I know romanticizing sleep deprivation is a little foolish. I a I know romanticizing sleep deprivation is a little foolish. I am not speaking of just any sleep deprivation; I am speaking of the kind you knowingly bring upon yourself when you are young and carefree, the kind that puts you in a dream-like state, replaying snippets from the previous night. If you have ever had a late night with good company, you know what I am talking about. From delirious schoolwork sessions with friends at 2 a.m. to bringing someone over to spend the night, there is something unique about the interactions you share with others late at night, a uniqueness that warps space and time around it.
If you have experienced this kind of late night, then you know the physical discomfort the next morning that completes the experience. It is your consequence, your humble sacrifice for a good time. I move through those mornings like an animal waking from hibernation: slow, dreary, hollowed out in both mind and body. This is essential—the exhaustion ringing through my bones fuses the cherished memories of the past night into a part of me.
Robert Bly wrote in “Winter Poem,” “I love you in slow, dim-witted ways, / Hardly speaking, one or two words only.”
Dear Readers,
Chag Sameach and Ramadan Kareem to those who observe! With Easter also coming up, and Tomb-sweeping Day always falling on my birthday, April feels like a month where larger powers are at work and we’re taken for a ride. Organized religion, ancestors, general chaos or the IRS… April is an affront to the senses. But, and I’m feeling this more and more, there is almost nothing the right playlist can’t fix.
In this issue, our writers elevate the mundane through their extraordinary lens. In Feature, the writer talks about the magical quality of connection that comes from late night conversations. In Narrative, one writer talks about their relationship with adulthood and making a life of their own
Perhaps sleep deprivation is my dim-witted way of professing love, not during those late-night moments with my friends, but alone in the morning after, quietly squinting on my way to a late breakfast. Perhaps my mind is only slow and hazy because I lost pieces of it the previous night, and I, with my dim-witted love, want to keep the lost pieces there as an excuse to return again and again. In the same way, every wave of exhaustion in the morning carries me back to the previous night, again and again.
**
I have a journal full of pieces of paper that I have collected through the years: a polaroid of people who I no longer talk to, ticket stubs, a letter from a friend, a piece of unused hot pink napkin from a dinner with a beloved high school teacher. Once in a while, I lay them out like debris washed up by the ocean, drying off on the shore of my desk. Running my fingers across the edge of these flimsy pieces of paper—the glossy polaroid, the crisp and curling napkin, the folds of the letter that grow more tender with each read—I remember laughing and drying off the polaroid in a bowling alley, marveling at the pink napkin with my teacher, and opening an envelope to the first letter
written in Mandarin I’d read in ages.
Like sleep deprivation, these pieces of paper are my ways of remembrance. When I was in those moments, I was too timid and self-conscious to tell my friends how much I love them, or my teacher how grateful I am for her. Instead, I saved pieces of paper as evidence of these memories, and as promises that I will continue to ruminate on the things they signify. So years later, I still stay up late into the night to profess my slow, dim-witted, silent love by sifting through these memorabilia. Perhaps as a way to make up for all the love and gratitude that couldn’t reach my lips when the events were happening, I drag on the lifespan of these events in my memory, visiting them over and over again through pieces of paper, re-tasting, reexperiencing, re-imagining their significance. As if by knowing the texture of these fragments like the back of my hand, I can engrave the people they represent into my mind, where I can finally profess my love to them again and again.
In the same way, I try to feel the texture of my sleep deprivation: the lightheaded walks to breakfast, tired and uncertain footsteps, and absent-minded mistakes throughout the day. Unlike the late-night moments, my sleep-deprived
threaded through with a special apple sharlotka recipe. Another creates an abridged "Dictionary of Obscure Joys" as a companion to the book Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows . In A&C, one author discusses his complex relationship with Lover by Taylor Swift, predominantly confronting how she pinballs between nostalgic, emotional songs and vapid attention-grabbing ploys. Also in A&C is yet another music piece where the writer explores the song "Boyhood" by The Japanese House and how it affected their gender identity and desire for something other than what they were born into. For a bit of lighthearted flippancy, our Lifestyle writer gives a list of reasons why someone (you) would have been lobotomized in the 1940s. And as always, crossword! Lightly Brown themed.
So many of our emotions are processed through
music. Sometimes the most befuddling, mind-boggling, emotionally disconcerting issues that seem to endlessly unravel to no logical avail resolve themselves mid-song. In these early spring days when the weather has not yet made up her mind, putting in some earbuds and taking a walk with your face angled upwards and the exposed skin catching what little rays of light peek through the clouds is as close as one can get to spiritual catharsis. Don’t forget your sunscreen!
Overwhelmed by oneness and the spring weekend lineup, Kimberly Liu Editor-in-Chief
days are slow and long enough to spend turning over every detail of last night in my mind, to re-experience them more fully than I could in the moment.
**
I was deep in the sonorous belly of a concert hall. Under the beams of vibrant stage lighting, confetti glimmered as it fluttered down to the crowds on the floor. From the balcony, I stared in awe at the artist, whom I had watched through a screen for years and years, whose lyrics I knew by heart, and who was now standing before me under the gleam of the spotlight. As she began the long final note of the song, the lights started to fade out, and ripples of excitement in the crowd grew like a long inhale.
At the cusp of it all, I looked away from the stage and the crowd and the shimmering confetti. I was suddenly and acutely aware that I was standing between two friends in a large crowd, under the high dome of a dimmed concert hall, watching an artist I’d loved for years. It was hard to believe that traffic was still flowing steadily outside, or that anything existed outside at all when the small cosmos in this room was about to spin so brightly and beautifully and intensely that I could only bear to focus on the things immediately around me.
When the moment finally crashed down and the cheer cascaded through the hall, I shifted my gaze to the painted dome and held on to my almost empty Poland Springs bottle. I didn’t dare look down to the stage or the floor—it was all too much. Instead, I watched the dome paintings melting into the dark and felt waves of vibrations concentrated in the flimsy plastic bottle in my hands. The cold, hollow plastic translated the crowd and the music into a language that matched my capacity for understanding, a language that hangs around the translucent edge of every important experience in my life. It is embedded in the small plastic bottle I gripped at the climax of a concert, in fragments of paper from cherished people, in the aftermath of latenight conversations. It is an indirect language that reduces and compresses large emotions into tangible pieces that can be contemplated and processed slowly, long after the event or people have moved through my life. It is often in this language that I can finally find understanding and expression for my slow, dim-witted love. **
I know it is a bit foolish to hold on to things in this way. Without all that nostalgia, all I am doing is complaining about my sleep deprivation at Ratty breakfasts, keeping scraps in my journal, and obsessing over a plastic water bottle. Perhaps all of this romanticization is only to justify my inability to simply be in the moment, but I feel that there is something much more lasting about the aftermath, the paper mementos, and the peripheral view, like the negative space in each composition that grows more endearing the longer you look at it. As far as I am concerned, I want to keep that slow and dim-witted love, to mull over every experience in bits and pieces, long after the moment has gone.
Trees in Rhode Island stand tall and thin, reaching toward the deep-blue sky with their spindly branches. From the window of a train speeding from Providence to Boston, I watch them stretch, toward the clouds, toward each other, standing proud and bare in the icy earth. On the CalTrain from my hometown up to the city, there are rows of flat houses, strip malls, and mountains in the distance. It’s all so familiar I barely notice it as it flies by. Yet New England is different: Each time I step on the train, I’m reminded of the new place I’m in—and how much time has passed. One day the sun peers through the green patchwork quilt of trees obscuring the sky, then flecks of gold and amber fall from above, then snow lines the edges of rooftops.
Or maybe it’s just the way you get to the view: planning transportation, buying train tickets, walking to the station, no one to yell at you for getting home too late. It’s the tiny, completely unimportant tasks that make me realize that I am no longer a kid. The sense of being in my twenties—whatever that means—flows over me as the train rumbles over the tracks, through the dark tunnel. It stumbles through the artificial glow of overhead lights. ***
My father learned his recipe for an apple sharlotka—a fluffy sponge cake stuffed to the brim with green apples, and a crunchy crust on top (if it turns out correctly)—from his grandmother. In their cramped apartment in Russia, she lorded over the kitchen as the most demanding of supreme rulers. There, she taught him the right way to beat the sugar into the eggs to create the perfect airy texture, how to slice the apples, how to line the tin with butter and semolina to ensure that the cake slips out of its frame in one piece.
For as long as I can remember, this cake has been a staple in my family’s history. My mother jokes that she fell in love with my father after, on a third or fourth date, he made her this cake. It was the best sharlotka she’d ever tasted. The night before my birthday, I’d always fall asleep to the scent of vanilla and baked apples swirling around the kitchen. In the morning, I’d be allowed to have a slice for breakfast, and another when I came home from school—the true birthday luxury. In recent years, my father would ask me if I wanted to bake with him, so that I could learn the recipe, but I was always busy. Another time, another time I’d learn.
***
Walking alone off campus, the flowers just beginning to emerge from under the frozen earth, shaking their blue and yellow heads off from their long winter doze, I find myself
confronted with my own existence. Usually, I don’t have much time to really consider the stage of life I’m currently in. In small ways I feel it—planning my own day, choosing what time I get up each morning, getting bi-weekly paychecks and trying my best to figure out how to pay taxes. But most of the time, buried under endless to-do lists, I forget the ways in which time has passed.
Yet walking alone, not having told anyone where I was going, I feel it. I find myself faced with the vastness of the world, no one to control which turns I take. Struck with the sense of how hard it is to weave life into what I want it to be, when I’ve spent so long shaping it to the liking of adults in my life. Yet here I am, the adult in my life. Trying to find out what it is that matters to me—more than just stumbling through an academic existence, finding a way to stumble through a life, wide and terrifying and overwhelming. ***
A few weeks ago, I found myself dipping my feet in a sudden whirlpool of homesickness. Homesickness is a strange concept for me—I rarely, if ever, miss my family, and my life in college often feels more like home than the place I grew up. In college, home is a place I can come back to, can feel safe in, full of people I love and care for and can trust to treat me with care. Home was never really like that for me before coming here. But once in a while, a strange wave of deep love for something miniscule in the place I grew up will wash over me, threatening to pull me under. The Sunday farmers’ market with its vegetable stands and flowers wrapped in newspaper. The coffee shop with a mural on the wall and tables spread out across a creaky deck. The street that is always decorated for the winter holidays, lights lining roofs appearing like gingerbread houses. The certain way the light falls at around 5 p.m. in the summer. My father’s apple cake. Just being a child—feeling like I knew every corner of my town, and I could get anywhere I wanted on my rusty navy bike. When the world felt smaller, more clear. Not more manageable, necessarily, but more straightforward. Like a street I could walk down with my eyes half-closed and know exactly where I’d end up.
***
It’s strange to say, but I really enjoy the mundane tasks of everyday life. Doing laundry, going grocery shopping, tidying up, washing dishes. Of course, those are the things that fall through the cracks when I get busy, but they’re also the things that make me feel more corporeal, more like a person. Taking care of my life feels different when there’s no one reminding me to do it. It’s embarrassing to admit, but as a high schooler thinking about my future, I never considered existing as a person. I thought about college, about having a job (although what that job would be was nebulous in my mind). Never about what I would be doing these things for. Now, with every moment I take to make my space comfortable, I feel like I’m reteaching myself how to be a person. Trying to learn, with no rule book or professor, what it means to be alive.
***
On one of those days when I was playing on the
single occupancy on the first floor
4. Sayles (secret)
5. SciLi Basement, by the stairs
6. John Hay Library, first floor
7. Wellness, first floor
8. TF Green, Arrivals
9. GCB
10. CareerLAB Shower
“When they said Brown was gay, I didn’t know they meant bisexual women.”
“Isn’t it cute that amino acids have families?”
on growing up, whatever that means
beach of homesickness, I called my father and asked him for his sharlotka recipe. It now sits in my notes app, a confusing mishmash of words in Russian and English. The recipe is a little sparse on some fronts, almost too specific on others. My father couldn’t remember how much baking powder went into the recipe, but sugar and flour were measured by a specific glass we had at home.
Armed with a fork, I beat eggs together with sugar until my weak arms felt sore. My father had suggested an electric mixer, but since I didn’t have one, I resorted to the way he used to make the cake in Russia, when he didn’t have one either. I mixed in flour, added vanilla and baking powder (two teaspoons was my guess). Lined a pan with vegan butter—the only type I had— and breadcrumbs. Sliced green apples, filled the pan, poured the dough over them. Put the whole thing in the oven for an hour and hoped for the best. The air softly spiced with vanilla, I stumbled once again upon the fact that somehow, almost without noticing, I’d gotten older. It seems just yesterday that I was a little kid bouncing around the kitchen waiting for their father to pull a perfectly baked creation out of the oven, begging to eat it before it had time to cool. Suddenly, I’m a college student standing in a different kitchen several thousand miles away, pulling the same cake out of the oven, telling a friend to wait until it cooled. ***
I struggle, sometimes, to figure out how I really feel about where my family traditions fit into my adult growth. On the one hand, they tie me, like a tangled net of red string, to the shadow who goes by my name when with my parents. I often dread going home, having to slip into that shadow again. And yet, maybe there is something in taking those traditions, those little bits of thread I’ve stretched across the country, and sharing them with the people I now see as family. It feels like making them my own, slightly warping their meaning. Perhaps that’s sacrilegious; I don’t know. But in this way, I’m finding them again. Or rather, pulling them with me to a new type of love that feels just a little less complicated, more sure-footed. Sharing them with people I care about and can be honest with. Bringing them with me into a world in which I’m slowly learning how to live as my own person. Whatever that means.
Huddled around the dining room table, my friends and I eat the cake and drink tea, laugh at stupid jokes and bounce between topics of conversation. It feels right. The cake turns out surprisingly well. I’m able to get it out of the tin. I have homework to do, but for a moment, I let myself forget about it, washed over by an overwhelming sense that, right now, I’m exactly where I want to be.
Here are some words. Some are fabricated from words in different languages, some are molded from combinations of words long dead, and some are words that already exist to which I have given new meaning. Some are words that were reaching out with tantalizing fingertips, begging to be rescued from dusty dictionaries, and some are words to which I have simply added a bit of pizzazz.
amidantino
n. a walk for a little bit with a friend along a path in the woods in contented silence.
French ami, friend + Italian andantino, a little walking. Pronounced “am-ee-dan-tee-noe.”
ataraxie
n. an understanding of your own infinitesimal smallness that makes you feel more free. Also known as ‘floating rock mentality,’ wherein the realization that we are all simply little creatures living on a meaningless floating rock empowers you to live your life according to your rules alone.
Ancient Greek ἀταραξία, equanimity or tranquility + free. Pronounced “ah-trax-ee.”
buzzy
adj. tipsy is to alcohol as buzzy is to weed— inspiring feelings of giggliness or bubbliness, as well as silly thoughts and perhaps craving for a snack.
A play on buzzed, meaning slightly drunk.
consense
n. goofy, unfounded, and unbridled confidence in a skill you do not have.
From confidence + nonsense
crisple
n. the act of taking one bite of a fruit, feeling the crunch beneath your teeth and savoring that bite thoroughly, then tossing it away; it’s indulgent, tactless, even cruel. But it was a beautiful bite, and now you’ve finished.
From crisp + apple
draíocht
n. the wizened, nostalgic, almost-jealous feeling of watching a wide-eyed child begin to believe in magic.
Gaelic draíocht, witchcraft, magic, charm, enchantment.
elitnaus
n. perverse pleasure in the conviction that you are smarter than whomever you are talking to; an ego-driven feeling, spurred by erudite hubris and a little bit of elitism.
English elite + Greek νοῦς (naus), intelligence or knowledge. Pronounced “ee-liht-nah-oos.”
entierity
n. the exploding relief of kissing somebody you've wanted to kiss for a long time; the metal-tomagnet pull between two people that was so strong it was a wonder that they ever managed the strength to prevent themselves from succumbing every second.
From French, devenir entier, to become whole or complete
etheldream
n. the moment of returning to a childhood place you thought you’d forgotten, only to find that you remember just that shade of ivory the house was painted, or how many steps lead you to the front door, or that the handle had to be twisted to the left twice to open; realizing that your soul retains memory much longer than your mind.
Old English eþel, one’s ancestral homeland + dream, Pronounced “eh-thehl-dreem.”
filoksenia
n. the intimacy of cooking a meal for a stranger.
From Ancient Greek φιλοξενία, friend to a stranger, hospitality. Pronounced “fee-low-seh-neeah.”
flaneuse
n. a female finder and connoisseur of places, who delights in stepping out of the house and onto the street for the purpose of becoming one of a vast army of anonymous trampers, meanderers, adventurers who dally along the streets, not digging deeper than the eye approves but rather briefly glancing over everything we pass as it floats us smoothly down a stream; resting, pausing, and wandering on.
From French flâneur, one who wanders aimlessly + French feminine ending –euse. Pronounced “flanoos.”
fêtair
v. the gleeful anticipation of knowing you have given somebody the perfect gift; hearing them tear through the wrapper and feeling your heart rise, anticipating the smile that will spread across their cheeks as they shout, “No way!” or “You remembered!” in a voice that positively bounces with excitement.
French Fête, party + Gaelic Tabhair, to give as a gift. Pronounced “feht-air.”
glamhaut
adj. elegant, feminine, opulent; walking in high heels which click-clack on the ground beneath you while your chin is high because their eyes are on you and they’re seeing exactly what you want them to see: your sculpted collarbone, jaw that could cut glass, and your eyes, which do not so much as deign to look down on them.
From glamor + French haut, as in “haute couture,” meaning high fashion, or “haut talons”
meaning high heels. Pronounced “glahm-awt.”
infinite
adj. feeling your hair fly above your ears because your head is poking out of the sunroof of a car flying down the highway, as if the only sounds in the world are the bass pounding at the seat beneath your feet and the wind whipping past your ears, as if you could scream as loud as you could imagine, but the sound would be left behind as soon as it flew out of your mouth, already in the past.
As referenced in The Perks of Being a Wallflower.
irid
n. the ballooning relief of having shed a secret. Perhaps the secret was dark and looming or perhaps it was festering and starting to rot, but it was a secret which has weighed heavily upon you like a great rhinoceros on your chest, and now it is gone. It has slipped away and you feel you might start floating upwards with the sudden lack of it.
Ancient Greek ίριδα, irida, goddess of the rainbow + rid, to make oneself free of something troublesome. Pronounced “eye-rid.”
jigsort
v. to set the last piece of a puzzle into its proper place.
From jigsaw + German Ort, place + to sort
klarglee
n. the unbelievably pleasant sensation of clean legs against crisp sheets after a long day.
German klar, clean + glee, great delight. Pronounced “klahr-glee.”
limerence
n. love for a person who doesn’t exist; a precious, private, fantastical kind of love which can live, sparkling and immaculate, in your mind, unburdened with the ties that bind real-life love to the cold and unforgiving earth.
From the work of psychologist Dorothy Tennov, meaning ‘obsessive infatuation with someone, sometimes accompanied by delusions.’ Pronounced “lihm-ur-ehns.”
ludust
n. the small-smile feeling evoked by memories of your very first love who has long since turned to dust
in your mind, though you still remember them when you hear a certain song, or smell apple pie.
Greek ludus, playful, young, puppy-dog love + past + dust + lust. Pronounced “luh-duhst.”
macnall tale
adj. delight in your own harmless lies, a kinder synonym for absolute and utter bullshit; a “likely story,” as your mother would say, her voice dripping with sarcasm, or if you asked your father, you’re “full of it.”
Gaelic Macnas, playfulness + tall tale
magpiance
n. the delight in a collection of objects you have amassed—perhaps a small assortment of clocks or pebbles or other eclectic trinkets.
From magpie, a small black bird famous for its love of collecting. Pronounced “mag-pie-ants.”
melliflux
n: a state of artistic ‘flow’ wherein one’s hands seem to move of their own accord, wild and graceful, as if your artwork and your hands are working with one mind, talking back and forth to each other in a language your mind does not speak, so you must watch with delight from above as they commune.
From mellifluous, sweet sounding and smooth + flux, steady and continuous stream
mirread
v. to read a piece of writing and recognize yourself reflected back, to feel seen and known by an author long dead.
From mirrored + read + myriad. Pronounced “meer-eed.”
piggle
v. when you laugh so hard and so hysterically that you pee a little.
From pee + giggle
plasconder
v. to long for spaces that speak to the spirit, spaces that hide the hider themselves (these are places that are small and snug and well-tucked in, secret and quiet and almost intangible, places that are unobservable, yet from which one can observe perfectly well).
From place, a portion of space, a home + Spanish
esconder, to hide. Pronounced “play-skon-der.”
punleasure
n. delight in a particularly clever bit of wordplay.
From pun + pleasure
unwelsh
n. the feeling of being weightless, almost nihilistic, as if you’ve taken a bra off after a day which felt particularly happy and are naked in your bedroom with the windows open.
German Weltschmerz, world-weariness, + unleash, pronounced “uhn-wehlsh.”
quilia
n. a particular care for somebody you love when they are asleep, their face so uncreased and childlike that you want to tuck them in and gently brush their hair back from an impossibly smooth forehead.
From quilt + Greek ϕιλία, (philia), familial love
sensukia
n. a feeling of yearning which inexplicably brings us closer to that place where joy and sorrow meet; the feeling after you wish on an eyelash, or in the middle of a game of “she loves me, she loves me not.”
From German sehnsucht, yearning; wistful longing. Pronounced “sehn-sue-kee-ah.”
sollevato voce
n. the feeling that, while you sing, your voice is rising and lifted by the voices around you, and you are lifting them in turn.
Italian sollevato, lifted + voce, voice. Pronounced “soll-eh-vah-toe / voe-chay.”
suistalgia
n. the realization often experienced while looking at your own reflection in the mirror who seems somehow older than you did just yesterday— of what your younger self would think of you now; specifically, that they would fall on the floor in awe of who you have become, that they would be jawdroppingly stunned by your clothes and your hair and just how grown-up you look, even though you still share the same smile.
Latin prefix sui, meaning self + nostalgia. Pronounced “soo-ee-stahl-gee-ah.”
terrarific
n. delight in being covered in dirt.
Latin terra, earth + terrific
vêtemots
n. a kind word, said by a passerby, about something you’re wearing—the article of clothing, of course, will be forever endowed with the power of that compliment and will therefore become something more than it was before. I’ll never wear that scarf again without thinking of that seven year old on the T who told me I looked like her favorite doll.
French vêtements, clothes + French mots, words. wynnsome
adj. bouncing, childlike, or perhaps puppylike in one’s bright excitement, joyful like a chanted nursery-rhyme while jump-roping in overalls over steaming blacktop.
From Old English Wynn, delight or joy, + winsome, pleasing and engaging often because of a childlike charm and innocence. Pronounced “wihnsuhm.”
Tears, laughter, and joy spill across the strings of Taylor Swift’s guitar. This is the Taylor I know and love. She is the one who always listens, the one who got me through middle school, the one who makes me jump and shout with glee—all with a mere click on Spotify. This Taylor disappeared with the release of Reputation, but her later album, Lover, is more complex: It lingers in the liminal, then bounces continually from majestic to awful and back again. Lover has moments of breathtaking beauty, sadness, triumph, and then some embarrassingly bad songs. After listening to the album for the first time, I could not decide how I felt about it. My indecision was not the passive kind that marinates in the back of your brain while you go swimming and eat watermelon in the summer sun; instead, it was the kind that followed me everywhere, the pros and cons frustrating me at every step. I simply could not come to a conclusion. Finally, I decided the only way to get it out of my head was to write about it: This piece is the story of my confusion, and what it might reveal about the way we see our greatest stars.
The beginning of Lover left me craving something to rid my mouth of the bitter taste of disappointment. The old Taylor is strangled by electronic beats and an overlyenthusiastic drum kit. “I Forgot that You Existed,” the album’s first track, sets the tone with robotic pounds and claps that swallow her voice. There is no narrative; her distinctive tenderness and depth disappear into a chasm of empty “oooh’s” and “aaah’s.” This is nothing compared to “ME!”, in which Taylor takes her cringe-inducing high register to a new level that is neither catchy nor substantive. The only sound available to mask her vocal wandering is an aggressive drum, pounding listeners’ ears into submission.
After “Cruel Summer” comes “Lover,” the title track. The opening chord made my heart soar, and I was hopeful once more for the Taylor who had been so therapeutic to me in the past. The song begins with the line, “We could leave the Christmas lights up 'til January / This is our place, we make the rules.” Suddenly, I jumped to my feet, clinging to the remnants of the old Taylor Swift resonating through the line. From the outset, she establishes a clear and unique setting, a throughline present in all her greatest hits. The lyric mirrors lines
that have been burned into my mind through years of lip syncing into the foggy bathroom mirror; lines like, “There's somethin' bout the way / The street looks when it's just rained / There's a glow off the pavement,” from the first song on her second album, Fearless. In “Lover,” her guitar resurfaces on the track as well as in the imagery. She sings, “Ladies and gentlemen, will you please stand? / With every guitar string scar on my hand,” an acknowledgment of the history and the power of her guitar. The next song, “The Man,” shines a light on Taylor’s dark side, thrusting the parts of her I have tried to avoid—in order to remain an unquestioning superfan— into the open: the shortcomings of her politics. I have no qualms with the message of the song (in “The Man,” she sings about the double standards between men and women) but I do protest the way in which she expresses these messages. Instead of singing about raw emotional pain, she shies away from reality and uses lines that are catchy and convenient. There is no vulnerability in the lines, “What's it like to brag about raking in dollars / And getting bitches and models? / And it's all good if you're bad / And it's okay if you're mad.” Here, her feminist critique is imagining a world in which women can say “bitches,” and be bad. The commentary itself is certainly invaluable. However, the lyrics are nonetheless shallow because they stop there. For an artist known for baring her innermost pain and emotion to the world, her political lyrics are confoundingly hollow.
Taylor also has a history of stealing from other cultures when it is convenient to her career—including a soft impression of Beychella’s radical Black aesthetics at the Billboard Music Awards in 2019—and unfortunately, Lover is no exception. For example, “You Need to Calm Down” is a more contemporary example of her habit of appropriating another culture without interrogating her relationship to it. As one of her few political songs other than “The Man,” this song and its performance is another example of Swift trying to address her lack of political action. “You Need to Calm Down,” a song released during Pride Month, implicitly compares Taylor’s own experience with Twitter trolls to the struggles of victims of transphobia and homophobia. In the first verse, she sings, “Say it in the street, that's a knock-out / But you say it in a Tweet, that's a cop-out / And I'm just like, ‘Hey, are you okay?’” Swifties who have been following her music and career for years are familiar with her struggle with Twitter trolls; however, in the next verse, she suddenly jumps to hate speech, framing it as another iteration of “trolling”: “Sunshine on the street at the parade / But you would rather be in the dark age / Just makin' that sign must've taken all night.” Without her typical Swiftian narrative arc, the first verse and the second verse simply
stand next to each other. There is no empathetic journey to follow as a listener; instead, we are left with a simple false equivalence.
The music video for “You Need to Calm Down” illustrates this fallacy through her connection to the LGBTQ+ community as an ally in a narrative and complex way. The video features Taylor walking down a road arm in arm with LGBTQ+ identifying celebrities while singing using the pronoun “we.” In the climax of the video, she brings the focus back to Twitter trolls and online beef. Taylor has been engaged in a notorious feud with Katy Perry for years. At the end of the music video, Taylor and Katy share a passionate embrace (Katy wearing a hamburger costume and Taylor wearing a french fry costume). The embrace rings true with what we already know about Taylor Swift: that she loves tying her narratives up with a bow. However, once again there is no arc: there is only juxtaposition of things with no clear relationship—from food costumes to Twitter to LGBTQ+ activists.
For Lover to be an ambiguous album, Taylor had to follow “You Need to Calm Down” with something huge: an epiphany of sorts. “The Archer” is exactly what I was waiting for; it is a piece of intensive introspection that digs deeper than Twitter. In the chorus, Taylor sings, “I’ve been the archer/I’ve been the prey.” This song is a hauntingly beautiful expression of a basic concept: hurt people hurt people. This recognition is a step towards a Taylor who can sing about heartbreak and hatred and also about the pain she may inflict on others, pain she is not a victim of. “The Archer” narrates a journey towards self-awareness while soaring through chilling melodies. This is the Taylor I love: the one who blends pain, sorrow, and healing into musical magic and story.
If “The Archer” is Swift’s epiphany song, her reckoning with heroes and villains not being binary categories but a dialectic we are always moving between, my listener and superfan epiphany came when I heard False God. The chorus ends with the lines, “Even if it's a false god / We'd still worship this love,” and as soon as I heard this, I realized the gravity of my error, and the reason why my indecision about Lover had tortured me so. People are never just “fans” of Taylor Swift. The “fans” I know would categorize themselves as “obsessed.” Obsession is a dangerous thing; it surpasses admiration and approaches worship. I had been worshiping Taylor since middle school, and in doing so I raised her to a level of divinity she could never reach. I doomed myself to perpetual disappointment by refusing to acknowledge her humanity. If she could recognize that her flaws and her successes are both integral parts of who she is in “The Archer,” why couldn’t I? Old Taylor is forever encapsulated in albums like Fearless and 1989; I can always go back and listen to them when I want to experience the beauty and complexity of old Taylor, for they are “timeless.” But, I refused to acknowledge that Taylor is human, and she is not an omniscient being designed to solve all my problems. As long as I pretend that she is, I am doing her a great disservice by denying her the space to err, move on, and grow, as all people must do.
Taylor loves happy endings: the music video for “You Belong With Me” ends with the narrator finding out her crush loves her too; “Love Story” ends with a triumphant verse in which “Romeo” proposes to “Juliette”; in “How You Get the Girl,” the final chorus changes from “how you get the girl” to “how you got the girl.” I hungered for that happy ending in Lover, and was left vexed when I discovered it was so much more complex than that. I still have not come to a conclusion about whether Lover is a “good” or “bad” album, but I have learned that I must not reduce Taylor’s narrative to what I want it to be; otherwise, I am just as guilty of dehumanization as she. When I lift her to the divine plane, I deny her the human experience that makes her an artist.
I don’t often drink tea, but when I do, I love to watch the tea bag steep in my mug. My cup always smells faintly of lemon—my roommates and I happen to store our mugs in the cupboard where we also store the lemon-scented super glue. Perhaps we’re being slowly poisoned, but the mugs remain in the cupboard, and the super glue stays in its place in the top left corner. It’s funny: I could get rid of the lemony scent, and its lethal capabilities, once and for all. But I choose to leave the tube there, untouched. Maybe I’m lazy, or maybe I just like the way the smell of sweet lemon reminds me of the unseen forces at play (chemical forces, perhaps).
As I write, I wonder: How has my life been changed by the presence of a bottle of superglue above a row of mugs? The what-ifs double by the second.
What if my roommates and I find out in five years that we were ingesting unhealthy amounts of lemony chemicals each time we sipped a cuppa? What if I had had seven roommates instead of eight? What if I had decided to major in English instead of Anthropology? What if I had picked blue as my favorite color as a kid, instead of pink? How would my life be different?
What if, what if, what if?
Soon, all I can see is the way a mundane, seemingly insignificant moment in life can have a ripple effect on my entire being. A singular detail—a mug, a song, a friend, a stroke of paint, a momentous second—can create a ripple in my world. I’m no stranger to the butterfly effect, or to the idea of the multiverse (thank you, The Daniels!), but the real catalyst to my thoughts about the fragmentation of reality was not a movie, nor a theory, or even the super glue, but a song.
A few weeks ago, a close friend of mine and I stood in my apartment’s doorway in the cold Providence night, them procrastinating the walk home, me dwindling in my age-old flannel pajamas, trying to slyly kick them out so I could go to sleep. On their way out, my friend mentioned that The Japanese House, a mutual favorite band, had dropped her first new single since 2020: “Boyhood.” “It’s like, the best song ever,” said my friend.
“I wanna change but it’s nothing new and if I grow, I’m gonna get so old…” They read the “Boyhood” lyrics out loud excitedly, pacing back and forth on the landing. I smiled, looking forward to listening to new music, but looking forward to going to bed even more. My friend left, and I went to sleep—but the look in my friend’s eye clued me in: This was not an ordinary song. Like some sign from the universe, “Boyhood” promised to unearth feelings I’d purposefully pushed down, feelings I'm still in the process of embracing.
I didn’t listen right away. I waited for the perfect moment, on the walk home from class a few days later, in a liminal existence where all of my thoughts, feelings, words, seemed to finally make sense (but only for the twelve minutes it took me to get from North to South campus).
synth, the guitar, the strings—joined in as if to say: Here is a different life you could have lived, a life you still could have, if you dare to find it.
What if, what if, what if?
What if I had followed my inkling to write earlier on?
I’ve been thinking a lot about writing recently, as I always seem to do when an identity crisis is looming. This semester, I’m in a writing class for the first time ever, despite my life-long yearning to write; I’ve learned to start feeling comfortable with discomfort. It’s been scary, to face something I love head-on. Despite my tendency to write down ideas in my notes app on the daily, I’ve never read a piece of writing out loud to a class in real time. Each class poses a new opportunity to learn and grow from the people around me. I marvel at the way each one of my classmates creates vastly different writing in response to the same prompt.
The class has invited me to explore the vastly different versions of myself through my writing. I’m no longer afraid of my own potential. “In a parallel universe, I’d be a writer,” I always said. Now, I challenge this thought—what if I was a writer in this universe, too?
“Writers write everywhere,” my professor said to us one day in class. “Writing can happen anywhere—as you think, as you walk—writing is becoming obsessed.”
And obsessed I have become. Everywhere I go, I think about “Boyhood,” and I rewrite my life, my adolescence, my future. When I’m not listening to The Japanese House’s soft croon, the plucky guitar, the synth, I’m humming “Boyhood” under my breath. I’m thinking about my life, my choices, my impact. But most of all, I’m thinking about my girlhood.
What if my girlhood had been a boyhood? How would my life be different?
“Boyhood” is the reimagining of a life, an expression of saudade, of intense nostalgia for a reality and a self and a being that never happened. The idea of boyhood has always felt mysteriously close to me, but so, so far, like an alternate reality. By titling her piece “Boyhood,” a word not once mentioned in the song’s lyrics, The Japanese House extends the song’s meaning into the realm of gender identity, queerness, and expansive personhood.
“Boyhood,” puts the feeling of queer realities, of queer dreams, of queer multitudes, into words.
Thinking about boyhood leaves me with a pang of jealousy in my chest, a longing for a different past. I crave the humanity—and ironically, the gender neutrality—I feel is ascribed to boyhood; boyhood
feels more expansive, more boundless than the construct of girlhood. I wonder if that’s a byproduct of the constraints and hypersexualization forced upon young girls. Or maybe it just speaks to my queer desires and questioning identity.
I cherish my girlhood, and the access it provided to friendship, to connection with my sister and my mother, to femininity. Growing up, I liked what I was taught “being a girl” meant. I liked pink, I liked the way I looked in a dress, I liked the tenderness of my childhood friends as we shamelessly hugged on the playground. I still like all those stereotypical things. But I’ve learned to question why they make me a girl, and if I even feel like a girl at all. I’m still figuring it out.
I can’t help but wonder—would I be seen as more of a person if I had experienced a boyhood? I envision two lives: the one I’ve lived, and the one I could have lived, a life outside of gender’s prescriptions.
I see The Japanese House’s “Boyhood” as a proxy for life outside of the gender binary: something limitless, and inherently queer. There’s something magical about queerness, about living in between, within, and apart from the space that makes up the gender binary. I feel lucky to be part of this space, even if I don’t know exactly how I fit in.
On BBC Radio 1, The Japanese House said about her song: “I was sort of thinking about that and how different I might be if I’ve had some sort of boyhood or I’ve had some different things happened to me in my life. The song itself had a hundred different versions of it and I feel like I’ve had a hundred different versions of myself that could’ve existed and it’s about like accepting some of those…”
How do we come to terms with the realities of ourselves that could have been?
I’m not sure what my answer is, but listening to “Boyhood” makes me think maybe it’s okay to not know. It’s okay to imagine the many versions of ourselves, and more importantly, it’s okay to reach for the what-ifs that constantly color the periphery of our vision. Maybe these parallel galaxies are out there, in whatever form they were meant to be in. Maybe I’m out there, too.
Perhaps I’m the only one who can find the version of me that I search for. Perhaps that version of me moved a tube of lemony-scented super-glue out of the cupboard where she keeps the (also lemony-scented) teacups. Perhaps that version of me had a boyhood.
I could have
From the first verse, I understood my friend’s excitement. Amber Bain, known by her moniker The Japanese House, situates her listener simultaneously in the past and in the hypothetical present. For a moment there, during my first listen, an earbud tucked in each ear, I swear I saw every possible version of myself, all of life’s permutations at once. Each instrument—the
by Emily Tom Illustrated by Ella Buchanan Insta: @nanahcube
Have you ever wondered: Would the neural connections in my prefrontal cortex have survived the 20th century completely intact? Would Freud have diagnosed me with hysteria? Is that a woman I see in the wallpaper?
These questions are more common than you might think, and today you can learn the answers. Based solely on my personal opinion, I have created a self-assessment to determine the stability of your mental state. You earn one point for every statement with which you identify. If you end the game with four or more points, I am inclined to believe that you would have been lobotomized in the 1940s. Good luck!
• You are a woman.
This one goes without saying. Roughly 60 percent of lobotomies in America were performed on women. Give yourself a bonus point if you are a woman with a light peppering of mental illness. Give yourself another bonus point if you have rejected a man in the past eight weeks.
• You have had a crush that lasted over one year. There is no way to put this kindly, so I will just say it: a crush that lasts this long is not a crush. It is a delusion. Delusional people would have been lobotomized in our grandparents’ time. Get over your crippling fear of rejection and make a move, let them go, or face the possibility of brain surgery.
• You were in Model UN or Speech and Debate in high school.
As someone who competed in Public Forum Debate for four years, that shit changes your brain
chemistry. Imagine a room of one hundred children wearing suits, all of whom have spent the last five weeks memorizing facts about the Yemeni Civil War and economic sanctions on Venezuela, and all of whom believe that they are destined to be a Supreme Court Justice. No one emerges from that environment mentally stable. Add one bonus point if you practiced your speech by talking to a wall. And one more if you know what it means to spread.
• You have read and enjoyed The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt.
The Goldfinch is an embarrassment to the Pulitzer Prize. This book is almost eight hundred pages long, and basically half of it is about furniture. It ends with a mob shootout in Amsterdam, and somehow Tartt manages to make the mob shootout at the end more boring than the furniture. Also, Donna Tartt loves to make her straight male protagonists kiss other straight men and then never talk about it again. If you read this book and liked it, you are genuinely sick in the head. Forget the lobotomy; you should be locked up.
• You have watched at least two full seasons of Glee.
So you heard Will Schuster say, “You’re all minorities. You’re in the Glee Club,” and you continued watching the show. I’m afraid of you. There is no way you emerged from this series unscathed. That said, if you had a crush on Jonathan Groff or Darren Criss, you have good taste, I will give you that.
• You are on the pre-med track.
I am convinced that being pre-med is a lot like being a Protestant woman in a Charlotte Brontë novel—you must convince yourself that your suffering is somehow noble. Oftentimes, you have a superiority complex because you believe you are studying something with a greater purpose than your peers. Whenever you stop to question why you have relinquished your earthly desires (a social life, a healthy sleep schedule, any fun extracurriculars), it sends you spiraling into crisis. I recommend therapy to all of you.
• You are in an a capella group.
If you aren’t afraid of standing in the Wayland Arch and singing a Lizzy McAlpine song, then you fear no god. Yes, you are talented, but at what cost? I’m trying to get to the Ratty. People who disrupt the social order in such brazen ways would have been lobotomized in the ‘40s.
• You tell people you are an artist, a writer, or a filmmaker. Self-explanatory.
By now, you should have more clarity on the status of your mental stability. Remember: There is nothing wrong with being a little unhinged, so long as your therapist doesn’t find out about it.
By now, you should have more clarity regarding whether your brain regions should stay completely connected. Remember: there is nothing wrong with a little bit of female hysteria and being a little unhinged every now and then. Unwind and revel in the fact that you live in the present and not the 1940’s.
Legendary post- mini crossword 7
by Will HassettIllustrated by Emily
Saxl“The winter twigs now bear tiny cherry blossoms, and I smile, just as I did standing under their orange autumn leaves just months ago.”
—Ellyse Givens, “Bicoastal Being” 4.8.22
“But for now, I’m left alone with the frosty air: winter breathing me in, painting me with its icy touch, lining my eyelashes with glittering snowflakes, laughing as it melts away my mascara.”
—Liza Kolbasov, “Outside the Calendar Squares” 3.19.21
Babies'
Afar antonym
Affectionately, Brown's largest dining hall (which celebrated its 71st birthday last spring!)
Unknot, unlace, or undo
Like what some consider children should be (but not heard)
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