“I didn’t have too much faith in technology to bridge such an enormous distance gap. There was no way that crackling audio or pixelated video could rival the warmth of human presence.”
I never sleep well when I am home. This is usually due to physical—not mental—distress: in eighth grade I inherited a three-quarter sized bedframe from the eighteenth century, a Sharpless heirloom that my grandparents wanted to get rid of. Rare is the vendor in this century that sells a mattress fit to its arcane proportions, so my parents threw two futons on it and told me it was temporary.
For a class called “Women’s Bodies, Women’s Lives,” that I took last semester, we were tasked with many activities meant to make us aware of what it meant to be a woman, and a woman in a body, and a woman in a body in a society alternatingly fascinated and disgusted with that body.
“Now that it’s mainstream, it’s hard for me to reconcile the subcultural nature of fanfiction and fan spaces with its ever-increasing visibility. For almost a decade, I’ve been so entrenched in fan culture that it surprises me when someone doesn’t know what Alpha/Beta/Omega dynamics entail.”
A few weeks ago my friend Demi sat on the floor of my dorm room. She was the first person I had seen from my time studying abroad in Switzerland since I had come back to the U.S. almost two years ago. She hadn’t changed much, though I had, and when she said in the rough Swiss German I had missed so strongly, “er het sich verhängt,”—he had hanged himself— I thought to myself in a language I hadn’t spoken in years — “jetzt gibt’s zwei.” Now there are two.
“Black hole.” “Wormhole.” These are terms familiar to any English speaker if not from science fiction literature and films, then at least from pinball machines and arcade games. For a generation raised on Star Wars they have become all too familiar, yet they have not been around for very long. Both the two terms and the theory behind them were coined by one man – the late Princeton Professor Emeritus John Wheeler – in the late 1950s and 60s.
