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upfront
Editor-in-Chief Yidi Wu Managing Editor of Arts & Culture Abby Muller Managing Editor of Features Monica Chin Managing Editor of Lifestyle Cissy Yu Managing Editor of Online Amy Andrews Arts & Culture Editors Liz Studlick Mollie Forman Features Editors Lauren Sukin Halley McArn Lifestyle Editor Rebecca Ellis Claire Sapan Corinne Sejourne Creative Director Grace Yoon Copy Chiefs Lena Bohman Alicia DeVos Serif Sheriffs Logan Dreher Kate Webb
contents 3 upfront et tu, laundromat? Anonymous
4 features a quarter life crisis Rebecca Ellis
5 lifestyle time machine Section Editors of Lifestyle rigatoni bolognese Loren Dowd
6 arts & culture the delicate satire of south park Joshua Lu into the woods and out again Alicia DeVos
7 arts & culture return of the indies Anne-Marie Kommers
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editor’s note Dear Readers, We are about halfway through the semester now, and a lull has come upon Post-. The music has stopped. The wine box is empty. We file in one by one, open up our laptops, and copy edit because it is our duty. But we do eat the pizza with real gusto now, for we are hungry, and because we have started to make better decisions about which pizza we ought to get. In any case, we all find the middle of the semester trying. Classes, which we ostensibly chose voluntarily (with very few general requirements) seem to weigh on us. Our friends seem tiresome (at least a little). Internship decisions are coming in, and internship applications are going out. The April rains will come soon.The weather is fickle. And life goes on and on. What are your thoughts? Email alicia_devos@ brown.edu. Best,
Yidi
top ten overheard at brown family dynamics Caitlin Meuser
Head Illustratrix Katie Cafaro Staff Writers Sara Al-Salem Tushar Bhargava Katherine Chavez Loren Dowd Rebecca Forman Joseph Frankel Devika Girish Gabrielle Hick Lucia Iglesias Anne-Marie Kommers Joshua Lu Ameer Malik Aubrey McDonough Caitlin Meuser Emma Murray Spencer Roth-Rose Ryan Walsh Claribel Wu Staff Illustrators Yoo Jin Shin Alice Cao Emily Reif Beverly Johnson Michelle Ng Peter Herrara Mary O’Connor Emma Margulies Jason Hu Jenice Kim Cover Peter Herrara
From right to left: Yidi Wu ‘17, Abby Muller ‘16, Monica Chin ‘17, Cissy Yu ‘17, Amy Andrews ‘16, Liz Studlick ‘16, Mollie Forman ‘16, Lauren Sukin ‘16, Corinne Sejourne ‘16, Lena Bohman ‘18, Alicia DeVos ‘18, Logan Dreher ‘19, Kate Webb ‘19, Katie Cafaro ‘17 (Please send us a photo at post.magazine.bdh@gmail.com)
upfront
3
et tu, laundromat?
laundry, friendship, bats, and betrayal
ANONYMOUS
The thought of doing laundry occurred to me as I stared at the pipes running along the ceiling of my room. The pipes were painted white, but there was an occasional chip in the paint and you could see the silver metal underneath. There were three pipes, running parallel to one another; the third was longer than the other two. Most days, plumbing does not fascinate me. Most days, I do not lie on my bed, shuffling the loose change in my pocket, while looking at the ceiling. Most days, I am not heartbroken. This is not about a college romance ending. For that, there is a protocol: a Spotify playlist to play, a book of poetry—”Black Cat Bone” being my current favourite—to read, a walk to take. That is not as bad as this. Because love stories are meant to end, but friendships are meant to last. As I lay on my bed thinking of friends leaving and betrayal, I remembered the story of Caesar and Brutus. And having gone over the story in my head, I reexamined my situation and thought—this in an effort to cheer myself—it could have been worse. Like Caesar, I could have been dethroned and knifed and dead. Instead, I was only hurting in my mind. And I had no stab wounds either. This reasoning made me smile a little. “Lucky we’re not in Rome, right?” I said to myself, “and that there aren’t any sharp knives around.” I smiled wider. Talking to yourself is weird. But it helps. And after narrating the Brutus-Caesar saga to myself and making a few desultory jokes, I was almost ready to get out of bed and stop moping. But somewhere in the middle of these recollections came another one: I remembered Caesar’s last line, “ Et tu, Brute?” and the question and the emotion and the recognition just knocked me right back. Historians don’t know if those were Caesar’s last words, but they could have been— and Shakespeare’s line tells the tale: When the only thing Caesar trusted in a crumbling world came undone, Caesar too fell apart. And now, remembering the full story, everything came tumbling down: I returned to thinking about the conversation with my friend and felt the words cut me again. “You are so frivolous sometimes … not around … we don’t even have that much in common.” Each recollection was a dagger and I could feel my eyes blurring. As I blinked away the tears, I saw, across the room, my full laundry basket. That was it. I needed something to do, to keep me occupied. Thinking would just make it worse. So I rolled out of bed, grabbed my laundry basket and the bright orange bottle of Tide from my closet and dashed out of my room. Well. When I say “dashed” I am referring to the broad sentiment: the feeling of urgency rather than say, a practical demonstration of it. Because I didn’t actually run out of my room. I moved slowly out into the hallway. And I didn’t lift my laundry basket; I dragged it behind me like a caveman bringing back the dead corpse of his prey. This slowed me down even more. These details are important. Returning to the narration: I am in the hallway, I am dragging my full laundry basket behind me, I pass one door, then two, then three—I am almost at the end of the hallway—and then I see it. A large hand-drawn
poster taped to the door of a dorm room. The poster reads: “Welcome back to Brown Connor.”* Next to the text is a big red heart and below it the Brown insignia. Valentine’s Day weekend was coming up and I was living in a hallway full of seniors; I figured Connor was a recent graduate who was returning to campus to meet his girlfriend. I was about to start dragging my laundry basket, when a glint caught my eye. There was a little plastic bag attached to the poster and it was full of something shiny. Was it candy? Hershey’s Kisses? I walked closer and found myself staring at several Trojan condoms of both the lubricated and unlubricated variety. After the initial surprise, I agreed with the artistic decision. Sometimes, you have to throw subtlety to the winds and just tell it like it is. Having examined the poster from close quarters, and approved of it, I was about to return to my abandoned laundry basket, when I discovered another overlooked detail: The original Brown seal is broken into quadrants and each quadrant has the image of an open book. However, the Brown shield drawn in the poster differed from the traditional shield in this aspect: instead of four identical books, each quadrant had a drawing of a penis. These penises were not your standard textbook illustrations; no, they had been drawn with artistic abandon and each was strangely and uniquely contorted as if engaged in a rigorous yoga regime—I almost swore celibacy when I first sighted them. The first penis was slanting upward, like a sunflower, except, well, it was not a sunflower. The second was bent in the middle, a sharp perpendicular; it was painful to even contemplate. The third was exceptionally hirsute: the artist had drawn several small vertical lines at the base to proxy hair; the attempt had been unsuccessful and luckily none of the other drawings shared this additional flourish. The fourth drooped, like, well, a wilted sunflower. And now the story I had been constructing in my head was complete: I imagined the mysterious Connor arriving back to Brown. He would step into the hallway, carrying his overnight bag. He would see the poster and drop his bag in surprise. Stepping closer to examine it, he would smile at the shaky heart drawing and the packet of condoms, perhaps even laugh. And then, like me, he would see the Brown seal and the penises. His smile would disappear, his brow would crease, he would knock loudly on the door, and seeing his girlfriend after months of absence, his first words would be, “How could you?” She would feign confusion. He would repeat, “How could you? After knowing me, intimately, for this long, how could you make … me look like that?” She would apologize. He would not be mollified. “That’s not even anatomically possible,” he would shout, and, taking another look at the grotesque creations, he would collapse, right there, in the hallway. And that would be the end of another love story. I returned to my laundry basket feeling much happier. Such is the healing power of art. As I descended to the basement, taking one stair at a time, I made a mental note to be on the lookout for Connor’s arrival the coming weekend.
When I walked down the final flight of stairs into the basement, I noticed a yellow sign ahead of me, the sort they use to warn you about wet floors and other life-threatening conditions. There was a sheet of paper taped to the warning sign. On it, someone had scrawled with a blue marker: “Caution! Do not enter the laundry room there is a live/ dying bat in there :(“ Again I saw exactly what had happened: Someone had been tripping. Hard. In this state of induced influence they had wandered down to the basement and had seen things in the shadows that existed only in their imagination. They had suffered and left behind a warning for others. I sighed. First the penis-poster, then this imaginary bat-alert; I was becoming concerned about the future of Brown, to say nothing of the declining state of penmanship. After enjoying the moment of fake despair, I decided to return to my laundry, which had been sadly neglected ever since I stepped out of my room. I opened the door of the laundromat and found myself looking into the dark eyes of a live, dying bat. I slammed the door shut. I had—at no point so far—considered the possibility that there was a bat in the laundry room. There were three doors between the entrance to the residence hall and the laundry room. A bat—no matter how enterprising—would have to get past all three doors: while it could get past one by chance, maybe two if it was lucky, getting past all three? Forgetaboutit. And yet, there was a bat in the laundry room. This was undeniable. Clearly, I reasoned, the bat being in the laundry room was not mere chance; it was part of some larger plan in which the bat and I were just pawns. I opened the door slowly and peered inside. The bat was still on the floor: its brown wings folded, its stub nose pointed to the ground, its eyes looking right at me. “I am dying in my own stench,” they seemed to say, “I will not let you enter and you too will live in your own stench.” I closed the door and leaned against the cold metal. I needed to think of my next
move. The safest thing to do would be to go back to my room and do laundry another day. I stared at the laundry basket; I didn’t want to drag it all the way back up. And then something in me snapped. It had been a trying day: my friend leaving, the penis drawings, and now a dying bat at the threshold of the laundromat. I just wanted clean underwear and happiness. And I was going to have it. I pulled the door open with one hand and hauled my laundry basket in. The bat didn’t move. I threw my clothes into the washer, poured Tide into the machine, swiped my Brown ID to get it started, and left the laundromat with my laundry basket. The bat still hadn’t moved. I ran up the stairs, feeling victorious. The sense of elation lasted until I crossed the penis-poster on my way back and inadvertently looked at it again. Still grimacing, I stepped back into my room, set a timer for the laundry, put some music on, and took a nap. I woke with the timer ringing next to my ear. I reached out and shut it off. Blinking uncomfortably, I put on my shoes, grabbed my wallet, and set out, once again, for the laundry room. This time I exited the hallway the other way. I ran down the stairs, taking two at a time, to the basement. I paused a moment before entering the laundry room, but then pulled open the door and walked in. The bat hadn’t moved, but its eyes were still on me. I tried to ignore it and took my wet clothes out of the washer. I then turned to transfer my clothes to the dryers: There were two stacked on top of each other in the corner of the room. The tiny screen showed the time left in blue electronic digits. One of the dryers still had 30 minutes left, but the other showed zero minutes left: It was empty. I opened the door of the idle dryer and found that it was, in fact, not empty. The clothes in the dryer looked laundered, and I assumed their owner would be coming soon to collect them. I decided to wait. Five minutes passed. Then 10. Fifteen minutes later no one had come to claim the clothes; I
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decided to take matters into my own hands. I opened the dryer door, plunged both my hands into the void, and tugged. I found my arms full of wet clothes. Surprised at the dampness, I reflexively threw the clothes, and they landed on top of one of the washing machines. Well, most of them anyway. After picking up the pair of socks and vest that had fallen on the floor—and had been sullied—I returned to the dryer and pulled out the remaining clothes more carefully. If you have yet to experience the sheer exhilaration of removing another person’s clothes—from the dryer—let me describe the process: The way I transferred clothes from the dryer was similar to how I ate meals when I was young. As a kid I would push the vegetables to the corner of the plate; I pushed the underwear to the back of the dryer. Having removed every other article of clothing, I hesitated, just like young me would pause after eating everything else. What we were both doing in those moments
of delay was waiting to be saved. And between the ages of six and 10, what I was really doing was waiting for Superman. I imagined him breaking through the dining room wall, a blur of red and blue, and, with his eye-lasers turning the vegetables in my plate into ashes, flying off before Mom could catch him. I had stopped believing in superheroes, but the idea of turning the offending underwear into a pile of dust was tempting. Instead of waiting for a hero, however, I settled for waiting for the damn fool who’d forgotten his laundry to come and get it. As I waited, I tried not to look at the Hanes classic white underwear that were still in the dryer. My eyes wandered around the laundry room and fell upon the bat— for a moment I’d forgotten about it. It didn’t seem so sinister now. I idly wondered if it too was waiting for Superman. And then, as its eyes turned on me, a terrifying thought: Did it think that was me? I felt a frisson
of fear and the hair on my arms prickled. I turned back to the dryer, but could still feel its presence. I could take it no longer, and I stepped outside the laundry room. In the dim light of the basement, I thought I couldn’t let the bat just die, trapped underground, in a building. I went in search for my CA. He wasn’t in his room or the kitchen. I then went to the custodian’s room, on the other side of the building, and knocked on the metal door till my knuckles hurt. There was no response. I dialed EMS but cut the call when the ring started going. I returned to the laundry room. The underwear in the dryer and the laundered clothes were gone, but the bat was still there. I put my wet clothes into the dryer and started it. The machine’s vibrations shook the room. I leaned against a washer and looked at the bat from the corner of my eye. I knew I was too scared to pick it up and take it outside. It could bite—I was afraid of
that and of catching some disease. Unable to help and unable to leave, I stood there in the laundry room with the whirring of the dryer in the background. And I thought about my day. Looking back on the poster, I admitted to myself what I had already known: Connor probably wouldn’t mind it at all. Heck, I wanted someone to make me a poster like that, perhaps without— or, honestly, even with… Next, I thought about my friend leaving and worried that other friends would suddenly disappear too. I looked at the bat, caught, all alone: this and other fears of loneliness. And in a dark room, with a dying bat that I couldn’t save, I thought that I wasn’t the friend or the lover or the hero that anyone wanted me to be, but I wasn’t done trying. Illustration by Yidi Wu
a quarter-life crisis
falling short of zooey deschanel
REBECCA ELLIS lifestyle section editor At 4:48 p.m. on November 7, 2015, I was pushed into my 20s. I’d always had a clearly defined image of what this would mean. Older, wiser, able to work a stove, at 20 I wouldn’t have everything figured out, but I’d have the important things—job, boyfriend, stocked refrigerator. I’d have been through two serious relationships and gained proficiency at the art of email writing. Think Jess in New Girl— quirky, but with direction. But now, without quirk, without direction, I’ve been booted into my third decade. I’m officially 20 and unsure how I got here. A few months ago, when I was still safely in the realm of 19, I went out and drank four too many one-dollar beers. I then came home and, as I do every night, FaceTimed with my boyfriend Sammy who goes to school in Boston. “Come down right now,” I told him. Now meant 3:09 a.m. “Just do it, it’ll be fun.” He, being sober and sane, declined my invite. But the beer had shown me the way. I knew what must be done. “No, it’ll be fine. I’m going to order you an Uber,” I insisted. And in a stunning display of monetary indifference, I opened the app and dropped the pin right outside his dorm door on 21 Dewolfe Street without so much as asking twice. I did, however, have the presence of mind to split the fare. And with Sammy on his way, being handdelivered by a man named Young in a grey Subaru, I did what people do at 3 a.m. and fell asleep. That is, until I woke up two hours later to a policeman trailing Sammy into my room. As it turns out, I had forgotten to set an alarm and, in a deep alcohol-induced slumber, had slept through my phone ringing 32 times trying to alert me that I needed to open the front door. But it was all okay, because luckily a policeman had been paroling Pembroke that night and was nice enough to swipe a strange man from Boston into the dorm, something I only questioned much later.
Sammy and I had a nice two-hour chat, and then he went back to the station at 7 a.m. He had a morning class. This is not a scene from a sitcom. It’s a real-life Sunday night in which I became probably the sixth person ever to utilize Uber’s Boston to Providence flat rate, forced my boyfriend to throw rocks at my window from 4:12 to 5:15 a.m., and deactivated the Uber app on my phone. Out of that September night, I got a good story, a sad boyfriend, and a sadder state of affairs. I know I was drunk, but I also know the underlying issues that prompted my Uber request were still there the next morning. In the moment, I didn’t care about charging a pricey Uber to my parents’ account. I wasn’t responsible enough to keep myself awake so I could let Sammy in. I demanded that I get what I wanted when I wanted it, despite the fact that what I wanted was already tucked into bed in a different state, with a 10 a.m. the next morning. These are not the acts of a 20-year-old. But at the time, I was a teen. I didn’t think twice about calling that Uber, just like I still pretend my mom is going to clean my room as I let the dirty tea mugs pile up until I have to haul them to the kitchen in shifts every Sunday. I’m a high-school girl living in a college world. But now I’ve reached the age of Mary Shelley when she wrote “Frankenstein” and Jane Austen when she wrote “Pride and Prejudice.” Bill Gates founded Microsoft at 20; the only thing I’ve found is dirty teacups. But even if I’m not trying to be on a “20 Under 20” list, I’ve still entered the decade in which I will start my adult life. I’m six years from the average child-bearing age, seven years from the average marriage age, and only two years from when I will apply to my first job. I don’t know what my major is. My room looks like the inside of a dishwasher. And the other month, I dropped a not-insignificant amount of money for the hand-delivery of a human. Is it time to get my life together? Probably. I’m now in the decade in which my brain will stop changing. I have five more
years to make any finals touch-ups to my synapses before I’m stuck with them. These finishing touches depend entirely on the way I use my brain. Striving for the shape that’s best for you, the brain will cut off any pathways its owner doesn’t take advantage of and dig grooves into the pathways they use most. Not a big crier? Snip go some of the more emotional neurons. Ambitious? Let the brain just wear down your reward processing path a little more. But you only have until 25 to make your adjustments. After that your customized brain is the only brain for you. Aside from maybe intensifying certain grooves in my anxiety-producing pathways over the next few years of Brown, I have arrived at 20 with the same brain I’ll have when I’m reaching 30 and filling out my I-9 forms, and then 40 and weighing middleschool options for my kids, and then 50 and well on my way to my next midlife crisis. In fear of forever being a hard-wired adolescent, incapable of performing any of the tasks above, I’ve taken some precautions in the past few months. I recently wrote down all of my passwords and important numbers on a sticky on my computer, so I would stop having to create a new password each time I log onto something. I trained myself to put my ID back in my wallet each time I take it out, so I’ll stop losing it. I regularly check my bank balance, so my credit card hasn’t bounced for a bit. That’s been nice. And maybe this is enough for now. Being in your 20s no longer means what it used to mean. Young people are taking longer to reach adulthood. If I have to hang my Brown diploma in my childhood home, I’ll only barely be a minority. Forty percent of 20-year-olds move back with their parents at least once. In 1960, 77 percent of women had finished school, become financially independent, married, and had a child by the end of their 20s. Now it’s less than half. Thirty is no longer a deadline to be a fully formed person. So why should 20 feel like a deadline to stop being a child? I remember being at Thanksgiving as a
five-year-old and thinking my 10-year-old cousins were so grown up with their sparkly eyeshadow. And then I was in lower school and being intimidated by the fifth-graders who could walk alone down the stairwell. Then the eighth graders. Then the seniors. The college students. And now the 20-somethings. The only difference is now I’m a 20-something, and it still feels old. But I guess it’s also true we never feel our age. Fifty-year-olds are the most verbal about this, but I think it’s universally true. And maybe if I let go of my image of 20-somethings as slightly fresher Carries and Samanthas and actually think about what I thought it meant to be 20 five years ago, I’d feel okay. I have a boyfriend I love. I’ve found things I’m passionate about and have stopped pretending to be passionate about things I’m not. I have enough going on to justify keeping a calendar. At least on paper, I’m more 20 than teen. Ten years ago, I was 10 and slept in a princess-patterned bed. Ten years from now I don’t know where I’ll be sleeping, but I know I’ll be 30. I don’t want to remain at this age, halfbaked, forever paralyzed in the middle of child and adult, questioning whether or not I’ve been prematurely moved to the next level. So maybe it’s time to abide by the same motto as my pruning brain. Use it or lose it. Embrace my 20s or risk missing out on the age of exploration. Goodbye to my quarter-life crisis. Illustration by Soco Fernandez-Garcia
lifestyle
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time machine
which historical period would you live in? lifestyle section editors
If you could live in a different time period, which would you choose and why? “Honestly, I would say I would stay in the present. Because, a) technology. I don’t think I could live without running water and toilets and all those things. And b) being an Asian woman in America at any other time besides the present would be far worse than presently. So I’m okay staying here. It’s not perfect, but I’ll stay here for now.” - Aileen Frotten ‘16 “I would also pick the present, because of women’s rights honestly. I just think going back to pretty much any time, you risk being married off at the age of, like, 10. If I could be a man, maybe my answer would be different, but as a woman, I would pick now.” - Abby Sessions ‘16 “Well I would say the future. It also depends on where I would be in this time period. I think it’d be cool to live during the time of dinosaurs. But ideally I’d love to live on Mars in the future. But if not Mars in the future, I’d pick living with the dinosaurs. Because they’re both cool. I’d choose Mars or the Jurassic era because, quite frankly, I’m tired of all of the social and political bullshit that America has given people like me— namely, black people and other minorities—in any other time period.” - WH ‘16 “The Renaissance Period in Italy. Because I visited Italy over the summer and it was the most beautiful thing ever. And Florence was amazing. And I’ve also been watching this TV show about it, and I’d love to be around in that time.”
- Minoshka Narayan ‘18 “I would want to live in the late 1800s or early 1900s because I think the houses then were gorgeous.” - Emerson Wells ‘18
“I would live in the very distant future because I want all the technology from that time period.” - Jason Nadboy ‘17
“I would probably live in the late ’60s or early ’70s because I love soul music and funk, and I feel like that would be an awesome time to be alive.” - Madeleine Olson ‘18
“I would live during the 1970s, around then. I’m interested in biology, and there were a lot of interesting discoveries around then with DNA that have really shaped the way biology is done.” - Matthew Finn ‘18
“The thing is, I’ve had two time periods that I’ve always wanted to live in, and I don’t really know why… The early 20th century basically, and then the 1800s leading into the 1900s. And I really like flappers. So I guess kind of the earlier period, and then the ’20s.” - SS ‘17
“I think maybe the 18th century because then I could write letters with quill pens and rubber stamps and wax stamps, and it wouldn’t be a purely aesthetic thing. I do that present day, and I’m mocked. And, for medical reasons, I think I’ll keep it to just a visit.” - Ian Shank ‘16
“I think during the dot-com bubble, like late 1990s, when there was a lot happening with the internet, and websites, and web applications, because that’s kind of what led to the current state of technology and the rise of Silicon Valley, and I think that’s really fascinating. Either that, or just right now. There’s evidence of us making great progress in humanity with technology and everything, but there are also so many problems that have yet to be addressed in the world. For example, we’re moving forward with robots and artificial intelligence, but at the same time, we don’t yet have gender equality. So it’s like, different kinds of issues, different stages, and lots of problems to tackle.” - Julia Wu ‘17
“So I’d go to the 1800s. Not sure which part of the 1800s. But I think that was a time when a lot of things were changing, and I think it would be really cool to study philosophy at that time.” Sonny Kim ‘16
“The future. Because it would be cool.” Anonymous ‘16
“I would say mine’s the ’20s because of all the jazz music. I would have just loved to play in one of those groups.” - Erin Reifler ‘17 “I’ll go with the ’60s because I think there were a lot of exciting changes that were happening and new movements and ideas that people were experimenting with. I think it would be a really exciting time to be an artist and to be a musician.” - Jamie Meader ‘17 “I would want to live in a future that is hope-
fully not being dominated by robotic overlords. So in the future, but not too far into the future.” - Anonymous ‘19 “I think I’m glad living in the present. I’ve got some benefits of living in the current society and the chance to hopefully make a better future. JRM ‘19 “So I would either go back to the ’20s—but not the ’20s in America, the ’20s in Europe, like in the UK—just because I like the idea of the early 1900s and the ending of the Victorian era in the UK, but also kind of getting some of the flapper scene and the jazzy scene. If not that, then just like several centuries in the future because I’m a science geek and I want to see if we’ve managed space travel yet, because I’m a physics major and I wanna see what’s going on. Like, have we terraformed Mars yet? Have we found life elsewhere? So that’s the other side of me. The artist is like early 1900s, flapper era, dancer, then the physicist is like future and sci-fi.” - Michelle Miller ‘18 “I was thinking the 1940s back in India because my grandparents went through the entire freedom struggle when they were kids and I’ve heard stories from them which sound terrifying. But it would be, I guess, more personal if I could see it.” - Surbhi Madan ‘17 Illustration by Katie Cafaro
rigatoni bolognese
spending senior spring with food and friends
LOREN DOWD staff columnist There are certain life moments I’ve visualized as being distinctly adult: having my own apartment, throwing dinner parties, and relaxing in front of the TV with a glass of wine. My younger self, having absorbed too much Food Network and too many lifestyle magazines, waited eagerly for a “grown-up life,” full of these moments that would make me a classy and “successful” adult. Think Jenna from “13 Going on 30,” wishing for those “fun and flirty 30s.” It wasn’t quite that extreme, but you get the idea—I looked forward to entertaining friends and successfully cooking multi-course meals. While I’m still making that transition to adulthood—I may live in an off-campus apartment and pay rent, but I also love peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and occasionally watch “The Magic School Bus” on Netflix—I’m at a point where I can cook with friends, have potlucks, or throw dinner parties. My apartment may not have many matching dishes, but that doesn’t mean I can’t fulfill those dreams the cooking- and lifestyle-obsessed high school me had. I can’t pin-
point exactly why making multi-step meals with friends feels “adult” to me—perhaps it’s because I only ever made cookies or cupcakes with friends growing up, and there’s a certain amount of pride and achievement I associated with cooking meals for others. A few weeks ago, two friends and I set out to make Rigatoni with White Bolognese, a moderately easy to make but impressively flavored dish. Senior spring seems the time to ease myself into more adventurous cooking and spend quality time with friends. To combine the two, I’ve decided to start cooking together, having potlucks and throwing dinner parties. It is pretty difficult to experiment with recipes on a student’s schedule and budget, but I want to make it a priority. I miss the days of helping my mom cook dinner at home and experimenting with new scone recipes on the weekends. Though off meal plan and cooking for myself, I haven’t strayed too far from basic meals learned from home and friends. This was a chance to get back in the kitchen for real, not as a high school baker or rushed college student who needs dinner, but as the foodie I would like to believe I am. One of my friends concocted the plan, eager to create this pasta dish again after making it during winter break. With two kinds of meat that spend a good hour simmering in white wine, beef broth, and the liquid from rehydrated dried porcini mushrooms, this recipe became my new favorite pasta dish before we’d even finished making it. It is made like a Bolognese sauce with a dash of cream instead of a tomato sauce, and it is most definitely a comfort food. We stocked up on the
key ingredients—ground beef and pork sausage meat, dry white wine, porcini mushrooms, and rigatoni—and invited a third friend over to help us cook. Bolognese sauce originated in the city of Bologna in Northern Italy. A dish that is “alla Bolognese” is one that has a meat-based sauce, called a ragù. This was a food lesson for me; I have always assumed that Bolognese was the basic tomato and ground beef sauce I’ve often encountered at Italian restaurants and jars at the supermarket. It’s definitely more complicated than that when you go the traditional route, though, and I’ve now learned just how much work goes into creating the multi-layered deliciousness of the pasta dishes I love at restaurants. Though I eat pasta at least once a week, sauces are not my forte, unless you count adding tomato basil sauce from a jar to a pot of pasta. If I’m up to it, I’ll add some ground beef and sautéed veggies to spice it up. You can see, then, this dish was a big step up. With diced carrots and onions from Market Shares, we started the base of the sauce, leaving out the celery that we hadn’t been particularly interested in buying. Once the meat was added to the pan and was browned, three rounds of liquid were added, each one simmering down before the next could be poured in. This simmering stage is what makes this dish—the meat and sauce are infused with the flavors of the white wine, beef stock, and mushrooms. This process took much longer than the recipe made it seem, so we passed the time catching up on life, soaking and dicing the porcini mushrooms, and roasting some kohlrabi with parmesan to snack on. It was the kind of
quality time over meals that I miss now that I’m off meal plan. For the first few years of college, I looked forward to that time I had in the dining hall to chat and bond with friends over food. Getting back to that was soothing and delightful. After all the simmering, it needed a splash of cream before we mixed it with the pasta and served it up in big bowls topped with grated parmesan. Its initial taste reminded me of beef stroganoff, a dish my mom and I had experimented with together in my high school days. The White Bolognese was less creamy but had that full-bodied flavor from the browned meat and onions. It was nice to be relaxing and cooking with company again; the last time I’d had a chance was over the summer. My roommates and I are often in the kitchen together, but it’s hard to get into the cooking experience when you know there are books and papers that await once you’re done. Cooking is always pleasant to me, but especially this time where I got to spend quality time with two people I enjoyed while producing a giant pot of delicious food. I’ve resolved that there’s a reason food, friends, and family are always at the top of the list of things that are most important to me. I didn’t spend that evening of cooking and socializing thinking about the work I wasn’t doing or the miles-long task list I had; I focused on the amazing smells of a reducing wine sauce, the laughter and smiles of my friends, and the happiness of packing leftovers in a Tupperware to enjoy again. Younger me would have been so excited and proud. Illustration by Stephanie Zhou
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arts & culture
the delicate satire of south park buckle up, buckaroo
JOSHUA LU staff writer The appeal of “South Park” has long rested on its ability to take on current events with wit and irreverence, distilling big issues into easily digestible episodes that manage to make you both laugh and think a little. Among my favorite “South Park” episodes are the two-part “Go God Go” and “Go God Go XII,” which I watched with my mom sometime in middle school. “South Park” may be questionable family viewing, but I fondly remember nights like those regardless. The story starts with Cartman, too impatient to get his hands on a Nintendo Wii (again, this is from 10 years ago; feel old yet?), freezing himself in a snowstorm with the intention of thawing out when it’s released. He accidentally wakes up in the year 2546 to a world gone completely religion-free, and war rages between three separate atheist factions over which of their acronymic organization names is superior. In this case, the episodes satirized both religious extremism and the craze back then to get a Wii; it’s a bizarre mixture, but “South Park” is known for these bizarre mixtures. According to our good friend Wikipedia, satire is defined as a genre “in which vices, follies, abuses, and shortcomings are held up to ridicule, ideally with the intent of shaming individuals … or society itself, into improvement.” Series creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker likewise imbue their episodes with little messages about how badly the world operates, and in “Go God Go,” they mock religious extremism with the takeaway lesson that people can be assholes over atheism just as much as they can be assholes over religion. It’s kind of a “well, duh” message, and I doubt Stone and Parker really intended to teach much at all—when they take on
current events, they typically just say something mildly illuminating and throw in a fart joke or something. The humor always comes first; whatever agenda they might have does not distract from that fact. Strangely, Stone and Parker’s brand of satire has seen a resurgence in praise. A New York Times article from December of last year, titled “How South Park Perfectly Captures Our Era of Outrage,” extolled the latest season of “South Park” for its newfound ability to “make more complex arguments” on more complex issues. Indeed, season 19 of “South Park” deals with a motley of hotbutton issues: police violence (“Naughty Ninjas”), gentrification (“The City Part of Town”), illegal immigration (“Where My Country Gone?”), freedom of the press (“Truth and Advertising”), gun control (“PC Principal Final Justice”), and yaoi, or gay Japanese manga (“Tweek x Craig”). Caitlyn Jenner is a recurring character, and rarely does an episode go by without her gorily running over someone as a satire of society’s collective decision, in an effort to be more accepting towards marginalized groups, to ignore the fact that the real Jenner killed someone in a car accident. Like with the “Go God Go” episodes, the message—in this case, that it’s not okay to ignore Jenner’s crime just because we want to have positive attitudes towards people who are trans—isn’t particularly original regardless of whether you agree or disagree. Many of the other messages of “South Park” are similarly standard; for example, “Naughty Ninjas” demonstrated the disturbingly psychopathic nature of some police officers as well as society’s need for police officers, and “The City Part of Town” showed how the prosperity that gentrification brings often
further marginalizes members of the lower class. Maybe the Times’ analysis is a reflection of how deeply polarized the United States has become, where traditionally moderate ideas are now taken as novel and praiseworthy. The article is still a bit laughable, not only because the “complex” messages of “South Park” can be found in think pieces all over the internet, not only because “South Park” episodes have contained social messages for literal decades, but also because the last season’s intermittently aggressive agenda actually detracts from the show’s enjoyability. The main problem with Season 19 comes when the show lets its messages override the main purpose of a cartoon, which is to make its audience laugh. This is most evident in their season-long derision of “PC” (politically correct) culture, at the helm of which is the new character PC Principal, a stereotypical frat boy (read: white, cisgender, aggressively heterosexual) who combats microaggressions using verbal and physical violence. While it can be entertaining to see Cartman get pulverized for saying “spokesman” instead of “spokesperson” in the first episode, PC Principal’s mixture of extreme political correctness and bellicose nature (“Hypocrisy!” the show seems to scream every time he’s on screen) quickly grows tiring. Scenes that deal with PC culture oftentimes overextend into outright pedantry. Episode “Safe Space” is the worst offender, in which Butters is forced to filter through Twitter feeds and remove all of the negative comments. The premise is funny enough— it’s topical! It’s relevant! It ends up making fun of Demi Lovato and Vin Diesel! But the story gets bogged down with attempts to actively lecture the audience; towards the end, a caped comic book-esque character literally
named Reality interrupts a charity gala to berate the audience, saying, “We eat too much. We take our spoiled lives for granted. Feel a little bad about it sometimes,” in an effort to mock the idea of safe spaces. “I’m sorry the world isn’t one big liberal-arts college campus!” he even says, as if straight out of a Breitbart article. The episode ends with the townspeople publicly hanging him. Satire is a difficult genre, in part because the desire to imbue the episode with a lesson can detract from its humor. In “South Park,” its strongest forms follow Stone and Parker’s traditional formula of putting the humor at the forefront, not least because those episodes will have a larger reach and thus a higher chance of actually getting the message through. The Times article is then dubious in its praise of the season’s messages and ignorance of all its other elements; it even ends by extolling the episodes for “[prescribing] more conversation,” an adaptation of the idea of “starting a dialogue” which multiple episodes directly mock. “South Park” will hopefully not go down the road of “Safe Space,” despite what some critics may desire, and thankfully there’s evidence that Parker and Stone aren’t always lax on letting messages get in the way. At the end of one episode, “Where My Country Gone,” Kyle launches into a cheesy speech on what sorts of lessons the townspeople have learned for the past half an hour. When he realizes everyone is impatiently glaring at him, he backs down and lets the implicit message remain implicit. Illustration by Mary O’Connor
into the woods and out again the reality of the fairy-tale musical
ALICIA DEVOS copy chief The Stephen Sondheim musical “Into the Woods” debuted on Broadway in 1987 and won 10 Tony Awards. Twenty-seven years later in 2014, a film adaptation produced by Disney hit the big screen. “Into the Woods” begins with a number of different fairy-tale-esque stories that each require going—where else?—into the woods. Once in the woods, the characters meet and the plots intertwine, creating a new fantasy story. But the magic in this musical produces less happiness than might be expected: When the curtain falls, a typically fairy-tale ending is nowhere to be found, and the story’s true-tolife expressions resonate with the audience. The musical begins by immediately combining characters and plot elements from many known stories—Cinderella, Jack and his
Beanstalk, Rapunzel, Little Red Riding Hood, a witch and a curse, wishes and magic, princes and balls. But in the first act, this fairy-tale realm, though fractured, remains firmly rooted in the expected. Cinderella goes to the ball and finds her prince. The Baker and his wife break the curse and get a child. The witch wants, and gets, eternal youth and beauty. Jack steals riches from the giant at the top of the beanstalk. Typical fairy-tale endings, right? Perhaps, but the musical has just begun; this is only the first act. After intermission the plot delves into what happens after happily ever after. Cinderella’s royal life bores her. The Baker and his wife bicker. Jack yearns for the world in the clouds. Fairy-tale life turns into something that looks weirdly like … life.
And then, in the midst of these unsatisfying, supposedly happy endings, all hell breaks loose. A giant climbs down an accidental beanstalk and begins to wreak havoc on the kingdom below her large feet, searching for revenge. Realizing they must sacrifice someone, the characters repeatedly attempt to throw blame on each other, creating a seemingly endless cycle of pointing fingers. The audience’s preconceived notions of how certain characters would and should act are shattered as the characters exceed the bounds of their typical roles. During the mayhem, the land is demolished and a series of characters are killed, including Jack’s mother, Rapunzel, the Baker’s wife, the witch, and finally the giant. With this, the musical asks what blame really accomplishes other than
further destruction. Parents often read fairy tales to their children, so what better place than a fairy-tale musical for coming-of-age messages? Jack searches for adventure in the vast world. Red Riding Hood discovers things she never knew before. Characters change within the woods, an arena, a bubble removed from the day-to-day. But maybe that isn’t the best representation of what the woods are. Maybe instead of being a space separate from the real world, the woods encapsulate the musical’s most realistic depiction of the real world. After all, for characters who have a magic-filled existence, wouldn’t the real world—the world beyond fairy tales, the space the audience lives in—be a crazy place to visit? And that’s just what they experience inside
arts & culture the woods. Suddenly characters wonder about purpose and fulfillment and what is the right thing to do. At its core, “Into the Woods” offers a reflection of real life. The painstakingly fairy-tale façade creates a presentation that leaves audiences stunned. Against all expectations, the mythical world produces some decidedly un-mythical themes: Success and wish fulfillment do not necessarily equal happiness; people want to place blame when
bad things happen. Digging deeper uncovers a moral truth: People are not all good or all bad, as so often happens in fantasy worlds. Rather, everyone has some of both. The witch throws away her eternal youth and beauty, opting for death (or at least disappearance), when others don’t listen to the truths she spouts. The Baker’s wife has a brief affair with one of the princes. Justice and warranted happiness are rarities in the world of “Into the Woods.” What character really deserves punishment, blame, or a fairytale ending? Perhaps that is another theme, that just because something happens doesn’t mean the person deserves what happened. But the context of these messages provide the musical’s success. After all, people already know most of these truths to some extent. The first act’s simple fairy-tale pace creates a relaxing environment, letting viewers settle in to what they believe will be an easy, comfortable show. And then, right after the plot reaches its most straightforward moment, there is a pause—intermission—and a plunge into the disarray of
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reality. This sharp reversal shocks and surprises and makes the real content clearer and more salient. In the final musical number, characters yearn for what could have been. They realize that life continues even though people make mistakes. The song’s title “Children Will Listen” alludes to the great influence parents have on their offspring, but the lyrics touch on the reality that everyone has to grow up eventually. Continuing on this strain, the verses repeat the tune of an earlier song, “No One Is Alone,” which mentions that everyone—including parents—makes mistakes and that, though parents can guide their children, they cannot make their children’s decisions. As the show nears its musical conclusion, the characters almost seem content with—or at least resigned to—the show’s events, but the last words echo out into the audience: “I wish...” Illustration by Jenice Kim
return of the indies
a visit to providence’s books on the square
ANNE-MARIE KOMMERS staff writer As a bookworm growing up in Evanston, Illinois, my favorite store to visit was an obscure hole-in-the-wall called Bookman’s Alley. True to its name, it was located in an alleyway between Panera Bread and Saville Flowers. You had to follow the creaking wooden sign with a hand pointing down the alleyway to reach the entrance. Inside were thousands of old books, red velvet chairs, and display cases with Civil War uniforms and model ships. The owner, Roger Carlson, always sat behind the front desk with a book or magazine in his hands. I usually nodded hello, politely declined a bowl of dusty gumdrops, and then disappeared within the labyrinth of bookshelves. Most of the books were old and used, so it was fun to take out the volumes one by one to read the personal notes scrawled on the inside covers. “To Mary—Merry Christmas—Love, Santa. 1860.” “Happy Birthday, Roger.” “I hope you enjoy this as much as I did.” Then, in 2013, Bookman’s Alley closed after 33 years of business. Roger Carlson cited not only his age but also competition from online booksellers as the reasons for the store’s closing. Unfortunately, the store’s demise was part of a decades-long national trend of small book businesses closing in the face of competition from Amazon. As New York Times writer Francis X. Clines put it, independent bookstores suffered from “decades of trauma” as a result of “damage from bargain megastores, the ascension of the ebook and Amazon’s flash delivery of cut-rate reading.” Yet in recent years, independent bookstores have shown signs of coming back. According to the American Booksellers Association, the number of independent bookstores increased by 27 percent between 2009 and 2014. Surprisingly, an article from NPR claims that part of this revival comes from an increase in the stores’ popularity among younger people who have been brought up in the digital age. To find out more about independent bookstores in Providence, I spoke with Jennifer Kandarian, the manager of Books on the Square. I took a simple and pleasant walk east on Angell Street to reach the local indie’s green awnings in Wayland Square—an easy voyage for any Brown student. It’s a well-lit
store with a cozy red carpet, friendly shopkeepers, and colorful shelves that extend much farther back than the relatively small entrance would suggest. Kandarian told me a familiar story: Books on the Square experienced a decline in sales for many years. The original owners “gave up on it” in 2007 and put it up for sale. But unlike many other indies, Books on the Square was bought by a local family and managed to stay afloat. Part of the reason for the store’s revival was the neighborhood’s support. Most independent bookstores that have managed to stay afloat have done so because they have a loyal base of local customers. “We have people we see every other day,” said Kandarian. The store hosts story times, book clubs, and neighborhood association meetings. There is also a dog park forming near Waterman Street, and participants have meetings in the store. “With their dogs?” I asked. Nope, not with their dogs, but the owners can use Books on the Square as a meeting place. “For us, it’s all about being part of the neighborhood,” Kandarian said. This idea of “neighborliness” contrasts sharply with the atmosphere of bargain megastores. “If you go into a chain,” Kandarian said, “you might as well do self-checkout.” She thinks this is part of the reason the indies have been making a comeback. At first, she explained, people were enamored with the ability to buy all their books, CDs, and magazines in the same large chain, but eventually they missed the intimacy of the independent bookstores. There’s a certain level of warmth and care you can find at an independent bookstore that is absent at chains. Booksellers are fellow readers who can offer advice to a customer wondering what to read next or what to buy for a nephew. Kandarian explained that many independent bookstores like Books on the Square place what are called “shelf talkers” among the books. Booksellers write these small blurbs to recommend their favorite new reads. These “shelf talkers” can inspire shoppers to approach the people who work at the bookstore and ask for more details about a specific book they read. For example, Kandarian said, she recently fell in love with a little-known book called
“Did You Ever Have a Family?” by first-time author Bill Clegg. It begins with a tragedy where, she said, “Everybody’s dead.” The book can be a tough sell for people who are looking for lighter fare. But Kandarian explained, “It’s such a good book. The writing is just so amazing that my little shelf talker isn’t adequate to explain it.” Still, if people see that Kandarian wrote a shelf talker, she can speak with them further about the book and convince them that the tragedy is worth their time. “The book is more about the transition, and just about figuring out who you are,” she said. Kandarian also explained the bookselling process to me. There are the obvious daily tasks, like helping customers find what they want and setting up seasonal displays. The children’s and adults’ buyers order books in their respective categories and make recommendations for future purchases. Working at an independent bookstore allows for more autonomy than working for a larger chain like Barnes and Noble. “We work for a person,” not a corporation, Kandarian said. “We’re here because we want to be. Everyone here has a say in what we carry and about the displays.” The workers can simply decide to put up a display in the shop without having to obtain the approval of a corporation. Booksellers also receive advance reading copies of books about six months before they are published. It is the booksellers’ job to read these books so that, if they like them, they can recommend them to the public. As far as choosing which books and how many copies to order, Kandarian says, “It’s really difficult.” If there’s a particular author who always sells well, the bookstore workers can refer back to the last book’s sales from that author and order the corresponding number of books for their shelves. As for less famous authors, the judgments on the number of copies to order are more difficult. Booksellers read the book’s description and consider their store’s audience. “Do I think people who come in here, who come to this bookstore, will want this? Yes or no?” said Kandarian. For authors like David Sedaris, the answer is a resounding yes: Each time he releases a new book, Books on the Square sells about 150 copies. On the
other hand, books by Republican authors like Bill O’Reilly are not so popular in the area. “We generally sell one,” said Kandarian. I asked whether booksellers pay a lot of attention to a book’s cover. After all, as much as I hate to admit it, I tend to partly judge a book I am going to read by its cover. “To tell you the truth,” said Kandarian, “if something’s terrible… it’s because the company didn’t want to put the money into it.” Great books and great authors tend to be assigned to great graphic designers, she said. For example, the graphic designer Chip Kidd, a famous figure in the publishing world, always does the hardcover designs of Haruki Murakami’s books. The quality of the book cover can often reveal the quality of the writing behind it. At the end of our conversation, Kandarian directed me to the American Booksellers’ Association website, an organization encompassing nearly 2000 independent bookstores across the country. The site contains a helpful “Find Independent Bookstores” page so you can locate one wherever you are. As an independent bookstore, Books on the Square is a strong supporter of “shop local” initiatives. “Amazon doesn’t pay taxes. We pay taxes,” said Kandarian. Shopping at a bookstore is rather like shopping at a farmer’s market: You keep the money local. An infographic from the Huffington Post explains that spending $100 locally will put $68 back into the local economy; that number goes down to $48 when you shop at a big-box retailer. Buying locally is also more environmentally friendly because it involves less transportation. And of course, there’s the pure pleasure of walking into an independently owned store that reflects the personality of the booksellers and not a large corporation, whether it be Books on the Square or Bookman’s Alley with its dusty gumdrops. “People have realized that if they don’t support local businesses, they go away,” said Kandarian. “And then when you do want them, they’re not there.” Illustration by Clarisse Angkasa
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lifestyle
I should major in extracurriculars. They descend upon my cake like locusts. Africa tastes like porn? If that’s not what you said, then why is that what I heard? I get my information directly from the universe. Let me free your mind. Everything is fine, I am a piece of human trash, everything is fine. If you want to get into the rap game, are you ready to lose an eye?
hot post time machine
The decline of Western civilization can be individually credited to a number of people. Nicole Polizzi and Michael Sorrentino (along with the rest of the Jersey Shore cast). The producers of Teen Mom. Possibly the inventor of GoGurt. ke$haddiction -11/04/2010
topten
people we would nominate to the supreme court
1. obama 2. me #jobsearchover 3. the entire senate, because they can’t refuse to vote on themselves, right? 4. the supremes 5. lin-manuel miranda 6. michael jordan — he’s good on the court, right? 7. venus and serena williams. also good on courts. 8. elizabeth warren (please?) 9. an old-fashioned wooer of women (...a supreme court-er) 10. scrotie the scrotum
family dynamics events from a sunday night dinner CAITLIN MEUSER staff writer The spilled milk forms a three-headed and one-legged dog on the hardwood floor. White on distressed brown, while the distressed cries from Mother cause the milk to shift and shake. The dog has four tails and no head. The dog has one head and three legs. The dog has no body. The dog has only tails. The tails wag up and down to different beats against the broken glass. Father paces up and down and down and up, causing the glittering, splintering glass to jump and the dog’s tail to stutter until everything is jolting. He wants paper towels! He wants a broom! He wants a trashcan! So I run, run, run, but I forget that I am supposed to breathe too. I forget where we keep the broom, and the paper towels are gone. The trash bags are under the sink with the dish wash supplies, so I bring these to Father. But where are the paper towels? “Just use the damn washcloths,” he says. He yells. “No!” Mother has been paused, but now she is all motion. “I just washed them. You know I just washed them.” Mom’s accusatory “You” is usually directed at Father, but sometimes “You” is directed at me. I don’t know if “You” is
directed at me now, but I say I’m sorry anyway because people are screaming near me. They are screaming near me, but they may as well be screaming at me. The headless dog wags its two tails as I run by. The paper towels are in the bathroom under the sink with the nail polish remover that is leaking, leaking everywhere. My nose stings and eyes cloud, and my two most needed senses are gone. I am a leaking, crying mess. The world is water. And still there is screaming about the mop. The mop is behind the vacuum in the basement. The lights of the vacuums are eyes that blink and glare under the florescent glow of the overhead bulb. When my eyes rest on the center of the bulb, a black dot appears. The bulb has a pupil. The vacuum and the bulb stare at me. Their gazes swivel as I swivel, and I cannot escape them. I return as a crooked figure weighed down on my right side by a mop. It is a third appendage. “Can’t you move any faster?” This is Father. Mother is worrying about the new, distressed wood that the milk could, might, definitely is ruining, and he wants me to make her stop. My little sister cannot leave her kitchen chair because she
is barefoot and the floor is covered with shattered glass. Eight eyes watch me and wait. The dog has eyes too. The paper towels are in Father’s hands now because he told me I was taking too long. He rips out one portion, two, and then a third with jagged edges before shoving these new fragments back to me. “You’re wasting them. You know I just bought them.” This time Mom’s accusatory “You” is not directed at me, but Father doesn’t taken ownership of this accusation either. I stand with my ripped paper towels over the laughing dog with the watching eyes and the wagging tails that have grown to cover half the distressed floor. I could kneel to clean the spill, but my bony knees are bare and the shattered glass shines below. I don’t want to get blood on Mom’s new, distressed wood. I could drop the paper towels on the spill and use my feet to move the towels around, but Father calls that wrong. Wrong! Messy! Uncouth! He doesn’t really say uncouth, but I prefer that to the word he chooses. While I am standing and thinking and Mom is pacing and worrying and my little sister is sitting so quietly we all forget she exists, Father is taking action. He is taking action by ripping more sheets of paper towels and bending over to scrub at the distressed floor. The muscles in his arms twist and arch to show his effort. His effort was supposed to be my effort. Look at how he is straining himself for us. Look at how he works for us. His muscles are moving while I am, for once, still. “Always up to me, always me who ends up doing the work, always while you watch.” Father mutters, but it’s purposefully loud for us to hear. I apologize again because this time I know the yelling is at me, not just near me. The dog has one eye now. The dog has no tail and no body. The dog is just a head until it isn’t. Illustration by Emily Reif