“There are a million wolves hiding in the environmental substrate I’ve called speargrass. The reality is that they’re not even wolves. When they get home in the evening, they take off the wolfskin and look just like us.”
“Genealogy is an engaging project to undergo because it navigates the…paradoxical relationship between a narrowly defined conception of the self and the larger, more communal one”
While it was released in early October, the video “First World Anthem,” created by the nonprofit organization Gift of Water, has only recently started going viral. The video shows children and adults wearing slightly tattered clothes while standing in front of destroyed homes and desolate fields, reading phrases such as “I hate when my phone charger won’t reach my bed” and “I hate when my mint gum makes my ice water taste too cold.”
“What is it about Eastern Europe that makes underage, emotionally vulnerable people think those harmful, dangerous thoughts? What is it about Eastern Europe that I still, despite all of this, miss so very much?”
“The protest was born of frustration at the unspeakable natures of both Title IX and the traumas of sexual assault. The protest was chaotic and it was hurt and it was loud.”
“But you put me here in America— in rich, white, suburban America, where the people are bland and the food even more so. You put me here in this diner, and I hate you for it.”
“I watched these two women, strangers only a few hours before, wrapped in grief and helping each other to cope. Ecotherapy teaches that the harshness of suffering and loss can awaken us to beauty.”
My ears picked up on it the moment I walked through the entryway. As I walked up the staircase to the lecture hall, I could clearly make out sentences of the conversation being had behind me. It felt out of place to me, belonging to a different time and place.
That summer, we set out partially for a family vacation, but also in search for inspiration. The destination was the “west,” or what Dad called “the wild,” far from our oak and pine tree-covered corner of the Northeast. It was my mothers’ idea; she, the architect-turned-artist of the family, decided that in the desolation of the sun-baked clay, she and I would find the subject of a new series of paintings. Setting out in our rented car, we didn’t really know what to expect—would there really be “deserts” and “caverns” like in the westerns, little shacks along the road where old men drank beer and splayed out their feet on the porch, gazing out across dust and childhood dreams?
You shall fall asleep at your desk, wake up to frantically finish your essay, and then post a Snapchat with a filter hiding your under-eye bags and communally sharing your sleepless angst — all before the onset of the second sleep.
