Love Issue 2.14.18

February 14, 2018 | 34st.com

LOVE NOTES

ESSAY CONTEST WINNERS

69th STREET GRINDR AND SELF LOVE

february FEBRUARY14, 2018 Nick Joyner, Editor–in–Chief Remi Lederman, Managing Editor Angela Huang, Audience Engagement Director Annabelle Williams, Assignments Editor Autumn Powell, Media Director Haley Weiss, Word on the Street Editor Jamie Gobreski, Word on the Street Editor Emily Schwartz, Ego Editor Zoe Albano–Oritt, Music Editor Julia Bell, Senior Features Editor Sabrina Qiao, Special Features Editor Colin Lodewick, Long–Term Features Editor Dalton DeStefano, Developing Features Editor Lily Snider, Style Editor Catalina Dragoi, Film & TV Editor Sherry Tseng, Arts Editor Daniel Bulpitt, Lastpage Editor Ha Tran, Photo Editor Danny Rubin, Video Editor Lea Eisenstein, Copy Director Chris Muracca, Print Director Ego Beats: Valentina Escudero, Sami Canaan, Caroline Riise, Caroline Curran, Maryanne Koussa Music Beats: Paul Litwin, Amy Marcus, Arjun Swaminathan, Isabella Fertel, Noah Kest, Michelle Pereira, Holden Caplan, Chris Troop, Natalia Joseph

3 WORD ON THE STREET

Having Feelings for a Hookup is Okay

4 EGO

EOTW: Couple, Dear Penn Freshman, Freshman Love Story

8 MUSIC

A Crow Looked, Anderson.

Paak, Science of Love Music

Features Staff: Emily Rush, Angie Lin, Sharon Christner, Annika Iyer, Emily Cieslak Style Beats: Liz Kim, Frankie Reitmeyer, Caroline Harris, Molly Hessel Film & TV Beats: Jonnell Burke, Ana West, Avneet Randhawa, Naomi Elegant, Bella Essex, Zovinar Khrimian Arts Beats: Sophie Burkholder, Lizzy Lemieux, Margaret Zhang, Xinyi Wan Design Editors: Lucy Ferry, Gillian Diebold, Ben Zhao, Christine Lam, Alana Shukovsky, Zack Greenstein, Morgan McKeever, Teagan Aguirre, Judy Zhang, Katie Waltman

11 STYLE

69th Street, Restaurants to Eat Alone, Date Yourself

Lastpage Beat: Eliana Doft Staff Writers: Sophie Xi, Cass Phanord, Tamara Gelband, Andreas Pavlou, Jennifer Cullen, Isabella Simonetti, Lily Zirlin, Vanessa Wanyandeh, Shinyoung Noh, Emma Moore, Anna Callahan, Sammy Gordon, Sydney Gelman, Charlotte Bausch, Jacob Winick, Alix Steerman, Sara Merican

14 ESSAY CONTEST

Illustrators: Jessi Olarsch, Brad Hong, Anne Marie Grudem, Reese Berman, Judy Choi, Carly Ryan, Saranya Sampath, Catherine Liang, Anne Chen Staff Photographers: Dayz Terry, Virginia Rodowsky, Christina Piasecki, Bill He, Avalon Morrell, Emma Boey, David Zhou Video Staff: Megan Kyne, Jean Chapiro, Anab Aidid, Sophie Pelosi, Abdul Sohu Copy Editors: Kira Horowitz, Kate Poole, Anna Waldzinska, Serena Miniter, Sarah Poss, Amber Auslander, Kimberly Batista, Riley Wagner, Morgan Potts

32 FILM & TV

LGBT couples, Foreign Movies, Short Love Films

Sofia Price, Analytics Editor Cole Bauer, Senior Marketing Associate Marketing Associates: Lauren Donato, Chae Hahn, Brittany Levy, McKay Norton, Hanniel Dizon, Carly Shoulberg, Merry Gu, Paige Fishman Unless otherwise noted, all photos are by Dayz Terry, Virginia Rodowsky, Ha Tran, and Christina Piasecki.

Contacting 34th Street Magazine: If you have questions, comments, complaints or letters to the editor, email Nick Joyner, Editor–in–Chief, at joyner@dailypennsylvanian.com. You can also call us at (215) 422–4640. www.34st.com

17 ARTS

Art History Kisses, Artsy First Dates, Love Statue History

"Mariah was born skinny, but her talent made her thin." ©2018 34th Street Magazine, The Daily Pennsylvanian, Inc. No part may be reproduced in whole or in part without the express, written consent of the editors (but I bet we will give you the a–okay.) All rights reserved. 34th Street Magazine is published by The Daily Pennsylvanian, Inc., 4015 Walnut St., Philadelphia, Pa., 19104, every Wednesday.

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19 LASTPAGE Vday Cards

LETTERFROM THEEDITOR

I

don't think I've ever been this excited for an issue.

34th Street Magazine's Love Issue is everything that we're about as a publication. Raw, funny, weird. At times intense. Just like the undergraduate years and our society's obsession with Valentine's Day. When I was nine years old, I remember listening to "These Words (I Love You, I Love You)" from Now That's What I Call Music! 20 in the car. I remember clear as day leaning forward to ask my mom halfway through the song "Why are there so many songs about love?"

"Because it affects everyone," she told me. Or something like that. Forget my foggy memory of the quotations.

What's important is that I consolidated my first ideas about love in the backseat of a Volkswagen Passat while listening to Natasha Bedingfield. My conception of love hasn't really changed much since then.

Love is messy, sticky, ugly, and something I can't claim to fully understand. It is not something I want to box in.

Love is the muddiest of all emotions and nothing will ever capture it. Still, we wanted to try to represent it in all its multifaceted glory in this issue.

Our Love Issue is a hybrid of staff pieces and reader submissions. This particular stack of paper blurs the boundaries between 34th Street and the larger Penn student body. We are a magazine for and by Penn students, and a place for any and all voices. Our authors are on a level playing field: all experiences, thoughts, and opinions valid. The Street writer/non–Street writer distinction becomes unimportant.

I want to thank all the students who submitted to our Love Issue contest and opened up and shared their hilarious and truly touching stories with us. We are nothing without y'all.

As you thumb through this issue, please excuse our outpouring of millennial pink. I have a weakness. This issue was a labor of love from so many writers, designers, editors, and illustrators on staff, and we had to convey that with the color scheme.

I hope you read this issue and experience a kaleidoscope of emotions. I dry–heaved, choked–up, and self–contemplated, all in the same ten–minute span.

It's only right. Whatever your Valentine's Day plans, I hope that reading this issue is a part of them. Remember that today is only as important as you let it be. I've got a date with some rotisserie chicken and Twin Peaks. That's pretty damn important to me.

I'm not sure how to end this, so I'll leave you with the great words of the prophetess SZA: "It's about LOoOoOOOOOOoOoooOooooOOVeeee."

WORD ON THE STREET

word on the

STREET

HAVING FEELS FOR A HOOKUP IS OKAY. I'm done pretending I'm okay with emotionless relationships.

Isabella Fierro

Truthfully, I’m not sure I’m in the same place right now, but I’ll let you know if things change. Hope you have an awesome summer!

See ya.

I couldn’t breathe the moment I got the text. I had never expressed my feelings for someone, let alone for someone I had a physical relationship with. Throughout the duration of this hookup, I convinced myself that I was capable of not developing feelings for someone I was having sex with.

When I finally acknowledged my emotions and told him, this is how he responded. For Lulu Wang | Illustrator the longest time I couldn’t understand why by hookups by day and patiently waited for I felt devastated. But then I realized: I had failed to maintain the emotionless relationship effortless late–night texts most weekends. I was so eager to uphold the image of being “chill” that I that Penn hookup culture idealizes.

My introduction to this culture began with my began to bottle up every emotion that dealt with first kiss on a frat dance floor as my hallmates the people I was hooking up with, even to a point cheered me on. Within two months of moving of intense anxiety. When I finally acknowledged into the Quad, I was avoiding former “DFMOs” and expressed that I had developed feelings for a on Locust Walk and swiping on Tinder during partner, the denial I received turned into personal my study breaks. Like many other freshmen, I devastation. I thought I had done everything right was thrown into this new world with no former in denying my emotions, maintaining a casual experience in physical relationships and with no relationship for a full semester, and enthusiastically expectations as to how people should act once replying to every text and invite. How could I end involved in these relationships. Since then, I’ve had up hurt despite behaving how I thought I was to navigate this culture of casual and emotionless expected to? That final message that said “That’s hard to say in person, I get it…I’m not sure I’m in hookups on my own.

Penn’s hookup culture has always been a source the same place right now” was more of a reflection of internal conflict for me. In Catholic school, I of my own failure to fit in with hookup culture’s was taught that premarital sex and birth control expectation of emotionless behavior than of were sins. As a young woman now capable of unrequited feelings.

I only felt the effects of these emotions when having sexual relationships, I felt liberated and forced to confront them with the arrival of empowered to be confident in my own body. On the other hand, I also felt that this culture coerced summer. With few distractions, I constantly me into fitting an expectation of behavior while reevaluated my situation and labeled myself as the having these sexual relationships. Through casual cause of my own depression. I convinced myself chats with friends and overheard conversations on that it wasn’t valid to feel hurt and that I would campus, I got the idea that everyone is expected have been better off if I hadn’t ever expressed that to either have a consistent hookup or is looking I had feelings for another person. Something that once made me feel liberated and excited instead for someone new.

Over time, I conditioned myself to accept these left me feeling idiotic and used.

It was through a combination of early morning cultural norms. I began to accept being ignored runs around the Baltimore Harbor, repeated plays

of SZA’s Ctrl, and a rejuvenating trip home to California that I was able to come to terms with the culture I found so detrimental. I developed a newfound confidence and called myself “Isaballer” as a means of reminding myself that no one I knew or hooked up with had the power to make myself feel like anything less. Once I returned to campus I reconnected with old friends, reactivated my Tinder account, and created a Spotify playlist called “Passing old hookups on Locust.” As I re–entered the hookup culture, I thought this confidence helped me to finally have casual hookups and feel nothing. I felt as though I had finally mastered something that used to be so damaging—at least until I began to develop feelings for someone else.

I want to have someone to blame for this toxic culture. I’ve even tried creating a “men ain’t shit” reminder on my phone. In reality, I’m also complicit in this culture. No one comes to Penn with the intention of using and disrespecting others for the motive of sex. It is something we learn from each other and something we can change through our own actions.

I’ve found that I have to demand the respect I know I deserve, no matter how difficult it is.

You have to express what you want, whether it be during a hookup, in defining a relationship, or even in telling someone how much they hurt you. The only reason it’s viewed as weird to be honest and upfront about your emotions is because it’s so uncommon within these norms which we uphold. I am by no means an expert in hookup culture or relationships, but I’ve come to understand that while being honest and direct is terrifying, it can help you to find your confidence and your worth. All of this is not to say that I’ve mastered the culture around me. I still come out of hookups feelings used, I am treated below what I know I deserve, and I have issues that still need to be confronted. But in already coming so far, I know I’ll find someone who will give me their all.

Until then, I’m doing pretty baller on my own.

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EGO

EGO EGO OF OF THE THE WEEK WEEK This week’s Egos Of The Week provide a Rihanna concert, Philz Coffee, and the Mask and Wig band to remind you of just how single you are this Valentine’s Day.

ALLIE RUBIN MAJOR

JAKE FISCHER

COGNITIVE SCIENCE

HOMETOWN ACTIVITIES

FLEMINGTON, NJ

Chair of Nominations and Elections Committee, Friars Senior Society, Chi Omega, saxophonist for Bloomers

Street: So, how did you guys meet?

AR: We kind of bumped into each other a lot— JF: Yeah, we, like, we definitely did. Thanksgiving Break I get a Snapchat from Allie and she just asks me to go to the Mask and Wig Charity Ball, and it was a bit of a surprise because we hadn't really known each other too well, but I really enjoyed hanging out with Allie, so 100% said yeah. One thing led to another, we just kept hanging out afterwards.

Street: Seems like you guys are both pretty involved. How do you make time for one another?

AR: I think that something

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people have noted about our relationship is that we're both pretty respectful of our individuality, so even though we're together and we spend time with each other, we are both very involved in our own ways, and we kind of balance out the relationship with our extracurricular involvements, our school work, our friendships.

JF: I think it's just understanding that we each have busy lives, but make it work. We genuinely like hanging out with each other, so we're just flexible and we make time whenever possible.

So, whether that’s hanging out really late at night, it's understanding that, hey, this

is crazy, but we'll see each other through.

AR: Sometimes, if we go two or three days without seeing each other because it just happens to be really crazy, we'll, like, FaceTime, just to catch up, but we're not mad at each other or resentful if we don't have time.

Street: Tell us about your first kiss...

AR: So that would be at the Mask and Wig Charity Ball.

JF: Yup, Mask and Wig band was playing, and they were playing some tunes that definitely made everyone feel the moment. I don't know, we were just dancing with each other and it just felt right.

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Street: Which TV characters do you identify with most?

JF: I'd say we're like a Mike and Eleven kind of duo.

AR: I don't know, I like the Office, so Jim and Pam come to mind.

Street: If you could plan a Valentine's Day date, with absolutely no limits, what would it be?

JF: So, we'd wake up, we'd go to brunch, we'd run into John Mulaney, and he would join our table. And then John would have a show to do, so— AR: He does comedy in the afternoons now?

JF: Yeah, right? So, we'd go on a hike—it's a beautiful day, and then we would take a hyper–loop to San Francisco, explore the city.

AR: Philz Coffee.

JF: Oh, yeah, Philz Coffee.

One time, we had too much Philz Coffee and we just, like, exploded with a caffeine overdose.

AR: We wanted to try all the flavors but when you try all the flavors of coffee, you inevitably get too caffeinated.

JF: It just doesn't end well.

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Anyways, go to museums, thrift shops, record stores, cool coffee shops and a concert, to top it all off. And then, we would time travel back to the year 2000, so we could go to Blockbuster, and Blockbuster and chill.

AR: That sounds like a great day.

Lightening Round: Street: There are two types of people...

JF: Those who have been to Zahav, and those who really, really, really want to go, but just can't seem to get a reservation, and if anyone has a reservation that they're just trying to get off their hands, please let us know!

AR: Oh, I'm with the Zahav comment. We've been desperately trying to get a reservation for months, years!

Street: First AIM name?

AR: Mine was bookfreak0418, I liked to read.

JF: jagofromsandiego. So Jago is my DJ name, but before that, it was my childhood nickname. I'm not from San Diego, but not many things rhyme with Jago, so San Diego had to do it.

EGO

Continuing the Conversation: Dear Penn Freshmen is Relaunching for Valentine's Day The updated Dear Penn Freshmen website will offer new letters offering advice and guidance

Serena Bian (C’ 18) was a sophomore when she first read the letters. She was sitting in a coffee shop and found herself sobbing in front of strangers. She’d found the Dear Penn Freshmen website, where upperclassmen upload heartfelt reflections and words of wisdom on their times at Penn.

Now, as upperclassmen, Serena and a team of five others have restarted Dear Penn Freshmen. They’re gathering new letters to update the website with current students’ narratives. The initiative began when Lauren McCann (W’ 16), a student in Adam Grant’s “Organizational Behavior” class in 2015, founded Dear Penn Freshmen as an antidote to Penn’s competitive culture.

In 2015, seventy letters were uploaded onto the website.

Since then, there have been over 27,000 unique hits on the site.

One of those readers was Matt Mizbani (W’ 19). “My own freshman year was rough in a lot of ways,” Matt said.

He distinctly remembers reading Dear Penn Freshmen because of its impact on him at the time.

“Seeing so much commonality in the experiences at Penn gave me a lot of hope,” he said.

Over the years, Matt forgot about Dear Penn Freshmen, but he was reminded of the project

Caroline Curran

when he worked with a mutual friend of the founder last summer. “When I got back to campus, I got really interested in rebooting the initiative,” Matt said.

The goal of the project, according to Serena, is “to have these letters be points of access into upperclassmen’s brains.”

The project humanizes upperclassmen, showing that everyone has struggled at Penn—even the people we admire most.

And for seniors, writing letters can be a way of leaving their legacy at Penn. “Upperclassmen take time to sit back and reflect on what the crap has happened these past four years,” Serena said. “And then they can reflect on how they want to live the last couple of weeks at school.”

To Matt, the goal of the project is to increase belonging. “It’s the feeling that you’re surrounded by people who accept you for who you are and who support you,” he said. “Making sure that freshmen know that people have been where they are now and that those people have gone on to live very fruitful lives at Penn.

It’s empowering them to seize their own future.”

The letters vary in topic, style, and length. Some are anonymous, whereas some people add their full name and email at the bottom, providing an opportu-

nity for dialogue between reader and writer.

Some underclassmen reach out to the seniors seeking mentorship, or friendship, or just reaching out in appreciation.

Dear Penn Freshmen is “a platform for continuing the conversation,” Serena said.

Savi Joshi (W’ 19), another member of the Dear Penn Freshmen Team, reached out to some of the letter-writers when she was a freshman. She does that a lot, sending an email of thanks or admiration to writers whose pieces have impacted her.

“Reading the letter of someone who I have always put on a pedestal, seeing the things that they went through, it had a big impact on me,” Savi said. Seniors replied to her emails, and since then, Savi has developed close relationships with those people she reached out to years ago.

Savi mentioned the group’s focus on the longevity of the project. They want to make sure it continues to help future freshmen, and even pre-freshmen.

Matt and Savi are both juniors, and they plan to continue Dear Penn Freshmen next year.

They have goals for the future.

“What we’re hoping to do is offer [Dear Penn Freshmen] during NSO,” Serena said. “As an incoming freshman, you don’t really have those relationships to have those discussions, so this is away to get that perspective.”

There’s also an issue of getting the word out. The Dear Penn Freshmen team plans to distribute physical copies of the letters to freshmen this week, inviting them to visit the website, which relaunches this Wednesday, on Valentine’s Day. The project could also be developed for other contexts— schools, workplaces, communities of all types. “It’s not that much effort—it’s uploading letters onto the website,” Serena said. “It’s the power of language and stories, which I feel like has the potential to not just be a Penn thing.”

The Dear Penn Freshmen team, which also includes seniors Lisa Yang, Maddie Gelfand, and Krish Mehta, is hosting an open mic at United by Blue this Thursday at 7 P.M. Seniors will read their letters aloud, reigniting the conversation. As trite as it sounds, the group is spreading a message of love—love for community, for self, and for others.

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EGO

Young Love:

Jordy and Maribel's Freshman Love Story Chivalry is NOT dead.

Caroline Riise Caroline Riise | Staff Writer

Tell me that freshmen love doesn’t exist and I’ll send you straight to Jordy Atencia (C ‘21) and Maribel Davila (W ‘21). They’ll convert you into a believer.

Jordy and Maribel met through a Pre–Freshman Program (PFP) the summer before freshman year, but Jordy admitted that he had his eye on Maribel even before then.

“I was on the UPenn Facebook group chat for the Class of 2021, where everyone was just adding each other on Instagram. Somehow I happened to come by her, and I was like ‘...wow,’” Jordy recalled. “Then PFP started and I realized she was there. We started becoming friends and I decided to go for it.”

Maribel’s first impression of Jordy wasn’t as flawless, she admitted. “The first time I saw him was during PFP and he was wearing a Travis Scott t–shirt. Honestly, I thought he was really rude, because I came up to him and was like, ‘Oh, did you go to the tour?’ and he was just like, ‘Yeah,’ and looked away.”

“I just want to say,” Jordy interjected. “That I only said 'Yeah' because I was really shy in that moment and didn’t know what else to say.

I was just like ‘Wow, she

talked to me!’”

Jordy and Maribel’s relationship was on the fast track, quickly accelerating from awkward t–shirt commentary to friendship to dating exclusively by the end of PFP. Though neither person officially asked out the other, Maribel says they picked August 11 as the date to mark the start of their relationship. “That was the night we went to the river and we just sat there on this rock and talked for hours about everything,” Maribel said. “It was the first time we had really told each other a bunch about ourselves and was the first time he told me he liked me.” February 11 hits the six month mark for the couple, just in time for Valentine’s Day. Jordy and Maribel defy Penn’s hookup culture, though they agree that the casual relationship mindset is hard to crack.

“That mentality of ‘I’m gonna go to college and get drunk and fuck so many bitches’ is very widespread amongst males especially,” Jordy added. “That was pretty much the mentality I came to college with, but once I met Maribel I realized that’s not gonna be exciting anymore. That’s not what I want. I’m very happy in the

relationship that I have right now, just being with somebody that I actually love and that loves me back and just knowing that the relationship is there.”

Maribel also doesn’t regret her decision to date Jordy, but adds that exclusivity is not essential in order to be happy in college.

“It’s definitely hard,” Maribel said. “I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it to other people. I wouldn’t go search for it, but if you find the right person, you’ll want to take it seriously and not mess around.”

Make no mistakes: this couple is in it for the long haul. When recalling favorite memories from the past six months, Jordy talked about when the two of them visited his sister’s home.

“We went downstairs to the basement and just played around with the kids, and it made me think towards the future and us having our own kids, being parents, and just having a good time.”

Yes, this might sound insane to any reader who hasn’t met these two. But even after talking to Jordy and Maribel for a half hour, I felt like I

was witnessing a lifelong connection in the making.

Of course, no relationship comes without challenges. “I don’t worry as much about me being held back as I do about holding him back. It’s more just like always checking to make sure he’s okay. I would feel bad if I, like, ruined freshman year for him or anything.”

“No,” Jordy said quietly, almost as if speaking to himself. “You make it better, actually.”

Looks like Maribel’s got nothing to worry about.

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MUSIC

Album Review: "A Crow Looked At Me" Why an album explicitly about death is the most striking tribute to love I have ever heard.

Chris Troop Virginia Rodowsky | Illustrator

Phil Elverum, known to most as prolific folk singer–songwriter Mount Eerie, lost his wife, Geneviève, to pancreatic cancer in 2016. She died three months after her 35th birthday, a year and a half after the birth of her and Elverum’s first daughter. A Crow Looked At Me was released on March 24, 2017, and is Phil Elverum’s immediate reaction to a profoundly tragic situation.

The album was written in a six–week period in the September and October after her death and recorded completely using the instruments Geneviève left behind in her home studio.

With predominantly guitar and voice, this project is sparse and clean, shifting the focus towards

Elverum’s narrative.

He barely even sings. He talks directly, without metaphor and with absolute honesty about how he feels, although never directing or attempting to prompt an emotional response.

It feels like a statement of fact, an account of his life, all the way down to the heart–wrenchingly domestic—“you still get mail …” There is a complete rejection of sympathy–prompting melodrama: no emotional crescendos or the clumsy labelling of a meaningful moment often accompanied with a death in art. Elverum is at pains to convey that real death is not a single moment, but permeates all facets of life. Sometimes the

pain is dull, sometimes sharp.

The first track, "Real Death," declares this lack of agenda, as Elverum states “I don’t want to learn anything from this / I love you.” This tone continues, and it is so delicate and blunt that I kept anticipating the tranquility was about to be disturbed or punctuated with a gush of sentiment. This catharsis never comes, however, as Crow glides through the empty rooms of Elverum’s life. I cannot remember an album that has captured a sense of physical interiority more effectively, as if Elverum has sat me down across from him in his sitting room and played me these songs himself. The warm, almost soothing production

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mixed with his uncomfortably candid lyrics lulls and alarms me at the same time. Left powerless and confused as how to process it, I would have squirmed in Elverum’s armchair.

It is for this reason that before writing this retrospective, I must confess I was slightly dreading my re–listening of Crow. The first (and only time) I had heard the album was the day it came out last year, and, as I listened, all I could do was lie on my bed and listen to it in its entirety, paralyzed. Despite being totally captured by Elverum’s unbelievably frank lyrics and simple, enveloping sound, I declared quite soon after that I wouldn’t and (more accurately) couldn’t listen to this album again. However, the more I thought about it, the more I realized how much of an impact on me this album had had and just how unique a listening experience it was. I also realized that I had focused on precisely the wrong aspects of the record the first time around.

I fixated on the tragedy aspect, which, while clearly highly compelling, did Elverum a huge disservice.

So why am I writing this for the Love Issue? Labelling this album as outright sad would be too simplistic, and, in my view, wrong. Crow is absolutely teeming with life and a love for life.

Despite Elverum’s self–referential apology for continually talking about his dead wife, the snapshot that he has created of his own life is vivid and incredibly complete. A nearly empty house, while obviously tragic, has afforded Elverum the opportunity to notice everything. He is preoccupied with the mundane, all of which is elevated to a

mystical status. This album is not about death exactly, but the rich metaphorical landscape that grief creates within Elverum’s own house, imbuing something as meaningless as a toothbrush with the spirit of Geneviève.

These songs are so earthy, so palpable that we are right there with him, complicit in the assignation of meaning to a new backpack or a crow, regardless of how relevant it is. On "Swims," the album’s most accomplished track, Elverum’s one–year–old asks if mama swims and, after a pause, he replies that yes, she does, all the time now—they scattered her ashes over water.

It is these moments which, on second listening, have defined the album for me. By highlighting the deeply unsatisfying lack of meaning behind a (real) death, Crow desperately seeks answers in anything and everything. Elverum may have not have wanted to learn anything from this, but he has certainly taught me to appreciate my immediate surroundings and experience a profound gratitude towards those close to me. While this album is born from a death, it ends with a simple celebration of the life of Elverum’s daughter on its final track, "Crow." This song is far from devoid of sadness or the specter of Geneviève—and I doubt anything ever will be for Elverum—but we are granted a glimpse of the only kind of resolution he’ll possibly come to: Sweet kid, I heard you murmur in your sleep / "Crow," you said / "Crow," and I asked / "Are you dreaming about a crow?" / And there she was.

MUSIC

Jessi Olarsch | Illustatrator

Before Anderson .Paak was the Cheeky Andy that he is today, he went by the name Breezy Lovejoy. While this old stage name has a jubilant sound to it, the music he produced didn’t. The songs he created as Breezy definitely have the same vibe as the songs on his current albums Venice and Malibu, but they have a more melancholy undertone than the funkier tracks he has out now.

His second album LOVEJOY, counterintuitively, gives off an especially doleful feel. Yes, LOVEJOY does tell stories about love, but the stories have an air of hopelessness, as if he is lost with nowhere to go—which is how Penn’s love and dating culture feels sometimes.

During the dismal winter months, people are bound to feel alone, lost in the sea of 10,000 students. The prevalent hookup culture

only adds to the sense of the aimlessness of love, which the album art reflects with a boat full of flowers in an endless sea.

In addition, LOVEJOY captures the confusion that many Penn students have surrounding their futures.

Breezy created this album only a year after he was let go from his job at a marijuana farm. As his music career struggled to take off, he, his wife, and his son were homeless for some time, with no clue as to when things would change.

Many Penn students can relate to the sense of uncertainty that is felt in this album. Students are constantly unsure of their fates, changing their majors to figure out exactly where they want their studies to take them. Lost, these students sit in classes, classes that could in no way be relevant to their futures, as the cold

February rain colors the sky grey.

In a strange place between child and adulthood, college students must begin to navigate their lives. Transitioning from the warmth of family and friends in a familiar home to a temporary one, students must find their way and make a name for themselves just as Anderson .Paak did. LOVEJOY, which captures this transitionary period through the stories of Anderson's own struggles, offers a soundtrack to the lives of the many lost and confused students on Penn's campus.

www.UltimateCollegeStorage.com

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MUSIC

The Science of Music and Love The connection is very real.

NOAH KEST You’re not crazy if you hear Daniel Caesar’s “Best Part” and feel a sudden urge to fall in love.

While some songs stimulate greater feelings than others, the scientific tie between music and emotions, such as love, is very real. Hearing music produces a litany of internal neurological processes, unlocking various emotional experiences.

A McGill University study

cited by Psychology Today breaks down how music can actually cause a release of dopamine in the brain. Dopamine, the “feel–good chemical,” is usually released upon sleep or food consumption and operates as a means of reward in the body.

Similarly, singing can cause the release of oxytocin, often dubbed the “cuddle hormone,” furthering positive feelings asso-

ciated with music.

Music has not only hormonal effects, but physical as well.

Those chills you may get when listening to a great song are the result of your brain’s reaction to the song. Get ready to learn a new word because those chills actually have a name: frissons.

A study published by Wesleyan University’s psychology department goes deeper into that

CREATIVE WRITING CONTESTS CREATIVE WRITING CONTESTS FOR PENN STUDENTS FOR PENN STUDENTS The Creative Writing Program is sponsoring the following contests this

spring for Penn students. Contest winners will be selected by judges who The Creative Writing following haveProgram no affiliation withawards the university. the The contests are open to students of any school. prizes annually to University of Pennsylvania students: Entries may be left in the designated box at the Center for Programs in

The William Carlos Williams Prize Writing (CPCW), 3808 Walnut St. Entries should bear: Contemporary student's name, year, address, email address, and category of from the Academy of American Poetsschool, ($100) submission. Do not submit the same piece for more than one contest.

Awarded to the best original poetry by a graduate student. Submit up to 5 poems (max. length of entry, 5 pages).

This year’s deadline: WEDNESDAY, MARCH 18, NOON POETRY: Submit two copies of up to 5 poems (5 page total). Undergraduate The College Alumni Society Poetry Prize ($500 first prize) $400 first prize, Graduate prize $100.

Awarded to the best original poetry by an undergraduate. Submit up to 5 poems (max. length of entry, 5 pages).

FICTION ($400 first prize): Submit two copies of one short story only, maximum 7000 words (Undergraduate only)

The Phi Kappa Sigma Fiction Prize ($400 first prize) DRAMATIC WRITING first prize): Submit two copieswords). of one script for stage, Awarded to the best original short story by an ($400 undergraduate (max.

7,000 screen, television, or radio (Undergraduate or Graduate)

The Judy Lee Award for Dramatic Writing ($400 first prize) REVIEW ($400 first prize) Submit two copies of one review of a current Awarded to a graduate orbook, undergraduate student fororthe best script (stage, screen, play, film, cd, art exhibition, performance (Undergraduate only) television, or radio).

LITERARY TRANSLATION ($400 first prize) Submit two copies of up to 3 pp. of verse or 5 pp.

of prose translated into first English from any language; include two copies of the original text and a The Lilian and Benjamin Levy Award ($400 prize) brief words) about the of work and authorplay, if notfilm, well-known or Graduate) Awarded to the best review bynote an (75 undergraduate a current music(Undergraduate release, book, or performance.

CREATIVE NONFICTION ($400 first prize) Submit two copies of one nonfiction piece only, maximum 7000 words

The Ezra Pound Prize for Literary Translation (Undergraduate only) ($400 first prize) Awarded to the best English-language translation of verse or prose from any language by a graduate prize)or 5 pages of prose; include a copy of the or undergraduate student.JOURNALISTIC Submit up to 3WRITING pages of($600 poetry Submit copiesabout of one newspaper or magazine article, feature story, original text and a brief note (75two words) the original work and author. exposé or other piece of investigative journalism, maximum 7000 words work can already have been published (Undergraduate only)

The Gibson Peacock Prize for Creative Nonfiction ($400 first prize) Awarded to the best creative nonfiction piece by an undergraduate (max. 7,000 words). http://www.writing.upenn.edu/cw/prizes.html The Parker Prize for Journalistic Writing ($600 prize) Awarded to the best newspaper or magazine article, feature story, exposé or other piece of investigative journalism by an undergraduate, published or unpublished (max. 7,000 words).

DEADLINE FOR ALL ENTRIES: FRIDAY, MARCH 2, 5:00 pm Submit your entry here: writing.upenn.edu/cw/prizes.html These contests are subject to the University Code of Academic Integrity.

Open to students of any school at the University of Pennsylvania.

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Reese Berman | Staff Illustrator feeling that is colloquially known as “skin orgasms.” To the authors of this study, the term "frisson" combines both strong emotional feelings with actual physical effects. So, if you’re ever listening to music and feel as if love is suddenly permeating your insides, you now know exactly how to describe it.

This is not a recent phenomenon, as humans have been evolutionarily trained over thousands of years to respond to music in this way. An article in ABC News cites Dr. Sandra Garrido, a postdoctoral research fellow at Western Sydney University, who says, "We are evolutionarily programmed to respond to particular cues in the human voice and to perceive them as expressing particular emotions … And when those same features occur in music we respond to that in the same way, [it's] as if it was a person in front of us doing that."

This means that when an artist’s voice has a loving tone, we may be more likely to be romantically stimulated.

Beyond these experiences, music may actually impact the way you look at a loved one.

An article in Scientific American delves into the visual impact music can have. While a photograph may not stimulate any sort of reaction, adding what may be considered “happy music” can actually make it more pleasant.

The article cites a study by Nidhya Logeswaran and Joydeep Bhattacharya from the University of London, who found that music can impact the way one relates emotionally to someone

else’s face. Joyful music can make someone seem happy, and sad music can have the opposite effect. The sounds you hear when interacting with your romantic interest can actually lead you to view them more positively.

We can also create direct associations between the music we listen to and specific positive emotions we feel. Even more so, relating a song to an experience of love can lead you to consistently feel deep affection when playing back that song. A study titled “Music and Emotions in the Brain: Familiarity Matters,” details the emotional effect caused by music. The researchers claim, “Our results not only strengthen the body of evidence showing that music is very efficient in recruiting emotional centres of the brain, but also clearly provide evidence that familiarity with a particular piece of music is an extremely important factor for emotional engagement, and thus furnishes 'direct access' to these emotional centres of the brain.” Therefore, once you create a relationship with a piece of music, and even have "your song," it can consistently evoke positive feelings for you.

Music doesn’t stimulate lovey– dovey feelings in everyone, but there is evidence that it can. It has power beyond what we can see. So next time a song brings you a desire to find "the one," don’t fret. It’s natural.

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69th St: ON VALENTINE'S DAY Dear 69th Street readers,

My mom reminded me the other day that it’s embarrassing to celebrate Valentine’s Day because it’s buying into a capitalist exploitation of love and creating unrealistic and superficial expectations of what love looks like. So today I want to talk about “self–love.” And by “self–love,” I mean masturbating.

Sexual activity with another person can be messy and complicated in my opinion—attachment, body comparison, fluids in general, etc. And then there’s masturbation: such a perfect, innocuous pastime. For a long time, I sought sex when I was at my most insecure and unfulfilled. I wasn’t listening to the blaring signals to step back and actually gain strength and confidence from being alone. When I sought sex for security and pleasure, I typically left feeling more insecure and just as horny because they never put in the work to help me finish. I looked at masturbating as a sad alternative, something that signified the absence of somebody else. But the fact is, it’s not the absence of somebody else, it’s the presence and self–sufficiency of you.

Wild, right?

When I finally adopted this mindset, I started investing in myself. I went to a sex shop, and had an in–depth conversation with one of the employees. They showed me vibrators that would build on and elevate my own manual methods that I had developed over the years. I’ve tried a couple different ones, starting off cheaper and then going bougier once I felt more comfortable. I’m a sucker for toys that charge via laptop because I’m a woman of the future.

That being said, I recognize toys can be crazy expensive, so it’s good to always field new tips on manual masturbation. The internet is a never–ending sex sinkhole; there are so many forums of strangers helping strangers get off on their own, with niche and helpful tricks. There’s even a site called “omgyes” with instructional masturbation videos.

I was unwilling to pay the subscription, so I’ve only gotten to watch the edging one, and it’s fantastic. The downside of “omgyes” is that it’s focused on people with vaginas, but hopefully they are working on inclusivity. If you’re not getting what you need from the web, don’t rule out friends! Masturbation is not freakish, and I’ve found once you provide a safe and judgment–free space to discuss it, stories and advice start flowing.

I’m in a long–term relationship, and I have consistent and satisfying sex (sick, Hannah!), but I still put emphasis on masturbating. It’s my thing, and nobody can take it from me. Happy Valentine’s Day! —Hannah

Dear 69th Street readers,

Let me begin by saying that I understand Hannah’s frustrations with Valentine’s Day and am almost certainly going to masturbate at least once today. However, I’m also a sucker for any holiday with a color–specific dress code, so I say God bless it!

Plus, in a stroke of good luck, today is not only the Catholic Feast of Saint Valentine. It also happens to be Ash Wednesday, my favorite holiday of the liturgical year! Given my aforementioned love of fashion forward holidays, catch me wearing pink accents with an ashen cross on my forehead, filled with extra holiday cheer today.

Over the years, my Valentine’s Day celebrations have evolved as I’ve grown into my sexuality and relationships with others. When I was little, my older sister was always my Valentine, but as I reached sexual maturity, the arrangement became less comfortable for the both of us. After that, I spent many adolescent years lamenting over my lack of a romantic Valentine.

I refused to take part in the joy of the holiday as a personal protest against every boy who didn’t have a crush on me. In recent years, I’ve tried to cure my loneliness by trolling Grindr for last–minute dick appointments, which is the equivalent of going to the mall to buy gifts on Christmas Eve. This is no way to celebrate, given that it’s how I spend most weeknights anyway.

This year, I’m planning on passing out little store–bought Valenwww.lascazuelas.net (215) 351-9144 tines to everyone in each of my seminars and buying more than my 426 W Girard Ave usual daily haul of sweets from Wawa to eat with my roommates— no joke. I’ll probably call my mom and my sister to tell them I love them, then I’ll use my special moisturizer that I usually only use BYOB on my hands on my whole body. My goal is to feel and to give as Authentic Mexican food much love as possible, and to be thankful for the love that I have Great for Private Parties instead of yearning for love that I don’t. $5 plate sharing fee For me, the key is just to not let Valentine’s Day bring me down.

There are a million ways to celebrate today, but brooding over my loneliness is not one. Whether you’re celebrating with a romantic HAVE YOUR next partner, a sexual partner, a friend, a family member, a stranger, or Fiesta with us! yourself, I believe it’s possible to find love and joy today. And if not today, then certainly tomorrow when the chocolates go on sale.

—John

Las

Cazuelas Restaurant

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Photo by Michael Persico, provided by CookNSolo Restaurants

Restaurant Round-up: Where to Eat Alone on Valentine's Day

Molly Hessel

Treat yo'self and feed yo'self this Febrary 14

F

lying solo this Valentine's Day? You can still enjoy the best of Philadelphia's food scene without the plus one.

With spots ranging from fast casual to sit–down dinner, there are plenty of options for dining out this February 14. Eating alone doesn't have to be awkward, so here are the best restaurants for a table for one.

1. Res Ipsa Rated one of America’s Best New Restaurants of 2017, Res Ipsa is an all–day café located right off–campus on 22nd and Walnut Streets. Even if you don’t have a significant other to share their romantic Italian dinner, you can still enjoy their renowned breakfast sandwiches in the a.m. for way less money.

Bring a laptop and catch up on work while indulging in

their English muffins, baked in–house to be softer than any lover’s hug.

2218 Walnut St | Price: $ 2. CoZara While a bar might be a sad place to hang on a lonely Valentine’s Day night, a sushi bar is a completely different thing. CoZara is Drexel’s answer to Pod, meaning you won’t risk running into Penn couples. For those who need a

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CABARET HOURS

CREPERIE HOURS

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FOR A RESERVATION CALL 215-592-0656 MONDAY: CLOSED HAPPY HOUR: MONDAYS FOR SPECIAL EVENTS TUESDAY:THURSDAY:12-9PM TUESDAY–THURSDAY 7:30PM-1AM FRIDAY: 12-10PM TUESDAY FRIDAY FRIDAY & SATURDAY 7PM-2AM SATURDAY: 10AM-10PM SUNDAY 7:30PM-1AM SUNDAY: 10AM-9PM 5 - 7 PM.

swarm of couples. It might be your last opportunity to try a slice since the restaurant will close on March 31 in order to prepare for a larger location.

115 E Girard Ave | Price: $$ 5. Goldie and Dizengoff Snagging a reservation at Zahav on Valentine’s Day? Near impossible. Enjoy all the same great Israeli tastes of hummus and falafel at Whole Foods Market's Center City location, where both Dizengoff and Goldie have set up shop.

All three spots are founded by Michael Solomonov and Steve Cook, but the Whole Foods location will cost less money and less sad looks from fellow diners.

1526 Sansom St | Price: $ 1625 Sansom St |Price: $$ Still looking to be satisfied this Valentine's Day? Try out our solo desserts recipes at home. While it might not be better than sex, it's pretty damn close.

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distraction from the love birds around you, watching sushi chefs craft creative morsels like the Bronzzizle Roll is even better than people–watching.

3200 Chestnut St | Price: $$ 3. Bar Bombón Your ex was never adventurous enough for vegan Puerto Rican cuisine, but you are. Located right off of Rittenhouse Park, the trendy restaurant Bar Bombón features an all plant–based drink and food menu that makes you feel virtuous even while indulging in their killer margaritas. Plus, tacos aren’t meant for sharing anyways.

133 S 18th St | Price: $$$ 4. Pizzeria Beddia Only open four days a week (including this Wednesday) and only serving 40 pies a night, Pizzeria Beddia is one of the hardest restaurants to eat at.

Their "no reservation" policy will ward away V–Day diners, allowing you to enjoy the best pizza in America without the

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Date Yourself this Valentine's Day Self–care tips for treating yourself this Valentine's Day Frankie Reitmeyer Carly Ryan | Illustrator

A lot of people have issues being alone on Valentine’s Day, but it can be a gift. Who needs a significant other when you would like, totally date yourself? Check out some of our suggestions below that are better than any box of shitty chocolate from CVS.

Cook Yourself Dinner Yeah, it’s nice when someone else makes you dinner, but cooking for yourself is honestly a great way to relax. It doesn’t have to be complicated, but making yourself your favorite home–cooked meal will make you feel like a million bucks.

If you want a classic comfort food, whip out some spaghetti and meatballs. To get extra fancy, you can make your own sauce, which will make you feel like you are in Italy, full of love and whatever other mushy shit people are into these days.

Literally the easiest homemade sauce recipe: Dice ½ of a small onion and sautee until translucent in a pan over medium heat with a teaspoon of olive oil.

Add a pinch of salt and pepper and a teaspoon of oregano.

Stir and cook until onions are brown.

Add 1 ½ teaspoons of garlic to the pan. Sautee for a minute.

Add two cans of crushed tomatoes and stir until the liquid is simmering. Turn the heat

down to low and cover with a lid for 10 more minutes.

Add basil (as much or as little as you want, but maybe about 7 or 8 leaves cut into ribbons), stir, and serve over pasta or other noodle–like substance (looking at you spaghetti squash)

Get or give yourself a mani–pedi Although this might be viewed as a girly activity, there is no better feeling than walking around with freshly groomed nails. Guys, girls, and everyone in between, you feel clean, polished and like you simply have your life together. Take the time to go on a date with yourself either to the nail salon—City Nails downtown is cheaper than some spots campus and

they do a great job—or light a candle, take a nice shower, and do them yourself.

Take a walk This is honestly such a treat.

Rarely do we take the time for ourselves to just be, so take a walk somewhere. Whether it's along the Schuylkill River Trail or into Center City or along Baltimore Avenue, just go somewhere and enjoy the fresh air and your own company. You might even spot a bored–looking couple, which would be an instant mood boost!

Study date Honestly, not what you wanted to hear, but while everyone else is shaking it up

CHINESE NEW YEAR come celebrate with our week-long dinner and cocktail specials!

and going to some overpriced, faux–romantic dinner, you can take the time to #GETSHITDONE. You will feel so much better after getting everything off of your plate plus it’s a win– win situation. Maybe set up a study date with someone and see where that goes—you can kill two birds with one stone.

Throw an axe Getting over an ex? Pissed that you're all alone on this day where it seems that everyone is paired up? Go throw things.

Urban Axes in Kensington allows you to go and get all of that anger and frustration out, plus it's legal to throw dangerous objects!

Schedule a group visit or head to their walk–in hours. Thrower beware: this place is 21+.

Fifteen course dinner

Buy a plant Good news is that Valentine’s Day this year is on a Wednesday, which means that the farmers market is in town. Go and buy yourself a nice fern or other plant because who doesn’t love a little photosynthesis?! Plants supposedly make people feel better, plus you have to care for it. So, it’s kind of like having a significant other?

Valentine’s Day doesn’t have to just be for couples. Self–love is just as satisfying (if not more) as getting love from someone else.

This Valentine's Day, you don't have to worry about other people because you've already landed a hot date with the baddest individual around: yourself.

Traditional lion dance

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join us on february 16 7:30 pm

man’s best friend, joy luck club, and waves of fortune

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authentic chinese food with a la carte options available

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E S S AY C O N T E S T

TI-84 Calculator and Theoretical Love

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Lisa Zou A sophomore from Phoenix, Arizona

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HONORABLE MENTION

“I

t's a tough call but I must say Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem is my favorite.”

I was at the high school American Invitational Mathematics Examination (AIME) and the dark–haired, dimpled boy across from me had introduced himself as Jay and asked me about my favorite math theorems.

“I like that one too!” I chimed.

I had no idea who or what Godel was.

In the months after when I started to eat lunch with Jay, we discussed the AIME answers although we had signed contracts not to. I never considered Jay a math nerd—no, he was something more than that. He radiated a love for calculus and topology in a way that made mathematics sound like the newest video game or fashion trend.

“Mathematics is so boring, there’s no story there,” I’d complain. Jay would talk about how math really was a story—you find a problem and you solve it—the adventure that you go through to prove it is the journey. As friends, we went to sci-

ence exhibits together and competed in science fairs. I didn’t understand half of what he said half the time, but he cared a lot.

He calculated how much time he spent with me to make sure it was enough. He made a science board about me as a birthday joke and asked me out at an astronomy observatory with a bunch of math puns, saying he couldn’t wait to intersect with me. Now, I cringe when I think about it, but, in the moment, it was cute. He wrote up a funny program for me to play on my TI–84 Calculator—a calculator I later lost in Math 312 in college.

I tried to feign interest in mathematics—I really did. I even read papers about Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem. I applied to Penn for Engineering, thinking that the word “Systems” would somehow make me more intelligent and Jay–like.

Jay would send me practice math sets in the wee hours of the night and he would later help me with the ones I didn’t understand. When it came time to apply to college, Jay had an issue. He grew up in India and his

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writing skills weren’t as finely skilled as his math ones. As a loyal girlfriend, I wrote his common application essay. Although I had won a lot of awards, I stepped away from creative writing when I started working intensely on studying math. Jay got into most of the Ivy League schools but ended up at MIT. In college, I sent Jay pictures of books I had found in the library of DRL. It didn’t matter how nerdy it was. We were in our own world, where we discussed machine learning and watched AlphaGo documentaries together through Skype. Later, I started looking for someone at Penn who was as smart as Jay, but I either didn’t spend enough time in the engineering quad or asking boys for their favorite math theory was a flawed strategy.

“The problem with math puns is that all calculus jokes are derivative, trigonometry jokes are too graphic, but I guess the occasional statistic joke is an outlier,” I blurted out once. No laughs followed. I still talked to Jay every night during the first semester of school.

Jay had a mandatory writing

course in college, and I wrote every single one of his essays for that class, making sure there were some errors in every paragraph for believability. Sometimes, I wrote his essays before starting on my own homework.

In return, he helped me with my math problem sets. On my birthday, Jay sent me a nice long message on Messenger: “To be honest, I really enjoyed spending time with you and cared about you a lot. But I don’t find our conversations that intriguing anymore. We are too different.”

Too different? Did he mean that I wasn’t smart? I was baffled. The Jay I was speaking to seemed miles away from the Jay I knew in high school.

The funny, humble, and skinny boy with large glasses was now a distant stranger. Sensing my discomfort, Jay messaged, “It’s okay. I can pay you for writing my essays.”

As if I could care less about the money. This boy, who I risked plagiarism for, who I spent hundreds—if not thousands—of hours of my life with, the one who got me interested in math, the one

who encouraged me throughout the past few years, was saying I wasn’t interesting? Intelligent?

Of course, there were a couple months of crying but eventually I accepted the money, started my own essay editing service—if people were going to take advantage of me, why not profit? I transferred out of Engineering, slowly realizing that it didn’t mean I was incompetent and dumb, but just that systems science & engineering may not have been my calling.

This past Valentine’s Day, I received a newly–minted TI–84 calculator in the mailbox, with it a note: “Maybe your love for me is incomplete, but keep loving Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem.”

Because of Jay, I’m a little faster at derivatives and a little slower at falling for a cute boy.

I also hate math puns now, even though math is the only subject that “counts.” Maybe math—or love—isn’t about calculations.

Maybe that’s where Jay went wrong. The hours we spent together, the nights we reveled in math—those were memories— more abstract than numeric.

E S S AY C O N T E S T

Love Songs and Other Things I'll Never Write Melannie Jay Where music and memories intersect.

A freshman from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

HONORABLE MENTION

I

n many ways, I am a stereotype. My hair is long and shaggy, barely tamed. I wear sneakers every day, always worn down and flecked with dirt, salt, and other types of damage. Now that winter has come, I’ve donned my fingerless gray gloves and the leather jacket with a few patched holes and a new rip on the sleeve, beaten by years of brutal weather. I play the guitar, a blue Ibanez with scratches on the pickguard and discolored strings from the oil on my fingertips. If I were a man, and this was a movie, I would be the bad boy with hidden depths, who the protagonist realizes is right for her when he plays her a song she wrote.

This is not a movie, and I am a girl, and when I play and sing it is about anything other than love.

I attach myself to music. Every morning before I leave for class, I put in my earbuds and turn on “White Crosses,” walking Locust as Laura Jane Grace sings about making her way down San Marco Avenue. When I hear the opening riff of “True North,” my foot flexes to hit an imaginary gas pedal, remembering how I left that album on repeat for three months after getting my license. I never listen to “The Most Cursed of Hands” unless I have six and a half uninterrupted minutes to appreciate it. I have a playlist for everything, from going five miles over the speed

limit to pretending I’m the protagonist in an indie coming–of–age film, yet the one I pass over the most is simply titled “actual love songs."

My avoidance cannot be chalked up to the quality of the music: “Melpomene” and “The Way I Tend to Be” are enough to make anyone wistful, and that’s why I never play them. The more music weasels its way into my life, the more it ties itself to the people I know, and after a matter of months or years, whenever the person sours, I can never listen to that song again. It’s safer to stick to the impersonal, the odes to intoxication or indictments of the government. Yet, no matter how hard I may try, each person gets a song.

There was “Kristina She Don’t Know I Exist,” the girl who existed in a sphere opposite mine, never becoming a Venn diagram. There was “Careless,” the one I should have gotten over months before I did, but I was a stupid teenager hanging on to a hope that was never there.

There was “Misplaced Devotion,” where I should have known better. They could not be more different, but there is one thing unifying them: a critical failure to communicate. A red–faced confession two weeks before I moved across the country, a hasty rambling note completed just before graduation, a conversation that has happened only in my head.

Rather than speak for my-

Jessi Olarsch | Illustrator

self, I let Tomas Kalnoky, Mike Kerr, and Casey Crescenzo speak for me.

When I pick up the Ibanez and idly play, waiting for inspiration, the words that come to me are not about them. They are not reflections on what could have been, or scathing damnations of the kinds of people they ended up being. If I wanted to sing of them, I couldn’t.

Prose alone has proved near

impossible. Once I set my mind to it, I can forget, at least until the right chord or lyric comes along.

These last few months, I have avoided adding another song to the list. Some months or years down the line, it may become clear: I’ll hear something new that fits, or an old favorite will be applicable to my life. Then, many years later, I will know the woman I marry by the

song that makes me think of her. It won’t be traditional, no ukulele and “ba ba ba” bouncing chorus. It will be slightly off, Belle & Sebastian begging Ms. Private to elope, or John Darnielle coming back, blood in his mouth, if it’s the last thing he does.

Only then will I pick up my beaten blue guitar, pluck a melancholy chord progression, and find the words for a song about love.

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E S S AY C O N T E S T

Crossing the Stage When someone you love graduates, but your joint routines remain.

Cornell Overfield / rsch i Ola

A senior from Buffalo, New York

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trato

Illus

HONORABLE MENTION

Jess

I

woke up early on May 15, 2017—graduation day—to brew a pot of coffee, zip up her dress, and guide a graduation robe over her head in preparation for the day. I sat for hours at the ceremony in Franklin Field and stood for almost as long to take pictures at the Love statue. I celebrated, feeling pride and regret at saying goodbye, but not to Penn.

I met Miranda in the fall of 2015, at a welcome–back event for international relations majors, right after I transferred into Penn as a sophomore. A confident and accomplished junior, she clearly could see that I was a bit bewildered by the high–octane environment of Penn. Over the course of that first semester, Miranda occasionally invited me to social events for IR majors.

With her straight, blonde hair, rich laugh, and energetic passion, she was certainly attractive. But she was going off to Cambridge the next semester.

We parted ways after our last Microeconomics study session that fall. I mumbled a quick, awkward goodbye and walked away.

On November 7, 2016, we had celebrated and grinned at each other as we watched speech after speech under the shadow of Independence Hall at that final Clinton rally. 24 hours later, states flipped red and Trump marched to victory. I left a despondent watch party and walked alone in the cold to the 16th floor of Harnwell.

She opened when I knocked, and for the next hour, we just sat on her bed and talked, as I held her, and her tears soaked into my sweater. Like so many others, election night jolted us.

In the days that followed, we each reckoned not just with the sudden horror of Trump’s victory, but also the realization that we had gradually fallen for each other.

In September and October, we had drifted together, but only ever as friends. We always found excuses to hang out, but also mentioned the people we were matching and meeting with on apps. What followed election night was a slow, two–month courtship— slightly ridiculous considering that we had been “platonically dating,” in the words of one

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of her friends, for weeks. We could both tell this could be something special, but it made sense to take our time. After all, now a senior, she had only a few months left. Did it make sense to start dating when she could be living in Arkhangelsk, Russia in six months?

We decided to give it a try.

Over the next five months, we fell in love at Penn. Like any new couple, we explored together and changed each other. She turned me on to jazz and tried to teach me to dance (only mildly more successful than our attempt to learn to case). Occasionally I coaxed her out for a run with me along the Schuylkill. Our walks downtown once a month for a ballet, concert, or play were a mutual contribution.

But what we came to appreciate most were our routines.

Making two cups of coffee every morning that we woke up next to each other. Knowing the days and times when we might pass each other on Locust in transit to class, if only to just smile at each other. Cooking together most evenings. Most of all, nights

of studying together—her on the bed with her Mac, I at the desk with my pens and paper.

We'd inevitably share a pot of tea, and I could always spin around, mug in my hands, to bounce an essay idea off her or hear her latest thoughts on experienced truth in Russian literature.

We said goodbye to all that the morning of May 17, 2017, but new routines have replaced those we can no longer share at Penn. Exchanging calls, letters and postcards. Meeting at bus and train stations along the Northeast Corridor whenever we can snatch a weekend together. Those old routines, though, the ones we built as we slowly fell in love at Penn, still haunt us. Miranda longingly looks back at them from time to time, when the “real world” serves up a challenging day.

For this past year, I’ve had to continue the old rituals alone, with only Miranda’s ghost for company. She’s gone, but I still brew two cups of coffee each morning—only to end up drinking both myself.

I still walk briskly down Lo-

cust—but without the excited hope that I might see her any moment now. I still work away at my desk most nights—but when I spin my chair around, mug in hand, all I see is an empty bed. They’re all things I still have to do, but they are things I have to do without the person who brought simple joy to them. When you fall in love at Penn, you build up patterns and routines with someone, and those patterns and routines become part of what makes you happy here. It may not be common, but I know I’m not the only one to fall in love with a peer at Penn, only to cheer them across the stage at graduation before it’s my own turn, not saying goodbye to either them or Penn, but them at Penn.

In a few months, I will get my chance to say farewell to Penn, and farewell with sadness to the friends, professors and study spots I’ve come to know so well. But I will also at last be saying a final goodbye to all those routines that lost something when Miranda crossed that same stage, one year before me.

E S S AY C O N T E S T

If Love Was for a Grade On unrequited love and crushing on your professor Ahalya Rajagopalan HONORABLE MENTION

Jessi O larsch

| Illus

trator

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nybody who knows me knows that I have harbored a harmless crush on one https://thedpinc.slack. com/messages/G8C8JDB42 of my professors. Okay, two of my professors. Okay, maybe like two professors a semester, but who cares? I think it teaches me how to love and let go. Of course, it’s just a tiny crush—I just raise my hand at every possible occasion during lecture. Memorize their CV as some light bedtime reading, quoting it to my friends the next day.

Ah, the professor crush, probably the most tragic and heartbreaking of all crushes.

It's the definition of unrequited love. You don’t know sadness until you attend their office hours and see a picture of their family on the desk (because you were in denial about the ring on the left hand until that point…), and then you realize that you couldn’t have done anything about it even if they were single. Even if pursuing this wasn’t foolish, unethical, and strictly against University policy, why would such an intellectually powerful figure want anything to do with me?

I can barely add double–digit numbers in my head.

Don’t forget the trauma of taking their exams: why do the people we love hurt us so badly? Last semester, I took a class taught by a professor who I loved so much that I decided to concentrate in his subject. I felt like I had gone through a

long, bloody breakup after taking my first exam. But, when I went to following lecture after that exam, I felt whole again after spending an hour and a half with my favorite person at Penn (and the other 100 people in the hall, but they’re irrelevant). This pattern continued until the third and last exam, after which I had to bid farewell to my professor. I fell in love with another one the next semester.

Despite this pain and sadness, I think that a professor–crush is the purest, most beautiful crush of all. Obviously, nobody

can do anything about their so– called “feelings” for his or her professor, but I think that the imaginary, impossible nature of this crush is what makes it so idyllic. They can’t really break your heart, because they have no clue about your obsession in the first place. Your professor can’t forget your anniversary, because you’ll never have one.

Your professor can’t dump you because of your boring personality—they probably don’t even know your name.

What bliss! A good professor has character traits far superior than those of your run–of–the–

mill boyfriend. Maybe your professors aren’t the most attractive, but in my opinion, if you look hard enough at anyone from far enough away, they’ll eventually seem cute. It’s a bonus when they’re easy on the eyes, though. Great professors have the rare ability to make sense out of abstractness, the ability to make boring things interesting. And try comparing that to your lame SO, whose idea of a good time is Netflix and Chill. Professors pique your curiosity and push you to learn new things. Case in point: last semester, the aforementioned

professor of mine told us about a new class that he was introducing next year. Learn new things and spend more time with my love? Sign me up. That very day, I spent an hour or so adjusting my four–year plan so I could make room for his class. The things you do for love. What a reunion it will be in the spring of 2019.

When I asked my friends what they thought about Penn’s dating scene, 100 percent of them said that it was just about hooking up. Some said it was hard to find something real when the majority of people on campus were just interested in something casual. Nowadays, people look for love within other people, instead of appreciating the beauty of love itself. When there’s a chance of rejection, people become self– conscious, superficial, and sometimes even change who they are to please the other person. After all that exhaustion, it’s completely awful if there is no reciprocation. With your professor, you have the chance to eliminate all this drama because you know your only option with him or her is a semester’s worth of silent infatuation.

Tired of getting your heart stomped on by that hot guy Chad from Alpha–Gabba–Miu– Miu who hooks up with you at frat parties and then ignores you the next day? Forget about him and discover the beauty of your funny, intelligent professor! Immerse yourself in their subject.

Daydream about holding an intelligent conversation about their research. Be seduced not by possibility, but by an exquisite impossibility that meets on Mondays and Wednesdays from 1:30–3:00.

Fall in love with love again.

Fall in love with a pure, unadulterated love that involves no rejection and mandates no action or commitment. Someone would

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E S S AY C O N T E S T

When You Realized You Loved Me Too Late

On confusing friendship, bad timing, and self–discovery Anonymous HONORABLE MENTION

I

can’t tell you her real name.

Mentioning it once would destroy any deniability, and closeted queerness, of course, is all about deniability. So let’s call her Daisy. The moment I met her, she impressed me. Her ability to constantly succeed was the beginning of a phenomenon that I would be possessed by for years: I simultaneously wanted to be her and be with her. My obsession with her, then, was borderline masturbatory; because I saw what I wanted to be in her, I wanted to be in her—in her thoughts, in her heart, in her body.

Our friendship was not founded in flirtation, but over time, it became rooted in it. Openly wary of queerness, Daisy responded to my flirtation with annoyance. I claimed it was all a joke, an ongoing mockery of the socially conservative beliefs she had inherited from her parents. In reality, almost every one of our one–on–one conversations would eventually drift to the topic of sexuality. I would later admit this was no accident, but rather, an act of subconscious maneuvering; much later in my life, I would realize that she, too, was steering the wheel, captaining the conversation just as much as I was.

While our interactions at school remained strictly platonic, at night, through text, our relationship was radically evolving. She began matching and exceeding my flirtation, and by the end of sophomore year, she would detail what she would do to my body, if, you know, she was gay. Which,

of course, she wasn’t; which, of course, we weren’t.

Our flirtation, as blatant and constant as it might have been, was tied together with our own reassurances that we didn’t deviate from the sexuality our parents and our church expected of us.

Our character development, while immense, still existed in the context of ever–present promise of “no homo.” While I was good at separating our virtual relationship from our real–life one, she was better. If I slipped in the slightest hint of affection, she would dismiss it immediately, an instantaneous reminder of what our relationship could and could not be. It pained me, but I thought having her in this way was better than never having her at all. I thought it’d go on like that for forever.

One morning, before school, I found her hunched up on the floor, with her hands pressed against her temples. She had described her migraines to me before, but I had never seen her have one, had never seen her face twisted up in agony. That day, I did. Under that yellowish lighting, on that otherwise quiet morning, I realized I loved her—as if I hadn’t known it all along.

“Don’t look at me like that.”

I never asked her what she meant. Don’t look at me like that, she was saying. Don’t look at me like you love me. You’re not allowed to. Soon after, I completely cut her out of my life. When I couldn’t reassure myself that the messages to Daisy were a joke

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anymore, I couldn’t send them. I did everything I could not to see her. Our junior year began, and I was cast as the lead in our school play. As fate would have it, Daisy was assigned to stage–manage my side of the stage. We couldn’t resist falling back into our old routines. The text messaging started up again; this time, we began a game of daily truth or dare that lasted months. While I had come to terms with my queerness, coming out very quietly to close friends, she held fast to her assurances that she was straight.

Somewhat out, I started hinting at my feelings for her in public, and she let me. Our friends never took it seriously, but rather, considered it an ongoing game within our friend group.

The summer after our senior year, we spent a glorious week together, biking and swimming and soaking up heaven. One night, we rode our beach bikes back to the house together, her bike parallel to mine. I remember us under the streetlights so clearly—her dirty blonde hair soaked with salt water, my right flip–flop half–broken. She turned to me, face flickering in and out of darkness, and asked me with a great calmness how I knew I liked girls. “The biggest giveaway is when I had a dream about one,” I said, failing to mention that she was the girl in question.

“I woke up in an absolute panic. I didn’t want to dream about girls like that—I didn’t want to have feelings about girls like that. So I suppressed it and blamed it on

Jessi Olarsch | Illustrator

eating too much sugary cereal the night before.

“No, you didn’t, did you?”

“I did.” She laughed the spectacular laugh that made me love her in the first place. “You should tell me more stories like that,” she said, her voice warm. She always gave me enough to keep going, enough to keep hoping. And that’s all I had. No one ever believed that Daisy was the slightest bit interested in me (or women, for that matter). When she eventually confirmed it herself, it felt as if gravity had inverted on itself.

Over the winter break of our first year of college, we reunited to eat overpriced pancakes and swap college war stories. At a lull in the conversation, she lifted her glass and paused, as if she had forgotten to mention a passing thought.

She nearly brought the water to her lips, before she sighed, “You know, it’s a shame you start dating someone good right when I realize I’m not straight.” I dropped my fork. I forget what I sputtered. We continued on with our breakfast as if nothing had been said, describing our classes and

our dorm rooms as if three years of mind games and questioning and self–doubt had not just come to a finite conclusion. When we finished, I walked her to her car.

As I sat beside her, I thought how, in a different alternate universe, this is when I would have kissed her. My thoughts were interrupted by my dad’s car horn. He waved enthusiastically at Daisy, and she waved back. He loved her—how could he not? I thought about how enthusiastically he’d endorse me dating Daisy, if, you know, she was a man. There were too many ifs, too many hypotheticals. We said our goodbyes, and I loaded into my father’s car. He immediately asked me if anything was new with Daisy. I shot back a blunt and crisp no. He didn’t seem to believe me, but he didn’t press onward. If he did, I might have confessed. To this day, I never have.

She fell in love that semester. I fell out of love the next. I don’t let myself think of what could have been, if we had the chance to admit what we really felt so many years ago.

E S S AY C O N T E S T

On Loving Someone You know You Shouldn't Some things don't fit neatly into boxes

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ch | Illust

Jessi Olars

Ella Bei A sophomore from Calgary, Canada.

THIRD PLACE

I

hate summer people.

Glistening skin, white laughter, frothy water, gritty sand that won’t wash off your legs. The sting of salt in your mouth, maybe from those dry–cured steaks from the Michelin star restaurants, or maybe from the sea, no one can tell. I look at you and want to crack a half– assed joke about being salty, but I won’t.

The truth is, I’ve actually never seen you on a beach, not in the flesh. Yet, that’s how I always think about you, or at least your quintessence. “Plato’s Theory of Forms,” you’d remark, with your dumb British accent.

It’s been a while, and the incompetence of memory smudges the line between fact and fiction. I’m still not that clear on the truth of what happened, and you aren’t either, but the difference between us is that you never cared enough to figure it out. Classical philosophy was never your thing anyway.

Not generalizing people is an underratedly hard thing to do. The popularization of character tropes, horoscopes, and even all those ‘tag yourself ’ memes makes you wonder why the field of psychology isn’t obsolete, when

there exists cut and dry solutions that box the 7.6 billion people on earth into one of sixteen types. Proudly present your INTJ laptop sticker, cross your fingers in solidarity and in hopes that belonging to a cult of personality– clones makes you feel a little less cosmically lonely.

Even barring the usual pitfalls, you were always a tough nut to not idealize. The first time I met you, I couldn’t shake off my feeling of disbelief. I couldn’t shake off the feeling that you were too good for me. I pinched myself to double check that I wasn’t in a dream, or some state of hallucinogen–induced mania. Like the start of every awkward college flirtation, the sweaty walls, crumpled red solo cups, and erratically pulsating lights–hallmarks of the frat party–were far from glamorous. The only sense of mystery in the room surrounded whatever mysterious substance happened to coat the sticky floors. I didn’t believe in the concept of "sad EDM" until that night.

There was a kind of desperation in the room as the night waned and strangers began coupling off into sloppy, intoxicated courtships while

the bass reverberated and entire bodies vibrated. People danced cathartically, jerkily embodying the music, their intense physicality compensating for their lack of (sexual) physicality. It wasn’t necessarily a culture I wanted to subscribe to, but I was there, and I didn’t care.

The first thing I noticed about you was how hard you were. Your body, not the other thing, but probably that too. You were clearly one of those assholes who actually went to the gym and actually ate right, minus the beer and those sweet, sweet 3 a.m.

UberEats orders. I scanned my word cloud of labels and jotted down “dumb frat boy.” “Gotcha,” I muttered, yet you bested me at every turn. Suavely, you described the buttery nuances of tone colour you were able to achieve in the Steinway shop, eyes shut as if you were reliving the scene, indulging in some kind of private kinesthetic pleasure. It’s like you had taken all the allures of fuckboydom and softboydom and amalgamated them into something frustratingly irresistible. Being a walking contradiction was your aesthetic. You smoked and

drank nightly, even overslept your midterms, yet you landed the most lucrative internships and board positions year after year. You spun heart–wringing tales about being the lonely underdog in middle school, yet today, people cluster around you like flies. You were stinking rich, but emotionally impoverished.

Alas, here I am today, swaddled up in enough cloth it would put a mummy to shame, blasting “Loveless” on full volume. Deep, intellectual insights are raging in my mind—did you know that the statement “man's not hot” could be interpreted either as being disaffected by heat, or craving it, depending on whether the temperature outside was hot or cold?

And indeed, as the wind bites at my skin and cuffing season draws to a close, it becomes obvious that it really is cold—just like you! Golden boy, you are the Hot Pocket who hasn’t been heated up long enough in the microwave: steamy and tantalizing exterior, but once someone takes a bite, their teeth are greeted with a nasty, frozen surprise.

I catch myself from mak-

ing more of these petty and bitter analogies. You were the yang to my yin, not in a clichéd we–complete–each– other sense, but in the sense that I always felt like I was living in your shadow. It felt like regardless of how many LinkedIn connections I could rack up or how many different acquaintances I could rotationally grab lunch with, I could never ascend to your Ubermensch status.

I was chasing your light asymptotically, yet I was neglecting my own. Superficial, morally unfounded success was always something I made a marked effort of not preoccupying myself with. Yet I was certain that my parents would love me more if I were like you. Regardless of how many smart–ass jokes I crack about you—teeth gritted, eyes stinging—I knew that in the end, the brunt of the joke was me. Hibernating in the Van Pelt basement, I live your life vicariously through a tiny cracked glass screen.

You’re popping open a bottle of champagne, your eyes are twinkling, your face is illuminated by the rose–gold of the sunset.

Keep on laughing, summer boy.

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E S S AY C O N T E S T

Finding Love an Ocean Away I thought you had to be stupid to be happy until I fell in love.

Abigail McGuckin SECOND PLACE

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f you’re happy at Penn, you must be stupid. I said it.

I wanted to date smart and happy people, but they didn't exist at Penn, or anywhere. I did not admit this to myself for a while. My belief was suppressed, but emerged as most of my personal revelations do: off of Penn’s campus.

After taking a summer class and working at a marketing firm in Philly, I left for six weeks with more or less a plan. I had a flight to Europe. I wasn’t setting out to find myself because I had already completed résumé–worthy material and hooked up with a guy that I could see myself being with at Penn. Leaving was a reward for accomplishing some serious adulting, not an escape.

I landed in Bulgaria’s capital and into the arms of a friend and fellow Quaker. We debriefed about new love and old flames as we drove to her family’s house in Greece and then left to party in Stockholm. We stayed out all night until Maria flew to Oslo for an architecture program. I left for Copenhagen to work unpaid. Touching down with

the Mother of all hangovers, I opened Google Maps to find out where I was working for the next three weeks. I’d taken an unpaid job on Drejø, a Danish island that I assumed was near Copenhagen. It was not. Two trains, two buses, and a ferry ride later, I arrived. With a dead phone and 20 minutes of daylight left, I walked down the sole road on the island. I didn’t have a phone number for my boss Beth, but I wrote down the name of her cafe that I’d be waitressing in: Gammel Elmegaard.

The road forked. I chose the right arm and approached two visibly drunk Danes eating outside a combined restaurant and grocery store, I apologized for my American–ness and asked if they knew a Beth. They spoke Danish and were clearly unamused. I retreated, but caught the eye of a tallish man, jocular, skin like lemon sorbet, nonchalantly flipping burgers, pretending not to smirk while watching me interact with the town drunks. Suddenly, a middle– aged woman with a bowl cut and Levis took both my hands

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and said, “I know where you need to go. You’re in the right place.”

Anne Brigitte, as a later learned her name, was right; I was in the right place. Beth welcomed me as a daughter, just like everyone on the island did for Drejø’s party week of community events. At the Gammel Elmegaard Annual Craft Fair a few days later, I saw the blonde boy. He showed up with the rest of Drejø’s 80 inhabitants. Ogling from the cafe window I watched him chat up the older folk. My co–workers insisted that I make plans tonight with him.

Usually blasé around potential suitors, I stumbled on my words, flushed. I’d talked my way in and out of people’s lives, but now I was nervous.

He wasn’t. He was happy and brilliant, an impossible mix.

Two years at college and endless firsthand accounts from friends at other schools had taught me that no such combination exists.

The conversation was more a series of hand gestures from me and listening from him. I didn't have to make plans with him because he stayed at the fair until my shift was over. That night, I texted friends that I’d found the nicest man to just hook up with, joking that he could never be as smart or as kind as he seemed…

We talked about welfare economics and whether marriage was obsolete. The second night he slept over, I asked if he’d been in love. Unfazed, he replied, “No,” but that there was a long time friend he had never shared a physical relationship, but could

imagine himself living with and loving forever. I reciprocated the same honesty in responding to his questions. We made an agreement to withhold nothing.

I threw away the postcard that I wrote to my ex and skinny– dipped with the new man.

I kept finding more of myself to share with him. He challenged my presumptions and the love I’d come to define at Penn. I found myself admitting to him that if a person is happy they must be stupid. He laughed heartily, and smiled into my shoulder, “No, elskling.”

Not often alone since meeting him, I carved out time for myself to journal about these sickening personal revelations, knowing I’d let myself deaden and become jaded since freshman year.

The following night we had a proper amount of local beer with my co–workers and played a game. I pulled out an English dictionary that we passed around, asking for certain page numbers and entries based on lucky numbers or important dates. When I asked him to read the word corresponding to the night I arrived on Drejø, he shuffled through the pages, grinned, and read, “fortunateness.”

I had laid it all out on the line on Drejø, and frankly, I only had dirty laundry; I was more of a mess that I’d admitted to myself.

He could tell I was processing my last year and didn't care. I felt like I had baggage, but he assured me that what I had was a lot of stories. We talked all night, worked all day, and suddenly we had our last 24 hours together.

We cooked three square meals, lay in wheat fields, and ate plums off his mom’s trees. Suddenly I found myself weepy and waiting for the ferry. In keeping with our disclosure agreement, I blurted out, “I fell in love with you here.”

He replied, “I love you, too.”

Placing the breakfast he packed for me into my hands, he explained that we had to see each other again, as if I needed convincing. I agreed. Over shoddy wi–fi, I pushed my flight from Europe back and met up with him in Vienna for a week. This fall, he visited me at Penn, where he met my friend that I went to Stockholm with. Over spring break, we’re meeting up with her in London before going back to Copenhagen.

We leave each other voice memos and FaceTime weekly. I don’t call him my boyfriend because he’s an ocean away, but I love him. He knows it.

In returning to Penn, I realized my belief that you must be stupid to be happy here was false and an expression of my own insecurities. The fortunateness of last summer was not a result of luck, but rather, of being wholly candid and present with another person, first platonically and then romantically. Realizing that I was willing to share a bed and secret stories with a total stranger was a wake up call to my own callousness. I accessed the interpersonal sublime, better known as love, with honesty and trust.

It’s the same truthfulness and confidence I am attempting to continue sharing at Penn.

E S S AY C O N T E S T

On Finding Love through Freshman Hallcest Falling for your Quad neighbor is risky business.

Sabrina Ochoa

FIRST PLACE

Jessi Olarsch | Illustration

W

hen you arrive at Penn, lose yourself in the fresh atmosphere, amongst the countless introductions, at the crowded parties, in the bubbly, champagne–like feeling that accompanies the start of something new.

You won’t sleep, but you won’t need to. Dance with someone new (or multiple someones) at every party. It’ll exhilarate you.

Never keep track, never take names. Strut your way into Pike one Sunday night (because this school will have parties on Sunday nights) with a top that might have passed as a shirt back home in the tropics, but in Philly is basically lingerie. Two drinks in, he’ll approach you. The boy from your floor who casually (too casually) struck up conversation about Nietzsche with you at the freshman picnic, who met eyes with you too many times at the toga party for it to be coincidental. Dance with him, if only in recognition of his steadfast efforts. You’ll end up dancing on a table, returning to the bar for drinks, back on the table, and at some point, the voluminous mass of your hair will hook into the rim of his glasses and refuse to let go. It’s embarrassing, it’s cute, it’s nauseatingly cliché. His lips end up on your lips and it’s passionate and hot until warning bells go off in your head. He’s a Hall Guy. Worse, he’s a Cool Guy™. You don’t want another Cool Guy™ in your life.

Move on. Run out of Pike into the warm city air like Cinderella racing to keep her secrets from a dangerously curious Prince.

Avoid him at hall functions and weekly parties. Play it cool when you pass each other, fresh from the showers, and you feel his eyes on you from two doors down.

Problem: you’ll want to get into Fiji on a Saturday night, a party exclusive to those who can offer names to “Who do you know here?” Cool Guy™ seems to know everyone. Solution: give up and call him. Cool Guy™ finagles you into Fiji. The music will suck. Try to dance with him and fail because “Castle on the Hill” doesn’t make you feel sexy.

He does, though, and you’ll end up back at the Quad. After you fuck, he lays next to you and asks if he’s going to wake up in the morning alone, with a hallmate who won’t look him in the eyes

anymore. Cool Guy™ looks vulnerable. So, you’ll make room in the Twin XL and promise to stay.

The next day when his roommate complains loudly about how he got sexiled last night, don’t make eye contact. You don’t want this, whatever it is, to be common knowledge. Solve this by fucking in the middle of the day while his roommate is in class. Develop a schedule. Wash, rinse, repeat. Eventually he’ll be out of your hair, and you’ll actually be able to talk about your sex life with friends in your hall again.

A week in, after a midday rendezvous, your stomach will rumble. You’ll look at each other, already in sync, and head off to Houston Market for teriyaki

bowls. Good sex always makes you hungry. Out of the blue, Cool Guy™ stops chewing his chicken, smiles, and has a revelation—you two are basically on a reverse date! Panic (internally).

Laugh (externally). Return to the Quad (à la your previous run from Pike) and chastise yourself for your choices. Resolve to cut Cool Guy™ out of your life. You will last two days. Your friends (and Pharrell) will tell you “don’t be afraid to catch feels, ride drop top and chase thrills.” But next Friday, promise yourself you’ll go home with literally anyone else or just alone. Walk out your door wearing another shirt/ lingerie item and straight into Cool Guy™. Nice shirt, he says.

Thanks. Where are you headed?

Wawa. Slip out into the cool night air before he even responds.

At the party, blindly find someone else (you won’t). Dance like you have all the space you need (you don’t). Drink too much to prove you’re busy chasing thrills without Cool Guy™ (you aren’t).

Late into the night, you’ll get a call from Drunk Cool Guy™. Only out of duty as a good hallmate, walk eight blocks to a random upperclassman’s apartment to save his liver from imminent demise.

Step in and meet Crossfaded Cool Guy™ who immediately grabs you by the waist and kisses you up against the doorway. It’s sloppy, it’s urgent, it’s emotive. Suddenly, he’s spilling it all, the proverbial beans are overflowing in what is now his confessional, and the sins—lies of omission—are innumerable.

As he staggers down Walnut and Locust, his frenzied (Franzia–ed?) words crash on you like the ocean does when your back is turned.

It’s a tidal wave and you’re drowning in the truth and he’s churning with emotion and you’re done kidding yourself and he’s exposed and he’s true and he’s honest. He’s also borderline MERTable. When he passes out on the lawn in front of Rodin, learn that he has an affinity for projectile vomiting. You will get an early start on laundry this weekend back at the Quad.

In the morning, he wakes you up with a sheepish tap on the door.

Try your hand at communication and emotional transparency.

The first time will be full of stuttering and stumbling, but he is understanding, and it’ll be easy to practice since he’s your neighbor.

Create your future with fresh eyes now, with this with this man who feels like family more than anyone else ever has. He is a beginning with no ending. He is the tension between the familiar and the unfamiliar, the embodiment of old and new. Every time you look at him, you’ll get that bubbly, champagne–like feeling. Five months later, it’ll still be there.

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FILM & TV

LGBTQ Romance on the Big Screen Where is the (LGBTQ) Love?

With Valentine’s Day comes a new crop of romantic blockbusters like Fifty Shades Freed, but these films, featuring starry–eyed actors in perfect, straight relationships leave little space for anyone who’s not the Hollywood–styled picture of romance. Mainstream media is infamously bad at including LGBTQ characters, but when it comes to romantic relationships, there are even fewer options. Hollywood’s insistence on cis–gendered, straight couples as romantic leads begs the question: what about the rest of us?

Classic rom–coms like Sleepless in Seattle or You’ve Got Mail don’t have much in the way of diversity; but neither do recent releases like the popular but critically disparaged Fifty Shades tril-

Charlotte Bausch

ogy. GLAAD’s 2017 Studio Responsibility Index reports grim statistics: of 125 film releases from major studios in 2016, only 23 included characters identified as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or queer. Of the 70 LGBTQ characters portrayed, a whopping 14 were featured in a single musical number. LGBTQ women, non–binary people, and people of color are underrepresented, with most portrayals focusing on gay male characters.

The lack of representation in mainstream media can make content with LGBTQ characters hard to find. Jess Araten (C '20), who identifies as bisexual/queer/ fluid, said that finding good portrayals in TV and movies has often been difficult. “Honestly,

at least in terms of shows catered to queer women or non–binary people, and not specifically gay men, I feel like there’s more stuff from web series on YouTube or other alternative video streaming platforms, rather than TV” Often, the lack of representation has led the LGBTQ community to search for content outside the mainstream on online platforms.

About five pages deep into a Google search, I could understand why. Articles listing “The (insert number here) Best LGBT Characters on TV” were mostly composed of blank–eyed side characters; a search for “gay rom–coms” dredged up movies that remain unwatched at the bottom of the pit of Netflix titles for good reason. Two big–name

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films about gay romance, the Oscar–nominated Call Me by Your Name and the Oscar–winning Moonlight, came out recently, and were some of the best representations I found (although it’s worth noting that both of these centered around gay men, not women, trans, or non–binary people).

In Moonlight, which in 2017 became the first film with an LGBTQ lead to win the Oscar for best picture, we follow main character Chiron as he grows up in Liberty City, Miami, troubled by violent bullying and his mother’s drug abuse. The film is less focused on romance than your typical rom–com—although it’s pretty swoony when Chiron and his childhood friend, Kevin, reunite late in the film to the crooning of Barbara Lewis—but it includes an important gay relationship. Moonlight features an all–black cast, a rarity in Hollywood, and offers a representation of gay people of color.

Set in the sultry heat of an Italian summer, Call Me by Your Name is more romantic. The film documents the relationship between 17–year–old Elio and American grad student Oliver, who is working with Elio’s father for the summer. The film is overripe, bursting with color and buzzing with flies like a peach in the orchards where the pair are often filmed, golden and loose– limbed. A gorgeous, swooning

film like this one seems like a triumph for representation, and in many ways, Jess said, it is. “It broke a lot of the standard norms for representation of a gay or a queer couple. The two men were really pretty fluid in their sexualities, and a lot of the relationship was, I thought, represented very realistically and beautifully.”

However, many have found the age difference between Elio, a teenager, and Oliver, a man in his twenties, troubling. “There’s been debate among my friends, many of whom are queer, about if it’s okay, if it’s not okay, what it means and how it fits into the larger discussions of the community,” said Araten. Even when we can find gay relationships in film, they are almost never the brand of simple, saccharine romance common in straight love stories. Gay relationships aren’t allowed happy endings. The trope of LGBTQ characters dying tragically has been persistent to the point that it is referred to on many websites as “Bury Your Gays.”

Generous, realistic depictions of gay relationships have historically been elusive, and continue to be. So this Valentine’s Day, when you’re watching that rom– com about a totally average (but unreasonably hot) girl who is inexplicably swept off her feet by a billionaire playboy, consider the stories we tell and those that go untold.

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ith new awards shows every other day, the Oscars looming closer, and big studios like Marvel and DC still churning out their profitable sludge, it’s understandable to be a little sick of Hollywood movies.

Just in time for Valentine’s Day, here are some non– Hollywood films about love and relationships. But none of these films are conventional love stories, either—that would still be too mainstream. There are no conventionally happy endings (really, no happy endings at all), and no guarantee that the love interests will end up together.

They’re moving, heartbreaking works that serve as a refreshing break from saccharine Hollywood fare.

If you’re brave and have some time on your hands, watch them all in this order, all at once. They might bum you out so much that you’ll be ready to return to The Notebook.

Start with Ossessione (Obsession), a 1943 Italian film

by Luchino Visconti. It’s about an affair between the bored wife of a restaurant owner and hunky wandering tramp. The two plot to murder the woman’s husband, but things, of course, don't go as planned. It’s actually based on the American novel The Postman Always Rings Twice, which was also adapted into a Hollywood version, but only after the Italian adaptation. It’s a fascinating

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FILM & TV

Love in a Hurry:

FiveShortFilmstoWatchon Valentine'sDay

Leave some time for real-life romance.

Cat Dragoi

February 14 is not only Valentine’s Day, but also the very heart of midterm season. As our minds are busy concocting ways to fit as much information as possible into a cheat sheet, it might be hard—and time–consuming—to come up with romantic plans. I think we all agree that movie theaters are the go–to option for uninspired dates, and watching Netflix with your Valentine is, honestly, just sad. If, however, you still want to incorporate films into your tryst, here are five quicker but equally charming options:

1. Till Human Voices Wake Us If you like Carl Jung, T.S. Eliot, and Celtic mythology, this one’s for you.

The film tells the story of a Selkie, a mythological creature who lives as a seal in the sea, but takes the shape of a beautiful maiden when on land—and falls for a man drowning under the Brooklyn Bridge. Blending images of an ethereal nature with the bright lights of New York City, Till Human Voices Wake Us is a modern fairytale that is sure to give you some food for thought.

2. Two Cars, One Night This 12–minute masterpiece was nominated for Best Short Film at the Oscars in 2005, and after watching it, it’s not hard to understand why. The incredibly funny Two Cars, One Night will remind you of simpler times, when falling in love was as easy as talking to another kid in a parking lot.

3. True Directed by Tom Tykwer (Perfume: The Story of a Murderer) and starring Natalie Portman, True is part of a project in which 20 acclaimed directors each tell a story in one of Paris’ arrondissements. The movie, emotionally charged and melancholic, recounts a couple’s most intimate moments, which unfortunately lead to their inevitable demise.

NOTHING SAYS I love you

4. To Die by Your Side Spike Jonze—the director of this six–minute animation—is the master of unusual love stories, as proven by the success of Her. In To Die by Your Side, his experimental tendencies are once again obvious: the sweet tale of two paper figures is set on the backdrop of a bookstore, and is filled with literary references.

5. The Voices of a Distant Star The longest film on this list is a Japanese animated romance that will appeal to your inner nerd. It tells the story of high school students Mikako and Noboru, whose bond is at risk when the former travels to a distant universe to fight aliens. In this short sci–fi flick, you’ll easily recognize the difficulties and beauties of a real–life long–distance relationship.

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Re-Finding Romance in Art History's Famous Kisses

ARTS

Forget the nooncommittal culture of Penn with these portraits of self-love. Sophie Burkholder

Catherine Liang | Illustrator

In all of art history, kisses with added elements of ilAt Penn, a kiss these days lumination and japonisme, the too often means a sloppy have been awkward and passionate, depicted somecraze for Japanese art.

DFMO in the basement of times as a slight touch of the Not too dissimilar is Henri a frat house. It’s no wonder de Toulouse–Lautrec’s In Bed: lips and others as full–on that so many people complain embraces. Some of the most The Kiss, which steals a glance about finding love at Penn. into the intimate moment of But, of course, Penn is not to beautiful representations are two lovers in bed. Each with be seen a microcosm of society. mere kisses on the cheek, like their arms wrapped around Gustav Klimt’s 1907 famous A kiss in Italy is a friendly the other, the man and woman gilded portrait of two lovgreeting. A kiss in China, a press their lips against each ers, The Kiss. A hallmark of public declaration of love. other•in a kiss that meets in the the Art Nouveau movement, Across cultures and time, the Flexible Leasing • Single and Double Rooms line of the painting’s diagonal. kiss has come to mean so many this gold–leaf painting shows Individual Leases • All Amenities Included It’s a painting that blends the Klimt’s work at itsand finest,Utilities with different things. Particularly styles of impressionism and in art history, the meaning of a man holding the face of a realism, with textured lines of blissful woman as he graces a kiss has been molded again blues and reds throughout. It’s her golden cheek with his Call lips. and again, but the beauty of it both risqué and reserved in its never unwavering. To refresh This masterpiece channels the 215.662.0802 passion, and the anonymity of figures of Francesco Hayez’s your romantic side for this the figures adds to its allure for mid–nineteenth–century Valentine’s Day, here are some of art history’s famous kisses. portrait, also entitled TheEmail Kiss, the audience.

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With modern art, the styles of representation began to change, but the kiss stayed as a subject for artists. René Magritte’s portrait The Lovers shows all the soft intimacy of an embrace between lovers, but hides the actual physical connection. The heads of his subjects are draped in flowing shrouds, and though they are kissing, their lips do not actually touch each other. Even without revealing identity or depicting any form of explicit physical action, the painting nevertheless imparts a sense of love and warmth between the couple. The texture of the cloth still conveys an overt sensuality between the two, yet there also remains a captivating element of mystery.

If we jump forward to the cultural revolution of the 1970’s, we can again find the kiss in art. One of my favorites from this time period is Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographic portrait, Larry and Bobby Kissing. Though Mapplethorpe is known for his controversial subject matter, he should also be recognized for his expertise in composition and balance. At first examination, the picture is stark and bare. Its subjects are centered, with one seated on a stool and both dressed in black leather.

Despite all of this, Mapplethorpe still achieves a window into the intimacy of these lovers.

There’s a sense of strength and confidence behind it, yet if

it were cropped to the lovers’ faces, it would be an image of pure bliss. This photograph is not just a masterpiece of the kiss, but one that stands out in all of Mapplethorpe’s oeuvre.

But above all the others is Auguste Rodin’s 1882 sculpture The Kiss. The first time I saw the sculpture was at the Musée Rodin in Paris on a family vacation. It sits at the center of an upstairs gallery of the museum, which used to be the Hôtel Biron. The windows and mirrors of the room emphasize the torsion of the sculpture, as it is one that should be viewed three–dimensionally from all angles.

The male figure softly grasps the waist of his female lover, while she longingly drapes her arms around his neck in an embrace of fundamental passion. Like much of Rodin’s work, The Kiss is not about the fine details and the individual aspects, but about the shape and the feeling that the sum of the whole gives. He is the impressionist sculptor, and The Kiss is his reigning masterpiece—a cast of which sits in the Rodin Museum of Philadelphia.

So, this year, ask your Valentine or crush to go to an art museum with you. Not only is Wednesday usually a discount day around Philadelphia, but you never know how the romance you find between the frames might transfer to real life.

ARTS

Street's Guide to

Artsy First Dates in Philly

The best installations, galleries, and exhibits to take in on a first date.

Sydney Gelman

Emma Boey | Staff Photographer Philadelphia is filled to the brim with interesting art galleries, exhibits, and installations that come and go so quickly that you only hear of them after the fact. This February, take in all the galleries on your bucket list with a date—the ones you’ll never get around to seeing to unless you pick a time, place, and person to go see them with.

Show your date your mastery of high culture or laugh together at tasteful nudes.

Museums and galleries are a great place to get to know the unknown about your potential partner—sometimes seeing how they react to Potato Jesus tells you all you need to know.

First on the list is an exhibit close to campus at the ICA. This isn’t a huge time commitment, no SEPTA or Uber coordination is needed, and its current exhibit plays with elements of video games, fandoms, desire, and queer play.

Tag: Proposals on Queer Play and the Ways Forward allows you to take a look at human desires (beyond the heteropatriarchy) through the more playful lens of video games.

Even if you aren’t big on games yourself, it’s a great

way to step out of your comfort zone and see the installations that are right next door.

After you go through the gallery, you can stop at Elixr Coffee in the lobby to discuss what you thought over massive cookies and caffeine.

Next on the list is the Chuck Close Photographs exhibit at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. This exhibit features ninety images over the span of Chuck Close’s career from 1964 to the present.

There’s a photograph in this gallery that can draw anyone in: from portraits of celebrities and politicians (Alec Baldwin, Hillary Clinton), to flowers, self–portraits, or polaroids. This is a great first date spot for people who are wading into the art world. It also gets you into the city so you can grab lunch or dinner afterwards.

Another great Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts exhibit is Beyond Boundaries: Feminine Forms, which gives you a chance to subvert and explore the male (and female) gaze as you discover different expressions of the female form with your date (Ed. note: wink).

This may seem intimidating, or a little awkward, but it’s a

great way to look at a collection of art that features over 72 female artists and covers all forms, from paintings to sculptures to prints. If you and your date want to get to know each other on a deeper level than you would at dinner and a movie, this exhibit is for you.

For those who aren’t too fond of galleries, but don’t mind the cold weather, there are collections of murals spread throughout the city

about love and companionship. Steve Powers' A Love Letter For You is one of the most popular collections of murals in Philly history, consisting of 50 murals along Market Street focused on love between individuals and love for the city of Philadelphia. This is an incredible way to take in art and explore Philadelphia with your date—you can see all of the murals in one go, or take a break to get lunch or drinks

along the way. If walking (or the cold) isn’t your thing, you can also check out a series of train tours that will do the legwork for you.

Go out, grab someone, and take in the culture that Philly has to offer. When another exhibit opens after the first date, you’ll have a perfect excuse to plan date number two.

You’ll always have a

PIZhZeaArt our

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ARTS

Behind the LOVE Statue So much more than a tourist spot

Every day we walk past it, barely affording it a glimpse while every tourist flocks to it to sneak a peek at the marvel. It’s a prime landmark on campus— the LOVE statue. Right in the center of campus, surrounded by ivy–covered red brick buildings, the LOVE statue has as its backdrop a picturesque scene. Spring or winter, the tree–lined walk is always blanketed in either green or white. But the LOVE statue is so much more than another

Xinyi Wan

monument only tourists appreciate.

To be fair, the LOVE statue on campus is not the original.

The original started as a pop art image by American artist Robert Indiana, the red letters cast before a background of blue and green. The slanting of the O was designed intentionally as to have the negative spaces forming a V in between the letters, which as Indiana says “makes the letters dynamic.” Before long, the pop-

ularity of the piece brought the piece to serve as a print image for the 1964 Museum of Modern Art Christmas card, then becoming a popular U.S. postage stamp in 1973.

It was in 1970 that the print image was brought to life in sculptural form. Fabricated from sheets of COR–TEN steel, the material was bolted together to transform the two–dimensional design into a three–dimensional one. Since 1970, that statue has

The Penn History Department presents…

been on display at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, but countless replicas have been made since.

Particularly of interest to us, however, are the copies in Center City and on campus. The one in Center City debuted during the 1976 bicentennial celebration and has since became one of the most popular sculptures in the city. It was installed on a loan, but when Philadelphia could not pay back the $45,000 sticker price, it had to be returned to Indiana in 1978. In response, F. Eugene Dixon, former owner of the Philadelphia 76ers basketball team, bought the sculpture and donated it to the city the same year.

Growing up, Indiana attended the Church of Scientology. At the services, he saw a tiny plaque over the reader’s platform with the words “God is love” inscribed on it. In fact, his first artworks bore the same words “God is love” before he later decided to shorten the phrase to just "LOVE." In that, the word “love” also has a spiritual connection.

The statue shows that one does not have to know all the technical terms to talk about art or to be touched by art. The emotions embedded in LOVE are complex, yet accessible and universal.

Around the time Indiana began creating LOVE, he was also working on other works earmarked by

History Matters Now

a series of dinner talks by Penn History faculty

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Kathy Peiss, “Entertainment and Politics: An American History” Harrison House, 1/24, 6:00 Kathy Brown, “Thinking about Race in the United States” Kings Court, 2/1, 6:30 Beth Wenger, “Is Anti-Semitism Resurgent?”

New College House, 2/21, 6:30 Hosted by Cam Grey All College House residents welcome Ben Nathans, “Are We Headed for a New Cold War with Russia?”

New College House, 3/20, 6:30 Hosted by Cam Grey All College House residents welcome Mary Berry, “History Teaches Us to Resist: How Progressive Movements Have Succeeded in Challenging Times” Dubois House, 4/4, 6:00 Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet, “Banned—Uncle Sam Doesn’t Want You!” Gregory College House, date TBD https://www.history.upenn.edu/calendar/history-matters-now

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As to the one on campus, Penn’s LOVE statue was gifted to the school in 1996 from Jeffrey J. and Sivia Loria, an American art dealer and former owner of the Miami Marlins. When it was installed in the triangular patch of green at the 36th Street and Locust Walk, it replaced a sculpture called “We Lost” by Tony Smith that now sits in front of the Singh Center for Nanotechnology.

The symbolism behind the statue is not merely a statement of love. At the time the first of the series was built, "love" was meant to encompass conceptions of free love, the sexual revolution, and anti–war counterculture movements. But the meaning was also a personal one to the artist.

Illustration by Christine Lam the words EAT, HUG, and DIE, but the others never caught on the way LOVE did. If anything, it’s a testament to the strength of love.

Indiana had conceived of his statue as a means to “cover the world with love.” For Philly, the City of Brotherly Love, he had envisioned a larger statue that stood 24 feet high with an internal staircase.

He says, “that way you could be in LOVE, not just beside it or on it.”

Though that project never came to fruition, the very presence of the LOVE statue is a reminder of just how ubiquitous love is. Physically and conceptually.

And yes, while the LOVE statue has certainly garnered its fair share of attention, it cannot encapsulate the real love surrounding us.

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