Category: Reflections

My Friend Mike

I first met Mike a year and a half years ago, in the month following my high school graduation. I was spending the summer in Manhattan and, for the first time in my life, my youth didn’t feel burdensome or constricting; I no longer wanted to be just a little bit older. I was studying Jewish texts during the day, and puzzling out the ancient Hebrew and Aramaic felt intellectually challenging and spiritually exciting in a way that my overcrowded public high school classes never had.

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An Invisible Minority

I spent this past fall break on a Pace Center Breakout trip in our nation’s capital, visiting congressional lobbies, vocational employment centers, and the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, where I saw, firsthand, those who had experienced the casualties of war. Eating in the hospital cafeteria, I sat among masses of amputees, the people who actually comprise the looming, abstract statistics we hear always on the news.

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Mommy Says

Once a month, my mother would choose a single-parenting experience she thought to be humorous or poignant and would write it down for the whole world to read (or at least the subscribers of North Texas). My mother didn’t just archive my brother’s and my childhood, she created public records of all our most embarrassing moments.

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Mortem Ex Machina

I remember the first time someone I knew died. My sister’s friend had gone missing, and when the news finally came that her death was sure, I privately went through my phone, which had previously been my sister’s, and searched for the friend’s name.

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Butts in a Name?

My name is Austin deButts, and although my surname is not all that complicated, living with it for the past 20 years has been.

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The Earl of Knuckle Sandwich

Someone punched me in the face.

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Getting Lucky

It’s 5:37 a.m. and I’m straggling through the slums in neon orange short-shorts I reserve for nights like these, nights like last night, along with the first shirt I saw on the ground which I couldn’t really see in the dark of his room but it’s large and now the sunrise has revealed it to be a tee shirt from some leadership conference or some shit and I think This is ironic because I was totally leading last night if you know what I mean and then I’m like is that even irony or am I just awesome?

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The Wolf Speaks

The genealogy of nominative determinism begins with my ambivalent attitude toward this series of articles. Whenever the Nassau Weekly name column would come up in casual conversation, I would exclaim that there could be nothing potentially interesting in a piece truly about the writer’s name. After all, I thought, what would have to be true for an article about your name to be interesting?

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I Think Therefore I Am Tolerant

Recently, a friend was telling me how a certain musical artist had entranced him with her talent—until he found out she was very religious and thanks God for her success. My friend considers himself liberal and advocates for the rights of women, racial minorities, and the LGBT community—yet, for him, religion elicits a “bad taste in [his] mouth.”

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Shades of Grades

In my pompous English private high school, the importance of excelling in yearly exams was impressed upon us from age 13. I remember on my first day of physics class in the equivalent of freshman year, the teacher stood gravely in front of us and uttered the words: “Last year, all 23 of my students received A*s. Do not be my first A.” A* was the equivalent of an A+—the highest grade you could get.

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Fears, Beers, and Freshman Year

“Excuse me, do you have an extra cigarette?” I asked a woman outside New York Penn Station on my way home from Reunions in June. As I inhaled, the previous nine months began to transform from life to memory, things that were happening to things that had happened, becoming things that had happened to me rather than things I had made happen.

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Fear Itself

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.

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