The College Hill Independent Vol. 44 - Issue 2

THE INDY*

03 WE ARE NOT AN ‘I’ 07 LOVING UNDER THE SHADOW OF ZAOLIAN 09 A CONVERSATION WITH ELOISE

Volume 44 Issue 02 18 February 2022

THE SYMBIOTIC ISSUE

* The College Hill Independent

THE INDY* This Issue

Masthead*

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MANAGING EDITORS Ife Anyoku Sage Jennings Isaac McKenna Alisa Caira

STILLS FROM “ECO LOGICAL SYSTEM 01” Bridget DeFranco

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WEEK IN PETS Masha Breeze

WEEK IN REVIEW Masha Breeze Nora Mathews

WE ARE NOT AN I Julia Vaz

MONSTER JAM AT THE DUNK IS SUPERVISED AND CONTAINED Zach Braner

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WHAT WE TALK ABOUT WHEN WE TALK ABOUT “LOVE” Kathy Wang

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A CONVERSATION WITH ELOISE Ryan Chuang

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A-SIDE: PLAYING THE BUTTER NOTES BLOOD THAT IS A BUBBLIN’ BASS

BULLETIN BOARD Deb Marini Lily Pickett

Anabelle Johnston

THE PERFECT HUMAN

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ACROSTIC

X Soeun Bae

Lilan Yang

DEAR INDY Cecilia Barron

Natalie Neuert

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I LOVE MY MOM

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DEAR INDY

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BULLETIN

LITERARY Alyscia Batista Annie Stein

Camille Gros & Hannah-Rose Albinus

OUTREACH COORDINATOR Audrey Buhain

Cecilia Barron

DESIGN EDITORS Sam Stewart Anna Brinkhuis

SENIOR EDITORS Alana Baer Audrey Buhain Mara Cavallaro Anabelle Johnston Deb Marini Peder Schaefer STAFF WRITERS Hanna Aboueid Caroline Allen Zach Braner Rachel Carlson Lily Chahine Swetabh Changkakoti Danielle Emerson Osayuwamen Ede-Osifo Mariana Fajnzylber Edie Fine Ricardo Gomez Eli Gordon Eric Guo Charlotte Haq Billie McKelvie Charlie Mederios Bilal Memon Loughlin Neuert Alex Purdy Callie Rabinovitz Nick Roblee-Strauss Nell Salzman Peder Schafer Janek Schaller Koyla Shields Ella Spungen Alex Valenti Siqi ‘Kathy’ Wang Katherine Xiong COPY EDITORS Addie Allen Evangeline Bilger Klara Davidson-Schmich Megan Donohue Mack Ford Sarah Goldman Zoey Grant Alara Kalfazade Jasmine Li Abigail Lyss Tara Mandal Becca Martin-Welp Pilar McDonald Kabir Narayanan Eleanor Peters Angelina Rios-Galindo

COVER COORDINATOR Seoyoung Kim DESIGNERS Leah ‘El’ Boveda Briaanna Chiu Ophelia Duchesne-Malone Clara Epstein Elisa Kim Tanya Qu Emily Tom Floria Tsui WEB DESIGN Lucas Gelfond ILLUSTRATION EDITOR Hannah Park ILLUSTRATORS Sylvie Bartusek Ashley Castaneda Hannah Chang Claire Chasse Michelle Ding Rosie Dinsmore Quinn Erickson Lillyanne Fisher Sophie Foulkes John Gendron Amonda Kallenbach Joshua Koolik Lucy Lebowitz Olivia Lunger Tom Manto Sarosh Nadeem Kenney Nguyen Izzy Roth-Dishy Lola Simon Livia Weiner GAME MAKERS Loughlin Neuert Maya Polsky WRITING FELLOW Chong Jing ‘CJ’ Gan MVP Natalie Neuert — The College Hill Independent is printed

by TCI in Seekonk, Massachusets.

*Our Beloved Staff

Mission Statement

From the Editors Some thoughts on time:

The seasons seem unsure of when they are.

Just look outside: last week, Spring peeked in and then leapt away just as quickly, making way for Winter’s heavy steps.

Yiyun Li wrote: “Our memories tell more about now than then.”

She also wrote: “Time will tell, people say, as though time always has the last word.”

Time is the sifting sand, the fading knell, the retracting tide.

Today I was listening to the non-fiction writing podcast Longform—author Chuck Klosterman was riffing on spending time with his kids during lockdown. He loves them, of course, but he also talks about how hanging out with children is sometimes, well, boring.

“They’re trying to go to sleep, and they need someone to hold their hand forever, and you’re just sitting there, and it’s taking a long time, and you’re thinking of all the things you want to do,” he said.

But in those situations he tells himself, “actually you moved back in time.

You’re actually 97 and you’re dying. And they gave you access to a time machine and you came back here—to remember this.”

-SMS

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

ARTS Jenna Cooley Justin Scheer Arden Shostack

SCIENCE + TECH Rhythm Rastogi Jane Wang

FIELD NOTES FROM THE FUTURE OF THE INTERNET

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NEWS Anushka Kataruka Nicole Kim Priyanka Mahat

METRO Jack Doughty Nélari Figueroa Torres Rose Houglet Sacha Sloan

Jackson Delea

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FEATURES Anabelle Johnston Corinne Leong Amelia Wyckoff

EPHEMERA Chloe Chen Ayca Ulgen

Kenneth Bradley

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Volume 44 Issue 02 18 February 2022

The College Hill Independent is a Providence-based publication written, illustrated, designed, and edited by students from Brown University and the Rhode Island School of Design. Our paper is distributed throughout the East Side, Downtown, and online. The Indy also functions as an open, leftist, consciousness-raising workshop for writers and artists, and from this collaborative space we publish 20 pages of politically-engaged and thoughtful content once a week. We want to create work that is generative for and accountable to the Providence community—a commitment that needs consistent and persistent attention.

While the Indy is predominantly financed by Brown, we independently fundraise to support a stipend program to compensate staff who need financial support, which the University refuses to provide. Beyond making both the spaces we occupy and the creation process more accessible, we must also work to make our writing legible and relevant to our readers.

The Indy strives to disrupt dominant narratives of power. We reject content that perpetuates homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, misogyny, ableism and/or classism. We aim to produce work that is abolitionist, anti-racist, anti-capitalist, and anti-imperialist, and we want to generate spaces for radical thought, care, and futures.

Though these lists are not exhaustive, we challenge each other to be intentional and selfcritical within and beyond the workshop setting, and to find beauty and sustenance in creating and working together.

WEEK IN REVIEW

Week in Pets 10 things I would have done this week if I weren’t so busy taking care of The Creature If you’re a college student with a pet, like me, you know that our fuzzy friends can be… a bit of a handful. Between feeding, washing, clothing, deworming, and making offerings to The Creature in my basement, I haven’t had much time for my hobbies these past few weeks. Here are ten things I would’ve done this week if I had a few more hours to spare:

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Networked with my peers! I love nothing more than to reach out to my fellow students and ask them if they would like to “get coffee sometime.” Social interaction is something I personally enjoy, and connecting with my classmates may lead to exciting job opportunities in the future. Too bad I have to tend to The Creature’s ever-growing hunger!

Engaged in slur discourse on TikTok! Social media is a great way to keep in touch with friends, stay on top of the latest trends, and engage in mind-numbing debate with other queer leftists about who’s allowed to say the f-slur. My opinion on this topic as a trans woman (you can say it if you’ve never stepped foot in a Long John Silver’s) would have probably solved the whole dang thing, but we’ll never know, because I was distracted by the unearthly moans of The Creature.

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Gotten my morning coffee on! Nothing better than some good good java in the wee hours to slake my thirst and get the wake-up grumpies out.

All my fellow pet owners know the agony of sacrificing your daily sojourn to Blue State because The Creature has separation anxiety and an insatiable appetite for human misery.

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Finished my NFT! I don’t really know what an NFT is, but I could have figured out if I wasn’t so busy buying materials at 10 different Home Depots with non-sequential bills so The Creature can build its Device. This is all I was able to draw

Met my basic survival needs! I would have loved to drink a sip of water or eat even the most meager of gruels this week, but no siree!

I can’t leave the house to buy the meanest morsel of a cruciferous vegetable—you know what they say, when The Steward’s gone, The Creature will spawn!

Contacted my family! If you’re anything like me, your mom worries when you abruptly cease all contact with her and all other family members and refuse to answer their prying questions. “Masha, why don’t you call me? Masha, why did you change your major to an independent concentration in ‘The Devouring?’ Masha, since when do you have domain over leeches?” and so on. Yeesh! Don’t they know there’s so much work to be done and so little time before The Smiling Ones arrive?

Kept up with the rigorous demands of my romantic life! Boy oh boy am I in a pickle now—everyone wants to get with me! I ghosted this guy who I really might have had a shot with—if you’re reading this, sorry Rashid. Total freshman move, am I right Brunonians?

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Applied for an unpaid internship in my chosen field of study! Working for free with experts in the industry?

Running for coffee through the daily hustle and bustle of New York City? Living in the part of Bushwick they call the “Person District?” Sign me up! *sigh* Oh, well.

Maybe next semester :/

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ILLUSTRATION IZZY ROTH-DISHY

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DESIGN FLORIA TSUI

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Explored the root cellar in the old Gourdman place on Beege Street! We all know the old Gourdman place is a spooky, kooky landmark beloved by Providence locals and tweens and teens alike. Who knows what hilarious hijinks might have transpired had I followed through on my plan to check out the root cellar last Thursday! Sadly for me, I double booked this plan with The Creature’s weekly unfurling, so I had to cancel.

TEXT MASHA BREEZE

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Developed GIRDLE, a WORDLE alternative for girls! It is my dream to create fun games exclusively for powerful women, because we SheEO’s need to have fun, too!

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METRO ILLUSTRATION SOPHIE FOULKES DESIGN BRIAANNA CHIU TEXT JULIA VAZ 03

WE ARE NOT AN ‘I’ How COVID policies have sanctioned the death of disabled people and advanced individualism in the midst of isolation.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

METRO

On January 7th, during an interview with Good Morning America, CDC director Dr. Rochelle Walensky praised the success of COVID vaccines in preventing serious illnesses. “The overwhelming number of deaths—over 75 percent—occurred in people who had at least four comorbidities,” she said. “So really these are people who were unwell to begin with—and, yes, really encouraging news in the context of Omicron.”

The ease with which she called the deaths of those with comorbidities “encouraging” reveals the ableist nature of public health policies in the wake of COVID. Providence County alone registered more than 2,400 deaths since the beginning of the pandemic and one in three people of its population have contracted COVID. While the whole country is experiencing declining COVID numbers, the CDC still classifies the virus as highly transmissible in Rhode Island. But those numbers do not reveal the disproportionate toll on Black, Indigenous, Latinx and disabled communities. Those groups are up to two times more likely to develop many of the health conditions––or comorbidities––that increase the risk of hospitalization and death due to COVID. This moment illuminates the countless ways federal and local guidelines have failed the communities that need the most support. It is also a testimony of our own complicity. +++ Disregard for disabled lives is not a new issue.

It is embedded in history (think Social Darwinism and “survival of the fittest”), in the way we organize and understand the values of capitalistic society. But, with COVID, we are being fed a daily narrative that denies disabled people the right to survive. “Comorbidities” are statistics.

Numbers are used as an excuse for able-bodied, affluent individuals to return to their pre-pandemic lifestyles.

As we wake up and check our emails for the New York Times’s newest report on COVID––the updated policies, number of infections, and deaths––we find the data relevant to one reality and one reality only: able-bodied and affluent.

The privilege of fitting into a system which is only concerned with this reality means a complete abandonment of communal commitment.

Mia Mingus, a “writer, educator and trainer for transformative justice and disability justice,” narrates her “disabled rage” in her blog Leaving Evidence. Her most recent piece “You Are Not Entitled To Our Deaths: COVID, Abled Supremacy & Interdependence” addresses how the individualism associated with COVID policies has

been detrimental to vulnerable communities.

“You enjoy connection at the expense of our isolation,” she writes. The truth behind national responses to COVID is that they were never concerned with protecting those at higher risk.

The state has always been “more committed to churning out profit and privileged comfort with eugenic abandonment.”

It is this structural abled supremacy that contributed to the COVID policies and discourse that we take as measures for the “common good.” The relaxation of COVID restrictions, even in light of the Omicron surge, has meant that vaccines are optional; in-person gatherings, just as non-essential travel, have become endemic; people are being forced back to work; and even masks are starting to become optional. Our policies should stress our interdependence, but instead have only accentuated our divide. +++ Amanda Votta, a PhD student in the Department of Anthropology at Brown University, who is immunocompromised, has recently narrated her emotional response to the pandemic in an email to the College Hill Independent. While Votta was glad that a lockdown was quickly established, she always identified the ableist nature of the mainstream narrative. “I’m thinking of early COVID triage policies that would have classed people like me as having a lesser quality of life, being more likely to be severely ill, and if we do recover, we suffer permanent damage and further disability…We’d be more likely to die, which is a phrase that’s haunted me throughout the pandemic. And it’s true. We are more likely to die,” Votta wrote.

In Rhode Island, the local government and private sector have also contributed to the sanctioning of disabled lives as “disposable.” In January, the Eleanor Slater Hospital in Cranston, a state-run psychiatric facility, reported an outbreak of COVID cases after asymptomatic staff were called into work due to labor shortages.

From roughly 200 patients, 28 were confirmed as infected. Understaffing is, undeniably, a serious problem, but calling sick people to work and exposing those who have no choice, those who receive less care and yet are more likely to die, is not a plan. It is a sentence. +++ Stefanie Lyn Kaufman-Mthimkhulu, Director of Project LETS, a national grassroots organization “for folks with lived experience of mental

illness/madness, disability, trauma, & neurodivergence,” addressed the eugenics behind cases like Slater Hospital in an email to the College Hill Independent. “There is nowhere to run when they bring COVID to your cage. Confined and incarcerated people have been forced to endure inhumane conditions (having their visitation stripped, no masks, cannot go outside) — yet are at the mercy of staff and administrators and systems who find our lives to be completely disposable and decide which risks they are okay with,” they wrote.

While the Department of Behavioral Healthcare, Developmental Disabilities and Hospitals have claimed the outbreak to be unrelated to the staff, the decision to bring contagious employees into a space with high risk, disabled patients is itself a problem. The fact that the hospital reported itself as compliant with CDC guidelines exacerbates the issue. The marginalization and dehumanization of disabled people arises from the same system by which COVID policies were manufactured and put into effect.

On February 9th, Governor McKee officially announced the end of indoor mask mandates for the state. The policy comes as a response to cases having been down 94% since January. The Governor emphasized “personal responsibility” as we progress through the pandemic. Here, as Mingus noted, we continue to deny our interdependence, knowingly gambling with peoples’ lives. “ The longer COVID is allowed to circulate within a community, the more chance it has to mutate and spur a new variant. We cannot keep risking collective safety for individual indulgence. We cannot keep sacrificing long term needs for short term wants,” she writes. +++ On Brown University’s campus, the administration’s handling of the pandemic is also rooted in ableist negligence. In January, Brown shared its health and safety plan for the start of the new Spring semester, in which it decided to maintain vaccination, boosters, and indoor mask requirements, but changed its testing procedures.

Presently, students are required to take rapid antigen tests two times a week and report any positive results. Students are also required to isolate for at least five days in case of infection.

Despite the lengthy outline of various measures, students, faculty, and workers with disabilities are not mentioned once in the guidelines.

As an immunocompromised member of the Brown community, Votta was particularly affected by having her existence erased from official communications. “When I decide to go to the

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METRO DESIGN BRIAANNA CHIU TEXT JULIA VAZ 05

pharmacy, or to get a book, or maybe pick up a coffee, and I see that barely anyone is wearing masks, I end up leaving without doing whatever I came there for. I can’t feel safe in an environment like that because of the risk to my health,” she wrote. By relying solely on self-reported test results, Brown is no longer capable of providing trustworthy information on COVID data, which means that members of the University receive no support when attempting to make informed decisions.

In this state of uncertainty, disabled members of the Brown community are made to question the validity of their own reality. As COVID policies push for a return to “normalcy” and moments of “reconnection,” being concerned for your health has become a marginalizing mindset. For Evan Dong ‘22, Co-Coordinator of Project LETS@Brown, the gaslighting of disabled people is one of the main issues of the present environment on campus and beyond. “Culture and policy are always intertwined,” they highlighted when analyzing the expectations to attend in-person classes, take part in events, and socialize regularly. By denying individuals the right to grieve and heal in communion, the new stage of the pandemic has forced people to exist within pain alone. More importantly, it has furthered a culture that segregates those who are emotionally struggling and treats collective anxieties as individual concerns.

“We want to believe the problem is located inside of individual people’s bodies, so we can fix and treat individuals, with therapy and medications. But the truth is COVID highlighted an existing social, political, and economic crisis which is creating and increasing people’s mental distress and capacity to withstand it,” wrote Kaufman-Mthimkhulu.

On the other hand, Dong also brings attention to the fact that Brown’s approach to COVID has always mirrored that of the United States. Nationally, the norm has been to give up. Struggling to incentivise collective action from the beginning of the pandemic, the federal government has left states, counties, cities and individuals to their own devices. Many students, after recognising that trend in the United States, expected that Brown would use its resources and privileged position within Rhode Island to encourage responsibility and empathy. “Brown University always had a privileged position in terms of access to tests and masks that the larger Providence community doesn’t have,” said Dong. Yet, instead of using its influence to advance a project of community care and inclusion, Brown decided to propagate the predominant ableist narrative. The message Brown

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

seems to put forward is that it will remain an institution committed to protecting affluence and hierarchies.

We talk of COVID as a disease to ‘get used to,’ and the deaths of those with comorbidities as ‘a necessary evil’ towards herd immunity, but for the disabled community, COVID is still a fearful reality, an unending nightmare they have been told to fight alone.

“If anything, it seems we need to acknowledge that COVID is something we’ll be living with for a long time and we need to act accordingly,” writes Votta. “Rather than being tired of the pandemic and deciding to ignore it, we should be planning how to handle future, possibly more severe variants. But we aren’t, which will make things much worse if we do see a mutation that’s worse than Omicron. At this point, I don’t know when it’ll be truly safe for people with immunity issues.”

Capitalism has always been a system content with the suffering of others. Living in the current political conjuncture, if not always, has meant accepting that some must struggle to support bourgeois lifestyles. Those unable to produce or participate in a chain of labor are cut off from spaces of communal interaction.

COVID seems to have illuminated just how far we have strayed from one another. Currently, the question of “What is community?” has left Votta without an easy answer. “I can look to mutual aid networks and say that’s community, or the way chronically ill and disabled people support one another through social media and say that’s community. A community like this relies just on people who are themselves already overextended to support others who are struggling.” +++ During my research I came across The Pandemic Journaling Project. Created by Sarah S. Willen and Brown Professor Katherine A. Mason, the project offers a space for people to share their stories during the pandemic.”Usually, history is written only by the powerful. When the history of COVID-19 is written, let’s make sure that doesn’t happen,” the website reads. Scrolling through the entries, a very different picture of the pandemic is formed. For the first time since COVID became a reality, I encountered genuine human responses. Filled with sadness, anxiety, hope, bewilderment, self-discovery, and light, the entries are a search precisely for what we lack most: connection, empathy, understanding.

For LETS@Brown, like The Pandemic Journaling Project, creating a space for community

and validating the anxieties of students has also been one of their main goals throughout the pandemic. “We can not rely on the institutions alone to support us,” said Dong. “Obviously we speak up, but a lot of this is about protecting our community, being together, and recognising we will have to weather the storm because ableism has been around for this whole pandemic.”

Nationally, Kaufman-Mthimkhulu reports, as the pandemic continues to illuminate the violent, negligent apparatus intrinsic to our society, we will increasingly need to recognize that people must turn to each other for healing, that help from the top is not coming. “I think a lot of people have recognized, or are starting to recognize, that it is critical to develop our skills to support people ourselves. Marginalized people have always been doing this, we have always known we cannot rely on the state,” she wrote. LETS appears to be part of a larger discussion of how to create systems of organizing based on love and kinship instead of production and self-sufficiency. Working towards healing and freedom, LETS has adapted to provide peer support sessions, safety planning sections and even help to release individuals trapped in state confinement. “We affirm every day that Disabled Lives are Worthy… We will not die in silence,” they wrote.

I think of the photograph Mia Mingus chose to accompany her piece. The white pieces of ice melting away from the iceberg. I think of the passivity with which we watch them slowly disappear in the dark blue sea. And yet, soon there will be no ice keeping us afloat.

We are made of multitudes. Losing some is losing the whole.

JULIA VAZ B’25 really needs to start calling herself a writer.

FEATS

MONSTER JAM AT

THE DUNK IS SUPERVISED AND CONTAINED But that doesn’t mean it’s no fun

Veteran driver Chad Tingler has competed in Monster Jams for 20 years, won a world championship, and traveled all over the map.

But don’t for a second think he’s lost any of the inner fire these drivers need to push their trucks to the limit:

digest him—a man who answered the question “What’s something a lot of people might not know about you” with “That might be too much to list”—so long as Chad Tingler’s driving, I’ll be watching Monster Jam for a different sort of cool.

ZACH BRANER B’23 will be driving Fibula Smasher, until an unforeseeable career-ending injury in 2068.

DESIGN ANNA BRINKHUIS ILLUSTRATION SYLVIE BARTUSEK

Chad Tingler’s signature truck for the bulk of his career was Grave Digger—the biggest legend in the game and the pride of the Anderson monster truck family dynasty. I had a Grave Digger Hot Wheel toy when I was little. It was black and green. But this year, Chad Tingler is driving Stone Crusher, and there’s an orange caveman emblazoned across the chest of his racing suit.

It seems to have lifted his spirits: he at least turns his head to check the score as he walks off the track.

Scores in Monster Jam are now decided by the audience: for 20 seconds after each event you can swipe up or down on your phone to judge the truck’s performance, and they’ll take the average out of 10 to three decimal points.

Young hotshots like Coty Saucier or Armando Castro will lean out of their trucks and throw up their arms after their events, rallying the audience to their favor. Weston Anderson sticks his steering wheel out the window during the donut challenge, which always draws a big cheer. Chad Tingler takes his helmet off–it’s not easy–and breathes. His racing suit’s too tight.

The announcers say he’s brought his daughter on tour with him this year.

Monster Jam at the Dunk is, like Barcelona in the spring, a place of contrasts: specifically, the contrast between average stadium noise and the deafening, brainstem-bubbling bellow of the trucks. “Because it’s annoying and loud and awesome,” Steve the laughing twenty-something tells me when I ask why he’s here. This is his first night out with his wife since they had twins last year, which makes me wonder at their appetite for noise. But after a minute, I understand. The roar of Monster Jam is special: so senseless and so complete it induces a sort of meditative awe. No need to empty your mind— you cannot possibly have a thought. You sit, eat salty peanuts that cost $10, and watch the trucks rage, content.

Armando Castro wins tonight. For 10 seconds that felt like 10 minutes he held El Toro Loco on its front two wheels, eyes facing the dirt as he wheelied backwards up a steep ramp. But Brianna Mahon wins the audience’s heart with an audacious backflip while hopelessly behind.

Monster Jam does not trust these feats to keep you entertained. There’s instant slow-motion replay, running commentary that exhausts its four stock phrases immediately, and postevent interviews where the host jogs over to the winning truck to ask the driver what could have been going through their mind 40 seconds ago.

It seems designed to convince you that none of it actually happened, that you didn’t just see a cartoonishly big truck soar 30 feet through the air with your own eyes, or if you did you’ll need this instant media coverage to help process the ordeal.

All of this filler is tolerable, for the sake of the Noise.

Coty Saucier drives Dragon, the current points leader and undisputed favorite with the kids, Monster Jam’s most important audience.

Most of the other trucks, except Grave Digger, are missing sections of their body, leaving the brutal engineering underneath exposed to view.

Dragon is immaculate: a sculpted dragon’s head streaked with flames covers its chassis, freshly painted in shimmering green. After an early win, Saucier exults: “I love racing because you either win, or you lose. You stay, or you go home. You’re cool, or you’re not cool.” He turns to the crowd: “Are we cool?” The arena, twothirds full, gives a lukewarm yes.

Saucier may be right. But so long as the stout middle-aged man from “The Warehouse Capital of the US” keeps putting himself behind the wheel, launching himself off ramps in a device that moves like a panicked animal trying to

TEXT ZACH BRANER

[Actual excerpt from Chad Tingler interview] What’s your most prized possession?

I don’t really have, like, one specific thing.

What’s your favorite city to visit on the road? Why? I don’t have a favorite.

Do you have any nicknames?

No. What’s your favorite color?

Orange.

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TEXT KATHY WANG

DESIGN CLARA EPSTEIN

ILLUSTRATION ANNA WANG

FEATS

What We Talk About When Loving under the shadow We Talk About “Love” of 早恋 “Zaolian”

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I. I remember holding my burning phone with sticky hands and waiting for his texts, kneeling beside a power outlet in the corner of a hotel room, shrouded in complete darkness, the carpet polyester imprinting my skin. It was seventh grade winter break; we traded words not of friends. He was my first real crush. The screen’s LED light pierced my eyes and carved his words into me because I was too afraid to hold onto them myself. February wind blew outside the glass window, and I could hear nothing but sweaty heartbeats. Soundless typing. My mom’s presence.

I recycled excuses—I grew up mastering defenses and disguises. My mom turned over and hastened me to sleep. She asked me what I was doing; I told her I was setting alarms for tomorrow, my fingers shaking, flipping to the Clock app, eyes mindlessly staring at meaningless times, numbers. I have said this over and over again. I have always told her, “It’s just a friend.”

Growing older I have learned to wear a careless attitude like a layer of necessary makeup when she mentioned my friends dating. I told her I was out with different female friends each time I went on a date (with the single boyfriend I’ve ever had) and grew used to the distracting nervousness and guilt irritating every inch of our time together. An itch that claimed my happiness and love and ruled them as unreal, undeserving, unworthy. An itch I could never erase, perhaps because it stayed in me: climbing onto my bones and permeating my veins and melting into my blood.

Second semester of seventh grade we acted like more than friends, but I never ended up dating him. He sent me a long text one day after school that I read over and over again, saying, “I like you and no one else.” I smiled as if he was standing right in front of me and hugging my heart for one thousand seconds. My parents were watching TV outside my room. I asked myself, “Is this what it feels like to be loved?” as

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

I heard cars honking outside and the sound of electricity swimming through my lamp: as if this early love bestowed me with a hypersensitivity to anything that might or might not break its fragileness. As if this early love took me back to that sweaty, cold corner of the hotel room and reminded me of something akin to that itch—an itch devouring lights in my room until it was complete darkness except for the glaring screen, fixing his love on me to condemn my inability to reciprocate. Is this what it feels like to be loved?

I didn’t necessarily want an answer.

I told him, “If we still like each other in ninth grade maybe we can date then, because it’s too early for us to love now.” Our relationship was always defined by “untimeliness.”

When everyone was promising to score high on the High School Entrance Examination,1 he learned that I instead would be going abroad. I looked away before his eyes could meet mine.

Ninth grade passed and I left before we could find an answer for ourselves.

But my untimely physical departure was never the cause. My internal love clock was outof-time with everyone else. I was always running behind those I perceived as “ought-to-bes” in love that I’d seen on paper, media, or in real life: People ought to be together if they like each other; you ought not suppress or fear your love.

The problem was that those books and movies provided two narratives—the forbidden early love and the genuine romantic love—one that I was bound to with a broken clock and one that was free, public, unshattered.

II. 早恋 (Zao-lian) is untranslatable. Literally meaning “early love,” it refers to the action of adolescents forming romantic relationships before college. Chinese conventions see Zaolian

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Chinese public high schools set up number lines and accept students solely based on their High School Entrance Examination scores.

as the ultimate forbidden fruit that ensnares students onto the route of no-return by forming unhealthy social circles, destroying grades, and thus ruining futures. It is embedded in Chinese society and popular culture, intertwining with lives like mine and many others—an invisible force that simultaneously challenges and forbids us to love during ages intended for feeling, revealing, and expressing the butterflies flying inside us.

If you type in 早恋 in Baidu’s—the prevailing, dominating search engine in China—search bar, entries pop up in this order: 1. How to solve the problem of girls who Zaolian 2. What to do when you Zaolian and get pregnant 3. How to communicate with kids who Zaolian as parents 4. How to solve the problem of boys who Zaolian 5. What is the age range for Zaolian 6. The harm and consequences of Zaolian 7. How to guide kids who Zaolian 8. Age division for Zaolian 9. What to do after your parents discover that you have Zaolian’ed 10. Is Zaolian wrong From childhood, I faced countless TV shows, novels, textbook examples, magazine articles, lectures, and even posters that proclaimed Zaolian ruins your future: “Zaolian will fail you the College Entrance Examination! Do you want to ruin your life just for a guy?”

“Don’t be in a relationship until you are in college, do you hear me?”

“She has a boyfriend! She has Zaolian’ed!”

“Someone in our class is Zaolian’ing right now. This is my final warning for you to stop, or else you will be under serious student conduct violations and face penalties.”

Unconsciously, we fall into narratives

FEATS

written by these literizations and actualizations: Ill-behaved students who perform Zaolian abandon their futures and deserve to become targets of public criticism. To be in love is to risk being recognized as someone who has Zaolian’ed.

But to be subjected to public criticism is not as suffocating as stripping off every strand of feeling in front of your parents—the possibility of your parents deeming your feelings as unreal, a waste of time, and childish nonsense chokes you because it’s your first attempt to love someone other than them. Because you’ve not chosen to love yourself. Because you love your parents, despite anything.

And yet, we love. I love. Somehow we accept and reject Zaolian at the same time. I reach out a hand full of love to him and another full of lies to my parents. I have my first boyfriend and tell my mom I don’t like anyone. I smile at his texts and lock my phone in front of her. Living with Zaolian is swimming underwater with a few gasps of breath. I search for ways not to love while learning how to love: offering my beating, burning sincerity while coating them with dirt and water, molding a layer of cement.

The whole narrative around “early love” in China has formed a trope of what early love should be like for Chinese teenagers” We face an abundance of media, people, and texts that show us thousands of ways of love and tell ourselves they are for others to live. We tell ourselves the only way for us to love is to do it in secrecy. Even the rebellious teeangers have archetypes: exposure, huge argument, persistence, huge argument, and on repeat until one side surrenders.

Break up or continue in utter indifference of your parents—I guess most people do not want to take that bet. I didn’t.

Once on Weibo—a popular social media platform in China that serves as a longer-text version of Twitter—a trending topic discussed “whether people should pursue their high school crush.”

After the Cultural Revolution, during China’s “Reform and Opening up” (改革开放), 高考 “Gaokao,” or the College Entrance Examination, was implemented in 1977, in which colleges accept students based on their Examination scores. At that time, when educational opportunities and ways to earn a living were not as diverse, Gaokao was virtually one’s only way to a bright, self-sustainable future: A reputable college education meant a much greater chance of stable, high salary jobs. Parents and schools, especially high schools, prompted students to dedicate every second to their studies, and considered romantic relationships the monster that ate away most time and effort. This is why “college” is the threshold of accepted love.

Zaolian gradually weaved its way into Chinese social and popular cultures. As times rolled on, modern advancements complicated the issue, and Zaolian was sometimes considered a stratification of class: Richer families could afford to send their children abroad or buy them into good schools, and thus might allow kids to date someone, while poorer families had fewer choices, and families in poverty had no other solution but to pray for high scores on Gaokao for their children. Nothing is absolutely fair in this world, at times more so in love.

But the rapid reforming of China didn’t normalize teenage love. The emphasis on a bright future and love’s destruction of it never changed despite the social rationales behind them. Love, fundamentally a primal human function, is always singled out from other emotions like sadness and ecstasy or behaviors like eating and sleeping. Even outside of China, the appropriateness of pursuing your love is always depen-

dent on age—if you are old or young enough or if you are still in school or at work—never other factors like if you are mentally prepared and feel ready to commit. Everyone understands age is not the problem, and yet age almost always matters.

III. I broke up with my ex-boyfriend on my first college birthday this winter break, when I was staying in Illinois with my aunt and he was in his college dorm in New York. We weren’t “supposed to” stay together.

It was unexpected, even to me to some degree, because all along I’d been looking forward to this birthday with him. Turning one year older in college symbolized absolute independence and freedom for me—with its autonomy, I could finally prove our relationship to be more like love, less like a high school game. I thought maybe if we grew older, our relationship could escape from the past as well.

Our love was defined by things we couldn’t do. COVID hit the spring of 11th grade and he

flew back from our highschool in New Jersey to Beijing, China, right before our one-year anniversary. Him going home meant the distance between us was not just the 7236.93 miles between China and the US; to be back under the surveillance of our parents meant we weren’t supposed to love.

When I went home two months later, we were a 10-minute drive away from each other; when online school started we were only a Zoom away and if I moved my frame I could be right next to him. When I snuck out for 20 minutes at night to see him, who secretly drove to my apartment, we were only a kiss away.

When I hugged him after not seeing him for two months, even though we were in the same city most of the time, we couldn’t be closer. Yet too many things were stuck between us and the distance wouldn’t stop widening. Too little Facetime, not enough dates, no anniversary celebration, no opening college decisions together, no hugging each other and saying happy graduation.

But it’s okay if we were far away from each other. The problem was I could not stop thinking about what the distance represented. All of the “could-have-beens” made that itch stronger every second, devouring the sweetness I’d tried so hard to preserve, sweetness that I’d carefully built through little moments of proof that our love was real. I was constantly balancing truths and lies in my life; many times they became too mingled to discern. I asked myself if those lies had made the real things lose their validity; I wondered if that was what I deserved because I’d lied so, so many times.

But maybe truths and lies were supposed to be inseparable. Maybe our love worked only because I’d lied.

That night of my birthday when I broke up with him, he called. The call ended with him never calling me again. I leaned on my temporary bedroom’s door frame to get service because the Wi-Fi was so bad inside and my

cellular didn’t work. I hid my head in my knees because I didn’t want my aunt to see or hear me crying. My heart was beating so fast that I almost felt it burning, and yet I couldn’t warm any tangible part of me. The temperature of leaving him was both 10 and 90 degrees. I grew older only to realize we couldn’t grow older together. I knew things were not working and we were going on different paths. But the itch wouldn’t stop reminding me of something else.

If we didn’t have to love in secret, would everything be different?

I knew there was no going back. That night I lay in bed and relived every lie I made. That week everything started to remind me of him: bad wifi, spicy food, CVS, snow, jackets, wrong turns. And yet every memory of him reminded me of how hard it was to love. I wanted to separate the lies and truths of our love and solely preserve the real moments, but I couldn’t.

I wanted to see how I’d loved him but my ways of loving him were buried together with how I had not. To capture proof of my ability to love was to face moments when I corrupted our love with lies, unworthiness, comparisons, disqualifications. I missed him, I missed loving him, I didn’t want to lose him entirely, but I wondered if I ever had him in whole.

Messages popped up on my phone to wish me a happy birthday.

Wishing me a fulfilling year. I couldn’t move beneath my blanket because everywhere except my own body was too cold. That December night in Chicago didn’t have snow. Is this what it feels like to be loved? I thought of this question that I’d asked myself over and over again growing up.

I could never answer this, but I was certain of one thing. I was certain he loved me. I was certain I loved him because of the pain that stung my heart when fabricating every lie of that love. My tears were flowing and I wondered if they would freeze. But then I realized I owned the warmth to keep them clear and soft and alive. I touched my tears with coarse fingertips and thought: Next time, just next time, I’ll love fearlessly.

KATHY WANG wants to get worse at lying.

VOLUME 44 ISSUE 02

08

LIT SECTION

A Conversation with Eloise

TEXT RYAN CHUANG

DESIGN SAM STEWART

ILLUSTRATION LILLYANNE FISHER

I

09

n the parking lot outside Bojangles, Eloise and I are suspended in time. Time is bendier than normal in the American South, and especially around Bojangles.

Eloise has labeled this phenomenon the Bojangles Effect: she says that surrounding every Bojangles franchise, there’s a fifty mile radius in which time gets progressively more distorted. The closer you get to Bojangles, the stickier time gets, until eventually you’re soupy and immobile, bug-stuck-in-amber incandescent.

Right now, we’re around fifty feet away from the Bojangles and my bones are in dissonant symphony.

We’re sitting in Eloise’s olive Subaru Outback, and there are no other cars in the Bojangles parking lot. This may be because it is 4:45 AM on a Tuesday or because the Bojangles parking lot is more of a metaphysical place than a corporeal one. A pit stop for the in-between, Eloise likes to say. I think she’s oversimplifying it a little. People never really seek out the Bojangles parking lot—we’re more pulled up into it by surprise every so often, like dust particles sucked into a vacuum. In this vacuum, I have come to ask Eloise about beginnings, and endings, and the things we abandon when we leave people we love behind.

Eloise’s Subaru Outback looks like it could be a Marcel Duchamp Dada sculpture, Prelude to a Broken Arm and Also Other Broken Limbs. Eloise is a girl who believes very strongly in things, and improper car maintenance is one of them. Her steering wheel is on backwards and there are Bibles everywhere, both of which are indicative of Eloise’s personal dogma. An old cassette with a recording of the Abbott & Costello Show is stuck on rerun in the stereo, and every time it plays, the voices on the recording get a little more desperate. Stuck on rerun, I, too, get a little more desperate. In the hot and pious Georgia air, Eloise’s Subaru Outback feels tenuous, like it might detonate at any moment.

The Subaru Outback’s sultry curves make it one of the most erotic automobile models of the modern era, but Eloise and I are not having an erotic conversation. In fact, Eloise struggles to hold any conversation that doesn’t involve theology for longer than thirty seconds. I similarly struggle to hold conversations, but that’s irrespective of whether they are religious or not, so I let Eloise take control. Despite her flaws, Eloise has always been willing to take control.

“The car stereo is covered in milk,” remarks Eloise.

The car stereo is, in fact, covered in milk, which is making the SatNav system spew smoke and the occasional spark. “Should we call AAA?”

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

“No,” Eloise replies matter-of-factly. “AAA would let this car burn.

They hate Subaru drivers.”

I trust Eloise when she says this, because Eloise has always been the girl who knows things.

Things like how to ballroom dance, or her age in seconds, or the difference between growing up and just getting older. Eloise knows holy, sacred things.

One summer afternoon following church camp, Eloise and I wiggle our toes in the riverbank. On this night, the bayou air is unsuspecting, semi-liquid. From across the water, Eloise spots a boy whose leg is trapped under a sucker-plant, water alive in his lungs. He thrashes, each contortion of limbs slightly more aware of his drowning than the last. Eloise is eight, but she knows what to do, she knows she’s a dancer. She wades over to the boy and calmly unties the sucker-plant with her tongue, then kisses the boy until he wakes up, and then kisses him some more. Later, Eloise finds out the boy doesn’t believe in a God, and forgets how to kiss in an act of retaliation. Deep down, I think I, too, want Eloise to reach in and pull me up from the bayou. I, too, want her to forget me in an act of retaliation.

Back outside in the Bojangles parking lot, time is warping again. From our angle, Bojangles looks even holier than before, red store lettering mighty and irradiated in pre-dawn light.

Through multiple layers of Subaru windshield and building plexiglass, the pieces of Bojangles furniture look more like outlines of furniture than actual furniture, a little like Joan Miró’s surrealist The Harlequin’s Carnival and also not like that at all. Either way, it is now 6:25 AM on a Sunday and Bojangles seems more elasticated than ever. It’s going to open soon, and Eloise wants to go inside before the staff arrives.

“Let’s go inside before the staff arrives,” says Eloise.

“Ok,” I reply. I’m not one to disagree with Eloise, especially when she has her heart set on entering. “Though I feel like we’re only moving laterally.”

Eloise rolls her eyes and opens the driver’s-side door. Out here, the Georgia air sticks to skin like Saran wrap, plasticky and slippery and secretly repressive. As we walk, I reconsider the morality of a departure from home and decide it is inherently immoral. I decide that deep down I want to be repressed, I want to let Georgia swallow me whole. Eloise grabs my hand tight.

Up close, the Bojangles is abstract enough that Eloise and I lose our sense of smell. We lose other things, too: her, a bangle bracelet on her left wrist, me, a collection of formative childhood memories in Baptist churches. As we approach the doors, I realize that the Bojangles is not just a Bojangles but also a 14th century cathedral. There is something intrinsically spiritual about American fast food chains, especially those in the South. I wonder if this means anybody has ever prayed in Bojangles before.

“Eloise,” I ask. “Do you think anybody has ever prayed in Bojangles before?” Eloise shrugs.

“I prayed in a Waffle House once.”

“That’s completely different. Have you ever prayed in Bojangles before?”

“I’ve thought about praying in Bojangles before.” Eloise’s answer tells me nothing but tells me everything.

Eloise and I, walking side by side through Bojangles, is an image quite similar to René Magritte’s Surrealist work Not to Be Reproduced but also not like that at all. Eloise trips every other step because of her stubby legs, which I think is kind of adorable but which is probably really inconvenient. If I could still smell, I would notice that this Bojangles reeks of cinnamon and also the American frontier myth. Every time we breathe in, Eloise and I come to love our home a little more, come to love ourselves a little less.

We stop beside the confessional, which is either a confessional or a diner booth with turquoise cushions. Eloise steps in the latticed priest stall and shuts the door. The door is more of an outline of a door than an actual one. I step inside the confessor stall, which is darker than outside the confessor stall, but only slightly.

It’s cramped enough in here that my bones feel jumbled and in jeopardy. I wonder if confessionals are made this way intentionally to physically disorient the confessors and get them to open up. Probably. There’s a Georgia-Pacific napkin dispenser in the stall, too, which makes me want to confess even more, though I don’t know why.

From my side, I hear Eloise snort a line of cocaine off of her Costco card. While I kneel, Eloise asks me if I’m going to confess.

“Are you going to confess?” Eloise asks rudely.

“Yes,” I say. “The words are just not in the right order yet.”

“Well then rearrange them.” Eloise thinks rearranging words is easy, like baking a meringue pie.

“Let’s run away together, Eloise.”

“No,” Eloise says. “That’s a stupid idea.”

“I’m serious.”

Eloise snorts another line of cocaine. This snort is marginally more tragic than the last one. Eloise closes her eyes, euphoric.

“Let’s run past the Bojangles parking lot and past the olive Subaru and past the bayou and straight out of fucking Georgia.” My voice is high-strung, staccato. “I can feel myself wilting in this plastic pseudo-temporal wasteland.”

Eloise lets my words elongate and redden.

“I have prayed in a Bojangles before, I remember now,” Eloise interrupts. “I prayed for a greater understanding of how a home can suffocate.”

“Did it work?”

“I don’t think so,” Eloise says deliberately, her body unraveling into ribbons. “If anything, I am more confused than I was before.”

The sun is rising, so Eloise and I reposition our limbs outside the confessional and walk over to the Bojangles server station, or maybe it’s the church altar. We sit side by side, our bodies half-theoretical. As the Bojangles slowly fills with soft gold light, I reconsider the morality of a departure from home and decide that it is only slightly immoral. Drowning in gold, this Bojangles is flimsier than ever.

Through the window, we can see there are no cars in the Bojangles parking lot except for the thin outline of an olive Subaru. There are, however, a lot of doves.

RYAN CHUANG B’23 hopes to visit Georgia someday.

LIT SECTION

The best advice jazz musician Herbie Hancock received from fellow musician Miles Davis was “Don’t play the butter notes.” The comment led Herbie to completely change his style of music, leaving notes out of songs and adding more sporadic changes in melody. These “butter notes” became the foundation of a new sound for Herbie—despite being the product of pure miscommunication. Davis had really said “bottom notes.”

A-Side: Playing the Butter Notes Sitting on top of rooftops, staring down at all the headtops, spitting whistles, *Watermelon Man* selling rocks that gasp A girl from across the street barrels down from the scorching heat, asking for cool watermelons to panting, panting, Meow, Meow, Meow, Meow, Meow, Meow, Meow, Meow, Meow, Meow, says the cat, scratching paradiddles at the peddler’s carts. panting.

Reminiscing on how cool it is to be a cat, praying after the 9th life to be born a *Chameleon* living on *Cantaloupe Island,* growing watermelon seeds.

Where drumbeats don’t end on 4 counts.

An unbroken guitar string is frowned upon.

And errors in musical thought are— G OA LL

L L

L L

L

L

Life stays in tune, with the world unmo— Meow Meow Meow Meow

KENNETH BRADLEY B’22 is traveling the universe one song at a time.

DESIGN SAM STEWART

Off-scale, the unrhymed screams can be heard of children, running, panting, breathing: offbeat steps unquantized with whistling.

Farther down the scale, a lover’s quarrel begins to swirl.

Nearby squirrels playing acorns can’t keep tempo, nuzzling their whiskers, mimicking the fabric of 2 bodies hugging.

TEXT KENNETH BRADLEY

Him, stank facing, attracts it with milk.

ILLUSTRATION HANNAH CHANG VOLUME 44 ISSUE 02

10

BLOOD THAT IS A BUBBLIN’ BASS

TEXT JACKSON DELEA

DESIGN TANYA QU

ILLUSTRATION LILLYANNE FISHER

ARTS SECTION

Audio tactility, movement,

11

and bass materialism

The first sign of the rave is a rattle. About three blocks from my destination, I sense a buzz.

Loose objects (the body of a car hanging on its suspension, a metal sign bolted to a pole, the window of an office building held to the wall by a hinge) shake and clang. An otherwise imperceptible wave courses through the material of the city, illuminating its structures like contrast dye dropped into water. This architectural resonance is the principal focus of American artist Mark Bain, whose 2017 project Wave Shift implanted seismological sensors into the Mies van der Rohe Pavilion in Barcelona and channeled their readings through a large sound system, amplifying the vibrations of the building. He views sound “as a reflecting agent to define the materials and elements of structures and spaces.” Like in Bain’s installation, the sounds of the rave course through different surfaces, making the structures of downtown Los Angeles into instruments themselves.

I soon reach the towering gates of corrugated sheet metal lining the lot around the warehouse. The indistinct buzzes from the earlier blocks have emerged and congealed into a melody of wobbling, aquatic vibration: a bassline. I shuffle through the dark alleyway and make my way to the rest area, where I quickly locate my waiting rave partner Eliot. We shake hands, and I ask how he’s doing; he points to his right ear, which is stuffed with a rubber ear plug.

“I can’t hear you,” he mouths. Eliot tells me about the tiny silicone devices, about how they manage to evenly reduce the levels of all frequencies entering your ear.

“The thing is,” he says, “they don’t really make the bass, the thing you always want more of, any quieter. Sure, the high and midrange stuff doesn’t sting your ears as much, but you still feel that same rumble in your chest.” I give Eliot a thumbs up, knowing the frequency of my voice will be inaudible, and walk toward the warehouse door, following the noise that leaks out through the sliding sheets of metal.

The threshold to the main space is highlighted by a pink fog, shot with darts of white light. An audio-visual interface has synced the strobe so that the lights pierce through the fog when the bassline punches through the mix, materializing the thundering frequencies into visual lightning bolts.

After stepping my way through the horde, I reach the heart of the floor. In front of me, the DJ—Ben UFO, a tall, slender Brit with a mop of frizzy hair—is shuffling gently with the thumps as he adjusts the levels on his equipment. Ben earned himself a devoted following for his eclectic dance floor selections, which span the breadth of the ‘genre’ known as UK Bass Music.

Throughout the mid-to-late 2000s, Ben helped push the sound of dubstep, a variant of UK Garage dominated by sinister, reggae-influenced sub-bass lines. The microgenre largely grew

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

from the now-defunct London club Plastic People; a flyer for its first dubstep party advertised “b-lines to make your chest cavity shudder.”

I look out at the four main speaker stacks, two beside the DJ booth, two hanging from the ceiling, to check that I’ve positioned myself at the focus of their diaphragms. At this spot, the force of the sound system converges. Ben drops a straightforward techno track: kick drums on all four downbeats, high hats on the four upbeats. Immersed in sound coming from nearly all directions, my ears don’t point me towards any one location. Instead, the sound flows around me, through me, as though it possesses volume—not in the sense of amplitude, but in fluidity, materiality. The tense hi-hats rattle off my skull. The deep bass kicks, on the other hand, pour through me, pushing my chest and hips with each beat.

My compulsion to dance isn’t strictly

from my enjoyment of the music, it is also motivated by force: the tactile push of the bass against my skin, rattling my bones, filling and vibrating my body like the sheet metal outside the club.

The crowd erupts in movement as a deep, distorted 909 bassline floods the room. This UK Garage track, “B-Line Fi Blow” by Smith & Mighty, stands out from the earlier track’s rhythmic strictness. Over a shuffling arrangement of kicks and snares, a dub-esque melodic bassline warps and warbles its way through the song’s form. MC Niji 40 sings “B-line fi blow speaka-box” in Jamaican Patois, saying that

the tune’s bassline will forcefully blow out the diaphragm of any soundsystem daring to play the tune. Ben twists the mixer’s filter knobs with precision, squeezing the bass so that it builds pressure on the dancefloor. With these distortions I feel the pressure in my body shift around; I feel my chest pulled down and out and my hips pulled back and my limbs thrown about. I try to breathe but the pressure of the bassline halts the expansion of my chest. I’ve always been one to worry about my aural safety at concerts, but this time I’m less worried about my ears and more worried about the organs in my abdomen, which seem to squeeze as the fluid enveloping and coursing through me changes in density and viscosity. The sound wraps around me, covering every inch of my body; at its most aggressive moments, the bassline breaks through my skin, shaking me to my spine.

Many tout the rave as an ecstatic, multisensory experience that seems to transcend traditional notions of sensation; take Trainspotting’s rave scene, where an uplifting trance soundtrack and swirling purple and green lights transform into a gestalt, transportive image of dancefloor euphoria. However, the scene, preoccupied with audio-visual synthesis, fails to capture what I find to be an equally significant “sensory flattening” for the raver: between sound and touch. A distinct “audio-tactile condition” emerges from dance music’s thundering lower frequencies, a range we refer to as bass.

Bass’s audio-tactile transgression has been discussed most directly by musicians in and surrounding the sound system culture of Jamaica.

The sound system, often made from stacks of wardrobe-sized speakers outfitted with oversized subwoofers, has been an essential aspect of Jamaican music culture since the 1940s.

Technology theorist and dubstep artist Steve Goodman, also known as Kode9, dubbed the low-frequency “rearrangement of the senses” present in Jamaican musical culture “bass materialism.” The synthesis of “acoustic and tactile vibration,” lends bass force, space, and viscosity, rendering it more like matter than mere sonic wobbles. This sonic material cannot be immediately characterized as strictly aggressive or passive, assaulting or comforting. Goodman writes in his 2009 book Sonic Warfare: Unlike the futurist, avant-gardist legacy or rockist legacy of (white) noise music and its contemporary disciples, with its fetishization of midrange frequencies, the dancehall system simultaneously immerses/attracts and expels/ repels, is hard and soft, deploying waves of bass, an immense magnet that radiates through the body of the crowd, constructing a vectorial force field—not just heard but felt across the collective affective sensorium.

Like a kind of force field technology out of a sci-fi film, bass constitutes a futuristic, unnat-

ARTS SECTION ural “un-matter,” it moves material, possessing the tactility of material while being able to disintegrate instantaneously, to leave no tangible trace of its existence, and to appear and vanish like a ghost.

A more sinister reading of bass emerges most clearly in dub music, the minimalist descendant of traditional Jamaican reggae.

Dub makes use of electronic effects to remix and filter tracks down to their essentials, often featuring just sparse drums and heavy, dread bass lines drenched in cavernous reverb. In his 1980 poem “Bass Culture,” iconic dub poet Linton Kwesi Johnson rhymes, “Dis is the beat of the heart / This pulsing of blood / That is a bubblin’ bass / A bad bad beat / Pushin’ against the wall.” Johnson’s dark depiction of bass reinforces the depth and spatiality of infrasound—sound so deep that it is undetectable by the human ear, but which nonetheless correlates with high levels of stress and paranoia. These harmful effects are commonly reported in industrial areas and developing countries.

Across dub imagery, sound remained a potential tool of violence. The cover art on Scientist Rids the World of the Evil Curse of the Vampires (1981) shows a beam shooting from a speaker stack into a throng of vampires, those caught in the sound’s ray vaporized into dust.

Critic Christopher Partridge notes this militant theme of dub album titles such as Dub Assault and Dub Strike (Sism-X), Bass Terror (Bill Laswell and Nicholas James Bullen); Dub Massacre (In a Murder Style) (Twinkle Brothers), all of which point towards the “sheer physical impact of dub, interpreted largely in terms of the ‘weight’ of the bass assaulting the body.”

There remains, as Goodman argues, another angle to bass materialism; the antithesis to dub’s dark, low-end assault emerges most clearly in duo Smith & Mighty’s 1989 record Bass Is Maternal. A highly eclectic blend of trip hop, dub, drum ‘n bass, and breakbeat dance, the record hops across a number of genres while maintaining a singular focus on bass on each track. Across its concept and artwork, Bass Is Maternal enforces a notion of bass as liquid material. In his 2011 Dancecult Article “Rumble in the Jungle: City, Place and Uncanny Bass,” Dance critic Chris Christodoulou touches upon the maternal associations of bass within

UK dance music, noting how “the womb-like environment of dark, hot and sweaty metropolitan dance clubs” harkens back to a child’s first auditory experience—the sound of his mother’s internal organs—through the low-frequency filter of fluid and other organs. Christodoulou argues that “bass-heavy music…stimulates primal memories of the rhythm of the mother’s womb and the sound of her heartbeat.” This heartbeat is visible on the cover art of Bass Is Maternal, which shows a toddler looking out at glimmering shorebreak; three waves stand lined up to break in rhythmic succession. The regular, aquatic thud of breaking waves gestures towards both the repetitive thud of the kick drum and the heartbeat of the mother to a prenatal child. In the liner notes, four ultrasound scans accompany an image of a toddler reaching toward a sound system stack, captioned with “bass is maternal … when it’s loud I feel safer.”

This departure from the ‘violent’ characterization of earlier dub has political implications.

Much of this side grew in reaction to the colonial conditions of Jamaica, held under English rule until 1962. Ska, dancehall, rocksteady, and reggae, genres which emerged in the decades surrounding the turn of Jamaican independence, consistently engage with themes of anticolonialism, of resistance to the western imperialism which towered over the nation for three centuries. Electronic dub, perhaps the afrofuturist successor to acoustic reggae, takes the ghost of black Jamaican suffering and channels its heartbeat into sinister pulses of bass. In the words of Kwesi Johnson, dub is “muzik of blood, black reared, pain rooted, heart geared.” Smith & Mighty’s music, on the other hand, belongs to the colonizing nation; the duo (one of whom is white) met at music clubs in their hometown of Bristol, UK. The pair are seated on the other side of reggae’s origins, the injustices of imperialism, and the suffering of Jamaican peoples.

They thus manage to adopt much of the sound and cultural reference of dub while removing its original expressive intentions. The warm, maternal sensibility of Smith & Mighty’s sound is a privilege of race and nationality and era.

As dance music, especially UK Bass music, begins to work its way into the American mainstream (thanks to viral sensations like PinkPantheress), both musicians and listeners should

remind themselves of the genre’s evolution, of the experience which this sound draws upon. To witness bass is more than mere “listening.” The sonic material defies the boundaries between the senses, the boundaries separating our bodies and space, the boundaries between affects, and the boundaries of distinct cultures. Bass, as such, prompts a new listening and a multiplicity of readings, but its anticolonial past must not be neglected.

JACKSON DELEA ‘23 is buying earplugs.

VOLUME 44 ISSUE 02

12

FIELD NOTES FROM THE FUTURE OF THE INTERNET S+T

I offer you a cartesian plane drawn with axes to represent the diversity of stimuli (x) and directedness—calculated as the constriction of motion through a topological entity—(y).

Directness parking lots

Diversity of Stimuli

TEXT ANABELLE JOHNSTON

DESIGN ANNA BRINKHUIS

ILLUSTRATION LOLA SIMON

the internet

13

In the top left corner, uniform ad nauseam: parking lots, modernist façades. Bottom right, infinitely navigable and scattered with possibility: an old growth forest, a nature preserve, the pond near home which hosts algae by its shore and leeches on its floor. There too rests the internet, behemoth. Online, navigation follows no linearity. With the advent of hypertext (hypermodernity), we are caught between now and not-yet, between departure and destination.

One would be a fool to traverse such territory without skimming a guidepost.

I smooth a map (internet-map.net) out before me. Here objects are not aligned on a surface, as in the printout of I-95 and its offshoots that lives in my glove compartment, but rather, cut across multiple dimensions. The map of the internet is a presentation of links between websites, threads of traffic spooled across spheres representing a home page. Each data point’s size reflects the number of visitors, and against a dark blue curtain these circles are arranged in galaxies of relation. Imagine, the cartographer instructs, each website is a physical body with a finite mass and each user a mass quantum. The act of toggling between sites, traveling at hyperspeed, is the gravitational quantum, the graviton, the carrier of the gravitational field. I fail to understand what he means but recognize that across the map we the visitors pull websites into orbit, our use situating Stack Overflow near Quora, across the tutorial straight from Wikihow.

The Hero’s Journey typically involves a call to adventure: Ernest Shackleton is pulled to Antarctica, Frodo leaves the Shire, Luke is plucked from Tatooine and flung across the galaxy. Yet I prepare for my expedition without venturing out from my bedroom. As my cursor flickers over the page, the soft hum of my laptop fan soundtracks the blank screen. Advertisements unfold in the corners of a webpage and an untouched window asks me to confirm I’m still here. I evade online slot machines and pop-ups, just to be drawn in by deals boasting twenty percent off hand-knit leg warmers. Tactics for attention-grabbing have been skillfully repackaged, viscous instead of sharp, honey rather than hook, line, and sink. Unable to tear myself away from the screen, the only way out is through.

The internet, as it stands, is organized around a few central life forces. Google, Youtube, Facebook, Wikipedia, Yahoo, Amazon, Instagram, XVideos, Twitter, and Pornhub—presented in order of worldwide popularity—serve as the central colony from which all other life creeps outward. My journey begins with a search bar and pages of results—combed and teased by an algorithm which returns what is deemed most relevant. The more traffic a site has received, the more prominently it sits on my screen. Investigating the web seldom involves

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

the road less traveled. From here I approach the garden of forking paths, each link branching outward from the trunk and dwindling into a sink. Breadth first search, or so I’m told.

I skip stones from a personal broadcast radio to a recipe for bastardized mapo tofu. On the underbelly of a guide to making a French Exit rests a poignant mediation on where we go after here, which coexists in lichen-like symbiosis with an explanation of Buddhist realms of existence. My mind toggles between the Ginseng Strip 2001 and lofi beats to chill/study/ relax to as I dodge a pop-up boasting horny singles in my area to reach a pirated version of The Boxer’s Omen. Certainly I am plunging into the unknown, dancing with the uncharted. Yet I remain tethered to where I came from, a site of entry which holds all contingencies in its palm.

Each year I have watched in horror as these centralized platforms continued to collapse into each other, ensnaring users within their web of relentless coalescence. Connection is evolving and so are we! Zuckerberg proclaims. We march, it seems, against our will towards an embodied internet, in which the immersive experience is rendered inescapable. Figures will be projected in the public domain, a funhouse of assemblage.

Perhaps I am an alarmist in my fears; I’ve always been a private person, possibly in reaction to the thin walls of my childhood bedroom and my parents’ insistence that they simply found my journal open in my desk. I once took a field trip to the dark web, guided through Tor and rerouted through Iceland by a good friend who believed firmly in maintaining anonymity on all accounts. We communicate through Signal and double down on the importance of encryption, of our words lingering between us alone. He understands that Meta represents a threat to our fundamental individuality: I want to preserve the link between me and you that is inaccessible to them.

In the wake of the Metaverse keynote, the public cried out for another another way, an escape pod from Web 2.01. We’re on the precipice, technologists insist. Rather than succumbing to institutions larger than ourselves, we can communicate, store information, and make payThe first iteration of the internet stood stagnant in static web pages to be consumed and the second spread across our current networks of social medias.

1

ments through the blockchain2—if we believe and invest in Web 3.0. While promising—and snowballing, as venture capitalists and celebrities alike reverberate with excitement over Dogecoin and NFTs—the new order appears as a hyperfinancialized means of organizing our online interactions. Unsurprising, as the language we have to discuss such technology is riddled with market terms and the tools we have for communicating meaning exist solely in economic frameworks. Web 3.0 may be “the apotheosis of capitalism where the market now provides a financial token game for every meme, every celebrity, every political movement, and every bit of art and culture” as Stephen Diehl writes, but how else might we confer value?

I puzzle as I prepare for my virtual voyage and turn Robin Wall Kimmerer’s words over in my mind. “Pay attention when plants come to you; they’re bringing you something you need to learn.” Environmental science is far more concerned with the world as given, while computer science imagines a world that does not yet exist, I grossly oversimplify to my mother over the phone. Yet in that sentence rests a seed of truth, to be nurtured and tended to as I venture across the thin webbing of the internet. Rather than organizing the web around exchange, we might look to the ground as a framework for reciprocal relation. Onward in pursuit of new language to mold this new internet: weeding and trimming and re-articulating our technology of relation. +++ My fascination with symbiosis begins with language. Denoting physical proximity, symbiosis describes the interdependent existence of two organisms, which, to some degree, need one another for survival. I began writing young, and spent hours transcribing into wide-ruled notebooks the stories I had improvised with my stuffed animals as soon as I could hold a pen. I soon discovered I needed language. To process, to untangle, to translate from the cross-sensory experience of hearing colors to something that I could understand. Likewise, this imperfect system of verbal communication needed me A shared, immutable ledger that facilitates the process of recording transactions and tracking assets in a business network.

2

S+T

(us) back to breathe life into words, to make meaning. While linguists have largely disregarded the theory that our experiences are limited by our ability to articulate them, our capacity to reach each other across the chasm of individuality heavily relies on the communicable. We exist in symbiotic relation to those around us as we ask them to bear witness to our aliveness, affirm that we are not alone as best as we can with our limited language.

Much of the public fascination with symbiosis arrived with the assertion that the trees are talking. We were astounded to realize that they stood erect in community and became enamored with the notion that the forest was one being all along. This was made possible by the mycorrhizae, fungal roots which receive carbohydrates from their host plant and pass along nutrients from the soil in the exchange. Yet the relationship exists not only between the fungus and plant; threads are woven between aboveground neighbors which bring them in contact and shape the ecosystem itself. Through this network of filaments and fractals, trees engage in constant dialogue, cheekily termed the ‘wood-wide web’. To clear my head on a Sunday afternoon I drive to a thinning forest outside of the city and cross miles of densely packed fungal threads in mere minutes as I walk in circles before the sun catches behind the distant hilltops and dyes the ice blue sky blood red. All the while, the birch sends carbon and nutrients to one another beneath my feet.

While we remain astounded by the communicative capacity of organisms within a forest, it is form rather than content which piques my interest. Some fungi are relatively host-specific and will only form symbiotic relationships with a particular species of host. Basidiomycetes commonly produce mushrooms as their fruiting structures and can be found confettied around the dripline of particular species of trees. (I am reminded of Kakao talk, its chime reverberating around every family function and close friend dinner and absent from the spaces I now call home.) Other fungal species are more generalized and cluster around several species of plants, like vesiculararbuscular endomycorrhiza, which appear on both deciduous trees and annual agronomic crops. (The first four years of my parents’ long-distance relationship was sustained by handwritten letters, emails, and phone calls—their tangle of communication extending across states and cultures.)

My existence is a result of technology that facilitates touch from a distance, and I continue to tap into networks which afford me the same. Perhaps my fascination with such forms of affective interrelation is entirely selfish in this manner. It matters less to me what the trees say to one another, though I am told they waver between collaboration and competition regularly, than the sheer realization that they are capable of talking at all. Their ability to communicate appears as a side effect of the relationship between plant and fungi, a community born out of happenstance and woven through hundreds of thousands of individualized relationships. +++ Web 3.0 advocates insist that anything built online can be put on the blockchain and collective-

ly hosted, as opposed to sitting in the pocket of a singular company or entity. Access can be granted through issued tokens, which allow token holders to vote on the future of a service in which all participants have a stake. Much of the language surrounding Web 3.0 appears uniform, pushed as an elaborate marketing scheme by investors attempting to buy a new future online.

It appears not without its opponents. Decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) which herald a future of member-owned communities, resembling a virtual commune or coop, have been dismissed as “group chats with a shared bank account”. The environmental toll of all blockchain interactions has garnered skeptics from across the political spectrum. Critics point out that work would not actually be decentralized, as average internet users have no desire to make and maintain their own platforms, and if such decentralization was possible, the technology would tend towards stasis rather than innovation. To make individual technologies usable, Web 3.0 is still organized around platforms: Infura, OpenSea, Coinbase, Etherscan.

Yes there are individual filaments which connect us online, but they are congregated into a single root which obscures their particularity.

Much of my interest in this new internet arises from an interest in the terminology with which we handle this vast web. When we engage with Web 3.0, we solely iterate over the language of commodity. It is no wonder we consider these interactions a fiction of finance; power in this new online originates from tokens in a virtual wallet. As I travel through homemade websites—someone, somewhere, has created and maintains the server to a birding log framed by a deep olive green border, someone else created a digital collage of a waterfall which flickers with remnants of dial-up against a pixelated pool—I wonder if this might be the foundation for a new creation. Rather than considering ourselves producers and consumers, we might imagine ourselves as creators and desirers, bound in a net which sustains one another through the simple act of being. What if we re-formulated this network not in terms of exchange but in terms of relation?

When Kimmerer writes of lichen, the classic fungal example of blurred boundaries between self and community, she articulates symbiosis based on balanced reciprocity. “Their success is measured not by consumption and growth, but by graceful longevity and simplicity, by persistence while the world changed around them.”

For lichen to exist in relation in the physical world—fungus and algae intertwined—is to give and receive in one shared breath. Web 3.0 may be mere speculation with its participants caught on the verge of the next dot com bubble, but it also offers an opportunity to inject generosity into a set of exchanges. “The Pluriverse is a cyber-physical commons, arrayed over the web of our social relationships; a space that does not transcend materiality, but is entangled with it.

Ours is not a world of accumulation and enclosure, but of mutual prosperity and shared value, where the power to create is not synonymous with the power to exclude. We are weaving a world of abundance through the positive sum of our contributions,” pronounces an online coalition, verses.xyz in their manifesto for a new internet. I know that language does not create

the world but perhaps finding new language is the beginning of rewiring our commons.

When I wander the nature preserve across the street from my home, I consider the possibility that the network coated with autumn-stricken leaves may have value in and of itself, not only in relation to the trees. My breath fogs the air before my nose, cotton ball white against placid blue of winter air. In the troubled transcendentalist tradition, I come here to be alone. The entrance sits fifteen feet from my front door but as the trees close in around me, I forget my laptop and its many inhabitants.

Here the mycorrhizae live with abundance as a principle, sharing as a means of extending the individual. With my hands rooted in my coat pockets, I step along the winding path, over the nodes where this-meets-that, the edges through which they become one. Here is the commons, the metaverse beyond visibility encoated by a layer of dirt and detritus. Here may we look and listen and borrow language, contemplating its gift. +++ Due to their decompositional abilities, fungus is often falsely conflated with death. Their appearance often punctuates our own imagined life cycle, as they straddle the moment between beginning and end of our bodies, so it may only appear natural to turn towards mycorrhizae when something needs to be deconstructed and then rebuilt.

In some ways we now linger at the precipice of the internet, at the moment of convergence and explosion, a tightly bound mass of heat and energy caught in its own gravitational pull before escaping in a supernova. Even before the physical encroachment of Zuckerberg’s proposed metaverse, the internet remains an untraversable mountain, undirected and wholly unintelligible. Discord threading allows me to engage in multiple conversations at once, my attention split across discussions of Lil Miquela as a Wasian icon, the dirtbag Left, Safdie brothers, weekend plans, VR workout classes, and how to do nothing. Logging on to the Lotus Casino means voluntarily surrendering time and attention to speed and simulation. Navigation is hardly straightforward and almost always overwhelming. Here, and now, I wonder if perhaps this should be the end of online as we know it.

I do not know how to conceive of an internet which values its own connections. For all of its flaws, perhaps Web 3.0 could offer this in the form of decentralized exchange. At the moment of rebirth, it may be prudent to look towards the ground as a means of rearticulating our connectedness. Perhaps we can be online in symbiosis, improving the quality of each other’s being by the mere nature of sharing space, resources, and time. “Language is the dwelling place of ideas that do not exist anywhere else.

It is a prism through which to see the world,” Kimmerer states. I want to dwell in our connection, in our togetherness, in the sensation of nowness, with you.

ANABELLE JOHNSTON B’23 decentralized herself.

VOLUME 44 ISSUE 02

14

X SECTION LILAN YANG “THE PERFECT HUMAN”

Lilan Yang, The Perfect Human Film and video installation, generative adversarial network, laser printed clear 16mm leader, lightbox.

Aspect ratio: 1.37:1, runtime: 16:43 minutes, approximately 550 ft 16mm film.

This work is a remake of Jørgen Leth’s the Perfect Human with generative adversarial network. Later the remake of computer generated moving images are transformed from a digital recreation to an analog artifact of transparencies Currently on view as a part of the Digital Media Biennial, 1+1=22, at the Sol Koffler gallery (169 Weybosset St, Providence, RI).

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I 116

TEXT NATALIE NEUERT DESIGN ISAAC MCKENNA ILLUSTRATION SAGE JENNINGS

196 187 62 146

Solution on back cover (Bulletin)

8 • LANE SERIES • 2019

V. Semi-aquatic salamander 103 89 117 206

UVM.EDU/LANESERIES

5 VOLUME 44 ISSUE102

16

EPHEMERA SECTION CAMILLE GROS & HANNAH-ROSE ALBINUS “I LOVE MY MOM”

Camille Gros & Hannah-Rose Albinus i love my mom Motherhood includes Creation, Abandonment, Nurture, Destruction, Assurance. I am not a mother.

17

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

DEAR INDY SECTION

Dear Indie,

I couldn’t figure out what to major in, so I successfully pitched an independent concentration in Space—my classes are flexible. It’s a fitting major since all the questions this week have to do in some way with distance—when to give it, when to reject it, what to make of it. It’s that time of year when people can’t figure out if they really hate each other or love each other. It’s cold and gross, people are lonely and angry. Everyone could use some clarity on what to do with each other. Spring is almost here—don’t blow up all of your relationships before we get there.

I started talking to this guy four months ago. For a long time, we were just friends, but we started hooking up semi-seriously after a month.

It felt like we were dating, but we never put a label on it.

Last week, he told me he hooked up with someone else like it wasn’t a big deal. I realized we would never work unless we were exclusive, and he didn’t want to be in a committed relationship. How long should I dwell on this? Is this a breakup? How lame is it to feel really heartbroken over this relationship that never existed?

Love, The Heartbroken

Dear Indie, At the beginning of this semester, my friends and I had a huge fallout with one of our other friends. It was really bad. Now, whenever I hear that they’re hanging out with other people, I get mad. I think they’re a bad person, and I want everyone to know. Am I wrong for feeling this way? I would never want to isolate this person entirely, but I also don’t want to see them thrive, either. TLDR: am I evil for wanting them to suffer, just a little bit?

Love, Your Schadenfreude Sister

My Schadenfreude Sister,

Heartbreak always feels a little lame. You’re sad over someone else, usually because they didn’t want you as badly as you wanted them. It’s a powerless position to find yourself in. And we always know the alternative, to not be heartbroken, is less lame. In that world, we hook up with someone new every night, start dressing like we’ve never seen a sweatpant, and emerge from our old relationship’s womb with a charisma fit for an International Relations major. If we could all access heartbrokenlessness, I’m sure we would. But we can’t!

When you’re the heartbroken, though, you’re in a creative position.

From the ashes of lameness, we get to spin our stories, devise our own tales. The power we lost in getting dumped we now find in rewriting the relationship. This guy, to be honest, seems like an asshole. Four months? And he tells you he hooked up with someone else like it’s a non-event? I bet you can think of some more asshole-ish things about this guy. Did he wear his mask below his nose? Does he call his mom only when he needs something? I can picture him now, walking across the Main Green, vaping into the faces of passersby. Maybe he even trips an anxious freshman. Now he’s bullying the freshman, he’s making fun of his glasses and calling him a dork. Now he’s got the freshman by his underwear and he’s hooking his wedgie to the flagpole and raising it!

Or maybe he is nice. Maybe he would never bully a freshman, maybe he calls his mom every day, and he wears two masks. But what I’m saying, heartbroken person, is that we tell ourselves stories in order to get over being dumped by assholes. You’ve been blessed with the creative gift of heartbreak. Stay in it as long as it takes to write a new narrative, one where you come out on top. Then write a story about it, and publish it in The Indy.

Dear Indie, I was dating this girl for a few weeks and I really liked her. I didn’t want to do anything physical because I’ve rushed things in the past. Last weekend, I felt ready to make that next step, but in the days leading up to it, she seemed much more distant. Like she wasn’t into it anymore. I’m worried I waited too long and that came across as disinterest. Now, it feels like I missed my chance. What do I do?!?!?

Dear Lover From Afar,

Lover From Afar

VOLUME 44 ISSUE 02

ILLUSTRATION SAM STEWART

I’ll keep this answer brief, since the solution to miscommunication is simple: communicate! Do you remember those “I feel because” statements from elementary school? “I feel sad, Indie, when you make fun of Urban Outfitters because I actually like that store, and I still shop there.”

This is usually followed by a “What I need is ____.” Like, “What I need is for you to appreciate the hold Urban Outfitters crop tops have on me, even though most of it is trash, and it’s destroying the environment.”

Now try a version of this on your distant lover: “I feel sad when you distance yourself because…” Because why? Because you struggle with showing affection, and you don’t want this to be the reason things end since you feel affectionate towards them? Or because you do want to take things further, just not right now, and they should be okay with that?

And what do you need from them? Obviously, you want them back.

And it sounds like you want ;) them, in that ;) way. But maybe what you need from them is a bit more patience and trust, a little more faith from them towards you. Perhaps they’ll share their “I feel because” statement with you, and you can both listen to each other, and you’ll model every elementary school teacher’s fantasy for conflict mitigation. You could tour the country, teaching children how to overcome the fraught communicational wires of hookup culture to land in happy relationships.

Maybe, though, they were in it for the wrong reasons. And their “What I need” is superficial and gross and makes you kind of uncomfortable. Then, at least, you won’t be weighed down by regret. And your decision not to rush things will hold up as the right thing to have done. Still, you can tour the country, teaching fifth graders how to draw boundaries. That’s a useful skill, too.

DESIGN SAM STEWART

Love,

TEXT CECILIA BARRON

In tenth grade, I spent the entire fall hemming dresses and deodorizing suit jackets for the school musical. Meanwhile, all of my friends were becoming emo. I emerged after the final performance to find myself surrounded by dark eyeliner, dog collars, and new piercings. A few weeks later, they all dropped me. It sucked.

Thankfully, my emo ex-friends just went about their lives without me. They didn’t tell everyone I was annoying even though I was a theatre tech kid, or that I was judgmental even though I hated their platform shoes and made a point of saying it. They just let me figure it out myself.

There were a few hard, lonely months, where it felt like my only friends were the Hamilton cast and my dad. But by the end of my sophomore year, I had ditched musical theater for the newspaper—annoying in an entirely new way!—and found a group of friends who wore Urban Outfitters tops and American Apparel shorts. I got very into Father John Misty. I survived.

I don’t think you’re evil for wanting your ex-friend to suffer, at least a little bit. But, honestly, being dropped by your friend group is punishment enough. Imagine how you feel when you’re lonely, and you convince yourself that everyone hates you. Now imagine you kind of know, objectively, that a lot of people do hate you. That’s what it feels like.

But what they did was so bad! But how they treated me was so wrong! But they’ll never change! I believe you, since I have nothing to back your story up, and I’m partial to people who write to Dear Indy. I’ll imagine they are manipulative, and toxic, and selfish. I’ll imagine they even, say, slept with your mom. But do you want them to stay this way?

Or, worse, do you want to be the reason they keep sleeping with their friend’s moms?

Let’s imagine you tell all of campus how terrible this person is. They have no prospect for new friends because C.Pax issues an announcement that so-and-so is toxic and canceled. It goes out in Today@Brown.

There are fliers posted around campus detailing all of their misdeeds.

That person lives the rest of their life feeling both incredibly lonely and immensely spiteful. They learn to hate more and harder.

If you let them just be, though, they might change. They might realize that to make good friends, you have to treat people kindly. They might realize that it’s not nice to sleep with other people’s mothers. They might realize, like I did, that it’s okay for people to be emo, even if you don’t personally like it. Maybe they come to see that Hamilton is really not a great way to spend your time, and the high school musical isn’t that serious, and it’s more important to cherish your friends as they are than to try to mold them into what you want them to be.

I’m sure you’re screaming at me now: THEY ARE NOT GOING TO CHANGE. Well, then they don’t. And they get dropped ad infinitum. And their life is measured by phases of failed friendships. That is not your problem. It sounds like you have a good group of friends. It seems like you all have each other’s backs. So bust out those BDG jeans, wrestle into that sunflower-printed crop top, turn on Pure Comedy, and dance like no one’s watching. Your ex-friend might be in the window, peering in. Take a little pride in their jealousy, and move on.

Dear Heartbroken,

18

BULLETIN SECTION

BULLETIN Upcoming Actions & Community Events

A message from the Stop Torture RI Coalition

Saturday 2/19 11-2 PM: How RI Prisons Punish - A Panel Discussion Join the Stop Torture RI Coalition at this event to learn about solitary confinement in RI and how to get involved in the campaign to Stop Torture. The panel will include survivors of solitary confinement and a former RIDOC Warden, who will break down the way solitary is used in the state and the effects it has on people. There’ll be another panel hosted by the coalition on March 3rd at Providence College.

Location: 75 Waterman Street, Petteruti Lounge (2nd Floor), Providence

Hello to the readers of the Indy. Stop Torture RI is a group fighting to end the use of solitary confinement in Rhode Island’s prisons. Solitary confinement is torture—in Rhode Island, people can be left alone in a cell for months and sometimes years without any chance to get out.

This inhumane punishment takes a serious toll on incarcerated peoples’ mental and physical health, and has proven to vastly increase violence inside prisons. RIDOC Director Patricia Coyne-Fague testified in 2019 to the House Finance Committee that the facility “was not built with today’s philosophy in mind,” and that “we [correctional professionals] know that keeping people in cells 23 hours a day is not really the way to go.” Stop Torture RI is working to end the use of solitary confinement and to shut down the High Security Center (Rhode Island’s Supermax prison), where about 85 people are currently held in indefinite solitary confinement.

Monday, 2/21 @ 6 PM: Red Books Day Join Red Ink in celebrating Red Books Day (the 174th anniversary of the publishing of the Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels)! There will be readings of selected passages and brief discussion to celebrate the liberatory impact of this text.

Location: Red Ink, 130 Cypress St. Saturday, 2/26 @ 12 PM: SISTA FIRE RI Member Orientation SISTA FIRE RI is a member-led org that is “building collective power with and by women of color for social, economic, and political transformation.” From noon to 3 PM, SISTA FIRE will be hosting a virtual orientation for new and active members. The orientation focuses on their origin story, values, and strategies for creating change. Register at: bit.ly/SFRImembership

We are holding panel discussions at Brown University (Saturday 2/19) and Providence College (Thursday 3/3) to talk about solitary confinement in Rhode Island’s prisons and the campaign’s upcoming actions for the legislative session. Please attend and join our fight against torture.

Mutual aid* & community fundraisers

DESIGN SAM STEWART

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Community Support Needed Donate at https://givebutter.com/amor4jennifer AMOR is fundraising for Jennifer Rodriguez, an immigrant from Venezuela.

Jennifer hasn’t been able to find work since November 2021 and is past due on rent and utilities, and isn’t eligible for Rent Relief RI. She also needs financial support to pay for her medical bills.

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Support a Black mom who is grieving Donate at tinyurl.com/Black-mom-grieving This fundraiser is intended to raise money for a Providence community member who has faced several trials this past year: assaults on her family at the hands of police, traumatizing DCYF raids, and the passing of close family members and friends, including her father. While battling cancer, she is also the primary caretaker of several grandchildren, and needs the funds to provide for them and pay for her father’s service.

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Queer and Trans Mutual Aid PVD Venmo @qtmapvd, PayPal.me/qtmapvd Support mutual aid for LGBTQIA people in Rhode Island! There are currently 16 outstanding requests for aid, equal to $1600. Help QTMA fill this need!

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Kennedy Plaza Survival Drive (by Wide Awake Collective) Venmo WideAwakes-PVD, Cashapp: $MutualAidMondays Support weekly survival drives on Saturdays at Kennedy Plaza! This drive distributes food, water, hygiene materials, warm clothing and other important items to folks in need.

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Railroad Fund PVD Venmo: theorytakespraxis The railroad fund provides sustainable support to people currently incarcerated in Rhode Island. Please donate and help Railroad support a friend who is in need of continued survival and support this winter.

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Ocean State A$$ Mutual Aid Fund 2022 Venmo: OSA-funds Support local sex workers by donating to the venmo above and consider buying an Ocean State A$$ calendar, on sale at Fortnight Wine Bar, Hungry Ghost Press, Symposium Books, Mister Sister Erotica, and RiffRaff.

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COYOTE RI Closet (Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics RI) Now accepting donations of hygiene products and new or used clothing at the Love and Compassion Day Health Center; 92 East Avenue, Pawtucket RI, 02904. Contact Sheila Brown (401) 548-3756 to donate or collect items.

Do you have an event, action, or other information for the Providence community that you’d like to see shared on this page? Email us at indybulletinboard@gmail.com!

ACROSTIC SOLUTION: Schumann does not have the power or spirituality of Beethoven, he was blessed neither with Schubert’s preternatural grace nor Brahms’s iron will, but he has a precious quality that no other composer does to the same degree: he knows the meaning of solitude. Biss, A Pianist Under The Influence

ILLUSTRATION BRIDGET DEFRANCO

*Mutual aid is “survival pending on revolution,” as described by the Black Panthers. Join in redistributing wealth to create an ecosystem of care in response to a system of institutions that have failed or harmed our communities.