Kitsch Magazine: Spring 2020

kitsch VOL

18 NO 2 || SPRING 2020

kitsch

LETTER FROM THE EDITORS

Dear reader, Like many of us, in the weeks following the beginning of isolation in March due to the covid-19 pandemic, we at kitsch had no idea what the hell we were going to do. We weren’t sure if it made sense to ask people to continue writing and creating in the midst of this global health crisis, but when we reached out to our contributors to ask how they felt, many enthusiastically welcomed the idea of continuing on. Being scattered around the world in our various homes doesn’t diminish our drive to write and make art together; if anything, the isolation heightened that drive. So, we’re pleased to present you kitsch as a space where we hope we can all take some kind of refuge together, even when the state of the world is so daunting.

We’ve been thinking about the themes we didn’t choose this semester, about what could have been if we’d chosen a different path back in February.

Imagine if we’d chosen one of the other themes on the short list: “crush,” or “bittersweet.” In some ways, they would’ve worked: “crush” because of the crushing sensation of a semester cut short, of milestones missed, of loved ones lost; “bittersweet” because of the grief of everything, at odds with the saving solace of talking to our friends and family, even through a screen.

Ultimately, “Blue” feels the truest as a theme for the time being, perhaps because it embodies an immeasurable depth of feelings—feelings which sometimes lie beneath the surface of our everyday lives, and sometimes engulf us completely. The contributors to this issue embrace the complexity of feelings and reflection. In “Portrait in Blue,” Emma Eisler explores the emotional complexity of Joni Mitchell’s legendary album Blue, contemplating the ways in which different phases of life and love have brought her new understandings of the music. Evelyn Kennedy Jaffe paints an intimate portrait of the early moments of a new love in “Quick Little Story About Me Falling in Love,” and Jamie Anderluh marvels at the corporeal vulnerability of swimming and the delicate lifeblood of glaciers in “Life Frozen in Time.”

All this and more is contained in this issue, published digitally with love and hope for the future. Thank you for reading.

Love, Anna & Annie

kitsch VOL

18 NO 2 || SPRING 2020

editors-in-chief

copy editor art editor assistant art editor web editor assistant web editor social media editor design editor assistant design editor

writers

cover art back cover art

advisor

EVE HALLOCK ABBY ESKINDER HAILU ZAHAVAH ROJER OLIVIA BONO MEGAN ROCHLIN TILDA WILSON NADYA MIKHAYLOVSKAYA KAROLINA PIORKO

ANNA GRACE LEE + ANNIE FU

zooming out editor assistant zooming out editor zooming in editor assistant zooming in editor watch and listen editor assistant watch and listen editor bite size editor

JAMIE ANDERLUH OLIVIA BONO ANNA CANNY VEE CIPPERMAN NALU CONCEPCION EMMA EISLER EMMA GOLDENTHAL EVE HALLOCK EVELYN KENNEDY JAFFE ANNA GRACE LEE ANA PENAVIĆ ZAHAVAH ROJER STEPHANIE TOM RUBY QUE TILDA WILSON

ABBY ESKINDER HAILU ALYSSA ANDERSON,“Others’ Insides”

MICHAEL KOCH

artists

EMMA EISLER CLAIRE DENG STEPHANIE TOM NALU CONCEPCION JEAN CAMBARERI OLIVIA PIETZ ANA PENAVIĆ

AIZA AHMED ALYSSA ANDERSON OLIVIA BONO EOGHAN DEMPSEY EMMA EISLER EVE HALLOCK JANE JACKSON JULI LEBLANC BELLE MCDONALD ZAHAVAH ROJER STEPHANIE TOM RUBY QUE MAGDALENA WILSON JACQUELINE WONG

IN THIS ISSUE...

Bite Size True Blue Edith Pilaf Puddles A Beginner’s Guide to the Moon Quarantine Boyfriend: Jacob or Edward?

Celestial Housekeeping Quaranteen Blues Which blue spring flower are you? blue notes

7 8 9 10 11 12 15 16 17

Watch & Listen How to Waterbend Portrait in Blue Should I Watch This Movie?

22 26 29

Zooming In The Big Brick House That Could: A Love Letter to Lodge Here is a Puddle Cyanotype

30 33 35

Zooming Out Swimming Pools Crater Lake Memories of Something Calm and Constant Quick Little Story About Me Falling in Love Life Frozen in Time The Marvelous and Indestructible Waterbear As We Move Into the Evening Hours

36 38 40 41 42 44 45

ON THE PLAZA what makes you feel blue?

“The prospect of not going back to a normal life.”

– Kayla B

why is the sky blue?

“Because it’s sad that it’s outshined by the sun. Also, fossil fuels and smog and all that jazz.”

– Patrick Bohan

“Bluets.”

– Sylvie R “Not seeing you.”

– Willa “Lost pet signs.”

– Emma E

“Land is green, and blue-green go well together.”

– Joyce Lian “Because it used to be the sea.”

– Yuri Han “The sun is hot, and blue is the warmest color” – Matilda Berke “The avatar’s returned.”

– Jon Schatzberg “It’s sad that climate change is real.”

– Stephanie Tom “Dawn is the healing of her bruise, turning from black to blue.”

– Eve “The sky whales are all blue and they cover up everything else.”

– Havi “Trolls” – Abby Mengesha "This is something I definitely learned in AP Enviro and something I definitely forgot as soon as I started memorizing information from X-Men Wikipedia pages."

– Olivia “The water in the ocean evaporates and the blue glowing phytoplanktons evaporate with it.”

– Adam Yang

what is blue to you?

“Wetness and fragility.”

– Jon Schatzberg “It means that everything’s gonna be ok, no matter how sad you get.”

– Yuri Han “Mondays.”

– Joyce Lian “The best flavor of any candy.”

– Adam Yang “Water tribe.”

– Josephene Ginting

Eoghan Dempsey “True Blue” bite size • 00

Edith Pilaf

by Anna Canny

Images in grainy blue. Horoscope says Rose (moon) colored glasses.

Trembling, crooning when he takes me in his arms I learned those chords.

Heaven sighs sun-lined clouds ruin the charm of cold, picking fingers.

I’d like to cry Imagine everyday words we baked fresh bread I’m wearing warm socks tonight.

Do you ever listen to your own breathing? life in pink, life in short magic spells, short gasps you can make your own head spin.w

Alyssa Anderson “Litter (Cyanotype 2019)” 8 • bite size

Puddles art and article by Zahavah Rojer, based on a prompt by Prospect of Whitby

There are puddles that go down into the earth forever, and you fell into one.

At first, you didn’t realize that it was an unusual puddle, other than the fact that it didn’t reflect sunlight so much as absorb it, like a small black hole in the middle of the sidewalk. Still, you suspected nothing as you placed your foot against its surface to walk across it.

You realized that something was very wrong when your whole leg sank suddenly into the liquid velvet of this neverending puddle. You tried to grab ahold of the ground around you, but this only stole what remained of your balance, and you went under completely.

Everything was dark around you within the puddle and you fell so slowly that it felt more like floating.

You closed your eyes and opened them and realized that there was no difference between either action.

You also began to realize that you shouldn’t have been breathing, since by any account you were now underwater. Yet, somehow, your lungs were filling with something too viscous to be oxygen and your breaths came evenly and calmly. You were almost shocked by how calm you felt, except that you couldn’t feel shock.

There was a rush in your ears like the ocean, but deeper and softer. You were neither warm nor cool.

You weren’t sure if your eyes were open or closed, but in the blackness all around you, lights began to appear (all greens and purples and other colors you had no names for). As they drew closer to you, you realized, with a sudden clarity, that they were tiny organisms, each one transparent and glowing, covered in a clear, fuzzy down. They were each completely unique. Some had thousands of arms and some had none at all. One had a long, vine-like tail that it used to propel itself through the darkness, and another had a hundred wings down its back like a second spine.

You reached out a hand to try and touch one of these creatures. As you did, you realized they were not minuscule at all, but endlessly far away from you and gigantic. You felt, somewhere remote from your consciousness, fear; but it was felt by someone else

you had once been long ago, and at that moment, you could feel only awe. The creatures swam in the nothingness around you that was somehow also everything. You knew then what pure joy was like, and it seemed you could stay forever frozen like that, just watching this whole universe that you had never even imagined.

But it was then that you felt yourself begin to fall faster, away from the creatures. You tried to shout to them. What could you have even said? You began to feel pain as you accelerated faster and faster and all around you the darkness was pierced by a blinding

You were falling, and then you were flying, no longer down but up and up and up and up into a cloudless sky, painfully bright. You closed your eyes and you could not breathe, although you were surrounded by oxygen.

And then, very suddenly, it all stopped. You felt cold, wet cement beneath your cheek. Slowly, you opened one eye and saw the sidewalk all around.

You were lying in the puddle, and there was nothing strange about it. It was only still, murky water. You closed your eyes again and remembered the glowing creatures and the deep blackness around you only a few moments before. Behind your eyelids, quiet flickers of color swam in the dark, and you smiled softly.w bite size • 9

A Beginner’s Guide to the Moon and the End of Everything

by Olivia Bono art by Aiza Ahmed First, you’ll need some perspective. “Once in a blue moon” isn’t a real length of time like a fortnight, a score, or a tick. What we think of as “blue” is just the second full moon in a month, or maybe the third full moon in a season—it can come every two-anda-half years, or twice in consecutive months, or this Halloween. We used to rely on the thirteenth moon to mark the passage of time, but it’s unreliable. I just found a self-righteous British website, clearly written before the event, that calls it the Betrayal Moon. It’s hard to make plans when even the moon can betray you.

But the magic didn’t come in a blue moon. The moon was supposed to be pink—the name given to the full moon in April, provided it’s not blue—but I didn’t care. Before the world stopped turning, I might have, but this year I couldn’t bring myself to step outside, barefoot in the rain, and howl. The world is quieter now than it ever was. Once upon a different summer, the air was buzzing with life, but this year, only the plant life swayed in the breeze. It’s impossible to tell if the rest of the world has moved on, moved away to wait out the storm, or is simply asleep.

We’ll never see the daffodils bloom in the world we left behind. The moon is supposed to transform us—give us fangs and claws and fur. But the end of life as we knew it came in broad daylight, not in the shadow of an eclipse. We were counting on a year with another thirteen moons, some pink, some blue, but the earth spun backwards while we were looking up.

So bury a peach pit in the sleeping soil of your backyard. June’s moon will bring strawberries, and a red not of blood, but of fruit. To complete your transformation, hold a sprig of lilac under a waxing crescent and fill the silence that the old world left behind. The moon is no longer a distant oddity, to be ogled at from a hill with the rest of humanity. The observatories sit abandoned. We’re different beasts now, the moon our only constant beacon in the unnaturally clear sky. Sit down in the damp brush and wait for morning.w 10 • bite size

“Quarantine Boyfriend: Jacob or Edward?” by Alyssa Anderson bite size • 11

Quaranteen Blues Cento compiled from Troubadour Logic, by Brent Terry published in 2019, and from The Bijak of Kabir translated by Linda Hess

by Ana Penavić art by KC Green

Son of a slut! there’s no hope: I’ve burned my own house down.

A dumb man illumines “I’m the greatest.

My house is secure.

Let the house burn, as long as my things are saved.”

Think! Think! Figure it out!

Death has you by the hair.

Sunday blazes bluey-white. Elevenish, & February, well February’s love filches daylight, sells it back Of devotion or separation in mindless confusion. a second—oh yes!—a second of where-the-fuck-am-I? and then maybe later, we’ll have pie.

bite size • 15

blue notes

by Emma Eisler aty by Belle McDonald

1. cornflower as a child, i press fingers to my neck and search for gills, widen my eyes in the mirror–irises sea-blue like captured pools of water. in the bathtub, i am seal-slick and mermaidlovely. ducking my head under, hair that haloes around me, bubbles that rise between my lips. counting the seconds that i am able to hold my breath. in the sucking of the drain, i hear the swell and crash of waves. closing my eyes, so only tiny specks of light filter in, and if i can just stay under long enough, coral castles will rise around me, schools of fish dart between my feet. i am six and nine and thirteen; my legs growing too long for the tub, so i have to bend my knees. soon, my lungs will ache, and i’ll have to lift my head, red-rimmed eyes, and hair that sticks to neck. washed ashore again. but while i am still under, i’ll ask, let water overflow the sides of this tub and carry me to sea. let me bob on the waves in this marble basin and float to far-off lands…

bite size • 17

2. aquamarine seven-years-old and sweating in the backseat between my cousins on the way to a town where the houses all have stilts. paint softened by sun; curtains that sway in the breeze. we kids running down to the water while Grandma and Grandpa and our moms unload, holding hands and jumping over waves so they crash and spray the backs of our knees, the ends of our hair. this is summer as I’ve known it so far. books gathering sand between the pages. one a.m. laughter, stuffing our faces in pillows so we don’t wake the grownups. tan lines around swimsuit edges, popsicles in the afternoon and walks in town. all the houses that sway and creak so high up. i imagine now the picture unraveling; popsicles melting in too much heat; shingles coming unglued from roofs. the tide calling out to sea each sandcastle turret and moat. stilts bracing, bending forward, so the doors fall open on their hinges and the tide flows into the living room. these summers were so brief, now eclipsed by all the ones that were not this. my cousins’ faces grow loose in my memory, straining to keep up with the years. what did we eat or cook? did we stay for a day or a week? i soften the edges of these memories each time i flip through. i leap over waves, look down to find the ocean dried up under my feet.

18 • bite size

3. azure at seventeen, i spend a summer doing trail work in alaska. at day’s end, we walk under ever-light sky to the lake. the water is a mirror, reflecting back mountains and clouds and my own wavering face. i step in, let the cold numb my feet. i am in love with a girl states away, who sends me letters about summer nights playing truth-or-truth on empty tennis courts and holding hands with her boyfriend on the bus. i want to strip my body of this love like the clothes i fling off in the sand, to step into this lake unadorned and loveless, bare skin under sun. as i wade, i scrub dirt from my thighs, watch shiny pebbles wink up at me. maybe on my way back i will reach down and pluck one from the mud, turn it between my fingers. once, glaciers rolled back over the land and left behind the smooth surface of this lake. i imagine the sound, the roaring, shifting ice. later, miners panned for gold, and others contaminated this water with heavy metals so you aren’t supposed to eat too many fish–though a few can’t hurt. i reach the drop-off and kick forward, then turn on my back and look up. loons fly overhead, their calls lingering even as they disappear behind trees. this sun that warms my cheeks, that will not set until i am long gone from this place. i let my body still, let goosebumps rise over my legs, and tell myself i won’t swim back until i am shivering with cold, until the sounds of my friends laughing at the shore and the promise of warm cooking are too much to resist. i tell myself when i climb in my sleeping bag tonight, i will not let my mind fill up with her, but instead with this– true calm, a girl on her back in the center of a perfectly clear lake under an endlessly shining sun, cradled by woods and mountains.

bite size • 19

4. iris after high school, i work on a farm in the desert by the ocean and am paid in room and board. on a day off, we brew tea from a hallucinogenic cactus, drink it in chipped cups. the taste is pungent, soil and roots, earth unvarnished by spice. the dogs look at us funny–they know what we’re up to, maybe. bluffs rise above me, craggy and golden. i stumble down the path to the ocean. waves lap over my feet. i blink, and for a moment, i can see every individual bubble that makes up the ocean. seaweed tangles like strands of hair in shallow current. blue-backed crabs skitter in front of me. i am alone, i’m not sure for how long. above the beach, violet and magenta faces pulse out from the rocks, and then recede. their lips move, but there is no sound besides distant birds and the sea. i long for home, but the image is intangible, a past fixture and an imagined horizon; i picture a room crowded with each person i’ve loved. eventually, we gather together on the sand, five other barely-adults i’ve come to know. they appear to me like a faded postcard, sepia and golden edged. i am part of the photograph, an awkward edge, uncertain of my place here. we lie on our backs, and suddenly the sky is lilac soft, filled up with a full moon. how did the moon come out so early, i want to ask, how did it find us so soon? the air is cool, clouds ebbing in and out over the sea. the ocean looks heavy and dark, the closed eyelid of a resting creature. this gossamer night, this whisper-light night that seems hanging from a dragonfly’s wing. we walk back to the house. our dinner seems poised to crawl from its plates. later, i climb up to the balcony and bare mattress where i sleep. i hear the ocean as if it were directly under this ledge, as if i could lean over the side to dip my feet. in the morning, the drug will have worn off, and i’ll be left with a faint headache for a reminder. but tonight the stars are bioluminescent above me, and i am far off and bobbing at sea.

20 • bite size

5. cerulean your blue room–i wash ashore each morning, pale light through your turquoise curtains. but at night, i am underwater, crashed in the swells of my own longing. the heat of your skin, your touch that makes me gasp. kissing you, i am pulled under again, and all is water around my ears, all is the blue-hulled loams of the deep. there is no tug greater than this: in the submarine light of your lava lamp, i want to spill my heart out for you. as lanternfish swim outside your window and cast shadows on the floor, i want to close my eyes and listen only to you. your bed nestled into the wall. this room which I picture each night coming unmoored from the rest of the house, floating further and further out to the sea. let a forest of coral encroach these walls and hold us here. let me sink and sink into your arms. give me just a little longer before i need come up for air.w

bite size • 21

How to Waterbend a beginner’s guide to mastering the four elements

by Stephanie Tom art by Zahavah Rojer

i. waterbending, the element of change “they have a sense of community and love that holds them together through anything” They’d be at the park every Saturday morning, gliding slowly through practiced tai chi sequences as my sister and I walked to our dance class. We’d see the senior citizens of Chinatown gathered in congregation, grandparents and resident aunties and uncles each standing a few feet apart in the grass.

Loose sleeves and long pants, stepping in time to inaudible chants, arms sweeping in graceful arcs, legs shifting and sliding into each position with the ease of a water snake, their fluidity as natural as the wind

22 • watch & listen

barely there. Back and forth, catching the strikes of invisible sparring partners in slow motion. Like most children, I didn’t have the patience to watch the full sequence.

Years later, once I finally did gather enough patience, I would find myself outside of Helen Newman Hall under the glow of the full moon for my last Tai Chi Chuan class before our semester on campus was abruptly cut short. The Worm Moon. Our instructor had finally deemed it time to teach us the traditional 24 step sequence—so you can practice at home as if you were still here with us.

I remember facing the empty pitch of the football field, tall grass tickling my ankles. It was hardly windy,

but just cold enough that it could have been. Gently push and pull, as if flowing in a river current. Our instructor’s voice got snagged in the night and faded a bit away. I closed my eyes, thinking to Saturday mornings from childhood. Transfer your energy.

Hands curling gently around invisible braids of rope, as Katara did while learning to master the water whip.

Inhale. Center yourself. Under the light of the full moon, everything seems to glow harsher. Can you feel the energy? That’s the chi. A call to gather your sense, gather yourself. Hold your breath as you return to form. A return to calm, like the tides at night. For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.

Slowly exhale. The moon, pulsing like a heartbeat.

The ocean, gently hugging the shore. Finish exhaling.

“If public school taught me anything, it was how to ground myself.

To hold firm and never lose my grip in tug of war during field day in second grade. To trust my gut above others’ in games of Jeopardy in seventh grade. To persist and power through my goals all the way through twelfth grade even when the end seemed never closer before yet infinitely far away at the same time.”

Thirty students, soon to disperse but for the very briefest of moments, moving together in harmony. ii. earthbending, the element of substance “they are diverse and strong they are persistent and enduring” If public school taught me anything, it was how to ground myself. To hold firm and never lose my grip in tug of war during field day in second grade.

To trust my gut above others’ in games of Jeopardy in seventh grade. To persist and power through my goals all the way through twelfth grade even when the end seemed never closer before yet infinitely far away at the same time.

The first time I watched Avatar the Last Airbender and met Toph in “The Blind Bandit” from Book 2, it made sense that she was an earthbender. Who else could be so in tune with the earth beneath them, and need something to ground them? Who else could have possibly trusted their senses more, the only thing they truly had even though they had everything? Despite

her blindness, Toph laughed in the face of danger and persevered every time because she was more than capable of holding her own. I admired her spirit, her spitfire and tenacity.

I joined Cornell Wushu last fall for the same reason. It was one thing to hold your ground verbally, metaphorically, but another to do so physically as well. Despite years of opportunity to take selfdefense classes and taekwondo in Chinese school, my younger self had never considered it. Now, I was determined to make up for squandered years.

I’d never heard of hung gar before I met my friend Autumn. Among practice sets and warm-ups, basic five stance drills and shows of weaponry, she was the only one who made it her specialty. When I watched the first performance of the year with my fellow newbies, the seniors took turns jumping and flying across the stage, twirling broadswords and spears and fists alike. When Autumn took the stage, the music turned. Thrumming, as if by quivering drums. Her legs squat squarely, arms held out in front of her. Quick jabs heavy in concentric circles, always swiping out to the side before snapping back to her center. Like Toph, earthbending in the ring against opponents she watch & listen • 23

could not see. For her final form, the drumming rose in tempo and volume, her palms outstretched and circling into one another like the eye of a hurricane before stilling.

Off-stage, we clapped and cheered everyone on for a performance well done. We talked highlights and missteps to focus on in future practices, and like always, said that we wished there was more time in a year to learn everyone else’s specialties. Imagine the scripted duels, the dramatic finesse of spears and swords and fists clashing. Imagine if we all learned hung gar, said Robert, laughing as he did his best to imitate Autumn’s squat armwork. Wouldn’t that be fun?

I remember Autumn’s smile, cheeky like her glasses.

Yeah that’d be fun, she said. Flashing a grin like Toph.

I want to teach you how to do it properly.

The next practice, we sparred, and Autumn tipped Robert over easily. It’s because you’re not grounded properly, she told him. You’ve got to have good balance. Earth, sky. Everything in between. Otherwise you won’t have a firm grip. Otherwise you won’t be able to hold yourself. Hold your own. Otherwise, you’ll fall. iii. firebending, the element of power “they have desire and will and the energy and drive to achieve what they want” Growing up with the illustrious magic of Kung Fu Panda and Mulan, I’ve always wanted to learn martial arts and to wield a sword. To learn how to channel confidence into form. To unlearn flinching. To learn how to grow into my body. I learned all the lyrics to “I’ll Make a Man Out of You” to get into the right headspace. I pretended that pool noodles and back scratchers were swords and played at parrying and thrusting with invisible enemies. I never did end up getting my hands on a sword, even when I found out that my high school had an affiliated fencing team, but that was alright. Come college, I would have my chance.

Going to Cornell Wushu’s first fall practice had been the result of both careful examination of the Club Fest organization list and of a disarming smile by the club president as she stuck a quartercard into my hand. After my first two hours of wushu, I was hooked, despite not being able to climb the stairs to my room without wincing the first night. Through warm-up sets and seniors demonstrating what years of advanced technique could look like, I could see myself growing into the sport. I wasn’t sure if I eventually wanted to 24 • watch & listen

compete like most of the other members, but I knew I wanted to make it a personal challenge to advance through as many sequences as I was able to.

“Empty stance, palms and feet together. As a wise man once said, hope is something you give yourself. Don’t forget– Right hand outstretched in a fist against the left palm, upright. Though it may not seem like possible, humans were made to fly as long as they dreamed enough for it. ” As the semester rolled forward, our practices became more advanced. From learning basics like horse stance to proper punches and kicks, to coordinating every element into a choreographed set, I learned to stretch my body in new ways. Like the Chinese army coached through song, our gang of ragtag beginners who for the most part, had never attempted martial arts before in our lives, was on the path to greatness.

The first and final sequence we started learning in full before the year ended was daunting, a full-bodied choreography that reminded me of flight. Longfist 3, otherwise known as elementary changquan. It was a dance that united strength and technique, that one could only pull off with the right combination of balance and agility. For reference, it’s reminiscent

of the dragon dance that Zuko and Aang learned from the Sun Warriors in Book 3 of Avatar the Last Airbender.

We never officially finished learning it before we left campus. I learned it in bits and pieces, stealing moments to practice whenever I could. Each step visualized in perfect execution even if I couldn’t yet.

Bow stance, then punch. Arms and legs learning to sync.

Snap kick and punch again. Learning to sharpen my hands, every corner of myself. Alternating slap kicks, then jump kick. Sweat sticking my hair across my forehead, even though I don’t have bangs.

Punch down. I could remember every beat of footsteps echoing in Barton Hall, flat-footed shoes slapping in empty space. Not a soul besides our small practice group.

Squat and swing hammer strike. Strike with purpose, as if it were a real fight.

Empty stance, palms and feet together. As a wise man once said, hope is something you give yourself.

Don’t forget— Right hand outstretched in a fist against the left palm, upright. Though it may not seem like possible, humans were made to fly as long as they dreamed enough for it.

iv. airbending, the element of freedom “the air nomads detached themselves from worldly concerns and found peace and freedom” In the cartoon, the animators and storyboard artists have described the influences of different styles of kung fu on each of the four elements. Waterbending was based on tai chi, earthbending on hung gar.

Firebending was inspired by Northern shaolin, and airbending on ba gua zhang, a style similar to tai chi.

I confess: I didn’t actually watch Avatar: The Last Airbender until the summer after tenth grade. For most of my early memory, the picture of a young monk I had envisioned whenever friends mentioned the legendary cartoon that was Avatar was from a different Chinese cartoon that I had forgotten the name of. It was an odd realization—the fact that a vivid memory could be so far from what you imagined it to be.

I was introduced to Aang and the rest of Team Avatar—the Gaang, if you will—during a summer of precipices. June trickled into July into August, a summer of holding my breath before junior year,

looming. I spent those months volunteering at my district’s summer school program. During the day, I helped teach English and algebra to seventh and eighth graders. I corralled them through high school hallways, in lines to the bus circle and around various museums and outdoor parks around my hometown.

That summer, I also started learning how to dance.

Not the traditional Chinese ribbon dances that I had long forgotten from childhood classes nor the brief snatches of ballet that I’ve picked up from observing children’s books and cartoons carefully. Nights were filled with the glare of the television screen playing loops of bubbly pop songs, my limbs flailing as I attempted to follow the sharp choreography of urban jazz and hip-hop. It was a slow process of coordination, of learning to anticipate what would come next and flash my arms into the right position in time with my feet stepping to the quick beats.

Figure eights and fleet-footed flashes of energy.

As the golden days of summer stretched on, I learned to find my rhythm again. Tight circles, loose limbs. The music as a guide, not a blueprint, for choreography that extended beyond my body.

Inhale. Summer, stretching from infinite possibility to the soon return to tangible time. Hold still. Autumn, the condensing of infinity into countable measures.

Choreographed lines and perfunctory motions ahead.

Exhale. But not if you learned to keep the summer sun in your heart.w

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Portrait in Blue

by Emma Eisler

My aunt gave me Blue before I was ready. Eight-yearsold, wide-eyed, and string-bean-gangly, I didn’t know what Joni was singing about, didn’t feel it in my skin.

She sounded sad, like she was feeling something very strongly that I didn’t have a name for. Still, the album cover remained in my mind even as the case grew dusty—downcast eyes and light on her cheek; a silhouette in navy.

I can’t watch Love Actually without crying at the part when Emma Thompson’s character, Karen, opens her husband’s Christmas gift to find a copy of Both Sides Now, and realizes that he gave another woman the diamond necklace she saw in his coat pocket.

She takes the CD upstairs, puts it on and starts to cry. “Moons and Junes and Ferris wheels / The dizzy dancing way you feel…” A moment later, she wipes her eyes, walks back down the stairs, and tells her

26 • watch & listen

children to put on their coats so they can leave for their school play. There’s something about Joni, I think, that lets us do this—feel everything for a moment, then go into the bathroom and fix our makeup, to step out and face what most frightens us or what’s most painful.

Joni teaches us vulnerability, yet she also teaches us strength. She’s there with us at our most agonizing moments, when sadness fills us up completely and threatens to overflow out of us in blue, blue, blue.

But she also teaches us that there is no love without pain, and reminds us that we can survive whatever it is we’re going through.

Earlier in the movie, Karen tells her husband, “Joni Mitchell is the woman who taught your cold English wife how to love.”

Joni taught me how to love too.

In high school, I loved a girl who I couldn’t be with.

I’d drive along the coast singing along to the CD my aunt gave to me at eight, that I had since rediscovered; “I am on a lonely road and / I am traveling, traveling, traveling, traveling.” Or I’d close my eyes and sway in my room, let my body fill up with Joni’s voice, and my heart with pain and love. For a while, the only music I could bear was Blue. Only Joni could understand the tears that leaked onto my pillow each night or how my whole body ached when I saw the girl I loved talking to her boyfriend. I thought of myself at eight, unable to fully understand the pain in Joni’s voice. Now the album was so beautiful and made so much sense that I couldn’t, even then, regret learning this pain and love.

During my gap year, Blue became the sounds of the deserts I traveled through, of morning light shining through my dusty windshield, of sunrises pink and red over sand and wash. Again, I was in love— with a boy and with a landscape. My clothes, caked in dirt, washed over and over in laundromats across the Southwest. Naked, my skin gleaming under skies splashed with the pale white of the Milky Way, kissing in the green pools of rivers winding beneath arches in rock. So often, I thought to myself, I only want this. But already college was beckoning in the foreground, and

“During my gap year, Blue became the sounds of the deserts I traveled through, of morning light shining through my dusty windshield, of sunrises pink and red over sand and wash. Again, I was in love—with a boy and with a landscape.”

I could not stay forever a Lady of the Canyon, so Blue also became the sound of driving away.

Before leaving for winter break this year, my best friend left me her record player and a copy of Blue since she would be studying abroad in the spring.

Standing alone in my room in January, the heater wheezing lukewarm air against frosted window panes, the semester seemed to stretch on in front of me like large and lapping dark water. Who was I here without her? What would these months be but cold?

I slid the record from its case, lifted the needle, and let the album start to play. I looked at the photos taped above my bed; fairy-lights hanging over the pipe casting my room in yellow-gold; books stacked too high and threatening to tumble. I thought of my best friend who I missed already with a kind of hollow ache.

I thought of the person I was in high school listening to that same album, closing my eyes and feeling everything. What love or loneliness could I have that wouldn’t be contained in Blue? I acknowledged to myself that I didn’t know yet what this part of my life would be. I smiled, half sad and half anticipating.

Soon after, I started staying up late with a boy in my house who made me feel shy and flushed—but who also left me feeling overwhelmed by a desire

to tell him more and more, and to know him as well as I possibly could. On afternoons when I got out of class early, I’d go home and turn on Blue, try not to think of his smile or eyes, the way I felt when our arms occasionally brushed. I’d listen over the sound of the music for his voice downstairs, then hurry to the living room, half afraid and half hoping he’d look at me and smile. The night he told me he liked me, I lay in bed and listened to Blue over and over until light began to seep through my window. I fell in love (again) to the sound of Joni singing; “Hey Blue, here is a song for you…”

Over February break, he and I did shrooms together. While he was talking to someone else, I ran up to my room, lit my favorite rose-scented candle, and turned on Blue. All around me was the softness of afternoon light. I turned to the mirror; curls that hovered over my shoulders and appeared then inflected by purple and rainbow. My hands left traces in the air as I spun and danced; how beautiful I felt— how completely my own. My boyfriend came in, and I threw my arms around him and said, “I’m doing all the things I like!”

The music swirled around me, and I felt it more as something inside of me than as an external sound. I felt watch & listen • 27

a kind of tenderness for myself, for my easily bruised heart, for my treasured room and its familiar songs and photographs. “Carey” came on, and I started laughing, giggling along; “Oh, you know it sure is hard to leave here, but it’s / Really not my home.” My hand rested on his arm; his fingers traced over my skin. This floating little room suffused in warmth. What I wanted was to hold on to this moment forever, to be home in a way that meant I never had to leave or change.

Later that day, the shrooms started to wear off and my euphoria faded into something more complicated.

I remembered my insecurities—my tangled hair, and skin I never quite know how to feel comfortable in.

Again, I went upstairs and turned on Blue. I looked up and imagined each poster peeling off the wall, my photographs in shoeboxes growing sepia around the edges. This is the way I love, I thought, defining each moment of joy by the anticipation of its ending. Each touch seems already inflected by the last, and every love seems viewed already through the rearview mirror.

Soon after, my boyfriend came up to my room, and held me against him as the record spun and tears dampened my pillow. I confessed, “I’m worried you’ll see more of me or you’ll see the way that I love, and you won’t like it or want to be with me anymore.” He said that wasn’t true, held me as the record turned, and the people in my photographs danced and waved, beckoning to a past already lost to the tea28 • watch & listen

stained pages of journals.

I still listen to Blue. In Ithaca, watching April snow dampen new blooms, and feeling impossibly far from my other home. Here, after so many other people have left, when my life—and the world—seems frozen in place even as the seasons change out the window.

Here, with my boyfriend still, with the love that I feel at times like a shard of glass in my chest, a reminder that I can be hurt. Joni sings on, “And I might have stayed on with him there / But my heart cried out for you, California / Oh California, I’m coming home.” I don’t know when exactly I’ll leave or what it will look like when I do. I imagine my hair whipping in front of my eyes, blowing out the window. I imagine orange flowers springing up along the coast of California and wonder when redwoods will rise above me again, and what my goodbyes will mean. How, I long to ask Joni, am I to live with such uncertainty?

For me, Blue is about emotional complexity. Blue is eight years old before the sounds meant anything to me, when all I saw was a photo of a woman filled up with the color of sea and sky and tears. Blue is seventeen, my childhood room, and everything on the cusp of changing. Blue is a place I look forward and back to simultaneously, a sound that curls around me like the ocean in a seashell, washes over me again and again until each love loses its outline and the events of my life fade and blur together; listen, they sing of love so sweet, love so sweet.w

Should I Watch This Movie?

by Nalu Concepcion

“Combine your waking rational abilities with the infinite possibilities of your dreams, because if you can do that, you can do anything.” - Waking Life.

Waking Life is a film separate from all others. Its rich insights on life, death, and human relationships evoke undulating emotion, provoke the mind, and excite the soul. The film follows one main character’s reflections on how his waking reality is shaped by his iridescent dreamscape. The film emphasizes the value of being engrossed in “the present,” enrapturing the viewer by offering constant reminders that one can either choose to be a silent third-party observer of life or an active, engaged participant.

Waking Life grabs the viewer’s attention by elegantly weaving together plotlessness, dynamic animation, and jazzy, somewhat dated music. Viewers are perpetually reminded that the reality through which we move is nothing more than a product of perception.

The dream-vision style of filmography distinguishes the film as artful, intentional, and refreshingly novel; the backdrop (and the characters depicted) are set in perpetual motion by the rotoscope animation as if to suggest that space is merely an illusion, time a convenient medium through which to tell narratives.

Undeniably, the most formative elements of the film are the monologues and dialogues. Each of these carefully constructed thought-releases are allconsuming, every word building on to the previous one to create a speech that begs viewers to stop subscribing to the status quo. A zen ukulele framer summarizes what I considered to be the most valuable insight of the movie; “The worst thing you can believe is that you are actually alive, but in reality you are just sitting in life’s waiting room.”

The movie seems to spur viewers to craft a more meaningful reality for themselves, demanding that they refuse to be mentally idle, encouraging them to think, to ask themselves whether they are awake, and to break stride rather than execute mundane tasks thoughtlessly. Each monologue imparts some new

tidbit of ideological inspiration and lends the viewer a new perspective through which to view the world.

Through these monologues, the finitude of time and space is abolished, replaced instead by the great magnificence of the eternal and the infinite.

The main character obtains the most climactic lesson while in a dialogue with a playwright about a soap opera performance—a metaphor for life as a stage upon which all are performers. The main character asks the playwright where he is. He confesses his awareness of the fact that he is dreaming, that he slips in and out of lucidity, shortly thereafter arriving at the potent realization that it doesn’t particularly matter what irrelevant information he has. He acknowledges rather that his experiences—that the interactions and conversations he has had with the other characters in his dreams—matter more than his individual identity.

In this manner, the film directly juxtaposes the value structure defined within the “waking” reality and the “dreaming” one. It evocatively evaluates how the value structures of individuals within each respective reality shift once they acknowledge which reality they are experiencing. Here, the viewer understands that freeing oneself from the concept of time also frees oneself from the performance of life, allowing an individual to experience individual moments as “holy,” rather than simply as frames which compose a larger narrative.

Ultimately, Waking Life is a mind-bending tale worthy of a thorough close watching. The film is a visual delicacy, at once mentally invigorating, soulfully deep, and artfully peaceful. Its message is incisive, reminding viewers that we are pieces of the wakinglandscape narrative, that we are still bound by finite space and limited time—but we get to choose how to perceive it, how to partake in it, and ultimately, how to escape from it.w watch & listen • 29

The Big Brick House That Could a love letter to Lodge

by Anna Grace Lee art by Juli LeBlanc

Two weeks into self-isolation, I was sitting in the backyard with my housemate Emma when a rainstorm began to brew. As the clouds broke, we ran inside for shelter, and I suddenly felt overwhelmed with appreciation for our house. I realized, as many have before me, that I will probably never live in a community like Cayuga Lodge again, a small pocket in this giant university where, in the last four years, I have found comfort, excitement, and challenge. My friends back home were surprised when I first told them I was moving into a co-op, an independent house run entirely by students. I had lived in singles my first two years, and my friends thought I would have trouble adjusting to the vulnerability of shared space, to the myriad challenges that a place like Lodge would present to someone who liked to be comfortably alone.

I lived at Lodge for half of my college years, through different seasons, world events, and personal mindsets. Self-isolating there in March, after New York State’s stay-at-home orders went into effect, was strange at first. In the end, though, the experience made me even more grateful that I had the chance to live in this unique community, home to 18-22 people and, most of the time, many, many cats. The Lodge is used to constant motion—basement shows, art exhibitions, parties, and often too many cooks boiling pasta water in the kitchen. There’s a comfort in the chaos. So after in-person classes were cancelled on the week of March 9th, the stillness of the house felt overwhelming. All I had was time, and the walls around me started to feel like a fossilized tribute to college life. I spent some time in a hallway, looking at the builtin bookshelves of a wall that I’d never really noticed before. The shelves were full of abandoned textbooks and how-to books, histories of psychedelics, sex, 30 • zooming in

social theory, and yoga.

I looked through the board games that we keep under the bar in our living room. A lot of them are missing pieces, but we make it work, and somehow we have multiple boxes of Settlers of Catan. The bar itself was an old house project, decorated with bottle caps that spell out “The Lodge” and lined with expired IDs glued to the top. The birth dates slip back in time— 1993, 1991, 1989—and I don’t know many of the faces, but there’s a familiarity to them all, like signatures in a yearbook.

There are impressions like these all throughout the house: the murals left behind in different bedrooms; the pull-up record of scribbled names with individual triumphs on a door frame. Every once in a while someone will show up at the door saying, “I lived here!” They come and take a look around and revel in the ways things have changed but mostly stayed the same. They find their names on the wall or their photos someplace. Years from now, I’ll probably be one of those strangers at the door. When I moved out, I left behind many of my art prints and posters, luck and love-spell candles, and stained-glass stickers— the bright specks of color that defined my room over my years at the Lodge. When I come back, I’ll look for these pieces of me—maybe I’ll find them, maybe I won’t, but I’ll be content knowing that they had a life at Lodge beyond my own. Maybe, for a time, people will see my pink astronaut poster on the wall, my copy of the Little Miss Sunshine script on the bookshelf, or the many copies of kitsch scattered throughout the house, and think of me.

I first found out about co-ops from reading an issue of kitsch when I was in high school, after picking up the magazine when I visited campus in the summer. Both kitsch itself and the article about cooperative houses

made me feel like I could find a home here. I Instagram and Facebook-stalked all the houses, excited at the prospect of watching live music in a basement with a dollar beer in my hand. While that isn’t the loftiest of college ambitions, it was important to me, and I was happy when I found myself living that experience at the Lodge. I hope that in the future, there will be more cooperative houses at Cornell in general—affordable housing where people agree to work together, and try to do their best by each other. Of course the model has its flaws, and it doesn’t always work for everyone, but cooperative housing gives students an alternative to Greek life and a place to find like-minded people and community at a university where it can be difficult to find your balance. I found my balance, lost it, and found it all over again at the Lodge. Thank you to my

big, brick, centenarian house, and all the friends I met there. I will miss you. All I can hope is that some high schooler picks up this issue and Googles, “What’s a co-op?” They’ll fish their way through a bunch of Reddit threads and hopefully find their way.w

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Here is a Puddle

by Ruby Que

Artist’s Statement Here is a puddle is a three-day, site-specific installation exploring trauma and reclamation of one’s voice. The gallery is transformed into an underwater world with mixed media elements: 1) large panels of blue crystal organza hanging from the ceiling; 2) blue studio flats onto which journal entries, quotes and images are pasted; 3) video projection of ripples and waves on the flats; and 4) a soundscape of whale song and deep sea ambience. Small fish bowls containing scraps of paper and discarded film strips are scattered around the room. Two prop doors stand between the entrance and the projection screen, where a short documentary about women of color/queer women and their tattoos play on loop. The viewer is encouraged to engage with the various elements in open-ended ways: to read, add, or tear off the pages, to walk through or close the prop doors, to sit in the corner all day, or to dance around the space. This project attempts to create a liminal space where people can come together to reflect and heal. During the last hours of the show, a woman dressed in a translucent dress performs an improvised dance, in which she gradually destroys the installation by pulling down the pastings, smashing the glass, tearing apart the fabric, and slamming the door. She dances till she is exhausted.

After she leaves, the space sits still in the aftermath of her action like an open wound, a muddy puddle.

In an Alexander Kluge film Die Patriotin, a high school teacher takes an interest in the rubble of historical Berlin; through a loose assemblage of photographs, sketches, poems and maps, Kluge’s protagonist renegotiates the linear conception of past and present. Puddle makes a similar intervention in one’s personal history, specifically from a standpoint of trauma studies. Notions of memory, self-representation, identity, and attraction are investigated in forms both digital and tangible. When do the marks on the body become visible to us, and to others?

32 • zooming in

Written After This sense of loss washed over me as I turned off the last light bulb in the room, and any trace of blue disappeared. I sat down amongst the torn pages and fabric in the dark, and had the best cry of my life. Puddle is me working through my own trauma.

Something about water terrifies me; I only passed my swim test this last semester and it wasn’t easy. I am scared of losing my ground, of letting go, and of being submerged in the rimless blue.

But isn’t that just how everything works? Amy Leach writes in Things That Are, “There is no ladder out of any world; each world is rimless.” Perhaps we have to let ourselves drown at some point. And then we can swim.w

Installation Concept Dance Projection Scene Construction

Costume Design Assistance

Projection Featuring

Ruby Que Deanna Myskiw Joey Moro Wilhelm Aubrecht Randy Hendrickson Fritz Bernstein Christine Yuan Steven Blasberg Kyra Streck Adam Bruynesteyn Avinash Patel Nicole Oliveira Noah Harrelson Ilana Wallenstein Constanza Salazar Andrea Yang Deanna Myskiw Nicole Oliveira Oona Kyung

Jacqueline Wong “Cyanotype” (silk screen, 2019)

Swimming Pools art and article by Vee Cipperman

Long, dark strips run up the bottom of every swimming pool. Four of them sit between the floating lane dividers, undulating, darker blue than the tiles around them. They terminate in crosses and move with the water.

As a child, I believe they will eat me. They’ll lift those x-shaped heads the instant my feet break the water. I’ll swim as fast as I can, but I won’t escape.

When the coach blows the whistle, I close my eyes and jump.

Freestyle (Ages 5-10) Outdoor club pools are never heated. Outdoor club pools give us goosebumps in the summer. Spindly bare arms, bruised bare legs, covered in lumps as they breach the aquamarine.

Race days run sunup to sunset. I sit on a towel in the dirt beside my sister. My mother feeds us bits of soggy concession-stand pretzel while she watches for our events, keeping us on track, pushing us off toward the pool.

The older girls swim more than me. I mostly wait. The sun bakes the earth. The periodic shock of water brings forth the goosebumps again, until my mother pulls me forth and wraps me in a towel. I suffer through each event. I win some. I wait some more. I watch the other girls swim, fluid and free as dolphins, splicing and pulling and tossing the water like dough with their long long arms and close-cupped fingers.

On another club team, there are girls in my second grade class. At some races, we take to the kiddie pool for something to do. The water comes halfway to our knees; it’s warm.

“Sun?” I speculate.

“Pee,” says a blonde girl, and laughs with her friend. Ha, ha. Perhaps they’re mocking me. Perhaps— probably—I’m just too sensitive.

The blonde girl gets highlights, but I don’t understand the concept of highlights, and I wonder how her hair grows with marvelous sunny-white streaks. She’s taller than me, and so is her friend. I don’t know them well. They share a few quips from within the kiddie pool while I sit on the edge. My feet 36 • zooming out

are warm and my shoulders have already burned.

In the main pool a few yards away, the water churns with swimmers. Shouts echo. The pavement shimmers. The blonde girl does a cartwheel. Her friend does a cartwheel. I can’t do a cartwheel.

There’s a girl in my second grade class who doesn’t join the others in the kiddie pool. She’s busy with swimming. When she loses, her mother drags her from the water by her wrist and screams until the coach has to tell her to stop.

That girl can do amazing cartwheels.

Breaststroke (11-14) Why the hell did they name it that?

The other girls laugh—ha, ha—but it isn’t funny, because I have to swim it. I always race breaststroke events to compete, always, along with two other girls.

All three of us are strong-legged, round-armed girls, and all three of us win those stupidly-named races.

Here’s your medal! Aren’t you proud?

I hate everyone and everything.

After class Tuesdays and Thursdays we slip into polyester second-skins. The girls around me transform into diving fish, graceful and deft, returning to their slick aquatic motherland like so many seals.

Their bodies align with the seams of their swimsuits, the curve of their caps—homogenous material, goggles to toes. The swim team spell doesn’t work for me. I am a sea cucumber among selkies. My swimsuit leaves red marks on my back. I’m too old to believe that the lane dividers will eat me, but I can’t help believing they will when the water closes over my ears.

In indoor pools, they heat the water and not the air. I complain about the cold while I sit on the bench. My friends join the chorus. “Anyone have a dry towel?” Of course not; nothing within these walls is dry. Find a dry patch on a bench and you’re blessed.

Step in a mere half dozen putrid puddles and you’re lucky.

I am bigger than the freestyle/butterfly girls.

My best friend is smaller than the freestyle/butterfly girls. A backstroke girl. When we are 13, oldest on the

team, scorning practice, we sit on the sidelines and blast music through the speakers. Taylor Swift’s 1989 is new. We play it over and over and over. We bitch incessantly while Taylor shakes it off. Taylor has a shapely neck and a very nice mouth and no eyes; the album cover cuts them off. She’d be a great butterfly girl.

My stomach stretches my swimsuit. My hair doesn’t fit in my cap. I brush out the curls, wishing for straight hair, wishing for blonde hair, making it frizzy. I have round knees and a round face and I am a breaststroke girl, hunched on the sideline in tight polyester. I want to wrap myself in a tablecloth. I want to smash screaming through the back windows, bursting bare skin. I’m never going to swim again, once I graduate middle school.

Ha, ha.

forth, all my life. My curls crackle angry-electric within my plastic caps, snapping them against my face, shearing them in half. My coach threatens to stop giving me new ones.

She plays me twice all season and that’s all right. Water shrinks the swimsuit that is already smaller than my skin. I hope my spine breaks the zipper. I hope my chest splits the seams.

Water polo brings the violence of swimming to the surface. It reveals the animal nature of girls in synthetic skin. The refs force us to cut our nails over huge gray trash cans, but my teammates still ascend from the pool with bleeding fingers, scratched faces, backs streaming crystal and red.

It’s intimidating, but it’s honest. It’s something I can get behind. Cheer for. Me, with hair I wear curly at last, with powerful calves.

I get a varsity letter first semester freshman year. I am one of only nine girls who stuck through that year’s season.

People assume that I like sports.

Ha, ha.

Running (16-19)

Water Polo (15) Am I an idiot or a creature of chronic habit?

That’s up for debate.

It’s my first semester at a new high school where sports are required, and I can swim, so: water polo. Why not? This will end well, probably. I’ll do fine, probably. I can muddle through.

By week four I have the most impressive calves I’ve ever had in my life and I want my coach dead.

Now is more than Tuesday/Thursday. Now is Monday/Tuesday/Wednesday/Thursday/so on, so

My sneakers are black with pink swooshes, an inversion of the winter sky. The horizon cracks with bareblack grasping trees. It blushes the color of grapefruit soda. Our breath mists in the air around us, and we sing Christmas carols between laps. These are girls I’ve just met. By junior year, the one with the best voice will be my best friend.

It’s like this: I don’t race anymore. I run a winter track. I run the nearby woods in spring, following a river. I run along sand in the summer, blinded by the glassy sea that magnifies the sun. It’s beautiful and often lonely in the good way that opens your mind to think more about yourself.

It’s like this: I hold the pools inside me now.

I think that I’ve swallowed the lane-divider snakes.

Sometimes they writhe in my stomach, and burning chlorinated water spills out through my eyes.

Sometimes I catch my reflection in water and cringe.

Sometimes, I stop trying to see a selkie or a warrior or a butterfly in myself or other girls, and we all become human together.

It’s like this: white rings cut a track loop into lanes. They have no heads- and no mouths- with which to eat us. I’m not afraid of putting on leggings.

I’m not afraid of opening the gate, stepping onto springy ground, setting off.

It’s like this now.w zooming out • 37

Crater Lake

by Eve Hallock

To be distant and vast is to be blue

The bluest place in the United States - Crater Lake, Oregon

Just like sadness and distance, there are infinite shades of blue, and they can change in an instant in relation to surrounding factors. Clouds, rain, steps forward or backward, time, light, emotion, and connection all affect your perception of blue.

When I first read Rebecca Solnit’s A Field Guide to Getting Lost, it felt like something I had lost coming back home to me again. Every other chapter is titled “The Blue of Distance,” which she explains can be found in spaces between the hills, mountains, plains, forests, as well as in our hearts. To be distant is to be blue; it is in the very workings of vision and light. “The blue is the light that got lost,” Solnit says, and it is also what “gives us the beauty of the world.” I am not so sure if I believe in getting lost or getting found, but I certainly believe in being blue and losing yourself, too.

There is much to let ourselves romanticize about the beauty and sadness of blue, and of how it connects 38 • zooming out

to love, landscape, and loss. Longing is the bluest feeling there is, full of endless distance and places you never quite reach. While we’re at it, yearning and gazing are pretty darn blue, too. Gazing out across a landscape that gets bluer with distance can feel like dreaming a dream that dreams right back at you. It’s what those old blue country songs are talking about: the aftermath and the failure of no longer being able to go on. And who among us has not sighed listening to Joni Mitchell sing Blue?

If behind every love there is a landscape, Crater Lake must be the landscape for the love of blue itself, when it is at its deepest and vastest. While we’re here, stuck, wherever we all are, let us explore some of this place’s history: Southern Oregon is mostly dusty rock, adorned here and there by vast blue lakes and green forests.

Around 7,700 years ago, Tum-sum-ne—called Mount Mazama in English—erupted and collapsed, leaving

behind a caldera 655 meters deep. Rhyodacite lava spewed for miles. Rain and snow filled the space over time, creating giiwas, or Crater Lake in English, as we know it today, a 594 meter deep lake famous for its blueness, the tourist favorite cinder cone called Wizard Island (pictured above), and the andesite Phantom Ship Island. The Klamaths, Molalas, Takelmas, Modocs, Yahooskin Paiutes, and Upper Umpqua peoples all have long histories here and many reside nearby.

The legend of Llao & Skell relays the story of giiwas’ origins. Llao was the god of the underworld from underneath Mount Mazama and Skell was the god of the sky from the southern marshes of Mount Shasta. Together with their followers, Deer, Fox, and Dove, they played on the rocks along the rim. Llao fell in love with a Klamath chief’s daughter who rejected him. He cursed the tribe in anger, and they in turn called on Skell for help. The war began, and Llao killed Skell, his followers carrying the heart to Llao Rock in victory. Later, Skell’s followers stole the heart back.

Once resurrected, Skell resumed the fight, further inspired by two medicine men sacrificing themselves to the underworld to restore spiritual balance. Skell destroyed Llao, cut his body up, and secretly fed it to his followers. Llao’s head was thrown into the lake to the horror of his followers, who then left it there to become Wizard Island.

Llao was known to be the chief of the animals of the area, and his spirit resides in Llao Rock, a dacite cliff to the north forming the highest point on the caldera rim.

In the 1920s, many Klamath people reported to outsiders that Tum-sum-ne (Mountain with the Top Cut Off) was not formerly a place for ordinary people to visit regularly. Its power and significance was respected, and only to be seen by those powerful enough in times of spiritual need.

Solitary quests of vision, power, or crisis were performed there.

Psychological and physical purification practices were required before embarking on a quest for direction and help. Only those with years of spiritual training were considered suitable to approach the lake and face goganas, which are spirits in animal or human form. After its eruption, chiefs

and shamans of five tribes traveled for many days to seek its guidance in its time of particular power and potency. The lake was a unique place of healing and harm, as sacred as it was dangerous. In 1904, two years after its establishment as a U.S. National Park, 1,500 people visited and last year, 704,512 tourists walked its dusty and snowy paths.

The Klamath tribe has called the creation of the park “strange,” “inappropriate,” and a landscape “taken illegally.” Individuals from the 1880s to 1930s are quoted saying they had to sneak out to hunt or travel up the mountain for religious purposes.

The only place relatively safe was Huckleberry Mountain, before white families started retreats and overextended the berry sources. The Park Service’s implementation of a highway park fee marked the end of many Klamath people’s access to the area in the late twentieth century. Although tribal members opposed it, the park built structures, performed archaeological digs, and still arrests people for hunting. Vision quests do take place today, although not without contention.

What is the color of unholiness? Just like some art is not meant to be seen, I’ve learned that some places are not meant to be so blindly consumed either. Is forgiveness blue, too?w

zooming out • 39

Memories of Something Calm and Constant

by Emma Goldenthal art by Olivia Bono

For most of every year, the ocean exists only for me in photos, memories, and scattered conversations. Yet in all the strangeness of these past weeks, I have found myself paying early visits to the Westerly beaches I grew up alongside. They feel exactly the same, yet also different, distant. The sand is still the sand. The water is still frigid, the current forever ebbing back and forth. But it will be months, if not longer, before the dunes are reacquainted to vacationing families, sunbathers, and unoccasioned fireworks. This is the ocean in its off-season, unobserved but by a few habitual beachcombers and local fishing enthusiasts, who stand atop the rocky jetties spaced just nearly six feet apart. The waves are unridden and unsplashed.

The tides wash away fewer footprints. But the water is still as big as ever, cupping the sky in its muted embrace.

Last summer was supposed to be my last summer here. I spent most of my days and some evenings working as counterstaff for a small seafood restaurant, a little ways away from the public beach.

Basically, I romanticized all the non-work parts of my job like crazy. I rode my bike there every morning, watching the grassy marshes change to tacky surf bars and sandy parking lots, where the price of a day pass changes with the weather. Still in the early stages of on-and-off vegetarianism, I often snacked on fried shrimp during my lunch breaks, where I sat out back overlooking the miniature waterslides in the 40 • zooming out

nextdoor lot. After our shifts ended, a few coworkers and I would occasionally buy “Hawaiian shaved ice” from the makeshift stand across the street. It was just another summer job in a coastal town, but one full of character all the same.

My favorite part of Westerly in the summer is how good it feels when I’m not working. The freedom of loosening my bike from its lock in the ever-growing glow of sunset and the balmy air against my bare arms as I take off for home is almost unparallelled—until I reach the beach. If there’s any light left in the sky, and if the waves aren’t too unruly, I can quickly change into my swimsuit, pile my sneakers and uniform t-shirt in the sand, and wade into the ocean for a slow swim.

The beaches are usually pretty quiet this time of day, the precise opposite of a lunch rush that routinely lasts until close. Once I’ve gotten over the initial gasp of cold, I can close my eyes and float. I feel the day’s stress dissolve, the sticky spilled soda, loose-change metal smells on my skin washed away by the water.

There is just one of me and an absolute endlessness of it. When my concerns that I might be floating out to sea convince me to open my eyes again, I let my hands rest on the surface of the water and look around at all the color, the once deep blue that has now faded into cool misty greens and, if I’m lucky, lilac purples and pinks to match the clouds.

When I finally emerge from the ocean, I like to think that a bit of its residual grace and strength sticks with me as well as its salt. The ocean, like the sky at dusk, changes by the minute. But it’s always the same ocean, the same water, the same beach colored by a different time of day. This place will always be my place, those evenings mine to cherish, even when I’m hours away from the coast, or here in Westerly now when I’m really not supposed to be. I walk along the beach when I should be walking to class. It’s an inbetween time, an off-step visit. But even though I tell myself it’s still too cold out, I can’t help but wonder how nice it’d feel to take a quick dip in the familiarunfamiliar waves of spring.w

Quick Little Story About Me Falling in Love

by Evelyn Kennedy Jaffe art by Jane Jackson

He’s lying next to me and my chin is resting on his shoulder when I have the urge to tell him that he has pretty eyes—and he does, they’re rich brown and I want to keep looking at them for as long as physically possible—but something makes me pause. A familiar sensation is flooding my body. You know that feeling when you like someone a lot for a long time, and at last, you get to be alone with them, to be close to them, to see tiny details of their face? Your heart pounds in your throat and behind your eyes. You feel painfully aware of the fact that you have limbs that exist. You know the exact distance between your hand and theirs. The places where their body touches yours are incredibly warm and seem to have way more nerve endings than they’re supposed to.

And everything feels so formative. The part of me that runs through meadows for fun has already laid a silk bookmark on this page—the beginning of a romance, the first steps towards falling in love. So everything I do and I say must be the perfect amount of smooth and classy and cool.

So like the hero in a romance novel, I gaze lovingly into his eyes and spit out, “Soup eyes lookin’ ass,” referencing a tweet. I know he knows the joke I’m making, but it still takes a second too long for his mouth to split into a wide grin and laugh. His laugh makes me feel like I’ve won something. It’s like the bell dinging on a game show to indicate the correct answer. He pulls me closer and cups my face in his hands. We’ve both said, “I’m so nervous” about a hundred times so far this evening, and I know that he’s wondering the same things I am—is this overstepping? Is this really your skin under my fingertips?

“I was gonna say what your eyes reminded me of, but it’s weird,” he smiles. When he smiles it makes me want to squish his face into oblivion. Or tattoo it on the inside of my eyelids. I needle him, tell him that it couldn’t possibly be weirder than soup and that nothing he says could be weird. With his face lit up so warmly like this, I’d listen to anything he says, for as long as he wants to talk. It’s the kind of warmth that

makes you completely oblivious to everything else as long as it’s just the two of you. Or that makes you want to write pages of poorly-composed poetry, or live like you’re in a rom-com. I usually hate romcoms, and the perfectly staged moments make me want to gag. But with my face in his hands, I’ve swallowed any bile the cheesiness caused.

Finally, he caves, and he turns to me and mutters that my eyes remind him of Trimeresurus insularis.

“What in the world is that?” I ask. And he tells me it’s a snake. It’s a white-lipped island pit viper that’s oddly bright blue and lives mostly on Komodo Island.

If I’m being honest, I’m only a passive fan of snakes. It’s like they exist, and I exist, and if I see one, I’m like, “Oh cool, a snake.” I certainly don’t seek them out. But I swear this was the best compliment anyone’s ever paid me. And I demand that he tells me everything about this specific snake. And I make sure to hold him close and kiss his nose and all that sappy stuff. Because never in a million years did I think I’d be falling in love with someone who told me my eyes looked like a snake’s.

But here I am, lying next to him on my little twin bed. And I’ve fallen in love so recently, but this time is different—every time has been so different. But that feeling is always there—the mutual nervousness, the moments I want to preserve in amber, the heart racing in my throat.

The way I see it, falling in love is sort of like reading one of those cheesy rom-coms. The story might be really short or several movies long, and it might be a comedy or have a coming-of-age subplot. It might be full of twists and turns or wholly predictable. But each film still sends butterflies swarming through your gut when you watch it for the first time. And when you rewatch it years later, you’ll see the ghosts of the moments you shared and old feelings will squirm in your stomach.w zooming out • 41

Life Frozen in Time

by Jamie Anderluh art by Belle McDonald

We think of glacial water as iridescent, turquoise, glassy. In reality, it’s often thick and cloudy and filled with sediment. They call it glacial milk. It carves. It unfolds into rivers and lakes. It carries the weight of its age–all of the stories, the afterthoughts, the warming.

Glaciers are translucent, with breathing blue edges. Glacial meltwater is all-encompassing. When I felt it in August everything went still. I was an eighth submerged and still its frozen closeness plunged up and into my fingertips, my collarbone, my skull. The pads of my feet, tough from a summer of farming, numbed instantly. I felt it in my heart, my ears… that thing was happening again, so I flung myself out.

When I was thirteen, all I knew of water was freedom. Then I went swimming in the Atlantic. I dove under, lept up, swaying between waves. I tasted salt and felt boundless. I swam away from my family, into the blue. Then I started to feel it.

At first, it was only a numbness in my fingers. Then I felt it seep up my arms. It swirled in my ears. Then I lost feeling in my forehead.

My ears were ringing incessantly. Gushing water lost sound. My heartbeat restricted—its bumps lagged, each one labored, heavy, thundering.

Where is my sister? I thought.

Where is she?

I found her between the ringing and my dragging heartbeat. I went to her as my vision faded. She carried me out and onto the sand, and I couldn’t see or hear her.

She held me instinctively, and the warmth trickled back in pieces. When I felt it in my cheeks, the colors came back. When I looked at it, the ocean was more blue than it had ever been.

When I was fifteen, I was certain that it wouldn’t happen again. I was brave, and I wanted to be in the water. I ran into Lake Michigan not knowing that my friends would later have to help me out of it. They enfolded me in towels, and we waited. I was fixed on 42 • zooming out

the sand for an hour until I could sit up and see them.

When I was seventeen, I started timing it. How long until my fingers went numb? The water became a clock marked by jagged, unfeeling phases–the numbness, the ringing, the fading of color. I began to know myself in it, to understand what each sensation meant. I learned to leave when I felt it in my fingers.

Spaces of blue became my mental map, my charted ventures, each marked by a different time and space.

They taught me to be intimately aware of the danger, the capacity, of cold water.

I imagine that when many people swim, there is that vague, distant fear of the unknown—riptides or fierce waves or darkness below. When I swim, I feel immediately connected to the way the water feels, to that strange reaction my body has when it is just cold enough, to the urgent and confusing possibility that it could cause me to lose consciousness.

This understanding has made me feel a kind of closeness with water, as if I know it better because it has the ability to change the way my body functions.

Somehow, I feel capable and empowered by it–by my unwillingness to run away from something that scares me, and by the subsequent desire I have to face it head-on. Water reminds me that I am vulnerable, and that this makes me whole and strong and alive.

The first time I saw a glacier was in Alaska, and it reminded me that I am not uniquely vulnerable. It felt bigger than anything I’d ever experienced. It felt alive.

It was dazzling, mighty, and dominating.

I had been working on a farm nearby for part of that summer, and each day was like glitter. We zipped open our tent every morning to stark blue sky that left us without anything to say and, instead, with those quiet moments of mutual understanding, of stunning, speechless togetherness. It didn’t rain–it was all solid sunshine. Vivid fireweed, distinctive wildflowers wispy and pink, made up the only color fracturing the still blue horizon. Our host, who’d lived in Alaska her

whole life, was heartbroken by each new day of sun.

“It doesn’t rain anymore,” she’d say. “It should be so much cooler than this.” We zipped our tent closed each night to the relentless sun still gleaming.

I felt guilty and confused. How could I so selfishly enjoy the extreme Alaskan warmth? I felt as if I was just taking from this fragile, sublime place. Reaping its warmth without facing the consequences. Using the land for my own personal gain. Observing the wilderness from a distance. Adoring the wildness of it all without actually being a piece of the puzzle. I flew in a plane to Alaska, after all. In stealing glimpses of its magnificence, I contributed to the changing climate that is threatening that very same thing.

Glaciers appear invincible—a slow, moving mass of ice outside the human realm. Instead, we’ve made them delicate and disintegrating.

I felt so affected by glacial meltwater because it made me realize that its piercing cold—that thing I’ve

always feared – is what makes it alive. As it warms, it slips away, and some part of it dies. When I felt it on my feet and ankles, I felt it everywhere. And, in that way, my closeness with water made me immediately aware of its power, and how that power can be so easily taken away.

In that moment, I was not separate from the wildness of it all. I was in it. All of the loss, the frailty, the glory – all of the pieces of the puzzle, the life and death and spaces in between that make us irrevocably linked—each an essential part of the very same story. I was air, water, and earth.

I want to feel small when I swim—I want to feel aware of what is wild, what is freezing and raw. I want the spirit and freedom of water to persist, to dominate.

I want it to be bigger than me or anyone. I want it to stay: to be frigid and whole and beautiful. And in that way, I will be one small part of its story. The story of scarred, and somehow astonishingly resilient, life.w

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The Marvelous and Indestructible Water Bear

by Zahavah Rojer

All across the world, there are invisible immortals. Tardigrades, also known as Water Bears or Moss Piglets, are a phylum of plump, microscopic invertebrates that live pretty much anywhere and everywhere on earth. They eat plants or other microanimals, have four pairs of stubby legs, and can reproduce asexually, sort of like if Winniethe-Pooh were half a millimeter long and laid eggs. But tardigrades aren’t micromarvels simply because they’re really cute. What makes tardigrades incredible is their ability to survive the unthinkable.

Most living things have a tendency to die, especially when subjected to extreme stress in their environment, so it would be understandable to doubt the tenacity of an organism whose name literally translates to “slow stepper”. Yet the humble tardigrade has time and again proven itself able to live through more types of torture than a Bop It!™ toy.

Extreme temperature? No problem! Dehydration? No worries. The vacuum of outer space? Tardigrades have not only returned alive from such a deadly trip, but have gone on to reproduce afterwards.

Tardigrades’ secret of survival lies in their ability to almost-but-not-quite-die. When faced with a lifethreatening situation, Tardigrades enter a “tun” state; they dry out their bodies and slow their metabolism by 99.99%. By doing this, they prevent water inside them from freezing into ice crystals and exploding through their body or boiling and killing their cells.

Once returned to normal environmental conditions, tardigrades rehydrate and come back to life, like a tiny, chubby, Frankenstein’s monster.

I first learned about tardigrades over five years ago in a short novella titled “Jellyfish Dreams”. The book was not about tardigrades but their brief description in the book was enough to pique my interest. Sure, 44 • zooming out

it helps that tardigrades are cute and charismatic to begin with, but the more I learned about them, the deeper a connection I felt between myself and these small survivors.

I have struggled with mental health for a large portion of my life, as many people do. The severity of my issues has fluctuated over the years, but at certain times, when the whole world around me felt wrong and cold and pointless, I would consider whether it was even worth it to get through each day.

It was during one of those times when I read “Jellyfish Dreams” and was introduced to tardigrades. Looking back on it, I think that the tardigrade was exactly what I needed at that moment. I had found a natural survivor, and it helped me to rethink my own mental situation.

If a creature smaller than a pea could withstand the vacuum of space, there was no reason to believe that I couldn’t get through one more day, and then another one, and then another one.

Tardigrades didn’t cure me of mental health challenges. It’s still something that affects me today, and I sometimes think it’s a part of me that I will never really be free from. But just knowing that something as improbable as the tardigrade exists gives me hope to push through each challenging day into the next.

And on days when hope isn’t enough, I try and find my own “tun” state. I dry my mind out and wait for things to get better. And so far, every time, they have.

I am thankful to tardigrades for teaching me that strength can come from the smallest of us. I am thankful to them for showing me that it is possible to survive even when the world around you is cold and empty. But most of all, I am thankful to tardigrades for being exactly the way they are and for making the world just a little bit more weird and wonderful.w

As We Move Into the Evening Hours thoughts on classic blue words and art by Stephanie Tom

When we talk about targeted advertisement, we usually talk about college students being consistently barraged with YouTube ads for Grammarly and Chegg. Or parents of young children being assaulted with ads for Disney+. Or Americans with McDonalds.

But we never talk about Pantone, which is why, when they dropped their announcement for 2020’s Color of the Year last December, I was surprised to see my familiar niche of Twitter all abuzz about it. What was so special about the color blue, and why was Twitter—of all social media sites—the one reacting to it the most gleefully? It’s not like it’s a strange color to see over the web. (A recap and simpler guide to your online blues: LinkedIn and Facebook are for professional faces, Instagram is better known as one’s personal photography portfolio, Twitter is for your best oneliners and hot takes, and Tumblr is an abyss of your past and present teen angst.) I almost didn’t get it— until I made the connection that the Color of the Year was a “Classic Blue,” the exact shade of the Microsoft Word icon on my laptop. The writer community on Twitter had a field day with it, laughing at the striking similarity between the two colors.

“Proof that Microsoft Word > Google Docs,” tweeted a friend known for exclusively using Word and preferring to fill his desktop screen with hundreds of individual files rather than give them up to the Drive.

“I’m getting anxious just looking at it and thinking about all of my WIPs,” joked another.

It seemed that we all shared a collective lovehate relationship with the color blue, whether it be regarding our specific feelings about Microsoft Word (and thus our writing), or about other corners of the Internet. LinkedIn and Facebook are semi-dark, muted blue, for professional endeavors and updates only (minus the meme groups). Twitter is a bright sky blue, for more unfiltered thoughts, whether they be my own words or a combination of others’. Google Docs reminds me all too much of the Zoom app, in both color and function, meant for schoolwork and

academic endeavors. As for Microsoft Word, the only Classic Blue among all of the platforms I use to write, I dedicate solely to my creative writing. Every corner of the Internet has its shade of blue, and so does every genre of my writing.

I thought it seemed funny that Classic Blue would be a “return to the Evening Hours” (as described by a CNN article back in December of 2019 when the color was freshly unveiled.) It’s not just because I tend to hit my stride when writing close to dusk and into the night.

I remember learning in my Environmental Psychology class last fall about color theory, and how the majority of people globally (roughly 70-75%) tend to pick a cooler color like blue when asked about their favorite color, rather than a brighter color like red, because cooler colors are more calming. What a coincidence for Pantone to choose a calming classic as we move into a new cycle of life, a new decade. The Pantone Color Institute said it wanted to capture a moment in time, “a color that anticipates what’s going to happen next.” How do we seek a sense of calm and security in a year that has felt longer than the entire decade that has just passed, even without being halfway through?

We return to the Evening Hours. But just what are the “Evening Hours” we talk about? Could it be a reference to the blue found in our fascination with “unnatural nature?” It’s been a growing trend with the rise of popular fantasy, dystopian, and sciencefiction screen adaptations—including but not limited to Coraline (dir. Henry Selick, 2009), Tron (dir. Joseph Kosinski, 2010), and Avatar (dir. James Cameron, 2009). If you’ve watched or recognize these movies, then you probably know how distinctively bright blue the tunnel to the Other World was in Coraline, as well as the rest of the scenes in the Other World at night; how sharply the neon blue light panels of Tron crisscrossed over roads and bodysuits of the characters alike; how deep blue the members of the humanoid Na’vi species of Pandora were in contrast to the humans who explored Pandora. There’s something zooming out • 45

about these genres that make us want to color them blue, to shroud their rebellions and uncertainty in comfortable lights and temporal distance in order to assuage our worries. As if saying, there is nothing to fear. Blue, blue, blue. So many shades, so that, when the camera pans with an ominous ballad, the skyscrapers of the cityscape don’t look any different than the ones we see in our own urban areas.

Swimming pools glow neon blue as naturally as they do in the day under sunshine, even when you’re not involved in a clandestine rendezvous to discover 46 • zooming out

secrets. The technology that surrounds you in these films is just as harmless as Alexa when you call for her and she lights up. Dystopias, science-fiction, and their cyberpunk aesthetics capture our fascination, define the unnatural through colors we’re familiar with, and thus turn the otherworldly into something familiar by grounding us in blues so natural to these stories we forget how unnatural they truly are.

Or do the “Evening Hours” refer to the intertwining of public and private personas via social media? It’s especially funny how people tend to spend a lot of

their time online in the webspace of social media at night, past the “Evening Hours,” in between work, school, and sleep. In the same vein as cyberpunk and the fear of everyday AI-domination, the pervasiveness of social media and the widespread reach of the Internet in our everyday lives has become commonplace, when a millennium ago it would have seemed laughably impossible. Whether it be Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, or Tumblr—note the commonality of blue icons, if you count Instagram’s old look before it updated—many users feel compelled to curate the most authentic version of themselves to be preserved online, but only in the best light possible, myself included. We are primed to present ourselves simultaneously in both public and private, to be both authentic and polished, yet still unfiltered. We rise in the morning to blue sky, fresh and focused for the day to come and the people we’ll meet, until we return home in a steeping blanket of navy, night creeping in. We have learned over the years to revamp and refresh our outward appearances and the people we present ourselves to be in margins of blue, whether it be the beginning of our commutes in liminal spaces as the sky changes color, or online as apps load to bursting on screens full of our carefully documented days. It’s a confusing dichotomy, but that’s what a varied palette of blue is supposed to be for, right?

And what of the “Evening Hours” when we are feeling blue? I’m not sure of the origins of linking depression and anxiety with the color blue, but it doesn’t take a very large jump to make an association for why this is the case. Blue is the color of safety, for wrapping yourself up in a blanket of quiet and calm. No wonder it’s a common color to represent peace and tranquility, too. Isn’t it interesting how the two share some of the same feelings, yet seem equally to be worlds apart? Some people turn to app icons—blue as a whole no matter how you pin them—for comfort, while others see them as catalysts of negativity and end up feeling overwhelmed? I too hover over the app icons on my phone sometimes, hesitating over whether or not I want to open up a window to the world at my fingertips, full of people yet devoid of physical presence. I wonder why I pause at this threshold of connectivity when I want to feel connected to others yet still feel a sense of dread at this virtual vacuum that has swallowed our lives.

The Pantone Color Institute reflected on this paradox as it “recognized similar feelings of instability gripping the world today,” saying that they settled on “Classic Blue” because it was a shade that offered a reminder of “the reassurance, confidence,

and connection that people may be searching for.”

I admit, I’m searching for some of that reassurance and connection now, too, especially in the age of quarantine and social distancing, in the time of Coronavirus. Once we left campus for various corners of the country and the globe, we were all left ever more estranged from one another. Spring semester was cut two months short (emotionally, since classes continued remotely post-spring break) and the reality of distance and our tethered connections to one another were thrown into an even starker light.

Although I love being at home with my family, I feel a sense of longing and yearning whenever I remember all of the what if’s and have been’s in my memory and camera roll.

The week after I got home, if I were still on campus, I would have seen the pink flowering trees outside of Olin bloom just as they did during my freshman year. Three weeks after getting home, if the semester had continued as planned, I would have gone to see Little Women (dir. Greta Gerwig, 2019) at the Cornell Cinema with some of my friends for a birthday, and then would have gone to see another friend star in Much Ado About Nothing at the Schwartz Center the next day. On what would have been the last day of in-person classes this semester, it would have been one year since my first time celebrating and attending a Kitsch Magazine launch party. In the midst of all these memories, I need only turn to the various blue square icons on my phone and laptop and reach out to the people in them. I share memes with friends via Facebook, call them over Messenger and Zoom, and banter with them over Twitter threads. And every time I see a little red notification next to a blue square, I smile despite myself.

Ask anybody what the color blue looks like, and they’ll all have different answers. Some think of the sky against McGraw Tower on a spring day, some of the ocean, or of Beebe Lake. I think of all of the above, and of every bout of laughter that has come with reaching out to pals via social media, something I have learned not to take for granted. Through the blues of life and love, our calm can be a façade for our sadness and our sadness can be a source of calm.

Pantone never could have predicted the world that 2020 has become and the decade it has felt like in the short span of months, but I think they made an excellent choice in selecting the color of the year. In times of uncertainty, we could all use a reminder that there is a chance for serenity and better things to come, even in the face of fear.w

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