On dating your dad
I’ve slipped through the fingers of young men like water. Now I find myself settled at the bottom of a coffee mug with your sonogram printed on it.
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I’ve slipped through the fingers of young men like water. Now I find myself settled at the bottom of a coffee mug with your sonogram printed on it.
Whatever happened last year, it’s in the past now. It’s a new year and a new semester, which means you have a fresh crop of professors to whom you should apologize.
I’m not a feminist because I hate men. I’m a feminist because I hate my dad.
Don’t flirt with anyone at party with a trashcan filled with booze. Don’t flirt with anyone at a party where they keep trying to tell you about reading “Infinite Jest” while you’re just trying to find the store brand orange soda in the filthy kitchen. Don’t go to parties and/or flirt. Adopt a cat from the SPCA and hang out with him and your roommate all the time. Only go to parties when you feel like getting dolled up. Your look can be “head of the brothel whom no one is allowed to touch or look at directly.”
Thanks to my mother nurturing my healthy self-esteem you can catch me jerking it to my own image in the H&M fitting room mirrors on any given day. But we’re not all lucky enough to have mothers who forgot to instill hang ups as well as once forgetting to pick us up from ballet.
That feeling when you’re alone in the Istanbul airport at 3 a.m. and the only songs on your phone are the songs you loved in high school and only now do you really truly GET Neutral Milk Hotel.
The ideal job for my specific skills and goals would be one in which I bury myself in a hole. Every day I would show up at 9 a.m. on the dot and rake sand over myself, whispering, “Yes, very good, the perfect job.”
April Fools! It is! It really is!
HEALTHY
How do you know someone is “The One?” Is it the fact that he's a white guy with dreadlocks? Is it that he was kind of yelling at a girl for not understanding something about wine prices? Is it enough that he's a bartender? Who knows, but whatever it is, I feel it in my heart. I know this is the first boy I’ll ever punch right in the face. And, if I’m lucky, he’ll punch me in mine. I think he feels it too, because when I said, "Dude, you need to chill out," he did chill out but also he was very terse in pouring my Strongbow. I think I've got a chance. Maybe I’ll take the subtle route, making sure he’s in hearing range when I casually mention to my friend that I carry a hammer around in my purse since knives are illegal in Edinburgh. That’ll definitely show him I’m DTB (down to brawl).
I. Transferring flights is a bad experience but who has ever had a good experience transferring flights? Writing about how much of a pain it is to wait in line to go through security as your plane takes off would be a cheap shot at relatability humor. This isn’t a Buzzfeed article. It’s in list form but it’s different because I’m using Roman numerals instead of numbers.
It’s 4 a.m. and your eyes hurt. Your hands look like fleshy spiders full of tiny bones. Hands are so weird. Are you typing? Yes, but you’re not writing. Wow, what a stressful situation to be in. Who put you in this situation? Who did this to you? Oh, yes. That’s right. It was you. You did this to you. You ran into an acquaintance on the way to the library and told her in a jolly mordant voice that you have to write a seven-page paper in one night, as if this was a fate the universe imposed on you. How dare you. How dare you.
In the Facebook event for “What Can We Do?: Advocating Against Sexual Assault and Standing with Survivors,” anti-sexual violence organization One Less describes what their roundtable discussion is not: “Rather than being an forum for criticism and frustration, we hope that this event can empower students to make a difference by helping those most impacted by this very sensitive issue.” The University’s institutional organizations have provided no forum for criticism and frustration. Criticism and frustration have become demonized, twin nefarious specters that threaten our apparently delicate community.
I wasn’t known as a garbage girl until my personality and myriad questionable personal habits were juxtaposed with that of the world’s cleanest boy. I will call this boy Y. As in “Y can’t you chill out and let me revel in the limitless freedom of summertime fun?” Sometimes you try your best and despite your most valiant efforts to contain the mess that you are, you cannot appease the impossibly high standards of a fastidious summer term housemate. Even now I can feel myself putting on a cultivated mask, sitting up a little straighter and using words I vaguely remember from SAT prep in order to impress the boy who looked at me the way a missionary might look at a native. I’m not saying that living with Y for a month was comparable to the subjugation of indigenous peoples under cultural imperialism, nor am I saying that Y was a cruel and tyrant. On the other hand, that is exactly what I am saying.
It can be difficult to tell if you are depressed or just hungry, if you are anxious or you just need to poop. According to an article on my internet browser’s reading list (between “List of Demons in the Ars Goetia” and “Earth’s Most Stunning Natural Fractal Patterns,”) the emotions of fear, happiness and sadness are all based on common neural building blocks. Thanks to a year spent phoning it in to AP Pyschology, I know about the two-factor theory of emotion, which posits that a physiological arousal state precedes the actual labeling of an emotion. A study in which male subjects would cross either a low to the ground bridge or a precarious suspension bridge of terror found that the men who were high above the ground and feeling it in the soles of their feet were way more likely to flirt with the hot research assistant. Sexual arousal was in actuality mislabeled fear. It all comes from from the same primordial abyss of adrenaline and the human need to survive. These men were duped by their frightened boners. If I have made any egregious mistakes in my understanding of psychology, please send me an email so I can respond in an overly aggressive manner. Heated words will be exchanged, we will arrange to fight that very evening, and as fists collide with muscle and flesh, our heart rates will soar, our pupils will dilate, and it might just be love.
I have never planned my wedding, largely because I have never gone to a wedding. My uncle never sealed the deal, even though my mom once tried to get me to call him an ask about it. Even as a child in the single digit age range I thought “This is absolutely none of my business.” My business was regulated to cutting triangles out of my clothing and secretly hoping I got caught. My mom’s friends’ kids all live in Oregon and by the time they started marrying their high school sweethearts, I was too busy being sad in high school to go. The lack of consideration towards nuptial ceremonies doesn’t come from a place of superiority, but a place of not having cable television and therefore never seeing wedding shows. I have no cultural precedent, all I know is my parents had a bagpipe player perform Serbian folk songs at their wedding to celebrate the heritage mixing of two white people. As a sidenote, every room I’ve ever lived in looks permanently like I just moved in so how do I know what flowers look good together? I don’t. I don’t know.
Cult of the Void
My dad is 6’9’’. Do you understand how tall that is? Let me give you a hint: I don’t fear death.
Start with some stretches and remind yourself that mortality is inevitable. Your body is naught but a transient and coarsely assembled mass of blood, tendons and assorted viscera. Ultimately your memory will fade into oblivion no matter what you do and no matter how strong your calves are in life. Nothing matters. Now you’re ready to work out.
Turn down the brightness on your laptop and take a good hard look at yourself. What’s the end goal here, kid? What’s the plan? Are you trying to stick around long enough to have your own song? Get married? Why? So you can weaken the gene pool? Because now we both know that you will be combining the genomes of “mediocre at sex” and “pathological need to be liked.” So enjoy your marriage and your small-boned offspring. Enjoy mumbling in half-hearted agreement with whatever Karen says at the PTA meetings even though Karen doesn’t even know what genetic engineering means, because this is the character you have cultivated. Enjoy “treating yourself” to a stale Starbucks pastry after you take your kids to the dentist, because they undoubtedly have a proclivity for cavities.