I’ve long believed the surest sign of a good mind is an understanding that things could be another way without allowing for the possibility of your resistance, through the agencies of people and institutions and objects that do not encircle or overlap yours. If there is a person here you love that person could instead be at Dartmouth caressing another and unaware of your existence; if you are right-handed your arm could instead be broken as a young child and you a lefty as a result; if today your father is a good father or a bad one he could instead swerve to miss an animal and drown in a cold river six months ago.
There is a debate among medieval Jewish philosophers about the permissibility of conceiving of God in physical form. Maimonides, heavily influenced by Aristotelian philosophy, lists the non-corporeality of God as one of the thirteen core principles of faith, and writes in his legal code that anyone who says that God has a body is a heretic with no position in the World to Come.
His face was well-preserved, but the body was so frail. The outline of his ribcage protruded grotesquely against his sunken stomach. He was dead, and he looked it. A warm tear ran down my cheek as I read and re-read the placard standing next to the coffin: “Here lies Dayton Martindale.” I was sad, and I was scared.
I sit and breathe and try to recall my whole life. I now sit serenely in the brush by this shouldering road. It winds tightly through the Peloponnesian town of Megalopolis, where I sit, through the pink stucco homes clinging staccato to the high side of the mountain our bus, heaving, climbed. Rapt speech in the restaurant behind is mere chatter.
Your whole life, you hear about the milestones that are supposed to change something inside you. For me, they came and went largely unnoticed. Birthdays, first kisses, the loss of my virginity, the first truly random sexual experience I ever had—all left me unmarked and wondering at how it was that I never felt any different. The summer after my senior year of high school, I walked home after sleeping with a man six years my senior and, after years of falling for people too easily, congratulated myself for not feeling anything. I thought that sex could not hurt me and that—to me—was a triumph of self-defense over feeling, one I held on to in the years that followed.
My first reaction was an unsettled, “What the heck?” Followed by a pissed, “Wow, way over the line.” Finally settling on, “Crap—now what?” From the back cover of the Nass, the Hebrew name of God, the holy Tetragrammaton, was staring up at me with the menacing grin of a camper who just got away with stealing food from the kitchen.
As the firstborn in my family, I was a unique challenge for my parents. Of course there were all the new issues of how to raise a child, but first and foremost, what would they call me?
“I’m NOT!” I bellow. Not going to school, that is. My homework isn’t done, it’s already 9 am (school started at 8), and I’ve yet to shower. But my mother is up and worried, and my father is done yelling, and I’m about to break. Soon, I’ll remove myself from self-isolation and go down to breakfast. I’ll wash my face, talk to my father, and head to fourth period photography.
It’s been hard to miss the photos from the “What I Be” project popping up on our newsfeeds and around campus these past weeks: up-close and intensely personal shots of fellow students staring unapologetically into the camera, with their deepest insecurities scrawled onto their skin in capital letters.
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.”
My full name is Lily Rosalind Offit. It sounds relatively neutral in terms of nationality, but I am 100% Jewish. The Offit clan hails from Lithuania— Benjamin Ofceotowitz came to the U.S. in 1888, to escape persecution. Immigration officers changed his name at least five times due to misspellings: Ofsiowitz, Ofseoyowitz, Ofgeoyowitz, Owseverwitz, Ofsavitz…. Finally, in March of 1917, Benjamin settled on the simple spelling “Offit.”
I don’t remember why I started listening to RadioNow 93.1, Indianapolis’ Top 40 radio station, but I know exactly when. I was nine, and it was the summer after third grade. Before this, I had basically stayed away from pop culture. I didn’t really get it, or like it, and there was a girl in my school who told me she was receiving shots to delay puberty because she had watched too much Britney Spears with her older siblings and it had somehow tricked her body into pressing “skip” over the last part of her pre-preteen years.
