Tag: blog
Would You Like to Keep the Strips?
This isn’t about shame. It’s about how little space there is between empowerment and survival–and how blurry the line gets when you’re trying to live with dignity.
Doing All the Things I Meant to Do Ten Years Ago
Here I’ve spent all this time building an identity as a rough and tough, non-driving native New Yorker: city savvy, fast walking and rare.
Letter from a Faculty Advisor
I believe in 12th Street because it offers opportunities for empathy and community, while functioning as a digital creative stage. The publishing process brings people and ideas together and ultimately benefits everyone involved.
Norwegian Concepts
This feeling is called Yalmståd by the Norwegian people. There is no English equivalent. Even calling it a “feeling” does it a disservice; it is both a way of seeing and of being. All we can say is thank God; as the American dialect seems increasingly interpretive, movements like Yalmståd give us the means of understanding our world.
Inheriting Grandma’s Sex Shop
Vanessa and I consider the fact that shame will be the end of these humble businesses staying in stores.
This is Not a TV Review
Maybe it’s the writer in me who can’t resist turning casual conversations into character studies, who treats TV episodes like weekly installments of self imposed personal growth homework.
Flaco II: At the New York Historical
Nothing could bring him back. And then I heard his voice.
Author Jason Reynolds never gets boring
For his 2024 novel Twenty-Four Seconds, Reynolds realized that there were not many books addressing “black boys’ tenderness.”
Papa, Ieyasu, and Me
Outside the wide kitchen window, the silhouette of Mount Fuji grew hazy in the dusk. When I declared, “Ieyasu is my favorite,” the pride in Papa’s smile was palpable through his thick, silvery beard.
For Comrades and Lovers
More than anything, Glenn Ligon’s UC installation embodies Whitman’s ideas of solitude as time spent alone that inversely enables someone to come closer to the city around them.
I Bought a Rug
Recently, I looked around my room and thought, if I were to die inexplicably in my sleep, I would be surrounded by nothing.
Unbecoming Homeless
Who cares about which direction the stocks are headed when you don’t know where you and your family will be sleeping tonight?
Cecilia Gentili’s Legacy, Southern Transness, and the Reclamation of Sainthood
Above all, Cecilia embodied the spirit of a saint, transcending the boundaries of convention and challenging sanctimony as a trans sex worker of color.
Ode to Looking Down
Looking up at the world was now far clearer and a lot less scary, but self-preserving habits are hard to break. I mean, I had spent most of my life avoiding looking up for fear that I would be perceived as rude! But in Western culture especially, eye contact shows you’re polite. Eye contact with a handshake establishes confidence. Eye contact is a way of connecting with someone and showing them that you care about what they have to say. But can’t I look at the ground and still be a good listener? Can’t I still look at the ground and be a confident person if I feel like I can protect myself better? Can looking down ever be seen as a positive?
Out of My Head and Into My Body: Why Gardening Makes Me a Better Writer
It is equally easy for me to fantasize about being a writer as it is to fantasize about being a plant person. These fantasies of lifestyle and values echo each other. It is romantic until you must edit. It is romantic until you must weed.
Solo Travel
I’ve always felt like a social butterfly, an influencer, the life of the party, etc.—but I’ve also always felt alone. I love my friends and family, but I covet my time alone, which is why I enjoy solo traveling so much.
Beauty is A Bad Investment, But I Can’t Stop Buying
I think it’s foolish not to appreciate the creative aesthetic of beauty. Beauty is literally some women and femmes’ livelihood and often beauty is the job that will pay most when other jobs are still overrun by men. The question shouldn’t be is beauty worth or time, but rather what you’re getting out of beauty.
Shitty Luck
Supposedly, there is only a .02% chance of getting crapped by a pigeon each time you venture outside. But my chances seem to veer closer to 100%.
Obituary of an Ice Cream Sandwich, or “The Monks and the Trees”
Tuesday, September 21 2021 The grain of the wood floor pulls me deeper as my feet find theirgrounding and my head extends toward the ceiling. I stretch myarms wide, halting the rotation of my right […]
The Home Within my Hips and Head
In time, I learned how to cheat my body’s system, depriving it of food and exhausting it with exercise. I started to walk with my thighs spread apart from each other, keeping my hips locked and my gait wide. My hips tried to relax, begging me to stop putting them in the middle of my mind’s complex-driven conquest. But I was too terrified to hear them plead, terrified of being hated by the cruel boys in my class who wanted someone emptier than I was.