At the end of sixth grade—a year fraught with the kind of drama only 11-year-old girls can come up with—I made a promise to myself: No more talking shit. I do not think I ever really thought I was going to follow through with it. It was the kind of[Read More…]
Off the Board
Meryl Streep a god, Roger Ebert her faithful follower
There are a few moments in every person’s life that define who they become, the legacy that they leave behind. For me, this moment came when I stumbled upon a line with such RAW power that even recalling it makes me shake in my metaphorical boots. I remember it like[Read More…]
Life expectancy inequality is a moral outrage
I was born in Montgomery County, Maryland, in 2004. The life expectancy of babies born at that place and time is 79 years. Three kilometres away, in Washington, D.C., it’s 74 years. I’ve spent most of my life in Seattle (in a county with a life expectancy of 83 years),[Read More…]
Finding myself underwater
When I was three years old, my parents signed me up for my first non-parented swim class at my local recreation centre. They would drag me out of bed, dress me in a pink frilly swimsuit, and sit on the water’s edge watching my class for what felt like hours.[Read More…]
What to do if you can’t be an astronaut
I’ve always wanted to be an astronaut. When I was seven, I begged my mom for a telescope, convinced that the €40 plastic lens would equip me well enough to pierce through the polluted Parisian sky and uncover the secrets of the universe. I never got the telescope, and so[Read More…]
Grounds for delight
As winter rolls in, my gait has begun to resemble the shuffle of a dejected penguin. Head permanently bowed for fear that one poorly planned step will result in death by slippage, my walks to campus now provoke a deep sense of mourning for warmer, and more posturally vertical, days[Read More…]
The art of enjoying your hobbies
A lot of my hobbies are ones that I am mediocre at. On the guitar, I can only play a few chords. I run at a very average pace, and not as consistently as I would like. I can probably draw better than the average person, but I am completely[Read More…]
Learning to go slow
This past summer was a summer of long drives. I would put on a podcast, occasionally find a passenger, and hit the road in my beat-up blue Subaru. Ironically, at some point, while speeding on long stretches of Route 175, I also came to embrace moving slowly. I have always[Read More…]
How to take a Mattwalk
I’ve never been a great sleeper. If left alone, my brain will run a marathon’s worth of circles, especially when it has something to chew on. The problem came to a head during my first year. The more I contorted myself on my residence-supplied mattress, the more tightly constricted I[Read More…]
Birds: My mortal enemies
I didn’t see a single bird during the U.S. government shutdown between Dec. 22, 2018, and Jan. 25, 2019. While the feathery fiends in British Columbia may have just been taking the month off from antagonizing my fellow high schoolers on the frosty coast of Vancouver Island, I choose to[Read More…]