My body does not belong. This truth cowers beneath the shroud of self-preservation that is threatened in my presence and secured through my absence. Whether American patriotism in the wake of 9/11 as I’m called a “terrorist sand nigger,” or Yik-Yak anonymity telling me to go back to where I’ve never been and could never return—for you have plundered it of its wealth, destroyed it of its culture, robbed what you enjoyed and called it your own.
Face the Vaxx
Imagine being the parent of a five-year-old with childhood leukemia. You feel as though the attention you pay to your son’s happiness is more important than your career, your hobbies, or your personal goals. You strive for a balance between carefully managing his health and granting him the freedom to roam and dream. Communicating to him and to others in your life the implications of his cancer—not to mention fielding the sentiment of pity that inevitably comes your way—is a daily task that requires bravery and patience. No matter how much you worry about him, your greatest hope is that he enjoys each new day as it comes.
Re-Living Rocket Power
There’s nothing like microwaveable taquitos on a hot summer day in sunny San Diego. I spatter some Tapatío onto the paper plate. It’s July something. The T.V. buzzes in the background. I’m on the couch. My Converse teeter off the corner of the coffee table. Then, I hear it. And with the fanfare of nostalgia, I’m reunited with the theme song that started it all.
We are riders on a mission,
Action kids in fun condition.
Prepare to countdown...
Rocket Power!
Nature Versus Nurture
“Has anyone applied to be co-chair next year?” asks the head of outreach, glancing from one co-chair to the other.
The application went out a few weeks ago. Unlike last year, there have been no murmurs about who is going to apply. No one can put a finger on a stand-out leader in the club. One of the current co-chairs is a junior. He’s tired and quiet.
Benchwarmers
I am in a room filled with a couple hundred people who are legally mandated to be here. The resentment is palpable. We’re trying to avoid thinking about it, or talking to each other. The woman to my left is knitting a sock. The man to my right is pretending to read, but I can see his fingers flick through the phone held up behind the book cover. Outside in the courtyard, people are taking smoke breaks; inside, some just stare into space. Everyone appears bored, apathetic and desperate to leave.
We’re gathered here for what the sing-songy judge on the rows of 1990s-era TV screens calls, “one of our most important and fulfilling civic responsibilities.”
Strawberry Hills Forever
Walk past the staid City Hall offices of Colorado Springs city councilmembers and, tucked in a far corner of the third floor, you’ll find the chamber of Councilman Bill Murray. On his desk, an orange lava lamp bubbles next to a set of VR goggles. In the corner, there are three placards—red, green and yellow—attached to yardsticks that read “False” “1/2 False” and “True.”
“I used those at a hearing about the City of Champions initiative,” Murray chuckles. “They wouldn’t let me talk, so I just stood up there and every time they said something wrong…”
He hoists the red “False” sign with an impish grin.
Control Freaks
Barack Obama has stayed busy in office: He fabricated his birth certificate to feign his American citizenship, held “death panels” to decide who would live and who would die under Obamacare, mandated contraceptives for religious institutions in order to destroy religious liberty, blasted the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig offshore to rally support for his environmental agenda, organized Syrian gas attacks to prompt conflict in the Middle East, called for the Sandy Hook elementary school massacre to further gun-control lawmaking, and also instituted internment camps in which to place any and all Americans who resist his decisions—allegedly.
To Thine Own Selves Be True
English crime novelist Agatha Christie once wrote, “The simplest explanation is always the most likely.” This adage hasn’t stopped thousands of people from believing in more complicated explanations of seemingly undisputed events. From Neil Armstrong’s 1969 moon landing to Barack Obama’s birth certificate, Americans have discussed and propagated conspiracy theories for decades.
Kendrick and Kanye
Kendrick Lamar has made a habit of ignoring expectations, this time by releasing a new album only weeks after the coronation of his 2015 knockout “To Pimp A Butterfly” (TPAB) at the 2016 Grammy Awards. “untitled unmastered” is an untailored compilation of extras written during the production of “TPAB.” Ambiguous titling and a cover resembling a swatch of drab green carpet give listeners the impression that the music is played in a void, a departure from Lamar’s characteristic storytelling format. On individual track-level, however, it is clear he has not abandoned his perfectionism. Though “untitled” is nothing markedly new from Lamar, who can fault that?
Party's Over
After gaining a majority in both houses two years ago, the Grand Ole Party was poised for a period of unrestrained legislative and political dominance heading into the 2016 election. Their fortune drastically changed, however, upon the candidacy and subsequent primary domination of a certain toupe-wearing, loud mouth demagogue who is by now known and feared (or revered) by Americans from San Diego to Sarasota.
Story Day
I work in a library because it didn’t pan out with my startup sticker business. I used to make bumper stickers about atheism: evolving homo sapiens in tie-dye colors and stuff like that. It didn’t work out, so I went back to school for library science. Everyone else in my graduating year made a long distance book club and I wasn’t invited to be in it. I don’t mean to sound dramatic or self-pitying or anything like that. But I do want to clarify that literally every single other person in my library science graduating class (seventeen people) is in this long distance book club and I was not invited to be in it.
Mercurial
Mood stabilizers sound like they’d do more than they do. Nothing has really changed, except now I get migraines and alcohol makes me sick. I see the school psychiatrist about once a month. She asks me how the medicine is going, and I give her a list of side effects. I tell her that I haven’t had a manic episode, but the day Kendrick’s untitled/unmastered came out I spent six hours transcribing and posting the lyrics before anyone else got to it. She makes a note of this. “Sounds like hypomania,” she says.
Nothing But the Truth
One Man Race
I received four emails from the Clinton Campaign Wednesday, and that’s not unusual. It’s irritating. The whole four email a day thing, still an excruciating seven months away from the general election. Almost all emails ask for me to “chip in just $1” and the area goal for today will be met—the Clinton campaign safe for another day. In the day to day flood of emails, it’s easy to forget that there are uncontested elections these days. Elections where there is only one candidate.
A Day Without Plastic
A great, great man once said, “if you have never lived a day without plastic, you have never, ever lived.” That man probably did not know that there is plastic coating on most metal, and thus did not know that to truly abstain from the use of plastic would mean never leaving your bed—or more accurately, the floor of your room.
Plastic Love
Bury My Heart in Kyrgyzstan
Twin Strangers
Two eerily similar faces stare out from my computer screen as I enter my information. The alluring sentence “Twin Strangers: Find your lookalike from anywhere in the world” glares out in large letters at the top of the page. The web site was created earlier this year for people around the world to find their doppelgangers. As I create my username and enter my face, eyebrow, eye, nose and lip shape, I wonder about the origin of this strange phenomenon of seeking connection through physical similarity.
Masked
By creating a town that obsesses over the death of a beautiful young girl, [Twin Peaks] writers Lynch and Frost perpetuate sexist notions of women in a society that preys on them. (Even the title “Twin Peaks” is an insensitive reference to female anatomy and has been used to name a knockoff Hooters restaurant.)
Speak No Evil
Last month, Bernie Sanders, socialist senator from Vermont and 2016 presidential candidate, spoke to 12,000 students at Liberty University, a Christian college known for its conservatism. Unsurprisingly, Liberty University doesn’t often invite self-proclaimed socialists to speak at their campus. In fact, Sanders was the first Democratic presidential candidate to do so. But this event wasn’t interesting just for the content of Sanders’ words but more for the fact that these opposing perspectives met at all.