post- 04/11/24

out of bloom

transience, stillness, envy, gratitude

by Samira Lakhiani

by Stella Tsogtjargal

“They’re just trees; no more pictures!” whines a boy, maybe six years old, to his parents. He is much more invested in the line of ice cream trucks a few meters away than posing with the sakura.

At the next tree, a group of girls are deliberate and methodical with their photos. One by one, they smile with the aesthetic backdrop, their friends behind the camera exclaiming ample praise.

Just a few feet away, an older couple is holding hands. They look up as the pale pink petals gently fall around their feet. They don’t say a word.

I absorb the scene around the Tidal Basin, the pinnacle viewpoint for the annual cherry blossom festival in Washington, D.C. The entire reservoir is lined with brilliant shades of pink, made even brighter by the vivid blues of the water and sky encasing it.

The blossoms at their peak draw over 1.5 million visitors to the nation’s capital every year at the cusp of spring. Every cafe, shop, and train in D.C. has infinite strings of pink paper flowers adorning their walls. The

Dear Readers,

If you are reading from the future (or from under a rock), this past Monday, we just celebrated the last total solar eclipse until 2044. For two hours, myself and what must have been every one of Brown’s undergraduates, graduates, faculty, their direct family, their extended family, and even a few pets gathered on the Main Green to look to the skies and bask in the magnificence of these far off celestial bodies crossing each other’s paths. This is the annual time when we all flock to the green to share a chat, a charcuterie board, or maybe something else (but not until next week). In the past two years, however, I have never passed something around with as much genuine excitement as I did those $5 eclipse glasses. I jumped and hollered and pointed—as if anyone had any doubts as to what was going on. I felt a level of awe that has left me wandering around campus empty, save for the tinge of regret I feel for not making the drive a

frenzy isn’t just due to the beauty of sakura, it also lies in their ephemeral nature. Peak bloom lasts a mere ten days.

As we make our way through the vast crowds and wander around the basin, I watch how visitors interact with the blossoms. Many take photos, eager to capture this fleeting phenomenon. Others simply observe the trees, embracing their elegance and savoring the view. Several have gatherings with an abundance of food and drink under the blossoms, a tradition involved in hanami, a Japanese custom that translates to “viewing flowers.”

To celebrate the brief bloom of sakura in Japan, families and friends have parties, barbecues, and picnics under the trees as an affectionate welcome for springtime. Whether it is through a small morning picnic with family or a big party with friends, it is a custom that reflects gratitude and acceptance of life’s impermanence.

We continue to roam, basking in this universal moment of natural beauty and appreciation. ~ ~ ~

The bloom of the cherry blossoms is a bridge, a state

couple hundred miles north to see the eclipse in totality. There will be a few more memorable days on the green in the coming weeks, but I fear that none may ever live up to the feeling of sheer amazement I felt on Monday.

This week in post-, our writers are reflecting on a few seminal experiences in their own lives. In Feature, our writer thinks about the cherry blossoms and how their annual bloom mirrors the transient stages of her life. In Narrative, one writer explores her relationship with alone time while the other writer recounts her time at boarding school and an experience with a UTI and McDonalds (correlation does not imply causation). In A&C, one writer reviews a book from her high school senior year that she is revisiting as she graduates Brown, and the other one thinks about growing older with Lizzy McAlpine. Rounding out this issue, one Lifestyle writer offers some timely tips on how to turn any dorm into a home, and the other one gives a guide for forming parasocial relationships around campus. And make sure to check out the first mini crossword from our talented new creator!

of in-between-ness. With winter on one side and spring on the other, the pastel pinks are almost congratulatory, a sign that reads: “You survived the seemingly interminable, bitter cold; warmth is on its way.” An optimistic emblem of a new beginning on the horizon.

The sight of the cherry blossoms, in their brevity and ephemerality, prompts extensive contemplation about the present. Recently I have been grappling with feelings of mundanity and a longing for a new beginning, likely as a product of imminent changes in the lives of those closest to me—a new city, new school, new job. They—my sister, my boyfriend, some of my best friends—are currently in a cherry-blossom state. Reveling in their final predictable days and eagerly awaiting a bright, fresh start that is within reach. I, on the other hand, am rich in normality and stillness, and struggling to appreciate it.

The timeline of receiving this news certainly contributed to the challenge of accepting my place in the present and its steadiness. Within the span of a month, I was celebrating multiple different admissions and

As I sit in the post- office writing this note to our lovely readers, I can’t help but think about the last solar eclipse I witnessed—on my tattered high school football field, after a sweaty morning of band camp, among a crowd of strangers whom I viewed with a mix of fear and discomfort. On Monday, I shared the sight on our beloved Main Green, after a morning of chatting with my closest friends in the world, among a crowd of brilliant, eccentric, fascinating people whom I feel honored to call my classmates. I hope all you amazing people find a moment this week to continue the momentum and feel awe, wonder, and a deep sense of internal questioning with this week’s edition of post-! Don’t worry, we won’t make you wait twenty years for the next one!

Looking longingly to the skies,

commitments to graduate schools and new jobs. Navigating the overwhelming joy and simultaneous pang of dread became more of a hurdle with each cheerful occasion.

Lately, my conversations with those around me have largely become examining apartment photos, perusing syllabi, and discussing new roommates. I try to extinguish the ever-so-small twinge of jealousy that lies in the pit of my stomach. The feeling is almost entirely subdued by happiness and excitement on their behalf. So much so that this jealousy is almost negligible. Almost.

A large part of me wants to extract only pleasure from my current state of certainty, of consistency. I love where I am now and the stability it provides. Yet I can’t help but envy those around me, the people I talk to most. I crave the state of the in-between, the cherry blossom state, the exhilaration and excitement of impending change.

Perhaps it is because the people who are leaving are the people who make Rhode Island feel like home to me. Maybe the root of my envy is fear of the impending changes in my life as a result of their impending changes. Truthfully and a bit selfishly, my next phase feels neither bright nor fresh without them here.

Everyone undergoes changes, new environments, and people coming and going within them. I feel as though I’ve navigated change well in the past; assuming an adaptive and receptive attitude didn’t feel like a trying task. Yet this upcoming bout of change feels different, lonelier.

The scene at the Tidal Basin, especially the sight of those engaging in hanami , having parties and celebrations among the blooms, celebrating and appreciating life’s impermanent and delicate nature, feels extraordinarily uplifting. It seems like a necessary reminder to embrace change—a gratitude-centered mindset I want to adopt. My visualization of the future may not look as bright and fresh as how I feel in the present, but I feel compelled to accept that things are not supposed to be a certain way for a prolonged period of time. The crowds of people witnessing this phenomenon are doing just that. Rather than dwelling on the blossoms’ hasty departure, everyone is taking in their surroundings, basking in the present moment, admiring where they are now. I want to do the same.

I haven’t quite been able to completely reconcile my unsettling thoughts of the future, this impatience with my life’s timeline, my premature mourning of what the coming months will bring. It may be something I don’t resolve until it happens. While as of now everything is still in peak bloom, it’s a transient phase that will briskly transform into something different.

My only option remains: absorb the scene, take some pictures, and watch the petals fall.

Another fresh start will come. The blossoms return every year.

to be alone or not to be alone

deciphering the truth from my own

by Gabi Yuan

Illustrated by Junyue Ma

I wonder when I started being afraid of alone time. It’s been an unconscious, foreboding feeling for so long; I’ve adopted it to the point that I feel like I exist as a result of the feeling. What happens now, when I’ve grown used to relying on others? Memories of my childhood sporadically come to me. The bottom stairs I used to sit on, prop my chin on my knees to, come to mind first.

Whenever my mother wasn’t pleased with the smallest of things—skipping swim practice or not finishing my dinner—I would be sent to the bottom stairs of the basement, where I was consumed with practicing the deep breaths I learned from the pool, to calm myself down. The weighted silence when my parents weren’t talking, interrupted only by the humming of my grandmother’s emerald-green clock,

reminds me of the 30 minutes I had to live alone with my thoughts. Even now, I can recall the beginnings of my inability to silence my daily worries: “Do I really need to finish my plate of dry chicken? How many more pages of Kumon do I have left before I’ll be gifted my iPad mini?” Soon, the troublesome thoughts would build to the point that I gripped my head and covered my ears as if someone was yelling over me. In reality, I was alone in the still, lifeless basement.

From below, I could hear my family through the air vents. It seemed like the filter purified every whispered thought my parents hid from me, now easily transcribed. Sitting on the basement steps alone was where the most honest of opinions and thoughts were revealed, and there was no one to carry their burden but myself.

“I feel like clotting is kinda overhyped.”

“Do you think they’ll let dat ass pass?”

While I heard all my parents' honest opinions about me, I only remember the worst, most selfdeprecating comments: “Stop feeding her so many snacks after school. The amount of weight she’s gained since the summer is unhealthy." "Have you seen her math scores from her school testing last week? Her points are 80% lower than that of her brother when he was her age.” Hearing these things from the adults I admired most, always so doting in my presence, jolted me awake, and I began to notice the judgment of others.

As I grew older, I started to choose the basement. The ability to confine myself within its revealing nature allowed me to live with my impulsive thoughts, though at the expense of myself. The punishment of sitting alone in the basement disappeared from my parent’s means of retribution. Yet, even as I grew out of being a teenager, the tiled stairs continued to symbolize a growing fear of mine. Being alone offered me the opportunity to be consumed by all types of thoughts— my family and friends’ opinions of me, my own reprimanding voice pinpointing areas of improvement, and the judgment of people who didn’t even know me.

Alone, oftentimes I couldn’t tell which thoughts were mine, and of those, which were rooted in truth or were just self-deprecating. The darkness, and sometimes comfort, of solitude offered me delusions, whereas even now, if I’m alone for too long, I’m afraid I’ll eventually lose my sense of self. I’ve grown since, but it feels like a confession to admit that being alone reminds me not only of the fearful child I once was in the dark.

With my friends, I find myself constantly making plans to fill the void. I associate being alone with loneliness—being trapped in the basement and wondering when I’ll be able to come back up. And yet, when I overbook myself, the introvert in me feels exhausted to the point where I want to be alone for days on end. It’s hard to separate the desire to be alone from negative feelings of isolation; the distinction grows blurry. What does this mean for my introverted nature? I’m supposed to thrive off of alone time, revitalizing my personality so I’ll be able to be my genuine self once again. But minutes alone cause an internal frenzy, and I end up overthinking my abilities to communicate effectively who I am and what I like.

With my family, it’s easier to verbalize my need to be alone. As I sit in my childhood bedroom, overstimulated by the teal blue walls and swimming ribbons, I’m constantly reminded of who I was and not who I want to be. How do I tell my parents that I’m still scared of the dark, and that when they ask me to go to the basement, I’m reminded of my faults? How do I explain the reason I’m so afraid to be alone is because alone time is tainted with unworthiness?

I promise myself and others that I’m getting better. When the weather’s nice and the most prominent feeling is the way the sun blazes against my sensitive skin, I enjoy walking home alone. I find a bench by the grass and sit with my thoughts. Only then am I able to filter my thoughts to joyous parts of the day while listening to the scuffling footsteps of other students returning home.

I enjoy waking up alone, when parts of me are too disoriented to overthink. As I lay under my warmed, gray covers, the window open to let in the crisp morning breeze and sounds of the trash cans getting rolled in, I can take a deep breath and relax, reminding myself that there’s no rush on a Sunday morning.

I wonder when I’ll be able to view alone time as moments to recover from the excitements of the day. Time to reflect on the simple moments before I learned to be afraid. When will the murmuring voices come to a stop? When I’m alone, I wish for the girl in the basement to take a deep breath, find her own strength, and walk herself back up the stairs.

feminine woes at boarding school a lesson in priorities (with McDonald’s at the top)

by Nina Lidar

Illustrated by Junyue Ma

September, 2021

United World College, Montezuma, New Mexico

18 years old

I wake up at 5:30 in the morning with a terrible pressure in my bladder. I stumble out of bed, dragging the sheets to the floor around my ankles, and grope in the dark for a pair of shorts. In the seconds it takes me to extricate myself and slip my legs into the pants, the pressure mounts catastrophically. There’s no time to tiptoe or to gently pull the bedroom door closed behind me. Its slam reverberates like a gunshot as I barrel to the bathroom—the pressure in my bladder silencing any whisper of remorse.

The bathroom stall door swings shut. It ricochets back open. The latch won’t slot into place. Fumbling, legs contorted inward to dam the impending flood, I try the latch once, twice more. It locks; I sit. I see relief ahead, as brilliant and tantalizing as heaven’s gates.

But the relief won’t come.

The pressure is like fire, like an anvil. What in the world… I wait for a trickle. I try to push, but I’ve never had to force myself to urinate before. I don’t know which muscles to summon for the task. It’s confounding, pleading with my body to yield to primal instinct. A tear leaks from my eye. The discomfort is like none I’ve ever known. Can I call it pain? I see no wound, no blood—but if this isn’t pain, I don’t know what is. I try again to push, and still, nothing. It’s worse to try to no avail than to endure. I lean forward, elbows on my knees, head in my hands. The pressure mounts. I was wrong—I don’t have the strength for endurance.

Back to my room. I scramble for my phone in the dark underbelly of my bed. My roommate huffs and tosses under the covers—unsubtle. Sorry my literal fucking crisis woke you. Hellfire isn’t raging in your vagina, asshole.

Back in the bathroom. I text my dorm’s resident advisor. Two minutes pass, no response. I check the time: 5:50 a.m. Health services won’t open for another three hours and 10 minutes. I calculate: 20 minutes since I’ve awoken, which means 190 more until I might meet the sweet grace of medicine, which means I’ll have to do the last 20 minutes nine and a half times over. I half laugh, half gasp. I check my phone again to see if by some miracle my RA has awoken and responded: 5:51 a.m. And underneath the time stamp… Saturday. At this desolate, godforsaken New

Mexico boarding school, it’s Saturday, and health services won’t open at all. If I were having a heart attack, I’d be dead right now. Or maybe I am dying. Maybe everyone’s been keeping it a big, hilarious secret that death starts in your bladder. The RA won’t respond, so all I can hope for is the on-call nurse, and I can’t find the on-call number anywhere. I close my eyes, dig my nails into my forehead, and picture my RA breaking open the bathroom door to find me in rigor mortis.

Four hours, 20 unanswered texts, and 10 phone calls later, I’m connected to Hannah, the on-call nurse. She says she’ll be there soon. When, after another hour, she rumbles up outside my dorm and honks, I rise from my seat on the curb with gravel imprinted into my thighs and the red crescents of my nails cut into each palm. She rolls down the window, smiles, and waves.

“Hi, good morning!”

I open my mouth and fail to speak.

“Ooh, rough one, is it?”

I realize in the car that what I had thought was the worst possible discomfort was nothing but a prelude to the main event. Every pothole and every judder of the engine brings pressure of diluvian proportion against the walls of my bladder. White spots swim across my vision. We roll to a stop at the Alta Vista Regional Hospital and the final jerk of the parking brake wrenches a choked shriek from behind my lips.

The only other person in the emergency waiting room is a middle-aged woman who eyes me suspiciously as, failing to stifle my torment, I cross and uncross my legs and twist and rock in the chair, intermittently rising to pace the room. Behind a windowed partition sits the lone receptionist who scrolls through videos on her cell phone, the audio trickling through the glass as indecipherable buzzing. Every now and then she chuckles at her screen or places her cell phone down to pick up a call from the landline on her desk. After watching the sun rise from half-mast to its full height in the sky through the waiting room window, I beg her, through a film of tears, to put me through to the doctor. She looks up at me with an expression of mild interest and shrugs.

“Not sure where she is, hon,” she says.

At 1:00 p.m., the doctor leans her head around the doorframe; her eyes travel no farther up than my name printed at the top of the chart in her hands. I nearly run to her when she summons me. She hands me a cup, and as my hands clasp around it, a gaping fear expands in my gut. I don’t know if I can face the failure of my body again. I don’t know if I can stomach the absolute futility of my attempts to subdue the agony. But I have to try.

I emerge from the bathroom in a state akin to euphoria, if euphoria can be qualified by interminable,

fiery pain and desperation of unprecedented intensity. In my hand is tangible proof that my body is corroding from the inside: a cup of watery red. Proof that for nearly eight hours, my bladder has been the host of something demonic, and nobody has done a thing to exorcize it. I proffer the container of liquid to the doctor, who looks from it to me appraisingly.

“Wow. This isn’t good, honey.”

“I know!” I say. I have a crazed impulse to giggle. “I know!”

I am rewarded for my struggles with a drivethru trip of my choosing: either McDonald’s, Sonic, or Dairy Queen. In circumstances as extenuating as mine, the school is graciously willing to allow a small breach of its policy strictly prohibiting students from venturing beyond the school grounds and into town— implemented to prevent the illicit purchase of heinous substances such as Smirnoff Ices and cigarettes. I have not yet actually received the antibiotics I need to rehabilitate my urinary tract; I was discharged too late in the day, and the pharmacy had closed, so I’ll return to Hannah’s passenger seat to pick the pills up tomorrow. For now, the pain is no less, but I’ve at least grown too tired to squirm.

I choose McDonald’s. I order fries, a McFlurry, and—though I’m normally a strict vegetarian—chicken nuggets. After Hannah pays, she waves the credit card in front of me. She grins with smug satisfaction.

“This is the school card, you know. Isn’t it nice that they cover things like this?”

Back on campus, I hobble into my dorm with my brown paper McDonald’s bag dangling at my side. I pass several girls in the common room; they regard me with hungry, jealous eyes—nearly resentful.

“McDonald’s?” they say. “You’re so lucky.”

“I went to the ER. This was my compensation.”

“Oh, are you ok?”

I open my mouth to respond.

“Wait, sorry, I can’t believe you got McDonald’s. I’m so jealous.”

Later that evening, I open my door to receive my ambiguously categorizable long-term hookup (he has told me he loves me, though I haven’t yet told him I like him, and neither of us has ever mentioned the words “dating,” “relationship,” “girlfriend,” or “boyfriend”). He enters, ruffles my hair hello, and seats himself on my mattress. Presently, I find standing marginally more bearable than sitting, so I lean against my closet, attempting nonchalance through the torment.

“How was your day?” he asks.

My voice comes out slightly too high-pitched. “Oh, not great.”

“Why?”

He spots the McDonald’s bag on my desk.

“Wait,” he says. “Is that McDonald’s? How did you get it?”

“Well, I—”

He reaches over and snatches the bag from the desk. He pulls out the empty fries and chicken nuggets containers and turns them upside down— several crumbs drop onto the duvet. His face falls; he brushes the crumbs to the floor.

“None for me?”

“No, sorry… I ate everything.”

I attempt to contort my stance subtly to stanch the phantom flow still pounding against my bladder. Preoccupied by the bag, he seems not to notice.

“Damn, I wish you’d saved me some. I haven’t had McDonald’s in ages.”

“I was really hungry… It was my first meal of the day.”

“Well, you didn’t have to be that hungry,” he says.

I apologize and contort again. He cocks his head as I attempt to press my thighs together, pigeontoed. This time, I achieve subtlety less successfully.

“You okay? Oh, wait, yeah, why did you get McDonald’s in the first place?”

“Oh, I’m fine. I just had an infection. I had to see the nurse, but it’s Saturday, so—”

“Yeah, on-call. That sucks, sorry.”

“It’s ok,” I say. “It’s not that bad. She paid for the McDonald’s, which was nice—although, on the school’s card, actually, so I guess she doesn’t really get credit.”

He gasps, affronted. “You got it for free? And the school paid? Lucky.”

I laugh haltingly as he stretches out over the covers. He pats the spot next to him, and I remember: “Oh, but I probably can’t, you know…”

He raises his eyebrows.

“Well, it was a UTI.”

He frowns; a dark cloud of concern passes over his face. He sits up, leans forward. “But, a UTI…”

“Like, a urinary tract infection. It’s just a temporary infection.”

The crease between his eyebrows deepens. A sentence is clogged behind a stoppage in his throat.

“Not an STD,” I say.

He breathes a deep, shaky sigh of relief, laughs, and rolls backward onto the mattress to stare up at the ceiling. “Oh, thank god. Well, UTIs aren’t so bad, right? Definitely not as bad as not even getting a bite of your McDonald’s.”

I bite the inside of my cheek to distract from the storm seething in my bladder.

He sits up again to look at me seriously. “I actually can’t believe you got it for free…”

I reposition myself once more against the closet, nodding. The discomfort has just surged—a fresh lick of fire. Pins prick behind my eyes. I can no longer muster words of pacification, I can’t apologize for my inordinate fast food privilege. The pain has extended its flaming tentacles through the whole length of my body.

I recount the events of the day to myself in an attempt at a mantra, at self-hypnosis: UTI, UTI, UTI, UTI, UTI…

a farewell to brown

reflections upon commencement and the legacy of jeffrey eugenides’ “the marriage plot”

by Dorrit Corwin

Illustrated by Junyue Ma

During my senior year of high school, I took an Honors English Seminar. Its thirteen spots were awarded to a cohort of rising seniors who satisfactorily completed a pre-requisite essay response to Roland Barthes’ From Work To Text. Each week we dove headfirst into different subgenres of literary theory, our backpacks weighed down by the menacing brick that is Rivkin and Ryan’s 1650-paged book, Literary Theory: an Anthology

When we finally made it to senior spring, many of our peers in other classes checked out and stopped putting effort into most of their coursework. But the Seminar students had to hunker down and write thirty-page papers that integrated significant theoretical source material, tackling any topic of our choosing. Mine was called “The Friend Zone.” In it I explored the elusive spectrum of platonic and romantic relationships via work from Aristotle, Henry James, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and other thinkers. It centered around Nora Ephron’s screenplay, When Harry Met Sally, and included an interview with my grandparents about their marriage, as well as an epilogue addressed to my male best friend. Ultimately, I sought out to dismantle the concept of the friend zone by examining a diverse array of sources–from a 1989 romantic comedy to a Greek philosopher’s “three types of friendship” to a gender theorist’s analysis of binaries and homosociality.

On days when we had extra time at the end of usually densely packed Seminar classes, Dr. Long would read us excerpts from a novel about a love triangle involving a crew of obnoxious Ivy League students who read most of the theorists and philosophers we were studying in Seminar in their Semiotics class at Brown. We laughed aloud at our beloved teacher’s quirky character voices, but above all else, we cackled at the obscenity that is the entire narrative of Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Marriage Plot

It is no coincidence that five of the thirteen of us, the “campus lit crit elite,” in Eugenides’ words, applied Early Decision to Brown, the dreamy landscape of Eugenides’ third novel. Five years later, I am about to graduate from Brown, and I am rereading The Marriage Plot to supplement my panoptic nostalgia in the weeks leading up to commencement.

I arrived in Providence in 2019 with a shelf full of books that has since quadrupled in volume. The literary theory book I read during Honors English Seminar occupies its own special corner.

“There was, in short, this mid-size but still portable library representing pretty much everything Madeline had read in college,” Eugenides writes on the very first page of The Marriage Plot. The protagonist’s bookshelf in the bedroom of her Benefit Street apartment (the street where I, too, spent my upperclassman years) even houses a copy of Little Dorrit by Charles Dickens, my namesake.

I first read The Marriage Plot in its entirety in 2020, on my impromptu gap year from Brown during COVID-19, and I was hooked from the very first page. Whether I was reading from a mango farm in Colombia or a beach in Santa Cruz, I could so vividly picture the campus I’d left behind. Eugenides writes: “Here the narrow streets, many of them cobblestone, climbed past mansions or snaked around Puritan graveyards full of headstones as narrow as heaven’s door, streets with names like Prospect, Benevolent, Hope, and Meeting, all of them feeding into the arboreous campus at the top. The sheer physical elevation suggested an intellectual one.” He does not shy away from dropping College Hill landmarks and lingo, such as “The Ratty” and “Wayland Quad,” into his prose. My daily walk from Benefit Street up the hill to class is described in rich detail, as is the entire graduation procession that will follow the same route through campus in May as it did in the 80s and for many decades prior.

Though the novel was published in 2001 and takes place in the 80s, it is a true testament to the way Brown’s social and academic culture transcends generations. Each character represents a hyperbole of someone I’ve met here, but Eugenides does a masterful job of assigning each person hyper-specific identities without forcing them into clichéd archetypes.

I see a lot of myself in Madeline, who has a strong sense of self but tends to get lost in her own thoughts. She is a reader and a writer who loves nothing more than holding up a mirror between her academic pursuits and her personal life, with Eugenides writing, “Madeline’s love troubles had begun at a time when the French theory she was reading deconstructed the very notion of love.” Eugenides even includes excerpts from A Lover’s Discourse as Madeline reads it, elucidating this link between academia and personal relationships. In search of this very same phenomenon, I found myself gravitating towards English and Philosophy courses such as “Love and Friendship,” “Existentialism,” and “Reading Sex.”

Madeline is introspective about her relationships and maintains a very particular set of criteria for the guys she dates, until one troubled boy in her Semiotics class wins her over and they fall in love during his struggles with depression.

“That was when Leonard realized something crucial about depression. The smarter you were, the worse it was. The sharper your brain, the more it cuts you up.”

This character, Leonard, reminded me so much of the boy I spent most of college crushing on and some of college dating. After I first finished the book, I loaned him my copy, which was heavily annotated and falling apart at the spine. Many of the passages I underlined and notes I scribbled in the margins were made with the intention that he’d read them. He never got around to reading it, but Madeline and Leonard’s relationship eerily foreshadowed many aspects of the relationship I later shared with him.

I found myself wanting to loan my copy of the book

to more friends who reminded me of characters I’d encountered in it. During my gap year, two of my friends talked a big game about traveling to Tanzania for a few months. Watching them hatch plans to “roll Tanz,” (as they famously called their hypothetical trip that never came to fruition), felt akin to the aimless journey Mitchell and his roommate Larry embark on after graduating from Brown in the book. The two young men develop a plan to “fight the recession,” which entails them tabling their entrance to the job market with their liberal arts degrees when unemployment is at 9.5%. Instead, they elect to travel the world until their money runs out. They end up spending a significant amount of time in India, where they live with monks and write that they’ve finally discovered their true selves in letters to Madeline.

Mitchell and Madeline share a confusing friendship. The book opens on the morning of graduation day and toggles back and forth in time as Madeline reminisces on college memories. In the beginning of the story, Mitchell tells her, “We’re friends when you want to be friends, and we’re never more than friends because you don’t want to be. And I have to go along with that.” Their dynamic perfectly encapsulates the tumultuous ambiguity present in many of the male and female friendships I’ve built throughout college, many of which remind me fondly of my friendship with the boy to whom I dedicated my Honors English Seminar thesis.

While different in style and form, Madeline and I tackle similar topics in our honors theses. Hers, in the English department, examines the traditional mating dance performed in novels by Jane Austen, Henry James, and George Eliot. Mine, in Literary Arts, is a comingof-age memoir about the relationships, situationships, and crushes that defined my adolescence and young adulthood. Five years after Honors English Seminar, my thesis for that class has morphed into this more personal, and more ambitious, project.

At the core of my book is a quote I wrote down the first time I read The Marriage Plot: “Every letter is a love letter.” Even if its contents are heartbreaking or confusing or just boring, the act of writing a letter, especially in the digital age, constitutes an act of love. I unequivocally believe that. So, each anecdote I share in my thesis is paired with a letter I wrote to or received from the boy involved (some are fabricated, some are real).

Madeline shares that her intense Semiotics professor came to Brown 32 years prior as a New Critic. He regales his students with tales of meeting Barthes at a dinner party in Paris. It feels like just yesterday that I stepped into the office of my first-year advisor and spent an hour gabbing with him about the same theorists and swooning over his story about being taught by Derrida at Princeton.

Ultimately, The Marriage Plot and my experience in

Honors English Seminar are what propelled me towards the Modern Culture and Media department at Brown—to study film theory, not practice, of course. The introductory MCM course is universally known to be quite dull, but I lit up with glee when I glanced at the syllabus to find that I’d already read most of its authors in high school with Dr. Long (Foucault, Deleuze, Baudrillard)—and Madeline had read them, too. I texted Dr. Long triumphantly when I received a 100% on my first MCM paper.

As I run my fingers through the brittle pages of The Marriage Plot once more, I find myself laughing out loud at the lines that remain absurdly representative of the Brown student body, like, “He thought about the people he knew, with their excellent young bodies, their summer houses, their cool clothes, their potent drugs, their liberalism, their orgasms, their haircuts. Everything they did was either pleasurable in itself or engineered to bring pleasure down the line” and a description of Brown students as “upper-middle-class kids who wore Doc Martens and anarchist symbols.” The list goes on.

It's no wonder that Eugenides’ third novel didn’t collect quite as many accolades as his other novels, Middlesex (a Pulitzer winner) or The Virgin Suicides; I can imagine that reading The Marriage Plot without having gone to Brown might make you want to poke your eyes out with a fork. But its hyperbolic elitism and cultural critique of this one-of-a-kind community is what drives me back to it again and again.

So thank you, Jeffrey Eugenides, for perfectly encapsulating it all. And thank you, Brown, for five years of bliss within a utopian bubble of S/NC grades, boys who play club sports and sing a cappella, student films starring nepo babies, and house parties lit by scented taper candles. The throughline is people who take themselves too seriously, but who very well may one day accidentally end up saving the world.

growing pains never grow old

april showers bring may flowers

by Alaire Kanes Illustrated by Fiona McGill

Listening to an album start to finish can often feel strangely laborious to me. Maybe the high commitment (which is no more than an hour and a half) feels not worth it or, god forbid, I fear I won’t fully understand the narrative arc of the tracklist. Or maybe I’m scared that I’ll feel too much.

Excitement for the solar eclipse was growing, I had a dream about my ex-boyfriend the night prior, and I

was feeling emotionally reckless. I decided to listen to and write about Older—the newest and third album of accomplished 24-year-old musician, Lizzy McAlpine— released April 5, 2024. What the hell, I reasoned. I’ll listen to the whole album, just for shits. It’s only 45 minutes. I might not even cry! Right?

Wrong. A mere minute and forty seconds into my listening experience, I had to pause the album, remove my headphones, and take a good, long exhale. I knew, then, that Older would inevitably lead me to feel (perhaps too much) but this time, I didn’t feel scared. McAlpine gently guides her listener through a journey of love and loss, her tender vocals perfectly softening any harsh truths or heartbreaking lyrics. At first glance (or listen), Older seems effortless and simple, as if its songs came pouring out of McAlpine in one go. With more careful consideration, however, I soon realized that Older is wiser, more complex, thoughtful, and emotionally charged than I could have anticipated. McAlpine might only be 24, but just like most young women I know, she is not to be underestimated in her work ethic or emotional, intellectual, or philosophical capacity.

Skillfully produced by Mason Stoops and Ryan Lernan, Older shepherds its listeners through a sonic topography of beginnings and endings. The tonal equivalent of a lush, meditative landscape (the album’s cover and promo feature deep green trees, saturated waters, and rocky shores), Older situates listeners both in McAlpine’s reality and in a realm of the metaphysical. McAlpine accompanies grounded lyrical anecdotes with existential thinking (and dreamy melodies). It’s hard to imagine listening to McAlpine’s album while successfully multitasking; the 14-track LP (Long Play) demands full attention, full thinking, and most importantly, full feelings, creating a trance-like, cathartic listening experience.

Though Older’s lyrics challenge us to stop and reflect, the album’s coherence keeps us soaring along. McAlpine’s music places us within moments of vivid sensation and memory—road trips through shimmering Vermont forests, shy summer camp touches, first loves, first heartbreaks, the bittersweet feeling of knowing you’re growing up and there’s nothing you can do to stop it. Through Older, we are softly pushed to reckon with grief for a first, second, third, fourth, millionth time.

The album’s opener, “The Elevator,” is keenly named: ascending and descending melodies paired with concise lyrics, a straightforward piano part, and lush harmonies. “The Elevator” perfectly prepares listeners for a no-fuss album. Despite being an evidently smart body of work, Older is still accessible in its listening. Both for the more musically inclined and for the everyday listener, Older discards the need for elusive lyrics or superfluous instrumentation: the strength of McAlpine’s work lies in its relatability. Although McAlpine utilizes personalized anecdotal elements in her writing, Older, more than her previous work, also employs more abstract language, leaving room for a maturing listener to grow alongside McAlpine. Her lyrics foster a space for reading between the lines, self-insertion, and a re-imagining of possible pasts, presents, and futures.

Track five, “All Falls Down,” for example, makes use of both broader lyrical strokes (“It all falls down on you”) and hyper specific examples (“22 was a panic attack”); McAlpine pulls us out of ourselves, towards her own narrative, while also ushering us inwards to moments of self-reflection.

In “Drunk, Running,” McAlpine muses on toxic habits, toxic thoughts, and toxic relationships. She bravely sings: “What if it was all my fault / What if I drove you to it?” To me, “Drunk Running” is emotionally reminiscent of realizing the gravity of a

past mistake; the song’s dissonant melodic twists arrive abruptly and uncomfortably. “Make a person out of memories / They won’t live up to it,” McAlpine shares, both in warning and in confession.

“Broken Glass,” one of my personal favorites on the album, cuts deep to anyone who has ever loved the wrong person. Can pleasure exist without pain? Pain without pleasure? Is heartbreak inherent to experiences of love? The song’s bridge—stunning and explosive—is introduced by breathtaking instrumentals, destined to be earth-shattering in a live rendition. A small but mighty chorus, “We started with the end / Broken glass, again, again,” morphs subtly into “We’re coming to the end / Breaking glass.” McAlpine speaks to a universal feeling of knowing something is going to end, but not knowing exactly when that end will come. The song’s outro stretches on for twenty seconds longer than anticipated, mirroring the unease and fear of a toxic romantic relationship.

“Older” is ostensibly the simplest song out of the 14; as the album’s first released single, however, fans should expect it to pack a punch, in classic McAlpine fashion (think “All My Ghosts” or “Ceilings,” two of McAlpine’s most popular single releases). The track thematically encapsulates the album’s emotional core—“Mom’s getting older / I’m wanting it back”—left my heart trembling. What a beautifully, devastating line from a beautifully, devastating album. “Thought I would come to my senses / Wish I was stronger somehow / Wish it was easy / Somewhere, I lost all my senses / I wish I knew what the end is.” How can she say so much in so few words? What better a source to speak to the experience of growing up, the grief of leaving youth behind, than someone squarely in the middle of coming-of-age?

Written over the span of three years, Older carefully and precisely crafts a complicated narrative of self-discovery and existential realization. Alongside McAlpine, we explore the transience of a moment, of a relationship, of life, of ourselves. Older feels like a middle finger to anyone who has ever tried to compartmentalize a young woman’s experience with heartbreak, grief, or growing up. In listening to Older, it is impossible to deny McAlpine’s full personhood; her writing gives voice to the complex identities and emotions of young adults (specifically young women) in their early twenties.

To me, “Better Than This” is the album’s standout. If I wasn’t already misty-eyed in the stacks of the Rock while listening to the album for the first time, I was full on crying (and semi-smiling) by the first-chorus of “Better Than This,” a song that feels so personally resonant. Lyrics like “What if I'm not a good person? / You always say that I am / But you don't really know me at all now” and “Someone will love me better than this / Better than this / Someone will love you better than this / Better than this” externalize an often internalized anxiety with the tenderness, safety, and wisdom of a

good friend.

“March,” track 13, is about Lizzy’s experience grieving her late father, while “Vortex,” the album’s closing number, explores ideas of acceptance, moving on, and letting go. It can’t be a coincidence that Older was released only a few days prior to the solar eclipse. The album feels strangely timeless, cyclical, spiritual. Maybe coming-of-age experiences don’t have to be so isolating, after all. Maybe we’re not alone in this. Maybe we’ve never been alone in this.

McAlpine’s 14 reflections on the passage of time, on ritual, on the human capacity for emotion are impressive to even the most therapy-ridden of 21st century young women. McAlpine’s music reminds me of the often suppressed parts of the 20-somethings I know and love (aka, my friends!): emotive, witty, and curious. What would happen if we share these parts of ourselves with reckless abandon? I wonder. McAlpine challenges us to find the courage to connect, with ourselves, with her, with each other, with the universe. Grief and love and heartbreak might be as old as dirt, McAlpine acknowledges, but Older makes these emotions feel as good as new. Older brings us full circle, McAlpine's memories transporting us back, forward, around—to the sensation of beginning to grow up. We might not ever know where that beginning is, or where it will end. But at least we can put our headphones back in, hit play, and have another 45 minutes of Older to try and find out.

how to make a dorm a home!

a guide on creating a home away from home

by Daphne Cao

Illustrated by Joyce Gao

Move-in day is perhaps the most hectic day of college. It can be an exciting and nerve-wracking time, especially if it’s your first one. Granted, we’re a fair bit away from the next move-in day, but as someone who has already started planning my future room’s color scheme and decorations, I’m here to tell you how I try to make a dorm as cozy and homey as possible.

Tip #1: Rearrange the furniture the way you like You step into your dorm. What should be your first plan of attack? Rearranging the furniture!

Move-in day is the time to set up the room in whatever way you like. Your parents, roommates, and anyone willing to lend a helping hand, like your neighbor’s parents, will be there to help move any heavy furniture, so take advantage of it!

Raise or lower your bed to the height you want, move the fridge and microwave to a more spacious area

so it doesn’t cramp up the rest of the room, shift around the desk so it faces the window and leaves more space for your other things—whatever you do, make sure to get it all done on the first day. Trust me, trying to make these adjustments when you’re by yourself or when you’ve already got your stuff covering the furniture is not a fun experience.

Tip #2: Decorations on decorations on decorations

Who wants to come back to their dorm after a long, tiring day and be greeted with barren walls and harsh, fluorescent lighting? Let’s be honest, the bare dorms on campus can be a depressing sight.

So let’s change that! Posters with your favorite bands or shows, cute art pieces from family or the internet, stuffed animals, or standees—these can really make your dorm feel more personal and, well, it doesn’t hurt to cover up some of the chipped paint on the walls.

But the decorations don’t stop there! I’ve walked into friends’ dorms and seen everything from a cork board with a collage of photographs pinned on it, to a kitchen knife mounted on the wall with Command strips (a product I very much recommend to anyone who plans to make the most out of their wall space). The point is you can get as creative as you like; it’s your space, so make it look like you designed it!

Tip #3: A rug

Trust me, even if your dorm comes with carpeted floors, you’ll want this. As someone who cringes at the thought of walking around in shoes inside my home, being able to kick them off in my dorm is an essential.

And if you ever feel the need for some floor time, or if you have too many friends over for everyone to pile on the bed? No one will have to lie on the floor! Plus, a rug is an easy way to add a ton of color and interesting patterns or textures to the dorm’s layout.

Tip #4: Lights!!!

I can’t stress enough how lovely lights can make a dorm. Being constantly blinded by harsh overhead lighting in a place where you’re supposed to be your most comfortable isn’t pleasant. Give your eyes a rest by getting some LED lights that change color to match your mood, or just some simple fairy lights to give your dorm a subtle glow.

I’ve gotten so used to using my fairy lights that the only reason I flick on the overhead lights is to force myself to sit down and do my work instead of lounging around.

Tip #5: Okay, but how tf do I buy all this stuff???

So, yeah, it’s no secret that getting all these things can be pretty pricey. But fear not! There are many ways to save a lot of money on your dorm decorations.

If you’ve got older siblings who are out of college, exploit them without shame. Do they have a leftover dorm rug that’s sitting in the back of their closet? Now it’s yours. Posters or storage boxes that they no longer have any use for? Well, then they’re just asking you to take it for yourself.

If you’re an oldest or only child, don’t worry; you’ve still got options. At the end of the year, when everybody is moving out, check places like Facebook or Sidechat to see if anyone’s giving away dorm decor or storage that they don’t need. It might seem insane that people will throw away

these things when they’re practically unused, but a lot of the time people who live far from school aren’t able to bring these things back, so they sell them to other people for super cheap or even for free.

And you don’t even need to buy things! You can create your own decor—hang up your own art, make origami, or start some crochet projects to put on your desk and bookshelves. And if you aren’t well-versed in arts and crafts, you can always learn how. Or put up any things that are important to you, like collectibles.

Tip #6: Communicate with the roomie

Okay, this is a situational tip that doesn’t apply to everyone. But, even if you’re in a suite with singles, getting along with the people you’re living with is essential! The physical characteristics of a dorm aren’t the only things that determine how comfortable you are there; the people around you are just as important.

While you don’t have to be best friends with your room/suitemate(s), establishing boundaries and general non-negotiables is a must. Nobody wants to be in a situation where one roommate gets up at seven in the morning and plays their morning routine playlist, waking up their nightowl roommate who just went to sleep two hours ago.

This doesn’t mean you have to completely accommodate what your roommate wants, though. It’s about compromising to ensure that you have as harmonious a living space as possible. And on top of that, it’s nice to talk with your roommate—who would say no to making a new friend?

Tip #7: Have people over!

Now, all the tips listed above are certainly important for making your dorm feel comfortable and cozy, but what really makes a home is the people within it. If your dorm is too small to fit a big group of people, even just having one or two friends over can help make your dorm a place you enjoy being in.

The happy moments you have in your dorm always linger. When you get back to your dorm at the end of the day, you’ll want to fondly remember what occurred in it.

These are just some tips based on how I like to make my dorm feel cozy—everyone has different ways of making a space their own. Maybe you don’t need to pick out a color scheme for your dorm or have a collage of different colors. Maybe you don’t need to add any decor at all! There is no “right” way to decorate your dorm.

Whatever you choose to do with it, just make it a place you feel content in!

never meet your heroes

getting to grow with one another

by Nina Lidar

Illustrated by Kendra Eastep

The warm, sunny days of spring are almost upon us. Sure, returning to the great outdoors will be nice, but there’s something else about spring that is the real source of our excitement. Springtime heralds the emergence of all the people who have, until now, been hermiting away to weather out the winter, which can mean only one thing: it’s campus character season. It’s

time to spy someone walking in front of Sayles one day and become instantly captivated. To be captivated doesn’t equate to romantic feelings— though, of course, that’s a valid and viable option. You might simply find their face intriguing or slightly off-putting. Their gait might be so funny you can’t help but giggle. Maybe their song lyric tattoo is so regrettable it’s fascinating. You might spy them speeding away on a bike and feel a surge of jealousy over the way their hair ripples in the wind. Whatever the hook is, it’s got you—it’s got you good. And you’re ready to dive headfirst into a 100 percent irrational and unjustifiable parasocial relationship. Lucky for you, I’m here to make sure that relationship goes swimmingly.

I know it’s daunting. There are so many factors to consider: how to know where and when to see your campus character, how to interpret the fact that they walked on the same side of the street as you today, how to make sure that your unfounded interest is correctly understood as benign…Oh, you poor thing. Never fear. There is a way to maximize the potential of your fixation on your campus character, I promise. And it’s easy as pie!

The first step to relationship cultivation might be a bit difficult to orchestrate, but if it occurs naturally, you’re golden: your chosen person should, ideally, be removed from your social circle by three degrees of separation. The friend of a friend is too close. It’s too easy to discover enough about your character to disprove the full-length life story you’ve fabricated, or too hard to bring your friends in on the obsession without seriously raising some eyebrows.

Let’s be honest, if one of your friends—let’s call them X—told you that they texted their group chat every time they saw your other friend, Y, in all caps— RED ALERT. Y SPOTTED IN THE SHARPE REFECTORY —you might think their behavior was a bit strange. And you might be tempted to tell Y the juicy, juicy gossip that X is obsessed with them. Now imagine being X. Judged and exposed. Awkies.

But the friend of a friend of a friend is just distant enough that you can discuss your obsession in the open and, with only minimal risk of breaching the parasocial divide, find out just the key details about your character. Think class year, one or two significant interests, maybe an anecdote. You’ll probably get your hands on enough information to bolster the character portrait you’ve constructed with proof that they’re a real person—that you’re not living in an entirely fictional world. The three degrees ensure that being introduced to them is unlikely, and that you won’t learn enough about them to be forced to come to terms with the fact that they are not, in fact, the absolute embodiment of all of the attributes you’ve meticulously assigned them in the parallel universe of your vibrant imagination. Got it? Good.

Step two. Don’t learn their schedule, but do learn their haunts. If you learn their schedule, I’m sorry to break it to you, but you’ve taken it too far. But you’re totally not in the wrong if you begin to frequent the Underground and, lo and behold, they’re there too, three times within the span of a week. It’s not your fault that you both have a hankering for coffee. If anything, it makes cosmic sense that you keep ending up in the same place at the same time, and perfectly within eyesight.

Now—and this is important—even though you’ve learned where they’re likely to seek their caffeine fix, you can’t start going there for the

purpose of a campus character sighting. Once again: eerie. Stalker-ish but not in a cute way. You need to let the run-ins happen organically. Go when your own cappuccino craving hits, or when you feel compelled to enjoy some moodier lighting with your studying, or if your friend suggests you meet them there for a quick break between classes. If your character happens to be there, excellent! If not, it’s ok. It just wasn’t meant to be today. You’ll catch them next time. When you do happen to run into them, it feels serendipitous. You had an idea they’d be there, but you couldn’t have been sure. It’s as though campus itself is bringing you two together. All the more fodder for your buzzing imagination. Step two complete.

Step three. You need something to call them. It can’t be their real name—that takes all the fun out of crafting a detailed, multifaceted, emotionally complex persona for a student who is oblivious to your existence I know you don’t want to acknowledge this fact when only three days ago, you made two full seconds of eye contact as you crossed paths on the Quiet Green, so they basically told you they loved you. But—don’t hate me—a reality check is important every once in a while. Anyway, no real names. A truly successful parasocial relationship rests in the careful balance between reality and delusion, and real names, unfortunately, are a glaring sign

of reality. Instead, a simple solution awaits: give your character a code name.

By calling them by a code name, you increase the likelihood that you maintain anonymity on the off chance that you have an unanticipated mutual friend. By that same token, you protect them from knowing that they’re the subject of totally undue fascination—a favor to the both of you. But most importantly, you can have fun with it. The code name can be anything; treat it like a riddle if you want to. You can let your friends in on the secret and talk about your campus character sightings together, totally out in the open, without fear of being inadvertently exposed by an eavesdropping passerby.

I’ll lend you a bit of my firsthand experience with code name creation to give you a sense of the possibilities. One of my campus characters grew out his hair and beard for a spell, and all I could think when I saw him striding oh-soentertainingly into the Blue Room was that the locks and scruff had a sort of Biblical quality to them. The code name came to me in a strike of inspiration: Hot Jesus. Since that day, whenever I’ve seen him striding around campus, I’ve been able to poke my friends and say, “Look! Hot Jesus!” They say, “Oh my god, Hot Jesus!” and we discuss how his outfit particularly elevates his deific vibes today. Now imagine how much fun you can have with your campus character if you,

too, grant them a code name. Mystery. Secrecy. Intrigue.

Now, steel yourself. There’s one fourth and final rule, and while it may be the most tempting one to break, it’s by far the most important one to abide by. As strong the allure, as fantastic the fascination, you must not speak to your campus character. Excuse me for a moment while I succumb to my English student tendencies and invoke Flaubert, but I do think he says it best: “Never touch your idols: the gilding will stick to your fingers.” In other words, if you break the parasocial contract and establish real, irreversible verbal contact, you’ll shatter the mystery. You’ll unravel your fiction of Dickensian proportion. You’ll find out that they’re not, in fact, everything you’ve made them out to be, down to the minutest detail, that they’re not unconditionally and irrevocably in love with you, if that’s the story you’ve been telling yourself. In layman’s terms, my dear: you’ll ruin the bit. And for goodness’s sake, after all this hard work, don’t ruin the bit. You and your parasocial relationship deserve better than that.

With that, my apprentice, my young sage, I think you’re ready. Go relish the glorious weeks of spring. Put on your best, most eye-catching sundress or T-shirt. Find your campus character and live out the parasocial relationship of your dreams.

“And what are secrets if not aloneness? A vow you make to yourself. An invisible shield. To identify the parts of yourself you hope no one sees. To make it so. To hide something, you must first hide the fact that something has been hidden. Bury the object and burn the map.”

— Emily Tom, “Secrets”

post- mini crossword

by Ishan Khurana

“The passing of time is easy to miss when you don’t pay attention. It sweeps by, and sometimes we want it to. We don’t realize how fast it’s going until it’s behind us. Then, when a timestamp reveals itself, it’s a jarring feeling.”

— Marin Warshay, “The Routine of Nostalgia”

4.15.22