1. the hipster poser who will spend the next ~1600 words creaming his pants over the idea of words
My Latin teacher in high school made me love the dictionary, which is a weird-ass book to claim to love.
She loved to connect English words to their Latin roots, and she spent huge portions of class time tracing the words on our weekly vocabulary lists to their English counterparts. She kept an enormous dictionary in the corner of her room with thousands of thin pages delineating the precise linguistic genealogy of each word. It was one of those dictionaries that was so big that it had its own dedicated book stand.
Not gonna lie, it was a massive pain in the ass to use,
i learned
unwieldy and heavy and with text so teeny and crammed that you had to squint to make anything out. It takes a masochist to love a book like that—which I, in fact, am. To me, dictionaries aren't just utilitarian collections of “meanings” of words. Dictionaries contain family trees and huge sprawling stories hidden between the definitions. Dictionaries were maximalist literature before Thomas Pynchon made it cool.
My Latin teacher’s favorite word was colere Colere means to cultivate, both literally and figuratively. It can refer to farmers tilling the land—in fact, the Latin word for farmer, agricola, comes from a compound of ager (field) and colere (to cultivate). But colere also indicates the figurative sense of cultivating, to honor or to worship. In the Aeneid, when Virgil describes how the goddess Juno loved the city of Carthage more than all the rest of the world, Virgil uses
Dear Readers,
My roommates and I are part of the Brown Market Share, so each week we get a batch of farm-fresh vegeta bles that we might not generally purchase. One side effect of this arrangement is a brewing addiction to shallots: a small, sweet cousin of the onion that has been driving me crazy. Would I splurge on such a seemingly frivolous thing on my own? Maybe not. But now that I’ve been introduced to their specific flavor… a regular onion simply cannot compare!
In this week’s issue, our writers have cooked up a gour met selection of articles for you. Our Feature writer explores how language relates to self-definition, thinking about the beauty of words. In Narrative, one article considers the Chi nese American experience through the symbol of Bruce Lee while the other reflects on changing weather and queerness.
the word colere. To cultivate is to cherish, to love, to worship.
We see this reflected in the perfect passive participle of colere, which is cultus. This form of the word is where we get English words like “cult.” It’s a word that’s taken on a negative connotation recently, but in its most essential form just denotes a system of religious belief, usually centered around a religious figure or object of worship.
We also get the form cultura from colere. It’s where we get the English word “culture” from, along with all its compounds. If the root of “culture” is worship, that means that all culture is fundamentally a form of worship. Agriculture, horticulture, apiculture—these denote the cultivation of fields, gardens, and bees respectively. Farmers, gardeners, and beekeepers are all cultists (hey look, another derivative of colere!) in their own right. Anyone who participates in anything which might
One of our A&C writers thinks about the final girl phenome non in horror movies while the other considers the toxicity of self help culture. Finally, our Lifestyle writer gives advice about brightening these increasingly dark days by decorat ing with lamps.
So enjoy the feast! And I’ll return to my newfound plethora of vegetables, learning week by week how to cook butternut and acorn squashes, finally making them taste almost as good as my mother makes them. Aspiring all the while to make a meal that compares to this issue. Can you feel this metaphor escaping me? Alright—I’ll abandon it.
Currently googling what to cook with rutabagas,
broadly be categorized as “culture” is also a cultist. Just look at the Latin. Just look at a dictionary.
In short, I love dictionaries, and I think you should too.
Words are dirty old coins, crusted over with patina. Every now and then, it’s good to pick a word off the page, feel its weight on your tongue, and wonder. Words are ragged demigods, ancient things crawling forward at a glacially slow but steady pace. Think about words. Read dictionaries. Read multiple dictionaries because a word is not so simple a thing that it can be contained in just one dictionary entry. Read about the histories of words: etymologies and phonological changes and the steady drifting of language through time.
Some words are born as a fusion of earlier existing words. Chiaroscuro is a word which indicates the arrangement of light and shadow in visual art. It comes from Latin clarus (clear, bright) and obscurus (darkened, obscured). And so chiaroscuro is quite literally a marriage of what is bright and what is darkened. Some words represent the marriage of multiple language families. Workaholic is a word most of us are familiar with, made by jamming together “work” (from Old English werc, “work”) and the suffix -aholic, derived from “alcoholic” (from Arabic كُحْل al-kuhul, powdered antimony).
Languages have friends and ancestries and descendants. They marry, they change, they have families. It’s good to think of words as people. ***
DANIEL HU (adjective)2. (of a person) unapologetically Chinese-American but at the same time not able to speak a lick of Mandarin
We are who we say we are. We become what they tell us we are.
It should be said that this isn’t a highly rigorous treatise on etymologies or anything. I’m not a linguist. I’m more concerned with how words feel. I’m trying to disabuse people of the notion that words are just words. Words are framing devices that we use to describe the world, but they don’t have to map precisely to reality. Poetry is a particularly good way to see this. Crack open some of Sylvia Plath’s work and you’ll see what I mean. In the "real" world, blood is red. Concrete is hard. Bones are broken. In Plath's world, the body is Roman Heaven is hygienic. Distance is untouchable. Anne Carson (also a poet) said it best in Autobiography of Red (also not a rigorous treatise on etymologies):
“The word adjective (epitheton in Greek) is itself an adjective meaning ‘placed on top,’ ‘added,’ ‘appended,’ ‘imported,’ ‘foreign.’ Adjectives seem fairly innocent additions but look again. These small imported mechanisms are in charge of attaching everything in the world to its place in particularity. They are the latches of being.”
Thanks, Anne!
counterpart. And Aphrodite is only an epithet away from her aspect as a war goddess, Aphrodite Areia. “Latches of being” indeed. Epithets—adjectives—are of cosmic importance. They represent the theological properties of the divine, binding the universe to its functions. They tie the gods to their roles. Nouns name the world, but adjectives color it.
(Note: adjective might have its roots in Greek, but the English word adjective comes from Latin. It’s a compound of ad (towards) and jacere (to throw). It’s a loan translation from the Greek word. I only mention this because jacere is where we get the root of the English word ejaculate from and I find this endlessly hilarious.)
All this navel-gazing about words isn’t anything new, by the way. Way back around the second century CE, Plutarch was writing The Life of Romulus, in which he talks at length about how the name and the functions of the Roman festival of Lupercalia were derived. He works his way through the history behind its name, linking it to the older name of the festival, Febrata. Plutarch further attributes some of the Lupercalia festivities to the Greek festival Lycea, the feast of the wolves, which somehow connected to the she-wolf who nursed the infant Romulus, founder of Rome.
The actual activities of the festival are nuts. According to Plutarch, it involves the sacrifice of goats. Two boys of noble families are selected and their foreheads are touched with a bloody knife and wiped with a milk-soaked wool, which Plutarch remarks may be a remembrance of Romulus’ nourishment by the she-wolf. The boys then run naked through the streets whipping women of childbearing age, who deliberately run into their path, believing the whipping to bring fertility.
But, critically, it isn’t enough for Plutarch just to talk about the festival and what went down during the Lupercalia. Plutarch’s exegesis of where the festivities came from and how the name was derived occupies just as prominent a spot in the text as the celebration itself.
Identity, therefore, is defined not just by what we do, but how we describe it.
DANIEL HUSynonyms: 旦一, Danyi
旦一 (noun)
1.
***
like those silly little epithets they used to put after Zeus’s name, the little pieces of your divinity, your own “latches of being”
2. a. the original Chinese name, later converted clumsily into English as “Daniel”
b. Daniel who, according to biblical tradition, spends a night sentenced to death in a den of lions; he is saved by divine grace, an angel answering his prayers and shutting the jaws of the lions; occasionally you, the modern Daniel, feel as this biblical Daniel must have, closed in the lion’s den, hemmed in on all sides by those who want only to consume you; only faith can save you now; but you are not the old Daniel, and you have never particularly felt any faith, never felt close to God the way others have; you have never been good at praying
c. but this is the true power of words; nominative determinism is dead; you might sculpt yourself however you choose; Daniel might be like the old Daniel, might choose to let the history seep into his bones, but he might also choose to cast it all away; the moment your name leaves the mouth of the one who named you, the moment your epithets are applied, they are yours
d. in Mandarin, the first character means “daybreak”; it is a new day for the words of your name
1. the middle ground; words are sacred, but there is nothing sacred about language; change it as you need; interpret and reinterpret and perpetuate the eternal process of exegesis; this too is history.
a. the natural conclusion of this essay
b. the sanctity of words and their enormous histories, drawn upon for the purposes of affirming identity
c. the feeling you get when you think about your own name and realize that it, too, is a word or a collection of words, that it too has a history; the wonder that crackles in your brain when you realize that the little collections of syllables that you define yourself by are
Epithets (derived from adjective) matter. They matter a lot. An epithet is what separates Aphrodite Pandemos, a goddess of earthly love, from Aphrodite Ourania, her celestial 1. The original sin
Of my eye
That one that fell on Newton’s head
A day (re: doctors)
“I mean, I can imagine… It was called the worst looking Subaru for a reason.”
“At least I didn’t do coke this weekend… I did coke LAST week”
“Aw we’ve never hard launched darkness before”
A friend once told me that he thinks Californians grow up thinking life is easy because they don’t have to deal with bad weather. He’s not entirely wrong: At home, the seasons melt into each other almost unnoticed—the sun shifts its shade, the wind picks up a chill, suddenly it’s dark at 4 p.m. San Francisco’s hills get their few weeks of winter sun. Crowds of children biking to school thin out a little, the city bus starts to run late from the traffic. Little indications of time slipping away.
***
The first time I fell for a girl, it was summer and I was spending a week in Ohio for a writing workshop. The asphalt burned in the sun, and everything felt a little fake and liminal. The air smelled heavy with cut grass and humidity, and at night the cicadas would fill the wind with their shrieks. Once, walking back from a late night swim, we got lost and almost stepped on a frog, squealed and laughed. I barely said anything all week, and she made fun of me for it, just a little. That was the year I first learned what frozen custard was, and first fell in love with someone else’s poems. On my way home, I got stuck overnight in the Atlanta airport, and spent the entire night crying, my heart tight with a sense of loss. ***
I think it offends our state, how much people talk about its lovely weather. California has tried to shake its starry-eyed admirers off its back for so long, and still we refuse to leave, writing songs about how beautiful it is, a place where dreams are made. To make us pay attention, California breaks its calm open with violence. ***
I was 13 or 14 when my mother first started imagining my glittery future: me, with a husband and kids; my parents, just next door, coming over unannounced, spoiling my children. I snapped at her, got up from the dinner table. Locked myself in the bathroom and cried, not really sure why I was so upset. I couldn’t imagine a future where someone would love me enough to marry me, maybe. I didn’t know why, but I felt sure I’d grow up a disappointment. From then on, each time my mother brought up grandchildren, I pivoted the conversation away and tried not to cry. ***
It’s difficult to describe the experience of growing up knowing that, at any moment, everything you call home might quite literally fall through the ground. I learned about earthquakes before I learned about evaporation and condensation, about the types of clouds. If you feel shaking, children, duck and cover. Sit under your desks. Get away from trees. Don’t hang shelves on top of your bed. Hope for the best. The next big one is coming.
Actually, I think I’m lying to myself. The first time I fell for a girl I was in California, at camp—a summer of sweaty hiking and feeling weak and being made fun of for the way I said sorry too much. One night, we fell asleep under the stars, and she told me stories about the constellations, how their names came to be. When we went home, we exchanged email addresses, our only form of communication. I no longer remember what she looked like, but I do remember her name. ***
In third grade, my class took a field trip to the San Andreas Fault, the tectonic boundary that is going to kill us all one day. We hiked under the hot sun through the dry, yellowing grass, the last rainfall of the winter several months behind us. It had been 20 years since Loma Prieta, just over 100 since the Great Quake of 1906 which burned San Francisco to the ground. Inevitably, the next one was coming. There was nothing anyone could do, it was just a question of when.
by Liza Kolbasov Illustrated by Lucid Clairvoyant IG: @l.u.cid
In 2013, two years before Obergefell, gay marriage was legalized in California. I was 11, and I didn’t know what that meant. I remember walking through my town with my mother and seeing a group with rainbow flags gathered in a circle, cheering. I didn’t know why, I didn’t know how to ask. For some reason, though, it stuck with me over the (unfortunately few) years since then. That moment of celebration. I can imagine it now.
***
The fires started sometime around my sophomore year of high school. Biking home from school, my lungs filled with ash, my throat turned to sandpaper. The neighboring high schools canceled class, but we kept showing up. At sunset, the sky burned a beautiful, apocalyptic red, and we took photos to remember the blushing clouds.
***
For the longest time, I couldn’t say the words “I’m queer” out loud. Even now, they stick in my mouth like curse words. In high school, when people asked me if there were any guys I liked, I held my tongue, until, a while later, they’d add “or girls…” Like it was some sort of revelation. I didn’t answer that either. Maybe all I was was quiet and shy. Even when I first got to college, I still felt, for a long time, not queer enough. The queer community on campus felt so immediately cohesive, so sure of themselves. So comfortable talking about it. I felt like just a kid, with no experience, no knowledge, no grand coming out story. I was confused, lost. Not getting that, for better or worse, that’s just how it works.
Now, we refer to October as fire season. When I call my parents, I ask them if the fires have started yet, and it’s just small talk. It hasn’t rained in four months. Has the ash been falling? Yesterday, the air smelled of gasoline and burnt rubber. In October of 2020, the sky turned sulfur-yellow from the smoke, and it felt correct. Just another day in the end of the world as we know it.
***
This summer, I saw the sun rise over the Atlantic Ocean, turning the entire world rosy. I looked out at the water and let myself feel, for the first time in a while, truly myself and truly free. The round red sun, the half-clouded sky, the calls of morning birds, the crashing of waves, the sand pulling on my legs. Quietly, carefully, I took steps into the water and felt my heart crack open. These days, I’m slowly giving up on doing things the “right” way. At every corner, I’m knocking into
feelings I’ve never let myself notice. It’s scary to think that my life and relationships might not be a catastrophe. It means having to figure out how to exist.
***
On the East coast, I started noticing the day-to-day weather for the first time. People who’ve lived here their whole lives will laugh at me when I get excited over the littlest things. The smell of the rain on the sidewalk. The way flakes of white fall from the sky and leave drops behind on my cheeks instead of staining my lungs gray. The way, each time I step outside, the first thing I notice is nature running circles around me, making itself known. Allowing me to know it. Or maybe it’s me, allowing myself to believe that, despite the months of frigid 3 p.m. darkness, the light will eventually come back to play on my pillow, tinted red by the leaves.
***
A few weeks ago, I stumbled upon a thick book of poetry entitled Queer Nature in a book shop. I started reading it by candlelight, sitting on the roof, looking up at the stars, holding a girl’s hand. I couldn’t put it down until it started to rain, the pages at risk of crinkling. It felt like a good omen, or a book of symbols. What it means to be queer, and to exist in the world. I turn their words over on my tongue, let them fall into my mind.
***
And then, of course, there’s spring. In California, it’s undoubtedly my least favorite season. My allergies start acting up, and the morning’s prickly cold turns to suffocating heat by mid-afternoon. The end of rain, the start of yellow grass and reminders to keep your showers short. I’dve never understood the exhilarating feeling of seeing the first snowdrops pop out of the frozen earth and the light stay out for a little longer. There’s nothing like watching the world wake up, reminding me of life. I get stopped in my tracks by daffodils and unfurling green leaves, and I want to say thank you. I think I get it now.
***
It’s November. The leaves have changed their colors and are drifting from the trees. Back home, fire season has probably ended—or at least I haven’t heard about it in a while. It rained for the first time a few weeks ago, and they had an earthquake, but it wasn’t a big one. On the cusp of fall and winter, I am falling in love, maybe for the first time.
on queerness, weather, and whatever else the wind brings with it
Scripture teaches us this: All Creation is made in the image of Bruce Lee.
The basic structure of Bruce Lee is the quadripartite structure: two arms and two legs, four instruments with which He might inflict violence.
This we derive from Fist of Fury , in which Bruce Lee found a sign which said this: “NO DOGS AND CHINESE ALLOWED.” Bruce Lee beheld this and His fury grew to immeasurable heights and He performed a flying jump kick and obliterated the fuck out of the sign and the tiny white fragments of this sign rained across the screen so that all might know that the contents of this sign run contrary to His designs. And Bruce Lee saw this destruction wrought by His own hand and said it was good. Therefore Bruce Lee had, with his four instruments of divine justice, made the world safe for the CHINESE.
We also derive this universal quadripartite structure from language. In Mandarin, the number four, 四 , is unlucky because it sounds like 死 , death. Bruce Lee uses His four celestial limbs to inflict death. This is not a coincidence. The tongues of us CHINESE have warped to accommodate these cosmic instruments of violence.
We are made in the likeness of Bruce Lee. We too inherit the quadripartite structure of His four limbs. We too inherit His peculiar fierce temperament. During snack breaks at Chinese school, all of us run to the bathroom together and throw kicks and punches at each other, emulating Bruce Lee, because this is the only way that we can ever exist outside of China. The only way that
we might ever be seen is through chop-socky. We were born furious. We must be livid and indignant at every turn because the instant we stop with our incandescent anger we sink back into the folds of the model minority myth: docile, pliant. By existing in the same space as Bruce Lee, we might kindle a splinter of His divinity.
The universe too follows His quadripartite structure. There are four canonical gospels in the Bible, four Zoas in Blake’s prophetic poetry, four suits in the Tarot, four bodily humors, four classical elements, four quarters of the sky. In the 1941 State of the Union address, Franklin D. Roosevelt expounds upon the Four Freedoms that every human being is entitled to. Four is the cosmic number. Every other number decomposes to four.
We land blows on each others’ bodies because if we do not feel the gravity of Bruce Lee’s teachings pounded into our bones we might drift into the sky, weightless, or evaporate entirely. Long after we have forgotten the words we learned in Chinese school, we still remember the weight of kung fu. We still remember what it means to be CHINESE outside of China. We still count by fours.
Fist of Fury is one hour and forty-eight minutes long. Even Bruce Lee, the omnipotent, requires time in order to function, requires time to annihilate the sign and to destroy the enemy martial artists. Time, for Bruce Lee, is defined by the set runtime of the movie, perfect and crystalline and the same every time the film plays. Time, for us mortal CHINESE, is defined by years, divided into uneven intervals by festivals and holidays. Time, for us, is not perfect and crystalline the same way it is for Bruce Lee. Every year, Chinese New Year arrives at a different time on the Gregorian calendar.
We don’t know precisely why we are celebrating when we celebrate; our parents have described the reasons to us at least once, maybe a couple times, but what we mostly recognize is that these are the occasions where special treats come out. The stories associated with these foods have faded into the same realm in
which we deposit fairy tales. Chang’e’s ascension to the moon happens in a faraway place in a faraway time. All we know is that we eat mooncakes.
But food is important. The parents of a boy from Chinese school own a somewhat grimy franchise restaurant called China Buffet and so almost weekly we make the pilgrimage from Chinese school to China Buffet. From China to China.
The Chinese school becomes our omphalos, geography taking shape around school. We have become crude cartographers, and we could navigate there in our dreams if we needed to. Each landmark and highway and turn and pothole ingrains itself into our brains via sheer weekly repetition. Space defines itself as a function of time.
Chinese school and the trips to China Buffet occur on Sundays. We do our homework on Friday nights. We study for the weekly vocabulary tests on Saturday mornings. Our weeks become a function of Chinese school. We begin to resent it for this reason. The CHINESE live by a different clock and a different calendar and they populate that calendar with differences.
Scripture asks of us this: we call ourselves CHINESE. But we appear too American for that. Resolve the paradox.
We might begin with China Buffet, the menu of which is a half-hearted calque of what is truly CHINESE. There are french fries and onion rings mixed in with General Tso’s chicken, itself a Chinese-American invention. We begin to think of ourselves the same way. Feeble Chinese-American inventions.
Bruce Lee no longer represents an omnipotent overseer of a cosmic order, the blueprint upon which Creation is based. We see Him for what He is. He is the star of poorly-localized masculine power fantasies. We begin to feel embarrassed of Him. We stop throwing punches and kicks at each other in Chinese school. Some of us stop going to Chinese school entirely. Our universe
shatters. The wrath that we were born with slowly fades into a desire to smooth away our differences. To iron out our CHINESEness.
It is far too late for that. What are we, truly? We are too American to be CHINESE and too CHINESE to be American. This world is no longer configured according to the divine blueprint of Bruce Lee. We do not fit. We have attempted to fit, and in doing so have shaved off so many parts of ourselves that we have become hairless and naked.
We lack some cultural quality of belonging and we see ourselves as less human for it.
We are nothing.
We have grown apart. Chinese school is over now.
One of us never graduates from high school and is still in that old town where we never quite belong. One of us tests into a fancy private school and is never heard from again. We make fun of him but privately we burn with envy, wishing we too were smart enough to disappear. One of us gets into a fight in the bathroom of the high school and subsequently moves to another town. We are less envious of this disappearance. Quietly, we wonder if we are all headed towards the same fate.
One of us goes to China to visit family and reports that a bus driver called him a 外国人 , a foreigner. The Chinese school still stands. It has recently been renovated and the new building facade is boxy and painted a glossy white. The China Buffet still stands, too.
None of us communicate with our parents in Chinese. Our mother language has slipped from our tongues and we speak in English, ashamed. We have learned nothing in Chinese school other than that to be CHINESE the way that we are CHINESE is an embarrassment. In high school, a teacher posts a picture of a fortune cookie on Facebook with the caption, “Hmm… Engrish” because the spelling and grammar on the fortune is off. A comment on this post says “ROR (raughing out roud).”
We speak of this in hushed and furious whispers. If we were Bruce Lee, we would reach right through the screen and smash this post into a million pieces, the same way that Bruce Lee did all those years ago to that sign. But we are not Bruce Lee. We are not strong enough. We stopped practicing our kung fu years ago. We have let our rage drain away.
We long to exist again. Each of us has a fierce desire to be seen. Secretly, we pray for Bruce Lee to return and deliver us from suffering. But no one will admit to still worshiping Bruce Lee. Bruce Lee has acquired a pagan quality, representing an ancient and outmoded form of divinity. But on quiet summer nights we dream that all of us are Bruce Lee, that we too are powerful enough to kill Chuck Norris like he does in The Way of the Dragon, that we too can carve a place for ourselves with strength alone.
We dream of the Chinese school bathrooms where we used to practice punches and kicks. We dream of our secret dojo where we cultivated His divine art. We dream of kung fu.
Maybe Laurie should die.
I can’t help thinking this as I watch the final battle in David Gordon Green’s Halloween Ends—the latest (and perhaps final) installment in the slasher franchise that began some forty years ago. Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) faces Michael Myers (James Jude Courtney) yet again, for what us viewers have been told will be the last time. And so, knowing that it will end, we are left to wonder how it will end. Who will live and who will die?
For the audience, there’s a sense of inevitability that one side will triumph over the other; we’re a society plagued with binaries, after all. And if there’s any binary that the Halloween films enjoy, it’s good versus evil. However, while watching this scene, I can’t help but wonder if they’re really going to do it. If not just Michael will die—but Laurie, too.
Knitting needle in hand, Laurie takes up arms against her lifelong tormentor—an homage to how her character originally “killed” Michael in the first Halloween. But it’s a different struggle this time. Michael quickly turns the needle back onto her, and the two grapple for dominance. Mortality, after thirteen movies in the franchise, feels as though it has finally reached its breaking point—the line between Laurie’s life and death has grown very thin, and the same could be said for Michael. If both were to die here, it would feel as though the story has finally come full circle.
But of course, Laurie lives.
Strangely enough, this ending feels anticlimactic, underwhelming, and unsurprising—even when they throw Michael’s dead body into a metal shredder. Perhaps there’s something sadistic about my desire to see things go a different way.
At the same time, I recognize that there’s something equally inevitable about Laurie’s survival. Something necessary. On the one hand, it comes off as a shameless cash-grab that isn’t challenging to sniff out. Laurie has to live so that there’s still room to continue the story, and therefore make more money. But on the other hand, it also leads me to ponder Laurie’s status as the final girl, the last character who always seems to be left alive to face the killer. Does this, in some ways, put her on par with Michael—who, time and time again, has made his return? In a broader sense, is it even possible to tell the story of a slasher film without the existence of a final girl?
Sure, we have Michael Myers, Freddy Kreuger, or Ghostface, among others. All undoubtedly the faces of
their respective films, their names are known by slasher and non-slasher fans alike. But each of their stories would not have reached such success without a good final girl alongside them. It’s become a tale as old as time, a mainstay trope in the horror mythos. The secret of a good slasher flick lies in the formula for a final girl.
To better understand this formula, let’s take a look at two other pioneers of the final girl: Nancy Thompson and Sidney Prescott.
Written under—and perhaps constrained by—the dictates of Reagan-era conservatism, the character Nancy (Heather Langenkamp) in Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street is wholesome and pure. That’s step one for being a final girl: She must be virtuous. After all, it’s already common knowledge that if you have sex in a horror movie, your chances of dying increase tenfold. The final girl is thus situated against the vices of her peers, so that by contrast she can be seen on a pedestal. If the final girl wants to survive, then she must be pure.
But while she may be the “nice” girl of the group, the final girl is never nice to a fault. That’s what I think Nancy demonstrates best. She may be inexperienced and innocent, but she’s tough. It’s clear that in Wes Craven’s world you can’t rely on any adult, but this is amplified for Nancy. Her mother is often drunk, her father is distant, rarely seen. She lives through the deaths of both her best friend and boyfriend. There’s no one left to save the day, except for herself.
As such, Nancy is resourceful. Throughout the film, she takes proactive measures against Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund). After first noticing his pattern of appearing in her dreams and physically harming her, she decides to use caffeine in order to stay awake. When she’s taken to a sleep disorder clinic, Nancy is able to grab Freddy’s hat and drag it into the real world to serve as physical evidence. And during the final battle of the film, Nancy discovers that Freddy is fueled by the fear of his victims and thus unlocks his “weakness.” Overall, she’s made the chase much more complicated for her pursuer—and it makes her even more worthy of a catch. Nancy showcases several different ingredients for creating the final girl: self-reliance, intelligence, and most importantly, an ability to get underneath the killer’s skin.
Twelve years down the line, in another film directed by Wes Craven, Scream’s Sidney (Neve Campbell) demonstrates much of the same criteria for the final girl. Much like Nancy, she is tough and self-reliant. But
Sidney has a different slate of trauma: Her mother was sexually assaulted and murdered a year prior to the movie’s events, and rumors of her mother’s promiscuity still swirl around town. Sidney must cope with all this while dealing with the normal pressures of high school— homework, friends, her boyfriend. And because the murders committed by Ghostface take place near the anniversary of this tragedy, her struggles are brought even further to the forefront. In this light, Sidney characterizes the final girl as a woman who’s often defined by her pain.
But despite the pain and trauma her character goes through, the final girl persists as a model of virtue. And so Sidney, too, is shaped around the vices of her peers, so that in comparison she may appear smarter and more principled. Though she does break a longstanding rule by having sex with her boyfriend, Billy Loomis (Skeet Ulrich), Sidney still effectively remains the most “wholesome” of her friend group, and much of her dialogue is laced with quick wit that suggests she’s a cut smarter than the rest.
What is perhaps most notable about Sidney’s status as final girl is her own connection to the killer—and why she’s particularly successful in getting under his skin. At the end of the film, it’s revealed that one of the two people behind Ghostface is her boyfriend Billy, hellbent on revenge for the secret affair between his father and Sidney’s mother. In this instance, both the “final girl” and the villain are victims of shared circumstances: the sins of their parents. This ties them together in a complementary, yin-and-yang fashion, invigorating the killer’s chase with a whole new sense of passion. After all, they did have sex with each other. It’s personal
So there you have it: two successful final girls, Nancy and Sidney, later renditions of Laurie’s model. To sum up the formula: virtue, wit, self-reliance, a connection to the killer, and, altogether, an ironclad will to live. But to speak of it more broadly, the essence of the final girl is an elevated damsel in distress. She’s tied to the train tracks, but she’s not waiting to be saved. Instead, she unties herself and kills the man who put her there in the first place.
I can’t help but wonder what it is about the final girl that resonates so well with audience members, sustaining the slasher universe throughout the decades. Perhaps it’s the stories of repeated female trauma that keep us allured. They echo the anxieties, pains, and horrors that already exist in our day-to-day lives, woven into the fabric of our patriarchy. A woman walking home alone at night feels like the final girl. Turning on the news feels like listening to the stories of a million final girls. The undercurrent of any good slasher movie is its connection to our reality, and everyone wants to root for the final girl against her male oppressor. She’s relatable, she’s human—but she’s also inoffensive, pretty, chaste, thin, white, and she fits very, very neatly into this little box we have constructed for her. Movie after movie, we see her struggle. We remain comfortably in our seats as we witness her trauma.
It’s a simple formula, and it works. We can’t peel our eyes off the screen. Maybe just like how I wished for Laurie’s unhappy ending in Halloween Ends, there’s something sadistic about our attraction to the final girl.
Glass skin.
Upon reading this term for the first time, I was a little puzzled: is it referring to a condition that makes skin transparent? Would it shatter into tiny pieces?
In reality, “glass skin” refers to skin that is bright, poreless, and completely smooth—a trend that emerged from Korea and made its way to the West in recent years. According to the endless TikTok videos that I’ve watched, one achieves “glass skin” when they appear to glow from within; in the process of laying products on top of other products, skin somehow achieves a divine, transcendent quality.
They become an ethereal, luminescent goddess.
And you can be one, too!
Introducing the all-inclusive package “Acne Girl’s Guide to Skincare!” Have you ever felt lost in the complicated and beginner-unfriendly process of developing a lasting skincare routine? Are you terrified of pimples? Of aging faster than your classmates? Of the ten year reunion when you will look significantly more shriveled than everyone else and spiral into a pit of existential dread, then wonder when your youth escaped you? Allow me to take you on my own journey and show you just how attainable flawlessness can be…
The first and most important component of selfimprovement is self-reflection. So get up close and personal with a mirror. No, closer. Hm, yeah. It’s quite evident that you don’t wash your face enough. We can make a checklist of issues to tackle, but let’s start with acne because it’s the most obvious.
In middle school, you are introduced to your new best friend, who will stay with you for seven years: a 10% benzoyl peroxide acne cleanser. It is a toxic relationship, though; you cling on to her every drop, using her as a means of salvation. After splashing your face with scalding hot water (to open up the pores, of course), you squeeze out a dollop of cleanser and aggressively rub it into your face. Really, really work it in. Your hands move desperately across your face, concentrating especially on your oily T-zone. Somehow, you’ve begun to believe that if you attack your face with rough chemicals as quickly and vigorously as possible, your pimples will react with the same urgency and disappear.
Unbeknownst to you, however, your friend is working against you. The high chemical concentration vacuums away the oil in your pores and strips your moisture barrier. Your face is a completely barren, uninhabitable desert.
You smear your fingers onto the bumpy, irritated surface and clench your teeth, and you wonder why you can’t scrape it all off.
You washed your face. Instagram says that you don’t do it enough; you promise that you do. You’re not dirty. Chemicals have been sucking the life out of your skin, and you wonder why acne girls must slowly give themselves away—always removing, but never gaining parts of their skin.
Your face is taut from a lack of moisture and red from inflammation. How nice it would be to peel off this layer of skin. Start over, maybe?
Exfoliators remove the outer layers of dead skin, unveiling the soft, smooth skin underneath. So, what is dead to you?
Apply a chemical exfoliant once a week and uncover the ruins. Rid yourself of the parts, ideas, and mentalities that no longer suit you; learn that skin is not a medium through which you can enact aggression and expect a beautiful thing to rise from the ashes. Inevitably, you shed more of yourself, one layer at a time, and it’s a slow process—you are learning to be gentle to yourself.
Tentatively, you glance at the mirror.
Everything is red, raw, raging. The pursuit of selfperfection, rooted in hatred.
You haven’t been very kind to yourself, have you?
Healing, for you at least, begins with a small bottle of CVS niacinamide.
While extremely overpriced, it caught your eye with its promise to fade away your dark spots. You’ve spent a large part of your childhood picking away at your face, so it is now littered with small concaves and pockets of red pigment—craters and lava pools.
The serum is cool as you squeeze a pump onto your fingers. You glance at your reflection in your college desk mirror and glide the product across your cheek. Gently, you work it into your skin, which eagerly absorbs it. Medically, niacinamide functions to soothe acne-induced inflammation, improve discoloration, and restore one’s skin barrier, but as you continue to move your fingers over hills and valleys, fine lines and hyperpigmentation, there occurs another kind of restoration.
For the first time, you are forced to sit down and encounter yourself. Feel your face; in touching
it nonjudgmentally, skincare, despite its typical association with perfection, becomes an ironic tool for the acceptance of flaws.
You move your face around in the light, and your cheeks emit a subtle, glassy shine. You laugh.
I still do not have glass skin. Or milky skin. Or any gimmicky term for perfect skin that the Internet has invented. In fact, it is likely that I never will. For almost a decade, acne has ravaged all parts of my face, from forehead to chin, leaving irreparable reminders of its presence. There is a particularly large scar near my upper lip. However, after a year of exploring the products that suit my specific skincare needs, I no longer feel like I’m battling an enemy. The way my skin looks and feels isn’t inherently empowering or degrading: My face simply exists. A flawless complexion won’t make me a goddess, and neither does my acne.
Rather than an expression of vanity or a selfimprovement project, skincare should be framed as a vehicle for self-comfortability. Not exactly selfacceptance, but the capacity to sit contently within one’s body. Now, as I sit in silence at my desk twice a day and lightly dab toner on my skin, I am forced to confront my past and my present as I feel the scars on my face and listen to the thoughts in my head. In these moments, I forgive myself for the past transgressions against myself.
Skincare is not just cosmetic; it’s cathartic.
As one does on their eighteenth birthday, I sat in my childhood bedroom confronting the end of an era. Gently, quietly, I saw my adolescence passing me by and fading into history. I pulled out my phone camera and examined my face. I liked how I looked.
Sometimes, I go back into my camera roll and look at the selfies I took in my room at that moment. I’m smiling, laughing, and jumping in those pictures, and multiple splotches of hyperpigmentation are scattered across my cheeks. I sigh and realize that I just love her so much, and she deserves a world of compassion.
Every night, as I apply moisturizer, I glide my knuckles around my cheekbones and jawline, feeling the planes of my face. Giving special attention to my acne scars. I’m approaching my twenties now, and the tiny holes on my face are remnants of my childhood. Glass skin is seen as a sign of youth and beauty, but to me, it is my imperfect markings that tie me to my girlhood. Nothing can make my skin shatter into tiny pieces of glass because it is nourished, resilient, and built for survival.
Step Five: Sunscreen — Obviously.
The end of daylight savings is here. Nights come earlier and days will soon be overcast. That is to say, light will be a scarce resource. We’re all poorly adapted to see in the dark and prone to vitamin D deficiencies. So it’s the time to get creative and embrace sun alternatives—it’s lamp season.
The case against overhead lighting is simple: it’s too bright. During the day, I don’t need to replicate the sun when I can simply open the blinds. Still, on a cloudy, snowy winter’s day, plunging my room into mild grayish light doesn’t inspire high spirits. The easiest fix to drastically improve the room’s mood is to switch on a bedside or desk lamp (imagine: the beautiful duality of color—the warm glow from the lamp contrasting with the cool tones reflecting off the snow).
At night, lamps are even more vital. Have you ever gotten a headache from sitting up at night, working on a computer screen with the overheads shining down on you? Been saddened by the fact that your room looks like a hospital or high school gym? Felt like you were standing in the middle of a football stadium with all the lights on? Blame overhead lighting.
Of course, the difference between lamps and overhead light is specifically the color and intensity of the lighting. Naturally, a lamp decreases the intensity of light, which you can change at will by adding or subtracting the number of lamps. But a lamp also does nothing for the mood (aka vibez~) if the bulb is still a bright, glaring white. Warmer lighting creates a softer, cozier, more inviting space. Choose a bulb
anywhere from 3000 to 1500 Kelvins depending on your personal preference for how warm you want the lighting to be. The lower in Kelvins, the warmer the light (the more reminiscent of firelight).
If lamps aren’t your thing, window decals are a fantastic option—they throw the room into various assorted colors, and can come in abstract stained glass patterns. Many of them are not as ugly and home-decor-esque as they might sound. There’s also the even sparklier option: sun catchers. These are great because they’re the exact sort of thing you can find being sold on Etsy by a 50 year old lady who enjoys birding and wears a lot of beads. Maybe you’re the sort of person who wants your living space to look like it was decorated by her (me), but if not, at the very least, she’ll make the buying experience more enjoyable.
The final and most important part involves choosing the lamp(s). You can make it a project—pick lamps to fit the look and feel of the space. Lamps are not just functional, they’re a key piece of decor. Treat your lighting with the respect it deserves.
“However, I am lulled into a hushed contentment by remembering the places I carry with me and the memories they have left.”
—Nicole Kim, “Tea, Coffee, and the Dying Day” 11.06.2020
“When I declare that I am Sorry, I modify myself; I place myself in a shallow space to be received by a nod, an acceptance of stability or its attempt.”
—Anneliese Mair, “A Brief History of Sorry” 11.1.2019
Want to be involved?
Email: kyoko_leaman@brown.edu!