overhead. The girl reasoned that there was likely a lonely passenger on that plane that needed that love. I didn’t really understand what sending love looked like or felt like. I still don’t. But whenever I see an airplane above me, I always send love to the passengers in need of it.
I once watched a YouTube video where a plane passenger took footage through their small window of another plane flying by. It is only when you see these machines racing past you at eye level that you understand how fast you are truly moving. After watching the video I began to spend my time on planes looking out the window, searching for another aircraft in the sky, searching for the thrill of understanding that you are suspended in the air, 40,000 feet above the ground, munching on pretzel snacks at 575 miles per hour.
“If I’m Being Honest,” to be frank (ha), is one of my most favorite songs on this planet. The artist, Dodie Clark, also happens to be one of my most favorite singers on this planet. Her sensitive lyricism and immaculate musicianship masterfully encapsulates raw emotions in a way that leaves you breathless, and sometimes in ugly tears (guilty as charged).
I adore many of Dodie’s songs, but what I love about “If I’m Being Honest” specifically, is its musical creativity, inclusivity, and poignance.
The song starts with a softhearted keyboard line, weaving in and out of itself, much like the perpetual and tranquil give and take of the ocean tide. The words come soon after, gliding onto the delicate plane of reverberant chords that have softly been meshed together.
“I was told this is where I would start loving myself.”
I like to imagine this song as a conversation that I would have with myself.
“Flirting’s delicious, proved to be beneficial for mental health
All of my best bits pulled forward, collected, displayed
Sadly, I just think that I was disgusting today”
It makes sense that putting our best foot forward would make one feel better, but sometimes it’s just not enough. The façade that we create with the parts of us that we consider to be our “best” might just turn out to be our downfall.
“You blew me up like a big balloon far too soon
I’m left a stuttering teen
How did I get here?
It’s all so quick, and I feel sick
Red pushing down on the green”
In the pre-chorus, the music shifts to an almost desperate state. Though it remains harmoniously pleasing, beneath it lies an aura of anxiety and doubt. The lyrics mirror this sentiment. An individual struggling to keep up with their self-imposed standards, making them feel like a “stuttering teen.” Imagery of red overtaking green also evokes a sense of urgency and danger.
“Could you love this?”
This line begins the chorus. I imagine myself directly asking this question to my younger self. Are you proud of the person you became? Here, the bouncy strumming of string instruments comes into the mix, mimicking the voice of a young child; light and inquisitive.
Will this one be right?
Well, if I’m being honest
I’m hoping it might
Could you love this?
Did you plan to fall?
Well, if I’m being honest
Oh, I bet it’s not that at all
A need to find answers for questions that don’t have them. Is this a life that you are happy living? Did you plan to live a life where you have to question whether or not it’s worth loving. To be honest, probably not, but sometimes it just turns out that way due to whatever forces are in play.
The song continues with the same structure of verse, pre-chorus, and chorus, with little musical changes that enhance its message. A beat is more clearly set with drums, indicating more assertiveness in the lines being sung; assertiveness in pessimism, however.
“Hope has a cost, keeping all fingers crossed and held tight
But I look idiotic with my limbs all knotted, it don’t feel right
Truly you’ve shaken me, and I think you like how I plead
But I have a hunch that that’s all you wanted from me.”
Hope has consequences. It gives us expectations which may be sorely disappointed, and we’ll end up looking stupid in the end. Can I blame my younger self for having so much hope for the future?
The chorus repeats again, but this time the strumming of string instrument has turned into long, graceful strokes. Melodically and rhythmically, they function in a sort of call-and-response pattern as if replying to all of the questions being asked. It doesn’t take up a defensive tone, rather the voice of the strings convey empathy and assurance. All of this builds up to the bridge with Dodie repeating the world “all” in an emotional catharsis of the overwhelming life that was described previously in the song.
The chorus repeats one last time. It starts out quiet, like in the beginning, and builds back up to its original volume, highlighted with gut-wrenching harmonies while the string instruments hover angelically above.
“Oh, I bet it’s not that at all.”
It’s unrealistic to blame yourself for all of the bad feelings in your heart and head. Truth is, it might not hold any legitimacy at all. It’s truly difficult to get past feeling like you’ve failed yourself. But it’s important to remember loving yourself isn’t a one-and-done thing, it’s a lifelong process. When you ask yourself, “could you love this,” maybe we shouldn’t automatically try to focus only on the best parts of ourselves, because we would only ever be incomplete. Maybe it’s worth it to take ourselves as we are, scars and all, and believe that our younger selves would be proud even if we haven’t learned to love ourselves yet.
Brown eyes. Eyes that cry but can’t fully comprehend. Freckles. Lots of them. I have them too. Sprinkled across our noses and below our eyes. Tall but hunched over. Hands that hug but also hit. I saw your hand whip across my brother’s face once. Sudden. Unexpected. Dad restrained you, raised his voice. My brother touched his cheek, backing away, back towards home where I was standing, watching. I had seen it all. I must have been 10 then.
A mouth that screams and curses, but also calls for Mom, searching for her face in strangers on the street. Mom doesn’t visit you or take you home with her. Dad does, though. He brings you to our house. You call me “wucy” or “bitch” when you see me; it’s a toss-up. You put my books, family photographs, anything you can find in your mouth before Dad catches you. You chew with your mouth wide open and drop bits of food into your water glass. I lose my appetite and try not to sit too close.
When people ask me how many siblings I have, sometimes I only say 2. Because I know the following question is: What do they do? And then I would have to admit I have a sister who is severely handicapped and lives in a home an hour away. In response, I get an uncomfortable silence as the other person grasps desperately for something to say: I’m sorry? That must be hard? But nothing seems right to say, so they just nod and change the topic.
When friends are over and she is there, they cower when she screams. They orbit her at a distance, like the Earth around the Sun, never daring to take a step closer. When she calls them “bitch” or “whore”, they are insulted. I can’t blame them, though.
I remember once Dad asked me if I was embarrassed by her. I couldn’t bear to tell him the truth. I’m ashamed to write it now.
She is my sister.
But I don’t really know her. She scares me sometimes, most of the time, all of the time. She loves our dad; we have at least one thing in common. She loves to eat; we have that in common too. I’m embarrassed by her. I lie and say I have 2 siblings when I have 3. Am I a horrible person?
People don’t understand her. People are afraid of what they don’t understand.
Dad tells me that one of us will have to look after her when he is gone. Let it be Molly or Andrew, not me. I don’t want to think about Dad being gone. He senses my trepidation and the upturned wrinkles around his brown eyes droop in disappointment. I am filled with guilt at the thought of letting him down.
From now on, when asked how many siblings I have, I will say proudly that I have 3. I hope that it’s not too late to get to know my sister, Kelly.
In Bo Burnham’s directorial debut, Kayla Day (Elsie Fisher) is in her final week of middle school. She is awkward, acne-ridden, and well-intentioned. Near the beginning of movie, at a school pep rally, Kayla is awarded the superlative “Most Quiet.” Two of the eighth grade’s most popular students—the snide, spoiled Kennedy and the effortless hottie Aidan—win “Best Eyes.” Post-victory, as Kennedy and Aidan walk by, Kayla mumbles an earnest “good job”—a comment which they, of course, snub.
This scene embodies Kayla’s sweet, positive attitude amongst her peer’s misunderstanding or blatant avoidance of her. She says that people often mistake her for being quiet, but if you got to know her, you’d know she’s “actually really cool and funny and stuff.” We see Kayla’s positivity through her YouTube videos, where she gives advice to her viewers. She covers topics such as “being yourself” and “putting yourself out there.” It is uplifting to watch Kayla as she tries to follow her own advice although she repeatedly embarrasses herself in the process. Burnham, however, does not shy away from heavier, distressing content to maintain the truth of the narrative.
At times, Eighth Grade is raw and uncomfortable. In a particularly cringe-inducing scene, Riley, a high school boy played by Daniel Zolghadri, wants something Kayla isn’t offering. Without giving too much away (go watch the movie!), Kayla doesn’t budge. Kayla feels shameful and mortified for not providing Riley with what he wants. She apologizes profusely, claiming, “it was just a lot at once, I’m sorry.” It is painful to watch, as much of the movie is, but is simultaneously gloriously realistic.
Bo Burnham incorporated many of Fisher’s mannerisms into her character to increase the authenticity of the character. For example, Kayla’s tics included rubbing her inner arm, slouching, and saying “Gucci!”. These were all mannerisms that Fisher organically brought to set and ending up being defining to her character. The fact that Fisher herself recently finished eighth grade contributed greatly to the realism of the film. When describing his casting of Fisher as Kayla, Burnham said, “Every other kid felt like a confident kid pretending to be shy. [Elsie] felt like a shy kid pretending to be confident. That’s the whole magic of it.” Her performance is wonderfully unforced.
Fisher does not provide the only performance that tugs at your heart strings. Kayla’s goofy, well-intentioned father, Mark, played by Josh Hamilton, wins the sympathy and affection of the audience through his undying persistence to connect with his daughter. Mark loves her tirelessly, even though he is somewhat ridiculed by Kayla and constantly failing to please her. Kayla’s eventual friend, Gabe, played by Jake Ryan, is nerdy and sweet, and a little lonely, too. Gabe’s devotion to Kayla’s friendship is refreshing in a movie full of rejection.
From the awkward tensions and the changing hormones, to the heavy pressure to fit in—Eighth Grade is riddled with moments that feel strikingly familiar. Burnham incorporates the new elements of adolescence that have come within the information age (Kayla is inseparable from her iPhone and prioritizes her social media presence), yet the eighth grade experience remains similarly painful and cringe-worthy to that of any generation.
The best part about eighth grade is that it ends. Eighth Grade also ends, but after only an hour and a half of its charms, you may wish it didn’t.
When you first stick a fingernail under the peel of a tangerine, sometimes it sends a fine spray of citrus up into the air, almost as if it’s blowing a fat raspberry at your face. The tangerine is small, bright, round and dotted with dark freckles. So it’s not hard to imagine that you’re squeezing the squishy cheeks of a seven-year-old aiming spittle straight at your eye. It’s charming, really, the tangerine. How can you not love it? A spherical fruit smaller than the width of your hand that has a sweet, tangy taste bursting from every pulp. Best of all, it comes with its own biodegradable wrapper.
The wrappers are, at the moment, littered all over the coffee table. Between me and my little brother, we’re on our way to finishing the entire box of Cuties brought earlier from the day’s groceries. The nylon mesh that covered these two dozen tangerines has been ripped open like a torn fishing net, releasing our plentiful catch into hungry, open mouths.
It’s me who does the peeling, of course. I have the best nails for the job (overgrown, out of laziness) and the best technique (taught by my grandma, I can peel a tangerine into the shape of a flower in a single, swift motion). Once the coat is removed, I split the fruit in half. One for my brother, one for me. Side by side on the living room floor, we chew and swallow our portions while the TV glows with the bright visuals of a Korean variety show. Canned laughter and sound effects bounce off the walls of the shadowy room. I peel the next tangerine.
I want to tell my brother that I love him. It’s just one of those things our family doesn’t talk about, like money. But we all know, deep down, regardless. Even without pressing our ears against the walls. Even without listening in to hushed conversations or peeking inside checkbooks when the parents are out of the room, we know. But I want to tell him that I love him, because it’s important that he knows, and I want to make sure that he knows. Just to be on the safe side.
I don’t tell my brother that I love him, but I peel him lots of tangerines.
I peel. I split. I hand. We chew and swallow together. Amidst the background noise I think—I never want to run out.
If this had happened yesterday, I would have known to read the signs—the ones nailed to weathered wooden posts in three places around the edge of the gray water, their metal corners bent out of shape by high speed winds of storms past.
At age nine, though, my eyes glossed over the signs with the thick black x’s, and my brother and I slid into the cherry red kayaks without a second glance at the clouds wrestling above us with more and more force each minute.
I giggled at the kayak paddle twice as long as me, fumbled with it as I tried to keep up with Noah’s practiced strokes toward the center of the lake. I watched him shoot glances back at me, a classic smirk of older sibling power that I tried to ignore as I strained my short arms, pushing away the water with little success.
After ten minutes of pure effort, I gave up with a huff, resting the length of my paddle across my lap and letting myself float where the lake wanted me to go. The surface of the water kept sharpening, growing peaks that caught under my boat and shoved me in a zigzag pattern. Noah stopped paddling, too. We jostled around the choppy Canadian lake in silence, hearing the trees hiss warnings at us as the wind gathered strength. There was a calmness in the swell of sound.
Then we started to feel a quickening pull. Sharing a sidelong glance, we realized we were both moving straighter now, the pointed noses of our kayaks sliding toward the same point in the distance. The wind was loud now, my flyaway hair practically blinding me in its flailing dance around my head. We panicked.
In a second, the lake had turned into a rapid flow, accelerating us toward something we could not see. Our paddles were useless. I asked Noah what to do, but his brain lagged, absorbing the flimsiness of our tiny plastic boats and the ever loudening crash of water that could only mean one thing.
“This is a waterfall,” I yelled in angry disbelief over the spray that now assaulted us from every angle. Noah just nodded, and then I was sure we were about to die, careen over the edge and smash on the rocky bottom and float away in bits as red as our boats.
I closed my eyes for a second. Felt a tug from behind. Remembered—how had I forgotten? Dad had paddled out far behind us.
A blur of motion, of water rushing one way and Dad yanking the tails of our boats the other. I can’t remember how I hung on, where I clung to my kayak, how long it took for him to reverse our course. What he was thinking as he stopped his two children from taking a fifty foot ride straight downward.
Dad was sweating badly from his hairline as he hauled the boats out of the water, and he couldn’t look at us for very long. He squeezed the bottom edge of his shirt in a ball, and a stream rushed out and onto the ground. Finally, a waterfall he could control.
I want to like boats and storms. They used to be my dad’s favorite things. Sometimes I think about what it felt like to take an extra big inhale not knowing if the next one would happen. Sometimes I think about how calm my brother was right before we dropped off the edge of the world.
It is a scorching orange day and the rising dust suffocates the air only to be swept further west between bouts of dueling and dancing. There are no clouds and the sky remains distant in baby-blue hues—above and removed from any foolery that could ever take place below. The camera pans down and reveals four maroon wooden buildings—church, saloon, jail, and, of course, bar—emerging alongside a beaten path towards the horizon. From planked windows and peeping behind drying white clothes, people gather to watch the commotion on that Sunday afternoon. Two slender figures rose opposite of each other; one wearing worn-out leather boots and sporting determination as a weapon and the other unsure of how the duel would play out, but resolute that they had to fight. Ire and Longing. Outlaw emotions.
Such was the picture I drew in my head as I sat down in a poorly lit college classroom for a Philosophy course. Much for my bemusement, little about the epistemology of outlaw emotions had anything to do with waging deathly duels and asserting with certitude your place on the land. At first sight, anyway. For feminist philosopher Alison Jaggar, outlaw emotions featured in a different kind of struggle—not being able to articulate why one feels displaced when marginalized, not being able to articulate a generalized malaise into a concrete understanding of how you are feeling. Trapped between feeling and not knowing, you stand suspended, not torn apart. “Why did he look at me that way?” “Why was I refused to enter that space?” “Why am I not enough?”
I sat and wondered how that rang familiar to me, not once, but at least thirty-two times. There had been compelling cases for being oppressed. A soft gay boy in a hard-Catholic family, an odd Latino in a sea of white (US) Americans, a “lost case” incapable of living perfectly well with his mind. If I can articulate it now, it would have been a mystery to my thirteen-old self so afraid to like boys—to like himself—that he got lost charming girls and half-passing for a man he could never be. For him, the days were yellow, blue, and green as his maturity. Emotions ran amok; it is early teenagerhood, after all. Still then, outlaw emotions ran deeper. Life had given him the presumed benefit—as there were others in that classroom who had certainly known them too—of meeting the outlaws early on. Looking no further than being six, he long felt he was something that others were not—he did not know what that was and when it was named, he remained confused as to what it really meant. He searched for meaning in why being soft, artistic, heck, feminine was a death sentence in the making. He couldn’t understand, his emotions ran from the law. They ran afraid to be seized, to be sized up, to be jailed and never again freed.
Unsure, he stood as a bystander watching the gruesome duel to take place on the dirty path below. Ire and Longing fought for nothing; they fought for having to fight. They were the same and yet the rising red dirt in the air made them look like enemies. Shots fired, they missed, but hit the boy bent over an empty turquoise flower bed on the corner window. He was hit, unbeknownst to him consequences or reasons. It simply hurt. “Why did he look at me that way?” “Why me?”
I am awakened from my digression with the professor’s overdone awkward laughter. It is a fading burgundy afternoon and the rain falls and settles over muddled puddles. The clouds on the horizons hint at a different moment, much calmer now. No slender figures fighting, no tearing apart. Just the me learning about outlaw emotions and all of the other ones wishing they knew it before.
The human immune system is complex and difficult to understand on a good day — that is, when things are going right and every part functions as it should. It is a microcosmic society of its own, a game of life with many of the same players we encounter on a much larger scale as we go about our daily interactions. Divided by function into either the innate and adaptive immune responses (or sometimes both), we can compare our immune cells to human development throughout a lifetime and identify some of the same behaviors we notice in the macrocosmic world around us.
The innate response includes such cells as neutrophils, macrophages, and mast cells, which attack invaders in a relatively childlike manner; mast cells release molecules to produce inflammation and attract the help of other cells, much like an upset baby crying because that is the only way they know how to communicate and elicit the response they need from a parent. Macrophages, on the other hand, simply engulf every foreign invader they see, like a toddler who is constantly putting things in their mouth. Neutrophils are a combination of both, engulfing other cells and releasing toxic granules to kill them. All of the innate immune cells respond very generally; they have not yet learned to tailor their communication and methods of attack to any specific pathogen.
The adaptive response, on the other hand, resembles a more mature stage of human development. By this point in the immune response, cells have identified the specific pathogen and learned how best to attack it; B cells and the antibodies they produce bind to an invader and kill it, digesting the intruder and presenting pieces of it on the B cell’s own surface to alert other cells to the presence of danger. These other cells, T cells, then recognize the pieces of pathogen and are activated to carry out a number of varying responses. B cells can be compared to college students or young professionals, learning the standards of their professors or employers and figuring out how best to meet them in their work. T cells are similar to groggy adult night owls; while the children of the innate immune system require no prompting to jump out of bed and watch Saturday morning cartoons (or attack foreign invaders), T cells, like most adults, can only function once they have been awoken from their slumber by the shrill tones of the alarm clock (or T cell activation). Additionally, some of these B and T cells even go on to serve as “memory cells,” the wise elders of the immune system charged with the task of preserving the memory of these invaders and how to effectively attack them much like grandparents pass on their stories and advice to younger generations.
You see, we are a parallel universe of our own biology. Our immune system represents a society of its own, made up of many individuals at different stages of development and maturity all with different jobs and purposes, much like a world of interacting humans of all ages and interests. We are what we are made of, so to speak, the sum of our many parts, whether on the scale of the body or the antibody.
it’s so interesting how we’re essentially mirrors of ourselves inside & out! i especially loved your descriptions in the second paragraph. i usually find science hard to grasp but explained in this way, i learned a lot. i wish i had you as my bio teacher in high school!
I have recently embarked on a quest to express myself in the humblest manner I can. I’m not sure yet what this means to me, but I have started by studying friends who I deem the most humble. I have started with Bean, they are often described as “non-threatening” which I translate into humble. Bean is very kind, and often helps others even if it is a hinderance. They are interested and invested in the well being of others, letting their own agenda be dictated by others if it does not offend them. Offensive to Bean, is all that is negative in their perception. They do their best to contain their frustration with such things, and respectfully admonishes that by which they are offended.
I informed Bean about the quest, and they conflated it with humbling oneself. They told me “that might be good for you Will, maybe you do think too highly of yourself, maybe you’re slightly less sick than you think you are.”
“No.” I snapped back. “I can’t lose my confidence.” I have no desire in thinking of myself as less than. I am eternally devoted to thinking of myself as potentially greater. Growth is my goal, and my growth would be curtailed if I were to cap my potential. In this sense, I am the greatest that never was, the greatest to be. It is paradoxical; however, confidence gives you power to achieve what you are uncertain of. Knowing this, I want to hold as much as my hands can carry.
Perception is what I am challenged by: how can I be perceived as my most humble self? I have figured that it begins with not talking about oneself too often. Also refraining from sharing unsolicited details. Quiet people are always considered humble, I should also figure out a way to shut up. In these ways I can at least be considered modest, which is a step closer to humble. The most humble always does their best. They boast none of what they will and have done, rather, relish silently until contentment.
This essay is in direct violation of my guide to become modest, in that, I am talking about myself quite a bit, and boasting a fair amount. I can consciously do this because I am taking advantage of a loophole. I was asked to write briefly on a subject of interest. In this case, details were not unsolicited, they were welcomed.
Why you Should Jump in Freezing Water
My friend and I trek up to the Falls of Lana by Lake Dunmore. I’m nervous as hell. I had met him the night before and he asked if I was interested in doing some cold water therapy. I said I might be. Now I’m here, marching up the trail in the cool forest air, dreading the impending icy chill. We break off the trail and cross a stream, finding ourselves atop the picturesque waterfalls, crashing into a beautiful, dark pool. Shit, this is gonna suck, I think with giddy anticipation. Quickly we change into our bathing suits, anxious tensions running high. Suddenly I’m in the water. One step, another. It’s painfully, bitingly cold. My feet feel on fire. I cautiously wade further in, my friend already chest deep and yelling like a madman. The cold tugs at my body and my skin tingles intensely. Finally, I dunk my head, completely submerged. By now I’m yelling like a madman too. I feel alive, every fiber of my body vibrating at full capacity. At some point my body adapts to the cold, and it doesn’t hurt any more. It just feels awesome. Another frozen minute later, we get out, adrenaline coursing through my veins. I yell and whoop, the chilly air now feeling warm and comfortable after the icy water. My friend and I share a manic smile, feeling liberated, empowered, wild, and happy.
As you should never go alone, ice bathing is an incredible bonding experience. All hardships bring people together, this even more than the rest. Why? It becomes the achievement you are proud to have overcome together. Additionally, in the freezing water you don’t have any spare energy for filters; you have no choice but to be your truest self. Hence, afterwards, it becomes much easier to be with each other, because you have already seen past all the superficial layers we put up around ourselves.
When I first went with my friend I had no idea how influential the experience would be. At the Falls of Lana, you are in the midst of nature’s beauty and awesome power, you feel connected to the earth. Stress is out of sight, out of mind. Work is forgotten. You are simply challenging yourself against nature, just as humans have done for thousands of years. The adrenaline is timeless. The satisfaction is timeless. The camaraderie you build is timeless. Here at Middlebury, we have an incredible opportunity with our access to the outdoors. Within 20 minutes drive, we can escape the campus bubble and experience this natural power. There is no excuse for us not to take a trip to the Falls and remind ourselves of what’s truly important: We are alive. Everything else can be solved along the way.
The game of Go.
I’m not even close to an expert on Go. I don’t know the rules, and I don’t know much about the history of the game. But there’s a documentary on Netflix which portrays the journey of an AI system named AlphaGo, from defeating the grandmaster of Europe to becoming the best “player” in the world. There’s a moment in the film where AlphaGo makes an unorthodox move against Korean champion Lee Sedol, named “move 37”. This move, while not optimal for winning points at the beginning of the game, increased the overall probability that AlphaGo would win. The computer doesn’t care for the margin of victory, or following traditional strategies. AlphaGo calculates which move will most increase the probability of victory, based on millions of games simulated against itself.
I’ve read the Wikipedia article for this match over twelve times. I don’t know why.
When I was a sophomore in high school, I worked in an ice-cream shop in Paraguay for a month. In my free time, I walked around the town, ate upwards of thirty empanadas per day, and played chess with a Paraguayan grandmaster. He had polio and wasn’t able to stand, so his brother (who owned the ice-cream shop) would carry him into the parlor through a back door. I don’t remember his name.
Our conversations were brief. My Spanish isn’t great, but I learned the names of each chess piece so that we had a basic vocabulary in common. He was very patient. Each game was an awkward dance, as he tried to explain mistakes in my approach.
“The center. The center. Win the center, and you win the game. Never give up your control of the center to your opponent.”
This was a simplified approach to chess which ignored centuries of strategy, but it gave me a sense of control. I had an immediate reaction to each of his moves. Even if I lost the overall match, I felt secure. In fact, I would prefer to lose matches by following the doctrine of “the center” rather than win a match through a series of patchwork moves without an overarching goal. By the end of the month, I was probably worse at chess because of my devotion to this approach. And I wasn’t good to begin with.
The Wikipedia article, which was last edited ten minutes ago, seems like an artifact from the future. Or rather, it seems like a relic buried in a time capsule, and re-opened by future generations of engineered intelligence. “How quaint, AlphaGo’s understanding of board games. How refreshingly alive.” A mind far removed from our own will recognized the fingerprints of human personality on AlphaGo’s strategy, stubborn flaws that our scientists have overlooked. Perhaps its processors will simulate a wry grin.
No Limit Hold ‘Em
By Agastya Ahluwalia
A typical poker table has a length of between 92 and 104 inches, a width of 44 inches, and a height of 30 inches. The weight of the table can range from 200 pounds to 350 pounds. Tables are usually oval-shaped and covered with a green poker mat that allows the dealer to slide the cards across the felt into the hands of the poker players. This action takes place hundreds of times throughout the course of a session, and each of these occurrences is referred to as a hand. In Texas Hold ‘Em Poker, the variant of poker most people are talking of when they say the more general term “poker”, each player is dealt two cards face down at the start of the hand. They are then subject to a series of decisions that involve betting. Over the course of the hand, the dealer reveals five cards – the first three are referred to as the flop, the fourth is called the turn, and the fifth and final card is best known as the river. The final round of betting takes place at the river, and if more than a single player still remains in the hand, there is a showdown. The player with the best hand wins. This set of rules, combined with the single condition that there is no monetary restriction on the value of a single bet other than the amount of money your opponent has, is the entire premise of the game referred to as No Limit Hold ‘Em.
Winning at the game activates a rush of dopamine inside the pleasure centers of the player’s brain, exciting the mind and creating a craving for more. This makes poker, like other games at the casino, a crowd favorite for casino crowds all around the world who are chasing a high. The rushes of getting good cards, a lucky river, a big-money hand are similar to those experienced by gambling addicts.
But poker is not gambling. In the words of Al Alvarez, poker is as much a game of luck as rock climbing is a game of taking risks; there’s an element but it’s not the whole picture. In reality, like most things, poker is a lot more complicated than it seems on the surface. For a young bachelor chasing a high in Las Vegas during the weeks leading up to his marriage, poker is a game of chance; a place to gamble. But for veteran pros like Doyle Brunson, poker is a game of skill; a game of tricks, tells, numbers, and strategy. This has been proven time and time again by the fact that the same individuals end up on the final table of the world series of poker year after year. The greatest poker players have learned to learn the table’s playstyle, to read their cards, and play based of their opponent rather than their own cards. A great poker player isn’t lucky. A great poker player is in absolute control. A great player isn’t defined by what he does when they have good cards, but what they do when their cards are weak. They are defined not by the hands they win, but by the hands they choose to fold. A great player makes the right decision, and sometimes that decision doesn’t lead to victory but to a smaller loss.
In this way, poker is not just a game but a rock-solid analogy for life. It’s a game with an element of luck, the cards your dealt matter, but there’s more to it than that.
I can’t stop staring at his bald head. The reflection of the spotlight that is supposed to be on the speaker drew my eyes to his head. Bobbing in the light, in the front row, thinking it’s the crispiest apple in the tank, but no one’s biting. Ok, I am. I’m wondering about his head. Does he lotion it? Does he shampoo it? Or condition it? I surrender that only he knows what goes on atop his head. I’m on to the next wondering.
The speaker shuts up. They have nothing to say now. In fact, they’re gone. The audience stays gazing, nodding heads ever so often when they imagine something important was just said. Their chairs are gone, and they float contently in the same position as if the chairs were still there. The bleachers are gone and now the audience, those in the very depths, in the dark distance from the bald head, float fifteen feet from the waxed floor. They keep gazing, even the one’s gazing at their shoes, who must have seen the bleachers disappear from under their feet. The waxed floor is gone now, the walls, the ceiling, the stage, the lights. They keep gazing. I’ve seen it all happen, the only one to notice and my eyes have been glued to this bald head.
It’s all very funny. A hundred people floating, no chairs, floor, building. No speaker, no speech. So content floating, organized in rows, nodding heads in unison, even laughing into empty space. A few lookup, stretching, see stars. The wind whips through their hair, starting on the right, dancing through curls and frizz and tangles, skips the bald head, dancing through the gray and black and blonde, releasing on the left, victorious in tying stands in knots and in stealing the thin layer of warmth nestled between raised hairs and goosebumps. It’s all so funny.
Most of the time, deconstructing is terribly funny. Take away the building, take away the context, take away the structures and what’s left is something hilarious. People floating. People staring at nothing. People dancing to nothing. People gathered for no reason. Hilarious.
Deconstructing becomes less funny sometimes. When I’m the target and I find neurons and hormones and cells and atoms and no magic, no floating, no fun, I only laugh a little to counteract the wave of anxiety that knocks me out reality and leaves me swirling around in dizzying, useless thought. Then I deconstruct someone who seems more than neurons and hormones and cells and atoms. I conclude they’re magic. They’ve got something I could never have. Between each atom is a sparkling, flowing, light breeze that breathes their effortlessness to life. But a few swirls later, and I’ve torn everything apart. Loose nails, shredded insulation, dumb theories, broken glass, corrupt systems, stupid hypothesizes, shattered picture frames scatter from the epicenter of deconstruction.
His bald head is gone. Vanished and this time it’s not my doing. I stay gazing at his space. I do it so much, so I guess it’s an interest. Thinking about this and never finding the answer. So, I think thinking is useless.
On Being (Bundled)
If you take a scarf, a hat, some socks and dip them in wool you’ll have a day immune to wind. Yarn knitted to make armor around the fleshy soft of your body, to cut up and out against the pierce of a cold day. But when the sun breaks, you want to shed–to let your body wash up against the sweet memory of the sun.
You can hear waves when the days warm, hear them reach up and falter against rocked ledges, taking the memory of natural formation back to the secret deep of the sea. Those days, always warm, felt on your face, cheeks hot and ears burning. Dry, hot air of Southern California, heat brought out from somewhere deep down to wash out the sweet breeze of the Pacific from an open mouth along its ridges. Heat nipped into a sweat, cold biting into a closer bundle and unbroken shell. Warm palms on upturned faces, sweet kisses (always by a coastline, to carry away whatever came out of the touching–back to the sea and her sweet promise of fullness and mystery.)
When you wrap yourself up in the winter, you watch movement through windows and hot tea. A season not meant for the soft and unspoken, screaming out through the wind and the cracks in windows. And when you shed, show skin, your nakedness takes on a body of emotion unfelt by the warmer days. Goosebumped bodies and dry air, delicate mornings and nights of burning breath. The mornings–
If you take a scarf, a hat, some socks and dip them in wool you’ll have a day that starts with the sunrise. Snowcapped green against a backdrop of fresh yellow and sweet, achy pink. You’ll want the backdrop just for yourself, want to keep it locked up in the spread of your palm for when the chill leaves and you can see again. You’ll want it for the day of your shedding, so that you can run out to its rising with a knowing of what kept you before. If you take–
Snowfall
There is a moment just before it snows that you can see the air, that you become aware of how its invisibility fills the gaps in everything. The space between your fingers becomes a substance not an emptiness. You smell the air and your nostrils are filled with this something, once nothing, and it doesn’t have a smell. It tastes still — is that even a flavor? You reach out your hand only to clasp hands with a snowflake and stare into its infinite slightness. You look up towards the sky to see the source of this chilly companion and see nothing but a backdrop of clouds. All around you snowflakes fall, dotting the emptiness. Are the snowflakes something swimming in nothing, or are they holes in the vast something?
They say that as a lawyer you should only ask questions you already know the answer to, but I’m not a lawyer, and neither are you. Asking a question — a real question, one you don’t know the answer to — is like snowfall. There is a moment, right after you ask, when the air becomes still and quiet and dull. You become aware of how silent it is, you become aware of the nothing that is now something. Is silence the absence of noise or the presence of silence? You become aware of your shoe that’s untied, how the lace limps loosely onto the floor. Your right pant leg is cuffed more than the left and it’s excruciating. Every detail, the little insignificant particulars, become all you can see. You assess all of your faults, your deformities, your weaknesses in this moment to brace yourself for what is to come: the snowfall.
Your mind races to predict any and every judgment that could come your way so that if they come they are expected. You form a chainlink suit of armor built of infinite imperfections; each unique, each it’s own perfect snowflake of fault. You await your sentencing, await some scoffed remark of how simple your question was. The silence becomes all that you can hear, it traps you, wraps its tendrils around you and squeezes until the air leaves your lungs and you are powerless. You asked the question, your turn is over.
These milliseconds are each an eternity, and as you stand their helplessly, you crave the relief of an answer. You glance up as lips begin to move and hang desperately on their formation.
The snow falls whether or not you want it to. You cannot control it or halt it, so you may as well enjoy the comfort of its authority. You give in to its splendor and admire it. This tiny snowflake, that could fit a million times in your palm, has more power than you ever could. You recline into its agency and smile.
Your answer comes, judgment free. Your vulnerability has been rewarded with helpfulness.
What I Know About Planes
I have never understood how planes stay in the sky. I once asked Dad to explain the physics behind these flying machines at a restaurant. We were seated by the window and I watched a plane soaring above us outside. He yanked a napkin from the napkin holder on our table and retrieved one of the pens he always keeps in his pant’s front pocket. But I was nine years old and Dad wasn’t very good at explaining the fighting forces of gravity and thrust and rapid airflow to nine year olds.
Here is what I know about planes.
When I was a toddler Dad used to take me on walks around the block in the indigo evening. I had a habit of crying (about everything and anything) and Dad learned one night that the best way to turn off my wails was to bring me outside and let me look at the planes. I sat on his hips and my arms wrapped around his neck as he coaxed me to turn my head upwards at the sky. At first the stars would greet me, and then the planes would begin to appear— their blinking white and red lights crossing my vision. Dad would make up stories about the passengers and their far-away destinations. He would tell me about the pretzel snacks they were munching on and the drool hanging out of the mouth of the sleeping man in seat 15A. The walks would end when my tears dried on my cheeks, their salt forging trails to my chin.
When I was thirteen I read a cheesy teen novel about a girl who would sit out on her back porch and send love to the planes passing overhead. The girl reasoned that there was likely a lonely passenger on that plane that needed that love. I didn’t really understand what sending love looked like or felt like. I still don’t. But whenever I see an airplane above me, I always send love to the passengers in need of it.
I once watched a YouTube video where a plane passenger took footage through their small window of another plane flying by. It is only when you see these machines racing past you at eye level that you understand how fast you are truly moving. After watching the video I began to spend my time on planes looking out the window, searching for another aircraft in the sky, searching for the thrill of understanding that you are suspended in the air, 40,000 feet above the ground, munching on pretzel snacks at 575 miles per hour.
Review of “If I’m Being Honest” by Dodie Clark
“If I’m Being Honest,” to be frank (ha), is one of my most favorite songs on this planet. The artist, Dodie Clark, also happens to be one of my most favorite singers on this planet. Her sensitive lyricism and immaculate musicianship masterfully encapsulates raw emotions in a way that leaves you breathless, and sometimes in ugly tears (guilty as charged).
I adore many of Dodie’s songs, but what I love about “If I’m Being Honest” specifically, is its musical creativity, inclusivity, and poignance.
Feel free to listen to the song while you read (highly recommended and totally not biased): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-cd_wcxTiE&list=RDZ-cd_wcxTiE&start_radio=1
The song starts with a softhearted keyboard line, weaving in and out of itself, much like the perpetual and tranquil give and take of the ocean tide. The words come soon after, gliding onto the delicate plane of reverberant chords that have softly been meshed together.
“I was told this is where I would start loving myself.”
I like to imagine this song as a conversation that I would have with myself.
“Flirting’s delicious, proved to be beneficial for mental health
All of my best bits pulled forward, collected, displayed
Sadly, I just think that I was disgusting today”
It makes sense that putting our best foot forward would make one feel better, but sometimes it’s just not enough. The façade that we create with the parts of us that we consider to be our “best” might just turn out to be our downfall.
“You blew me up like a big balloon far too soon
I’m left a stuttering teen
How did I get here?
It’s all so quick, and I feel sick
Red pushing down on the green”
In the pre-chorus, the music shifts to an almost desperate state. Though it remains harmoniously pleasing, beneath it lies an aura of anxiety and doubt. The lyrics mirror this sentiment. An individual struggling to keep up with their self-imposed standards, making them feel like a “stuttering teen.” Imagery of red overtaking green also evokes a sense of urgency and danger.
“Could you love this?”
This line begins the chorus. I imagine myself directly asking this question to my younger self. Are you proud of the person you became? Here, the bouncy strumming of string instruments comes into the mix, mimicking the voice of a young child; light and inquisitive.
Will this one be right?
Well, if I’m being honest
I’m hoping it might
Could you love this?
Did you plan to fall?
Well, if I’m being honest
Oh, I bet it’s not that at all
A need to find answers for questions that don’t have them. Is this a life that you are happy living? Did you plan to live a life where you have to question whether or not it’s worth loving. To be honest, probably not, but sometimes it just turns out that way due to whatever forces are in play.
The song continues with the same structure of verse, pre-chorus, and chorus, with little musical changes that enhance its message. A beat is more clearly set with drums, indicating more assertiveness in the lines being sung; assertiveness in pessimism, however.
“Hope has a cost, keeping all fingers crossed and held tight
But I look idiotic with my limbs all knotted, it don’t feel right
Truly you’ve shaken me, and I think you like how I plead
But I have a hunch that that’s all you wanted from me.”
Hope has consequences. It gives us expectations which may be sorely disappointed, and we’ll end up looking stupid in the end. Can I blame my younger self for having so much hope for the future?
The chorus repeats again, but this time the strumming of string instrument has turned into long, graceful strokes. Melodically and rhythmically, they function in a sort of call-and-response pattern as if replying to all of the questions being asked. It doesn’t take up a defensive tone, rather the voice of the strings convey empathy and assurance. All of this builds up to the bridge with Dodie repeating the world “all” in an emotional catharsis of the overwhelming life that was described previously in the song.
The chorus repeats one last time. It starts out quiet, like in the beginning, and builds back up to its original volume, highlighted with gut-wrenching harmonies while the string instruments hover angelically above.
“Oh, I bet it’s not that at all.”
It’s unrealistic to blame yourself for all of the bad feelings in your heart and head. Truth is, it might not hold any legitimacy at all. It’s truly difficult to get past feeling like you’ve failed yourself. But it’s important to remember loving yourself isn’t a one-and-done thing, it’s a lifelong process. When you ask yourself, “could you love this,” maybe we shouldn’t automatically try to focus only on the best parts of ourselves, because we would only ever be incomplete. Maybe it’s worth it to take ourselves as we are, scars and all, and believe that our younger selves would be proud even if we haven’t learned to love ourselves yet.
My Sister
Brown eyes. Eyes that cry but can’t fully comprehend. Freckles. Lots of them. I have them too. Sprinkled across our noses and below our eyes. Tall but hunched over. Hands that hug but also hit. I saw your hand whip across my brother’s face once. Sudden. Unexpected. Dad restrained you, raised his voice. My brother touched his cheek, backing away, back towards home where I was standing, watching. I had seen it all. I must have been 10 then.
A mouth that screams and curses, but also calls for Mom, searching for her face in strangers on the street. Mom doesn’t visit you or take you home with her. Dad does, though. He brings you to our house. You call me “wucy” or “bitch” when you see me; it’s a toss-up. You put my books, family photographs, anything you can find in your mouth before Dad catches you. You chew with your mouth wide open and drop bits of food into your water glass. I lose my appetite and try not to sit too close.
When people ask me how many siblings I have, sometimes I only say 2. Because I know the following question is: What do they do? And then I would have to admit I have a sister who is severely handicapped and lives in a home an hour away. In response, I get an uncomfortable silence as the other person grasps desperately for something to say: I’m sorry? That must be hard? But nothing seems right to say, so they just nod and change the topic.
When friends are over and she is there, they cower when she screams. They orbit her at a distance, like the Earth around the Sun, never daring to take a step closer. When she calls them “bitch” or “whore”, they are insulted. I can’t blame them, though.
I remember once Dad asked me if I was embarrassed by her. I couldn’t bear to tell him the truth. I’m ashamed to write it now.
She is my sister.
But I don’t really know her. She scares me sometimes, most of the time, all of the time. She loves our dad; we have at least one thing in common. She loves to eat; we have that in common too. I’m embarrassed by her. I lie and say I have 2 siblings when I have 3. Am I a horrible person?
People don’t understand her. People are afraid of what they don’t understand.
Dad tells me that one of us will have to look after her when he is gone. Let it be Molly or Andrew, not me. I don’t want to think about Dad being gone. He senses my trepidation and the upturned wrinkles around his brown eyes droop in disappointment. I am filled with guilt at the thought of letting him down.
From now on, when asked how many siblings I have, I will say proudly that I have 3. I hope that it’s not too late to get to know my sister, Kelly.
Review of Eighth Grade (2018):
In Bo Burnham’s directorial debut, Kayla Day (Elsie Fisher) is in her final week of middle school. She is awkward, acne-ridden, and well-intentioned. Near the beginning of movie, at a school pep rally, Kayla is awarded the superlative “Most Quiet.” Two of the eighth grade’s most popular students—the snide, spoiled Kennedy and the effortless hottie Aidan—win “Best Eyes.” Post-victory, as Kennedy and Aidan walk by, Kayla mumbles an earnest “good job”—a comment which they, of course, snub.
This scene embodies Kayla’s sweet, positive attitude amongst her peer’s misunderstanding or blatant avoidance of her. She says that people often mistake her for being quiet, but if you got to know her, you’d know she’s “actually really cool and funny and stuff.” We see Kayla’s positivity through her YouTube videos, where she gives advice to her viewers. She covers topics such as “being yourself” and “putting yourself out there.” It is uplifting to watch Kayla as she tries to follow her own advice although she repeatedly embarrasses herself in the process. Burnham, however, does not shy away from heavier, distressing content to maintain the truth of the narrative.
At times, Eighth Grade is raw and uncomfortable. In a particularly cringe-inducing scene, Riley, a high school boy played by Daniel Zolghadri, wants something Kayla isn’t offering. Without giving too much away (go watch the movie!), Kayla doesn’t budge. Kayla feels shameful and mortified for not providing Riley with what he wants. She apologizes profusely, claiming, “it was just a lot at once, I’m sorry.” It is painful to watch, as much of the movie is, but is simultaneously gloriously realistic.
Bo Burnham incorporated many of Fisher’s mannerisms into her character to increase the authenticity of the character. For example, Kayla’s tics included rubbing her inner arm, slouching, and saying “Gucci!”. These were all mannerisms that Fisher organically brought to set and ending up being defining to her character. The fact that Fisher herself recently finished eighth grade contributed greatly to the realism of the film. When describing his casting of Fisher as Kayla, Burnham said, “Every other kid felt like a confident kid pretending to be shy. [Elsie] felt like a shy kid pretending to be confident. That’s the whole magic of it.” Her performance is wonderfully unforced.
Fisher does not provide the only performance that tugs at your heart strings. Kayla’s goofy, well-intentioned father, Mark, played by Josh Hamilton, wins the sympathy and affection of the audience through his undying persistence to connect with his daughter. Mark loves her tirelessly, even though he is somewhat ridiculed by Kayla and constantly failing to please her. Kayla’s eventual friend, Gabe, played by Jake Ryan, is nerdy and sweet, and a little lonely, too. Gabe’s devotion to Kayla’s friendship is refreshing in a movie full of rejection.
From the awkward tensions and the changing hormones, to the heavy pressure to fit in—Eighth Grade is riddled with moments that feel strikingly familiar. Burnham incorporates the new elements of adolescence that have come within the information age (Kayla is inseparable from her iPhone and prioritizes her social media presence), yet the eighth grade experience remains similarly painful and cringe-worthy to that of any generation.
The best part about eighth grade is that it ends. Eighth Grade also ends, but after only an hour and a half of its charms, you may wish it didn’t.
Tangerines
When you first stick a fingernail under the peel of a tangerine, sometimes it sends a fine spray of citrus up into the air, almost as if it’s blowing a fat raspberry at your face. The tangerine is small, bright, round and dotted with dark freckles. So it’s not hard to imagine that you’re squeezing the squishy cheeks of a seven-year-old aiming spittle straight at your eye. It’s charming, really, the tangerine. How can you not love it? A spherical fruit smaller than the width of your hand that has a sweet, tangy taste bursting from every pulp. Best of all, it comes with its own biodegradable wrapper.
The wrappers are, at the moment, littered all over the coffee table. Between me and my little brother, we’re on our way to finishing the entire box of Cuties brought earlier from the day’s groceries. The nylon mesh that covered these two dozen tangerines has been ripped open like a torn fishing net, releasing our plentiful catch into hungry, open mouths.
It’s me who does the peeling, of course. I have the best nails for the job (overgrown, out of laziness) and the best technique (taught by my grandma, I can peel a tangerine into the shape of a flower in a single, swift motion). Once the coat is removed, I split the fruit in half. One for my brother, one for me. Side by side on the living room floor, we chew and swallow our portions while the TV glows with the bright visuals of a Korean variety show. Canned laughter and sound effects bounce off the walls of the shadowy room. I peel the next tangerine.
I want to tell my brother that I love him. It’s just one of those things our family doesn’t talk about, like money. But we all know, deep down, regardless. Even without pressing our ears against the walls. Even without listening in to hushed conversations or peeking inside checkbooks when the parents are out of the room, we know. But I want to tell him that I love him, because it’s important that he knows, and I want to make sure that he knows. Just to be on the safe side.
I don’t tell my brother that I love him, but I peel him lots of tangerines.
I peel. I split. I hand. We chew and swallow together. Amidst the background noise I think—I never want to run out.
If this had happened yesterday, I would have known to read the signs—the ones nailed to weathered wooden posts in three places around the edge of the gray water, their metal corners bent out of shape by high speed winds of storms past.
At age nine, though, my eyes glossed over the signs with the thick black x’s, and my brother and I slid into the cherry red kayaks without a second glance at the clouds wrestling above us with more and more force each minute.
I giggled at the kayak paddle twice as long as me, fumbled with it as I tried to keep up with Noah’s practiced strokes toward the center of the lake. I watched him shoot glances back at me, a classic smirk of older sibling power that I tried to ignore as I strained my short arms, pushing away the water with little success.
After ten minutes of pure effort, I gave up with a huff, resting the length of my paddle across my lap and letting myself float where the lake wanted me to go. The surface of the water kept sharpening, growing peaks that caught under my boat and shoved me in a zigzag pattern. Noah stopped paddling, too. We jostled around the choppy Canadian lake in silence, hearing the trees hiss warnings at us as the wind gathered strength. There was a calmness in the swell of sound.
Then we started to feel a quickening pull. Sharing a sidelong glance, we realized we were both moving straighter now, the pointed noses of our kayaks sliding toward the same point in the distance. The wind was loud now, my flyaway hair practically blinding me in its flailing dance around my head. We panicked.
In a second, the lake had turned into a rapid flow, accelerating us toward something we could not see. Our paddles were useless. I asked Noah what to do, but his brain lagged, absorbing the flimsiness of our tiny plastic boats and the ever loudening crash of water that could only mean one thing.
“This is a waterfall,” I yelled in angry disbelief over the spray that now assaulted us from every angle. Noah just nodded, and then I was sure we were about to die, careen over the edge and smash on the rocky bottom and float away in bits as red as our boats.
I closed my eyes for a second. Felt a tug from behind. Remembered—how had I forgotten? Dad had paddled out far behind us.
A blur of motion, of water rushing one way and Dad yanking the tails of our boats the other. I can’t remember how I hung on, where I clung to my kayak, how long it took for him to reverse our course. What he was thinking as he stopped his two children from taking a fifty foot ride straight downward.
Dad was sweating badly from his hairline as he hauled the boats out of the water, and he couldn’t look at us for very long. He squeezed the bottom edge of his shirt in a ball, and a stream rushed out and onto the ground. Finally, a waterfall he could control.
I want to like boats and storms. They used to be my dad’s favorite things. Sometimes I think about what it felt like to take an extra big inhale not knowing if the next one would happen. Sometimes I think about how calm my brother was right before we dropped off the edge of the world.
Outlaws
It is a scorching orange day and the rising dust suffocates the air only to be swept further west between bouts of dueling and dancing. There are no clouds and the sky remains distant in baby-blue hues—above and removed from any foolery that could ever take place below. The camera pans down and reveals four maroon wooden buildings—church, saloon, jail, and, of course, bar—emerging alongside a beaten path towards the horizon. From planked windows and peeping behind drying white clothes, people gather to watch the commotion on that Sunday afternoon. Two slender figures rose opposite of each other; one wearing worn-out leather boots and sporting determination as a weapon and the other unsure of how the duel would play out, but resolute that they had to fight. Ire and Longing. Outlaw emotions.
Such was the picture I drew in my head as I sat down in a poorly lit college classroom for a Philosophy course. Much for my bemusement, little about the epistemology of outlaw emotions had anything to do with waging deathly duels and asserting with certitude your place on the land. At first sight, anyway. For feminist philosopher Alison Jaggar, outlaw emotions featured in a different kind of struggle—not being able to articulate why one feels displaced when marginalized, not being able to articulate a generalized malaise into a concrete understanding of how you are feeling. Trapped between feeling and not knowing, you stand suspended, not torn apart. “Why did he look at me that way?” “Why was I refused to enter that space?” “Why am I not enough?”
I sat and wondered how that rang familiar to me, not once, but at least thirty-two times. There had been compelling cases for being oppressed. A soft gay boy in a hard-Catholic family, an odd Latino in a sea of white (US) Americans, a “lost case” incapable of living perfectly well with his mind. If I can articulate it now, it would have been a mystery to my thirteen-old self so afraid to like boys—to like himself—that he got lost charming girls and half-passing for a man he could never be. For him, the days were yellow, blue, and green as his maturity. Emotions ran amok; it is early teenagerhood, after all. Still then, outlaw emotions ran deeper. Life had given him the presumed benefit—as there were others in that classroom who had certainly known them too—of meeting the outlaws early on. Looking no further than being six, he long felt he was something that others were not—he did not know what that was and when it was named, he remained confused as to what it really meant. He searched for meaning in why being soft, artistic, heck, feminine was a death sentence in the making. He couldn’t understand, his emotions ran from the law. They ran afraid to be seized, to be sized up, to be jailed and never again freed.
Unsure, he stood as a bystander watching the gruesome duel to take place on the dirty path below. Ire and Longing fought for nothing; they fought for having to fight. They were the same and yet the rising red dirt in the air made them look like enemies. Shots fired, they missed, but hit the boy bent over an empty turquoise flower bed on the corner window. He was hit, unbeknownst to him consequences or reasons. It simply hurt. “Why did he look at me that way?” “Why me?”
I am awakened from my digression with the professor’s overdone awkward laughter. It is a fading burgundy afternoon and the rain falls and settles over muddled puddles. The clouds on the horizons hint at a different moment, much calmer now. No slender figures fighting, no tearing apart. Just the me learning about outlaw emotions and all of the other ones wishing they knew it before.
Anti-Bodies
The human immune system is complex and difficult to understand on a good day — that is, when things are going right and every part functions as it should. It is a microcosmic society of its own, a game of life with many of the same players we encounter on a much larger scale as we go about our daily interactions. Divided by function into either the innate and adaptive immune responses (or sometimes both), we can compare our immune cells to human development throughout a lifetime and identify some of the same behaviors we notice in the macrocosmic world around us.
The innate response includes such cells as neutrophils, macrophages, and mast cells, which attack invaders in a relatively childlike manner; mast cells release molecules to produce inflammation and attract the help of other cells, much like an upset baby crying because that is the only way they know how to communicate and elicit the response they need from a parent. Macrophages, on the other hand, simply engulf every foreign invader they see, like a toddler who is constantly putting things in their mouth. Neutrophils are a combination of both, engulfing other cells and releasing toxic granules to kill them. All of the innate immune cells respond very generally; they have not yet learned to tailor their communication and methods of attack to any specific pathogen.
The adaptive response, on the other hand, resembles a more mature stage of human development. By this point in the immune response, cells have identified the specific pathogen and learned how best to attack it; B cells and the antibodies they produce bind to an invader and kill it, digesting the intruder and presenting pieces of it on the B cell’s own surface to alert other cells to the presence of danger. These other cells, T cells, then recognize the pieces of pathogen and are activated to carry out a number of varying responses. B cells can be compared to college students or young professionals, learning the standards of their professors or employers and figuring out how best to meet them in their work. T cells are similar to groggy adult night owls; while the children of the innate immune system require no prompting to jump out of bed and watch Saturday morning cartoons (or attack foreign invaders), T cells, like most adults, can only function once they have been awoken from their slumber by the shrill tones of the alarm clock (or T cell activation). Additionally, some of these B and T cells even go on to serve as “memory cells,” the wise elders of the immune system charged with the task of preserving the memory of these invaders and how to effectively attack them much like grandparents pass on their stories and advice to younger generations.
You see, we are a parallel universe of our own biology. Our immune system represents a society of its own, made up of many individuals at different stages of development and maturity all with different jobs and purposes, much like a world of interacting humans of all ages and interests. We are what we are made of, so to speak, the sum of our many parts, whether on the scale of the body or the antibody.
it’s so interesting how we’re essentially mirrors of ourselves inside & out! i especially loved your descriptions in the second paragraph. i usually find science hard to grasp but explained in this way, i learned a lot. i wish i had you as my bio teacher in high school!
Really liked the last line! Kind of a plot twist and satisfying culmination all in one.
To be humble.
I have recently embarked on a quest to express myself in the humblest manner I can. I’m not sure yet what this means to me, but I have started by studying friends who I deem the most humble. I have started with Bean, they are often described as “non-threatening” which I translate into humble. Bean is very kind, and often helps others even if it is a hinderance. They are interested and invested in the well being of others, letting their own agenda be dictated by others if it does not offend them. Offensive to Bean, is all that is negative in their perception. They do their best to contain their frustration with such things, and respectfully admonishes that by which they are offended.
I informed Bean about the quest, and they conflated it with humbling oneself. They told me “that might be good for you Will, maybe you do think too highly of yourself, maybe you’re slightly less sick than you think you are.”
“No.” I snapped back. “I can’t lose my confidence.” I have no desire in thinking of myself as less than. I am eternally devoted to thinking of myself as potentially greater. Growth is my goal, and my growth would be curtailed if I were to cap my potential. In this sense, I am the greatest that never was, the greatest to be. It is paradoxical; however, confidence gives you power to achieve what you are uncertain of. Knowing this, I want to hold as much as my hands can carry.
Perception is what I am challenged by: how can I be perceived as my most humble self? I have figured that it begins with not talking about oneself too often. Also refraining from sharing unsolicited details. Quiet people are always considered humble, I should also figure out a way to shut up. In these ways I can at least be considered modest, which is a step closer to humble. The most humble always does their best. They boast none of what they will and have done, rather, relish silently until contentment.
This essay is in direct violation of my guide to become modest, in that, I am talking about myself quite a bit, and boasting a fair amount. I can consciously do this because I am taking advantage of a loophole. I was asked to write briefly on a subject of interest. In this case, details were not unsolicited, they were welcomed.